#am i Intersex

[intersex-questions]

Hi! I thought mabye this was the right place to ask this question? I know one way or another there is something wrong with my line of thinking but basically I have pcos and I was wondering if that made me intersex or if it was more complex than that? Because I do have things like I am growing sideburns and have a bit more hair under my chin. And I haven't had a period in over six years. Also my voice has been deemed to be more androgynous wich I think relates to the higher than average testosterone levels. But also when researching it seemed like mabye it was more about the experience. And while I have felt a little isolated about it in the past cause I didn't understand it, and I like the pcos intersex tag. I have also been privledged enough to live in an area where I have not faced bigotry for it. And I don't know if I can consider myself intersex or if that would be taking up space that is not meant for me?

Im not sure if this is a good question and no pressure to answer it of course! If the way I'm thinking is intersexist and you do decide to answer it please do let me know though! I'm just a little bit confused and my diagnosis has been a little bit of a revelation for me. Thanks for everything you do!

Many intersex people and much of the intersex community considers PCOS (especially with hyperandrogenism or symptoms of hyperandrogenism) an inherently intersex variation. The position of this blog is that it is inherently intersex. However, please note that this is a more inclusionary view—more exclusionary individuals and limited definitions of intersex may exclude this as intersex (although they usually still consider it intersex if there is significant or noticable hyperandrogenism). It is important to note that, although I do my best to be factual in many cases, my perspective is inherently biased in favor of inclusionary definitions of intersex and inclusion in the intersex community. However, the experiences you describe are something I think many people on varying levels of opinions on inclusion in the intersex community would consider intersex. I would absolutely consider you intersex, and many other intersex people would as well.

If you feel that the intersex identity describes you, that the community is for you, etc., I encourage you to label or acknowledge yourself as intersex! There isn't limited space—you are not taking up space by existing as an intersex person. The space is meant for you.

You don't have to have faced bigotry to be intersex. In fact, it's a good thing you haven't, and that's what I hope will be true for all intersex people someday! However, I would like to note, there are often modes of bigotry or oppression we don't always notice until retrospect. I thought I had never faced any transphobia really for some time in my life, only to later realize I had many incredibly transphobic experiences. Not that this is necessarily true for you—but sometimes we dismiss, don't realize, or, in a good way, aren't affected by instances of bigotry. But the fact that you even ever felt isolated, lost, confused, or alone because of your experiences is something that is very common for intersex people, and I think that deserves to be acknowledged and validated.

I don't think there is anything wrong with your lines of thinking and you are not being intersexist with your questions. And yes, this is the right place to ask these questions!

I hope I could answer everything you brought up, and if you have more to say, feel free.

TLDR; You are more than welcome to use the intersex label.

[trainsgenderfoxgirl2816]

I'm not sure if I'm intersex i think I might be but I'm not sure, I could be Perisex but I strongly think I'm intersex because my body does some weird things that make strongly suspect I'm intersex but also...

I'm so confused

[cyberfemboyfungusprince]

Just found out I might be intersex and so much stuff is starting to make sense to me. I'm still unsure about it however and also scared to claim the label for myself since I'm not sure that my kind of variation would be accepted as inter by the community. I also plan on doing a cromossome exam next semester.

[notsolonelyanymore]

I believe that the choice to use the intersex label is and should always be a personal one, however I have noticed many people with Turner Syndrome not wanting to call themselves intersex because 'We are real women' and 'It's a female only condition - We don't have male parts'

Not only is this incredibly transphobic as we don't all identify as women but it also completely misunderstands what intersex actually means (any variation in sex characteristic considered which is not typical for males/females)

Being intersex has never made me less of a woman, I can be an intersex woman and I AM an intersex woman. They aren't exclusive terms?

[satellites-halo]

"we need more weird queer people" y'all can't even handle intersex people wanting to call themselves queer (for being intersex)

[justdavina]

Miss Trans Queen India Nitasha Biswas: The most beautiful Indian transgender in women's strapless knit sweater dress.

So SEXY!

[trans-axolotl]

my gendered experience growing up as an intersex person was overwhelmingly defined by my responses and resistance to everything that got me labeled as a failure: failure to quickly get a gender assigned at birth, failure to go through a normal puberty and grow up into a woman, failure at meeting the standards for "complete womanhood" because of my intersex sex traits, and yet simultaneously failing to ever be acknowledged as a "real man" and being treated as a threat when I expressed I wanted to transition.

before i realized i was a man and came out as trans, the ways that girlhood was denied to me was very often humiliating and painful. locker rooms filled with other girls were a frequent source of shame. there were many big and small ways that i was told that my intersex body made me insufficient, incomplete, broken. i was forced onto estrogen, forced into shaving my body hair, and was constantly being told to change myself to better fit this mystical idea of a "normal woman." and even though I ultimately ended up becoming a man, the denial of girlhood was painful.

but i think that these things would have been even more difficult to navigate as an intersex girl if on top of everything I already said, i was having to cope with the denial of my girlhood while i was forced into boys locker rooms. if my doctors were forcing me onto testosterone hrt and refusing to even discuss estrogen, if all my legal paperwork had "M" on it and was a logistical nightmare to change, if every support group for my intersex variation labeled it as a "men's support group," if the LGBTQ community spaces i tried to join were misogynistic towards me often to the point of exile, if my self determination as an intersex girl was denied in most spaces of my life, and on and on and on. while listing all these things out i also don't want to make it seem like it's all about suffering and pain--so much of transition for me has been about joy in my self determination and how much it feels like a reclamation of autonomy to decide what I want my body and self to be like--i know this is an experience i share with so many of my trans intersex friends.

as an person who was AFAB, although there were many ways that trying to grow up as an intersex girl were a painful, logistical nightmare, many times and places that i was excluded from woman's spaces, etc. however, there was a simultaneous affirmation that i was right to strive for that in the first place. which is logic rooted in some fucked up compulsory dyadism, but also which would have made some things slightly easier or even possible at all if i had wanted to embrace being an intersex girl within this fucked up system.

pretty much every time i've seen people on tumblr talking about "afab transfems" in an intersex context, people seem happy to collapse these experiences and act like there's no meaningful distinction or point in distinguishing between different types of intersex embodiment. it seems incredibly extractive, to be perfectly honest with you--taking terms already used by a community to make meaning of their experiences and to expand and dilute that term enough that it means something pretty different than the original.

it's making me think about the concept of epistemic injustice, which is a term coined by Miranda Fricker to describe oppression related to knowledge, communication, and making meaning of the world. There's two subtypes of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice refers to the dynamic where marginalized people are labeled as not credible, excluded from conversations, and their testimony and knowledge is labeled as unreliable, even when they're the ones who are experts and have first hand experience of what people are talking about. (this is why i probably won't make this post rebloggable--i've noticed this pattern on tumblr many times where trans men speaking about transmisogyny get lots of notes and are given a lot of grace, where trans women are silenced, attacked for not having perfect wording, and otherwise delegitimized.)

the second type is called hermeneutical injustice. it describes how marginalized people are denied the right to make sense of the experiences in their own lives. this can look like preventing people from building community, terminology, a political understanding of themselves, and the interpretive resources needed to process how you live in the world.

this is a form of injustice that I think almost all intersex people are very familiar with--we are denied community and interpretive resources to the point that we're told we don't even exist, that intersex isn't a real word, and so many more examples that leave us isolated and with very few options for understanding what we're collectively experiencing. as an intersex person i really intimately understand how frustrating, confusing, and painful it is to not have words for your experiences, your identity, your life.

so it makes me really sad and pissed off when it seems like intersex people seem to be replicating this exact same type of epistemic injustice towards transfems and specifically towards intersex transfems. pretty much every time recently i see people talking about "afab transfems" they're doing so in a way that seems to deny that trans women even have the right to make sense of their own experiences in the world. there seems to be this mindset that these political frameworks, these interpretive resources that transfems have built up are just up for grabs for anyone. and then on top of that has come with it a lot of cruel, hateful language and direct attacks towards many intersex transfems who are facing so much harassment right now.

an important value to me is this idea of reciprocity as a foundation for solidarity. to me reciprocity means that we're prioritizing the ways we care for each other, we're thinking about how we can uplift each other, and we're watching out for extractive or exploitative patterns where one group is constantly expected to be in "solidarity" with another group without getting the same respect and care back toward them. i think that there could be so many ways that intersex people of all genders could share our overlapping experiences and actually be in true, meaningful solidarity with each other, but i barely ever actually see that happen on tumblr. and that pisses me off, because i do think that there's so much we have in common that we could celebrate and support each other with. i feel so much kinship with so, so many of my trans intersex friends, and ways where i see our lives converge. but i don't think that can happen in an environment where there's no acknowledgment of the ways that our experiences will sometimes (often) differ from each other, and the ways that we have unique needs.

another frustration i've had based on this most recent couple months of transmisogynistic intersex posting on tumblr is how intersex people have been mostly ignoring intersex community resources and devaluing the existing intersex terminology that people created to try to meet our needs. so much of what i've seen people describing on tumblr seems to really line up with the term ipsogender. Ipsogender is a term coined by an intersex sociologist Cary Gabriel Costello, and is used to describe intersex people whose gender matches the gender they were medically assigned at birth, but who might not feel like cis or trans fits them, might experience dysphoria, and who might feel like they've ended up transitioning medically or socially in some ways. this is a word that exists that an intersex person put time into coining because they wanted other intersex people to feel seen, embraced, and have ways of understanding themselves and communicating to others, and that's something that's super meaningful to me! and yet, i've rarely seen anyone reference it, and also seen multiple people making fun of it in other spaces online.

there's also intergender, which is another intersex specific gender term used to describe when your gender is inseparable from your intersex traits, and that your intersex identity is intertwined with your gender identity in some way. some people just identify as intergender, others use it as an adjective and exist as an intergender man or woman. intersex terminology like this is really important to me, especially because we're so often denied the right to make sense of our own experiences.

i think ultimately what i wanted to say with this post is just that when i think about intersex community, some of the most important values of intersex community for me are solidarity, care for each other, and affirming our right to define our own existence. and i don't think that can happen in a community where people are acting in extractive ways, harassing and attacking their fellow community members, and being dismissive of the realities of other intersex people's lives.

[ridibulous]

intersex people who are/were invisible to others and/or themselves, I love you. intersex people who don't have a cut-and-dry label or short explanation for their bodies, I love you. intersex people with imposter syndrome about their experiences, I love you. please have faith in yourself.

[lisaquestions]

So first of all, this is a lie. "Baeddel" did not refer only to intersex people and intersex people were not even seen as a distinct category when the word was first used.

Second of all, every single person I've seen say this is someone who has clearly never been called a baeddel saying it to women who have been, often many times. People are pissed that trans women, after being called this as an insult, are claiming it again, and trying to shut that down.

Third, this was on a post talking about how transmisogynists are calling trans women baeddels, so this person is telling a trans woman that she's not allowed to describe insults used against her.

This isn't a real problem, trans women calling themselves baeddels steals nothing from intersex people, nor is reporting the fact that transmisogynists are calling us baeddels in the first place. And this word hasn't been in common use for hundreds of years anyway. It's like telling lesbians to stop calling ourselves lesbians because it refers to the Isle of Lesbos.

Anyway, just leave trans women alone, stop trying to control our every movement and police our every word. Stop calling us revived slurs and then telling us we're stealing them when we use them for any reason among ourselves. Stop sending sexual harassment as anonymous asks. Stop contorting your logic into pretzels to prove that we're the problem when you're constantly attacking us for any reason you can concoct.

Edit: To clarify I don't know if the person who wrote the comment I capped is intentionally lying, but this is a falsehood I've seen more than once, so someone is spreading it intentionally.

[diospore]

I'm just saying if you're writing smut featuring trans people and you find yourself ONLY writing pre-op transmen as receiving penetration. ONLY writing your transmen as submissive.

You should really take a step back and think about why this is.

Also consider including trans people who have gotten bottom surgery. I'd like to see more of that. Or transmen using straps. That'd be cool too thanks.

[ghxst-system]

my body is not a trump card for ur argument against a conservative about sex and gender.

my mutilation is not proof of "gender affirming care" for cis people.

my body is not a rarity, that rarity is manufactured.

[intersex-questions]

i've been questioning if i'm intersex for a while, and i think it may be pcos or ncah but i'm genuinely not sure at this point. i started puberty early, i've always had excessive hair growth, i'm a very short adult (5'0 at 18 and i haven't grown an inch since 6th grade), i struggled with acne as a child that was difficult to get rid of and i got made fun of for and i still have very oily skin, i may have genital differences but due to trauma i haven't checked myself and it may just be a body dysmorphia/dissociation thing.

i guess the main thing i'm getting caught up on is that i don't find my periods particularly irregular or painful, at least not anymore. when i was younger, i went months without getting a period and when i did they could be very heavy and painful but i was told it was normal for my age at the time, and it evened out as i got older other than my cycle length being irregular still. though i doubt what my mother finds completely normal when it comes to these symptoms due to her mother likely also most likely being intersex and never being given the proper resources to grapple with that.

i initially started to believe it may be pcos because i believe i had two times where a cyst bursted? the first time i got an intense pain in my lower area and passed out from the pain. the second time i got a similar pain and was up late at night vomitting and my mother ended up taking me to the hospital. i've been meaning to see a gynecologist to confirm wether or not i have cysts, but again due to trauma i've pushed this back. i've also been wanting to get my hormones levels checked, but i genuinely just do not know how to go about that.

i know i don't have to have an exact idea of my variant to call myself intersex, my life makes a lot more sense in the context of that framework, but i guess i'm still seeking validation that it's okay to call myself intersex.

There's a few things I'd like to say. I really, really encourage you to go to a doctor when you feel able to, because pain to the point you passed out sounds really concerning and dangerous, although I do understand how trauma can make that incredibly challenging to do, especially since gynecologists are often NOT as trauma-informed and kind/gentle as they should be. But doing that seems like something you really should do not just to seek out an "intersex" diagnosis but to make sure your body is healthy and that you are safe. In the cases you've described, those are "you should go to the hospital" cases, so I am very glad you DID go to the hospital one of those times.

If you're interested in getting your hormone levels checked, you would most likely just speak to your general care provider/practitioner/whatever term is used for your just standard/regular doctor you see for things like check-ups. They should either be able to order them for you or redirect you to someone that can order those tests for you. For example, my frequent blood tests to test things like hormones (among others) are put in by my endocrinologist.

On periods: it is considered "normal" for people who get periods to get them irregularly for a couple of years or so after they get their first period, and then they "even out" to what their usual periods are like. Everyone's menstrual cycles are different, so some people do have shorter or longer time frames between them, heavier or lighter periods, shorter or longer periods, etc. Human bodies are so different and intricate it can often be hard to sometimes pinpoint, "is this thing about a period something that's indicative of another health condition or something else, or is it just "normal?" I am sorry that the pain you experienced in your early puberty was dismissed. Even if that pain truly was normal, it deserved to be treated and validated.

I can say that I do know some intersex people who had rather irregular periods that evened out to a degree as they got older and have PCOS and NCAH (separately).

If you're looking for answers on your body, you will have to go through more medical and diagnosis-seeking processes like you mentioned. However, I would like to point out it is possible to have PCOS without having cysts. You could try researching that as well as PCOS further, and you could also research symptoms of hyperandrogenism in general and see how all of those align with your body and your experiences, although I absolutely understand how that can be hard due to the trauma and body dysmorphia you mentioned, especially for things that are secondary or primary sex characteristics.

I always encourage people to use the intersex label if they feel it explains their sex differences in their body. The worst thing that could happen from you using intersex and then finding out you're not is that you were wrong. And it's okay and very common to be wrong. If you seek out a diagnosis, being misdiagnosed with things, whether it's an intersex variation or something else, is something that happens to many people. And seeking out a diagnosis helps you eliminate things that you aren't, which helps you learn things you could be, which I think would be helpful considering you've mentioned some concerning pain issues.

I hope this helps at least some, sorry if it sounds all over the place. Sending you good wishes!

[razzafrazzle]

strange old men!! theyre married for tax purposes (and gay purposes but thats less important)

[image description: a drawing of human designs for coach z and bubs from homestar runner. coach z is depicted as a lanky pale-skinned older man with a tooth gap, a five-o'clock shadow, and balding curly light brown hair with a grey streak through it. bubs is depicted as a bulky, dark-skinned older man with short greying afro hair and a short beard. end id]

[turtleblogatlast]

My favorite trans Leo headcanon is that he has no idea he’s biologically female/intersex and doesn’t find out until way later in life all like oh wait that makes sense-

My second favorite trans Leo headcanon is that he doesn’t initially know, but finds out around ten years old or so and proceeds to never mention it ever until it comes out in the most mundane of ways and everyone is like wait what-

[mimi-kkyutie]

[wingsofhcpe]

transphobes really see a cis woman with short hair and a sharp jawline and go "OH MY GOD THIS IS A BIOLOGICAL MALE MASQUERADING AS A WOMAN TO BEAT R E A L WOMEN UP HOLY SHIT CALL THE POLICE".

Anyway, yet another woman of colour, this time a judoka, is getting "trans allegations" because she defeated her white woman opponent. This time it's Prisca Awiti Alcaraz. Support her and Imane!