#because its an identity politicized along binary gender lines

[lesser-vissir]

Why is it that every time trans women stand up for transfem being a politicized category and not an identity that some intersex moron comes in and talks about how mean "perisex trans women" are.

[miseriathome]

There is just no way for a perisex (non intersex) person to become intersex, because intersex variations are present your entire life, from birth onward. [ ... ] Perisex people can never physically gain an intersex condition.

This is incorrect, insofar as intersexuality encompasses disorders of sexual development.

You could be born with all the “proper” and congruous gonads, dangly bits, chromosomes, and hormone profile, and you could still end up being understood as intersex down the line because of any of the following or more:

Surgeon messing with your genitals in an unnecessary/highly inappropriate way

Extreme exposure to external/environmental sex hormones (or hormone blockers!) which screws with sexual development

Acquired issues with hormone-producing/interacting organs

Cultural shift in the prioritization of certain biosocial sex markers, and thus a reevaluation of the “peaks” and deviations in the bimodal sex distribution

To frame perisexuality as some kind of innate and non-fluid marker even undermines why language has shifted from dyadicism to perisexism; the entire premise of the term perisex is to highlight just how fraught of a sociopolitical position that is. Perfect conformity to an ideal norm is absolutely impossible, and thus the focus of intersex activism in its most current iteration is identifying the privileging of proximity to those norms and the punishment of deviance from them. The “line” between intersex and perisex is socially constructed, as are both of those categories individually.

In the same way, the line between intersex and transgender is also socially constructed. There is actually plenty of good reason for people to conflate the two, namely that mainstream cultural frameworks do not recognize these as being meaningfully distinct experiences. The activism, development of language, and discussion of experiences surrounding both intersexuality and transgenderism are by and large niche. The distinction between the biology of sex and the sociality of gender does not come from mainstream institutions or the fundamental organization of our society any more than the distinction between any materialism vs immaterialism.

Within a framework that has identified and disentangled gender from sex, non-consent from conscious transition, sure it’s absolutely baffling that somebody could conflate intersex with trans. But the existence of that framework is not a given and, unfortunately, cannot be assumed. Identification is powerful and necessary work, and to take it as a given would be a detriment to activism.

And that’s not even getting into the tenuousness of intersex vs trans as it related to non-Westernism and to people of color. That’s not getting into variance within “the” binary of sex or gender (there are actually many binaries!) which falls along racial, cultural, religious, nationalistic, sociopolitical, or historical lines. “Failed performance of gender” and “successful performance of gender” are not mutually exclusive states of being, but rather can overlap and coexist simultaneously, for example.

And that’s not even getting into the tenuousness of non-consensual vs voluntary, or developmental vs non-developmental. There’s a whole world of sex marker body modification, sex marker trauma, medical malpractice, and acquired disability that exist post-puberty as well, in which there is no sufficient cognitive schema to describe those instances of sexual incongruence and non-normativity.

Now... all of this isn’t to say that I think “intersex” is a meaningless term or that anybody and everybody should adopt it if they so choose. I want to emphasize that intersex is a politicized positionality, that the self-adoption of an intersex identity is often a political decision, and that the political nonetheless has weight. Being socially constructed doesn’t make identity any less relevant or meaningful. So ultimately, I agree with the conclusion of the post I’m quoting, which is that conflating non-binary transition with “transitioning to intersex” is an incredibly gauche move. It’s true that such an act, done thoughtlessly, can be appropriative (in the sense of “taking and owning without understanding”), can obfuscate very real systemic problems, and can be incredibly disrespectful and invalidating of the personhood of classically-recognized intersex people. But such an argument doesn’t need to be hinged upon very arbitrary and vaguely exclusionary qualifiers for what intersexuality is and why its attributes are innate.

(And for posterity, the reason why this is its own post and not a reblog is because after a long deliberation, I��ve decided that it’s not my place to derail what is mostly a reasonable and compassionate argument. But since my own positionality within intersex/perisex and trans/cis paradigms is so fraught and so heavily complicated by the absolutism I’ve identified in the original argument, I do nonetheless feel that this critique has a place and should be voiced. Poststructuralism is a good practice and we only benefit as activists when we borrow from its tradition.)