#such as intersex women or women with PCOS

[thetimekeepers]

a take from my priv i don't think should stay private

[voidimp]

really not loving this trend lately of acting like shaving makes you a disgrace to the whole fucking queer community

like we really went from "not shaving is totally fine and good, body hair is completely natural & not gross" (correct) to "shaving is disgusting and unnatural, why would you do that to you body" (hmmm sounds kinda familiar) & even "its literally impossible to have dysphoria or sensory issues due to body hair/want to shave for any reason other than to appeal to patriarchal beauty standards & anyone who says they do is lying" (real, actual things i have seen people say, what in the god damn)

you can shave your face you can shave your head but as soon as its below the neck suddenly shaving is some sort of unforgivable crime. god forbid someone doesnt like the way it feels when their clothes rub against every little fucking hair. god forbid they dont like how it holds in sweat. god forbid they dont like how it holds in heat. god forbid they dont fucking like how it looks on them.

like. is the word "choice" not in peoples fucking vocabulary or something

[schizowitchic]

also like i partially found out i might be intersex because i was looking at trans stuff and there was like "(however many) months on t and finally seeing some bottom growth" and like pictures of t-dicks and i was like.... um.... that's kind of just what my clit looks like anyways. so i was like "hey google give me a quick rundown on this" and learned what clitoromegaly was and then i was like. hm. intersex resources. and it's like a sign? symptom? side-effect? of certain intersex conditions

[mr-nicegirl]

estradiol laced weed is sooo enticing to me btw.... pcos havers (cool ones that can hang obviously) and transfems would be sooooooo unstoppable i fear....

[supercantaloupe]

truly detest how pcos tags/forums/etc are absolutely crawling with terfs

[vamptastic]

saw a post of someone unironically claiming there is some large conspiracy of cis women with PCOS identifying as transfeminine... so out of touch. ime the vast majority of people with PCOS are cis women who are offended to even be considered intersex. online spaces focused on PCOS are kinda transphobic and mostly focus on weight loss and restoring your natural (read: female) hormonal balance and whatnot. like sorry but the vast vast majority are not doing that. and i trust the few ones who do to have a legitimate connection to the term.

[mithliya]

Do you mean that other intersex ppl aren’t male or female I’m low-key confused, I thought they were…that most if not all intersex conditions are exclusively female or exclusively male (not that pcos is an intersex condition afiak)

no i meant that unlike with intersex conditions, there is no kind of confusion on where those diagnosed with PCOS are placed (male or female). very often those with intersex conditions are genetically male & phenotypically female or vice versa. some are raised male, then develop more female sex characteristics around puberty for example. it’s also why terms like “assigned male/female” even exist bc there are male ppl assigned female due to their intersex conditions or female ppl assigned male due to their intersex conditions. it’s not the same as PCOS where there is no kind of grey area or lack of clarity in that regard. yes ppl who are intersex are either male or female & many intersex conditions are male/female-exclusive, but unlike PCOS there can be grey areas and it can be hard to place where an intersex person fits in socially or in terms of their experiences

[thedeepweb]

self proclaimed epic post-discourse city gays trying not to call a woman a brainwashed bimbo for shaving her face

[genderqueerdykes]

terves will try to erase the existence of women with masculine primary and secondary sex characteristics that developed without HRT, but we exist. my mom, sister, aunt and grandmother all grow/grew facial hair. my sister began balding in her late 20s due to high testosterone. most of my aunts have very masculine facial features.

my sister is diagnosed with pcos. my family is full of intersex women with naturally masculine features. one of my aunts gets misgendered as a man constantly because she doesn't shave her mustache that often, has black hair, and dresses very masc. most of the women in my family are stocky with dense builds. all of these women exist this way without any HRT or modification on their behalf. none of these women have endometriosis either. pcos is what runs in my family

intersex women are everywhere. perisex women who don't have intersex conditions are everywhere. women of color with features deemed "MASCULINE" by white beauty standards are everywhere. butch women are everywhere. there are women who develop masculine features all the time for a variety of reasons. it's time to stop erasing these people for the sake of attacking trans women.

let women with "Masculine" features, trans, intersex, queer, and everything else speak. stop erasing the existence of millions of women for the sake of petty arguments and transmisogyny. enough is enough. i will not sit here and pretend like my own goddamn relatives don't exist while terves do so they can silence trans women. women come in all fucking shapes and sizes period end of sentence.

stop attacking my sisters while erasing the rest of my family. all of these women are my family equally. stop fucking with us or i'll fuck with you.

[intersexfairy]

PCOS is an intersex variation, full stop. The reason that's controversial is that just accepting it as one undermines the gender and sex binaries.

The idea that we're just rare mutants that need to be fixed, or can be ignored for the sake of the majority, would further begin to fall apart. Recognizing people with PCOS as intersex makes it harder for them to treat people with PCOS like broken women.

Doctors treat their intersex traits as a malady that needs to be fixed. Even in the case of a cis women with PCOS and gender dysphoria or health issues, the treatment is so often laced with intersexism and coercion. There is no real choice given, and no affirmation of one's body as worthy of respect regardless of what it looks like.

This isn't unusual in the treatment of intersex people - people do try to hide from us the fact we're intersex (entirely, or by saying we have a disorder instead). But by not even considering people with PCOS under the umbrella, they prevent them from finding community with people like them, and advocating for themselves.

This is all to say, people with PCOS are not less intersex than other intersex people. They are just as intersex, and face all the scrutiny that comes with it. But more than that, they are integral to intersex liberation - and queer liberation overall. Your story as an intersex person with PCOS matters. We need you, and we want you with us.

May you find peace, community, and healing. May you find comfort and home in your body. May you find health and wellness. You are loved, and you belong - just as you are, and have yet to become.

Sincerely, a trans intersex person who doesn't know if it's PCOS or something else.

[serioussideblog]

Sports desegregation now!

The segregation of sports by sex or gender is wrong on many levels. It hurts transgender people, it hurts ALL women, it hurts intersex people, it hurts people with certain disabilities (in particular women with ADHD or PCOS are two examples I can think of), and it hurts people of color. It’s arbitrary and divisive. It doesn’t benefit women at all.

Know who does benefit? Big corporations, white cishet perisex able men, and TERFs. That’s about it. It’s not fair.

Sports should be about skill and performance. To make a competition truly enjoyable and fair, each side must possess whatever abilities the sport requires, in roughly equal measure, and nothing else really matters.

If a sport requires you to run fast, all that should matter is that the players can run fast - not the physical appearance of the runners, not that one of the runners has to take Adderall for ADHD, not what kind of private parts the runners have, not testosterone or estrogen composition, not gender identity of the runners, nothing else. The ONLY question should be if they can run fast.

If a sport requires you to be able to balance on top of a moving object, then the only thing that should matter is whether the athletes can balance on top of the object. Appearance shouldn’t matter, identity shouldn’t matter, unrelated abilities shouldn’t matter, none of that should matter.

If a sport or game requires quick thinking, the only thing that should matter is the players being able to think quickly. If a sport requires upper body strength, the only thing that matters is that the players have strong upper bodies. If a sport requires people to have good reflexes, all that matters is how good the reflexes of the players are.

Let me put this into further perspective. I’m autistic, and one of the things that I struggle with is motor skill deficiency. It affects both my gross motor and fine motor abilities, but my fine motor skills are slightly worse. Thus, if a sport requires coordination, then I should either only do it for fun with someone else who is just as clumsy as I am, or I should just sit it out so I don’t get hurt. Other aspects of my autism don’t matter, the fact that I am white affords me no advantage, the fact that I am a cisgender perisex woman means nothing, and unless the sport also requires one to be good at directions or time or any other mathematical skills or related skills, my dyscalculia doesn’t matter. But I can absolutely smoke most people in games that involve intelligence, provided that cognition (in particular with regards to social interaction and organization of thoughts), coordination, mathematics and related abilities, etc. won’t be involved. And in a running race, I am amazing as long as I am evenly matched with regards to coordination. What’s that? I shouldn’t be good at running because I’m a cisgender perisex woman? Well, guess what? I can run fast. That what matters. And I have a friend who is bizarrely blessed in the coordination department, despite having both autism and ADHD - two conditions that can affect coordination. If I were competing against him in, say, a running race, I might lose, not because I’m a woman and he’s a man, but because he can control his feet better than I can control mine. We’re both fast, but when you trip and fall easily, that can set you back. And my awkward gait doesn’t help. With that said, I might be able to win, because again, we’re both fast. Assuming terrain was very even, we’d be fairly matched. My dyscalculia would not matter in any scenario, the fact that we’re both white means nothing, and again, the fact that we’re both are different genders doesn’t matter. I have another friend who, if we were in a dancing competition, I would probably beat him, because his coordination is worse than mine and, well, I do have some sweet moves because I’ve been practicing my whole life through dance. It would probably depend on dance style, though. Things that don’t matter? He’s a teenage boy and I am an adult woman, and also the fact that he’s brown doesn’t matter. Provided we each have adequate space I would absolutely win, but we’d both have fun.

Sports. Desegregation. Now.

call me ignorant but i genuinely don’t understand why sports have to be split up by gender.

[osokasstuff]

i don't want to sound like i'm forcefully shoving identities on people who don't want it (who am i to do it, the patriarchy?), but.

"lots of people with PCOS/gynecomastia don't identify as intersex/don't want to be called intersex!" may it have something to do with all this aggressive gatekeeping around intersex label? with medical workers and scientists purposefully narrowing the definition of being intersex to exclude as many people as they can? with medical workers NOT SAYING even the actual diagnosis and being like "oh your hormones are messy you need to take these pills/get surgery?" with all these terfs screaming about "just disordered women/men?" with blatant misinformation around the definition of intersexness? with these ideas that intersex = visible difference at genitalia (at best) / bigenitalia (at worst)? with all these ideas that intersex people are rare freaky freaks, and it's nearly impossible to even see one of us, not to say BE one of us? may it have something to do with this?

"but we can't just say that 10% of people are intersex!" WHY? what makes you so scared of this idea? what makes you think that being intersex has to be something extremely rare? what you're afraid of?

i don't want to push labels on someone and pressure someone to identify with community they don't want to. but i'm really sure that gatekeeping and stigma play a big role in choices of people who don't identify as intersex while have body traits that fit the definition (not the narrow gatekeepy one but the community one).

[katrafiy]

Really not so sure how I feel about the idea of redefining transfem to include people with PCOS if for no other reason than it muddies the water of what the term transfem is generally understood to mean and also totally crowds the kind of people that term was originally coined for out of their own identity.

I'm an """amab""" intersex transfem. I was surgically altered as an infant, I was assigned male at birth and while the records are inaccessible i have good reason to believe I was born with PMDS that was dishonestly characterized as a "congenital inguinal hernia repair" (the scars are way too big and in completely the wrong location for that to actually be true).

Anyways, this is not a matter of inclusion/exclusion. Its a matter of people with PCOS generally outnumbering "amab transfems" by over 10 to 1.

By redefining the term like this, you are turning "amab transfems" into an extreme minority within the identity their label was coined to describe. It's a total appropriation of an identity label by a group that massively outnumbers the original people that label has been used to describe.

And it absolutely is appropriation in the truest sense of the word, wherein a group takes over a label or practice such that the original people that term was for can no longer meaningfully be understood by that term.

Intersex transfems obviously do exist, I am one after all, but I find it endlessly frustrating how often the term "intersex transfem" isn't being used to refer to transfems like me, but instead to refer to people who are blatantly attempting to appropriate an identity label.

I also find it endlessly frustrating the way people seem to invoke the spectre of intersex transfems as a cudgel against other trans women in discussions about transmisogyny. Trans women/fems are my sisters and my community, the people trying to weaponize me against them are not.

[thealternates]

Can perisex people actually shut up for 2 seconds instead of invalidating, harassing and denying intersex people the simple basic function of acknowledging intersex isn't RARE. Every time one of you calls us "DSD" or similar words an angel should come down and throw a bag of hammers at you. Acknowledging PCOS is under the intersex umbrella does not mean we're calling you broken women, it doesn't mean we're calling you men, it doesn't mean you're disordered now, it doesn't mean you aren't cis. intersex people can be whatever they want, cis, trans, both, neither, etc.

You don't have to personally identify as intersex for you to let others exist with the term and community. I'm going to combust! focus on other things that isn't chanting your intersexist views!

"Woah you're so aggressive" whenever we try to be calm, gentle and patient we get verbally stomped on or straight up told we shouldn't exist. i think its time we got mean - 🪽

[roisinivy]

September is PCOS Awareness month, and I'd like to point out some of the many symptoms people with PCOS deal with everyday...

moon face

excessive body hair, arm, chests, back, face, legs and buttocks

irregular periods

painful periods

extremely heavy periods

constant bloating

mood swings

struggle to lose weight

struggle to gain weight

food cravings

high cholesterol

insulin resistance

oily skin

acne

insomnia

fatigue

sleep apnea

depression

anxiety

tubular breasts

dark and sensitive underarms

skin tags

belly fat

high testosterone

excessive hair loss

thinning hair

pelvic pain

infertility

ovarian cysts

And so much more, as well as having to struggle to even find a doctor who will take any of our symptoms and pain seriously. The medical industry needs to take better care of women, intersex and trans folks with PCOS and Endometriosis.

Our pains are real and we deserve better.

[menlove]

tbhhhh one mistake I see a lot of fellow trans people fall into is using gender essentialiast rhetoric when it suits us as a comeback to transphobia. like a trans man on testosterone will have a beard and get misgendered and be like "wow you think THIS is a woman?" and everyone and their brother will clown on the transphobe for it

but the thing is, there ARE women who look exactly like that person! there are women with beards! trans women, cis women w pcos, intersex women, women who have gone on testosterone for gender reasons but aren't men & still identify as women, the list goes on

and the same is true in the opposite

like I do completely get where they're coming from (& felt the same disbelief myself when getting misgendered at times, when I was identifying as a binary trans man), but I think it's just. more harmful than helpful.

if we really want to accept that people can look any which way and still be any gender, we can't be falling back onto the idea that man = broad and hairy and woman = hairless and petite

it's Tempting but like. there's other ways to dunk on transphobes. and talk about misgendering without acting like their mistake is seeing you as the wrong gender rather than that their mistake was maliciously trying to harm you by attacking a core part of your identity bc they clocked you as trans