Some Notes on Intersex for Journalists

OII Australia notes with dismay that the Australian media continues to get it so very badly wrong when it comes to intersex and this was further underscored when News Limited’s tabloid newspaper The Daily Telegraph published a conversation a journalist had with a foreign sports official about Mokgadi Caster Semenya.

We request that journalists consult with us in understanding intersex and in obtaining quotes from informed sources rather than self-appointed experts.

“Anomalies” and so on…

Some self-appointed “experts on sex and gender” have been quoted by the media speaking about “anomalies” in intersex people’s bodies, and whether our bodies are somehow 100% male or female.

Such “experts” often seem to enjoy judging whether intersex people are “real” men or women, with the implication that we are neither and thus that we are subhuman. We wish to point out these “experts” are doing nothing more than unthinkingly subscribing to a System of Belief and not the facts.

That System of Belief may well be eugenics or neo-eugenics, or at least the binary sex system.

Binary Sex System

The binary sex system, sometimes called the dyadic sex system, is a System of Belief purporting that there are only females and males, only men and women, that all men have the XY karyotype, that all women have the XX karyotype, and that nothing else exists outside this.

The binary sex system exists and is fervently subscribed to despite the facts about intersex people and despite the facts of human biology.

Disorders of Sex Development (DSD)

Intersex people find this term abhorrent and insulting, and ask that it not be used in connection with intersex. It was invented by a small group of medical personnel to replace the word intersex and further medicalize and control being intersex when intersex is in fact a natural variation in human biology.

Intersex people object to the control that doctors have long exercised over our lives. Instead we wish to have them act as learned friends who practice client-centred health care in close consultation with us, and not one-size-fits-all solutions formulated under various unscientific Systems of Belief and that do few of us any good.

We do not appreciate being characterized as disordered or as actual disorders.

Intersex people demand that the use of the term Disorders of Sex Development (DSD) ceases immediately.

Eugenics & Neo-Eugenics

The Nazis were fervent believers in the System of Belief called eugenics, acting upon that belief in their persecutions, mass murders and medical experiments on those human beings the Nazi regime deemed “unworthy of life.”

An active belief in eugenics was not limited to Nazi Germany. It has also been found to exist within the governments and state policies of nations such as Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States and throughout the rest of the world.

Today, neo-eugenics is active, and is to be found in certain sectors of the medical profession, in certain countries of the world.

Neo-eugenics seeks to test infants in utero for intersex conditions, to recommend their abortion, to sterilize intersex newborns and to enforce non-consensual experimental cosmetic surgery upon their bodies in order to “normalize” intersex people.

This ignores the fact that intersex people will always be intersex regardless of what is done to our bodies without our consent.

Gender

Gender used to be a purely grammatical term meaning that a word was feminine, masculine or neuter until New Zealand-born psychologist John Money invented the use of gender as a word referring to one’s innate knowledge of being male or female and went on invent a number of theories of gender that were based on ‘evidence’ later found to be fraudulent.

Despite this, some second wave feminists latched on to his theories and elaborated them further into core beliefs in their System of Belief.

The essence of Money’s unproven beliefs is that one can somehow convince a boy that he is actually a girl and a girl that she is actually a boy. He tried to do the former in the case of the non-intersex boy David Reimer. The case was known as John/Joan.

Money faked the case history as his experiment was a failure. It was discovered to be so when David Reimer went public, confirming suspicions long held by Professor Milton Diamond.

Money’s methods including shouting at David, browbeating him, forcing him to simulate sex with his twin brother and showing him pornographic movies. Money was known to be interested in pedophilia.

Money’s theories are still used to justify non-consensual experimental cosmetic surgery on some intersex newborns. Intersex people want such surgery to cease immediately unless it is to save lives in the case of congenital conditions such as cloacal exstrophy.

Contemporary medical research continues to accumulate evidence that the sex an individual knows they are is set biologically in the womb in the early stages of fetal development.

The word gender is not to be used interchangeably with the word sex.

Gender cannot conclusively be tested for medically – all medicine can do with any degree of assurance is ask the intersex person what gender they are. In Caster Semenya’s case, she states she is a woman so her gender is woman. That is the end of the question.

All intersex people know whether we are men or women, male or female, neither or both, based on what our brains tell us. We don’t need “experts” to tell us.

“Grave health risks”

What “grave health risks?” Being born intersex does not in and of itself constitute a grave health risk, although certain doctors would have one believe that it does. Some doctors use scare tactics to frighten intersex people into having experimental cosmetic surgery on their genitals and reproductive organs to “normalize” them.

Some use the same tactics to frighten parents into permitting them to do non-consensual experimental cosmetic surgery on their child in order to “fix” being intersex, another way of gaining control over our bodies and lives.

It is true that a very small percentage of intersex newborns with internal testes may find the testes become cancerous at a later stage in life, but that can be tested for over the individual’s lifetime and acted on only when absolutely necessary and if and when the patient so chooses.

Hermaphrodite

This word is no longer used in place of intersex, and its use is considered by intersex people to be ill-informed, insulting and dehumanizing.

There is no such thing as a human hermaphrodite, that is, someone who has two full sets of reproductive organs, one female and one male, as earthworms do.

Intersex people do not appreciate being compared to invertebrates – earthworms, slugs and snails. We demand that the media cease using this word immediately.

Human Rights

Simply speaking, intersex people do not have human rights, civil rights, medical rights, the right to live in the bodies we were born with as they were when we were born (genital integrity and bodily intergrity) and neither do we have protection against discrimination and vilification.

We demand all of the above.

Nature versus Nurture

One outcome of John Money’s popular but unproven theories of gender is the equally popular and unproven belief that nurture triumphs over nature.

That is, that you can browbeat a boy into believing he is a girl or a girl into a boy.

Another variation of this system of belief is that people who appear to be one sex but know themselves to be the other were actually somehow convinced by some key childhood incident into believing that they are the other sex. But, no evidence has ever been found for this.

Despite the fact that nurture over nature has never been proven, it is a core belief in medicine, psychology and psychiatry and to question it invites disdain.

Non-Consensual Experimental Cosmetic Surgery

Also known as Infant Genital Mutilation (IGM), this refers to the cosmetic surgery that some doctors practice on some intersex newborns as well as some intersex people in their teens and later years without their actual consent.

It is practiced by doctors who subscribe to a system of belief that having genitals not matching their ideal of female or male will somehow do terrible things to a child’s psyche and socialization.

Thus, they believe, a socio-medical emergency must be declared immediately, and that surgery and hormone treatment must be carried out on the newborn’s body in secrecy. Most often the child’s parents are not told this is done, or if they are then they are warned never to speak of this medical treatment, which continues for a long time after birth, to their child.

Such children are raised with guilt and shame, in secrecy and silence, deeply traumatized and subject to post-traumatic stress for the rest of their lives after they have found out what was done to them.

The underlying System of Belief ignores the fact that non-consensual experimental cosmetic surgery can do terrible things to a child’s psyche, socialization and ability to live.

Intersex people demand that non-consensual experimental cosmetic surgery on intersex people ceases immediately.

Pedophilia

Intersex newborns are popular targets for pedophiles – intersex people seem to hold a special attraction for men so inclined.

A survey of this website’s access logs shows a large number of search engine requests for photographs of the genitals of intersex infants.

The medical profession has accumulated a large and popular collection of such photographs ostensibly for members’ own use but which end up providing fodder and encouragement to pedophiles to seek out more and more of them.

We note that certain psychologists and sexologists past and present seem to have a particular interest in intersex children, surgical modification of the genitals, pedophilia, and accusations have been made by patients. We believe intersex people deserve better.

Prevalence

Depending on which research documents and books on intersex one reads, 1:60 or 1:100 people are born with conditions that underlie intersex.

There are many such conditions, each of which may have its own many variations. Colleagues who have worked for WHO state there are over 154 of these conditions each of which may have many variations within.

Sex

Intersex is a question of sex, and not of gender, nor sexuality, nor sexual orientation, nor sexual attraction.

Being intersex is not being transgender, although some intersex people may also identify as transgender or transsexual as a result of having passed through those medical protocols in the attempt to obtain appropriate medical treatment.

Intersex people are people who, as individuals, have genetic, hormonal and physical features that may be thought to be typical of both male and female at once. That is, we may be thought of as being male with female features, female with male features, or indeed we may have no clearly defined sexual features at all.

Systems of Belief

This is our term for constructed systems of believing in things which are not proven by observable facts, such as religions and ideologies.

Medicine, being art as well as science, is subject to Systems of Belief, as are psychology and psychiatry.

“Tragedy”

Intersex lives are not inherently tragic, but the way we are mistreated is. Abuse of all kinds – medical, physical, psychological, sexual – of intersex people is rife from birth onwards, and the way intersex people are treated in this society is itself inherently abusive and thus may well lead to tragedy.

There should be no need to point out that if intersex people were not abused from birth in all possible ways then tragedy most likely would not have a place in our lives and they would be happy, healthy and productive.

The reporting you do on intersex people directly affects how we are treated, and whether our lives will be tragic or not. Please bear this in mind.

The way so many journalists cover stories about intersex people in a never-ending quest for sensationalism and salacious entertainment masks the real stories lying there ignored – fascinating stories of real science and real lives.