intersex awareness day — Blog

Written By: Alicia Roth Weigel

Hello and I hope this blog post finds you and yours healthy in these trying times.

Who else is ready to not have to start emails that way anymore? Let’s be real, this quarantine sucks. And what sucks even more is it seems like if society collectively had a bit more empathy—to understand how, even if we’re okay and not experiencing health inequity and will ultimately be fine, our actions (or inaction: let’s all vote, y’all) still affect one another—we’d be out of our cages a whole lot sooner.

As an intersex person, it’s not the first time I’ve felt like this. If you’re not sure what that word means, I don’t blame you as we exist largely hidden from society and often even from our own friends and family. According to Planned Parenthood, intersex is “a general term for a variety of conditions where a person is born with reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t fit typical definitions of “female” or “male,” comprising an estimated 1.7 percent of the population.” According to me, we’re born with traits that mean our bodies are in between what most consider to be a binary, literally “inter-” “-sex”.

There’s a lot you can read to familiarize yourself with what probably seems like a foreign concept, but I’m more interested in focusing on some phenomena you likely will understand. We’re all trying to stay positive on the rollercoaster that is this global pandemic, but I’ve realized a few of the more frustrating aspects of quarantine are familiar feelings intersex folks experience day in and day out.

The first, and often most frustrating, of which is feeling trapped in a space that is supposed to be our home. Maybe some of us have felt on the verge of murdering that person we love the most because we’re not used to spending every. single. waking. hour. of the day with them. I know I sometimes want to throw my adorable little puppy out the window (not actually) when she refuses to stay quiet as I take an important call in my one-bedroom, which before the pandemic seemed big enough for the two of us.

Beyond these “quarantine feels”, for many intersex people, feelings of resentment are usually directed at our parents or doctors—who’ve often made life-altering decisions to pump us with hormones or rearrange and remove our body parts without our consent. This atrocity is referred to as “intersex genital mutilation”, and often assigns a gender to a young child regardless of how they identify, involving irreversible surgeries that necessitate that they transition later in life. Many trans folks understand not feeling at home in the body they were born with; imagine that same feeling in a body that was created by doctors, and altered based on your parents’ wishes and not your own?

The second, is loneliness. Wikipedia describes it as “an unpleasant emotional response to perceived isolation”. Growing up intersex, you’re usually labeled with some medicalized term (I got “Complete Androgyn Insensitivity”) rather than being told you’re part of a global population of roughly 150 million individuals like you, and you’re told that sharing your intersex status with others will lead to being ostracized.

That means that as we experience marginalization—whether it be unconsented surgeries on our bodies, or the daily microaggressions of having to fill out forms or choose bathrooms that don’t include us; we go through it alone. This is a bit different than the experience of, for example, BIPOC folks, who often form part of a community of shared identity; and as many of us intersex folks “pass” as cisgender, we don’t always wear our target of persecution visibly—which can be a saving grace, but also means it’s even harder for us to find one another.

Per Wikipedia, “loneliness is also described as social pain—a psychological mechanism which motivates individuals to seek social connections,” which is why we seek to be accepted into the broader LGBTQIA+ community. While there are many unique aspects to being intersex, there is so much we share… We all have experienced shame and stigma. We’ve all faced uncertainty as to the best way to care for our health and wellbeing due to the lack of adequate medical care and resources. We’ve all faced questions as to who we are, in a society that often tries to legislate our rights, and sometimes our whole beings, out of existence.

But it’s often a struggle to get our fellow members of the alphabet soup to even include our letter in the acronym, let alone include us in their advocacy in a more meaningful way. We’re often told to wait our turn, though intersex advocates have been yelling for decades—or labeled “problematic” for our tactics of trying to be visible, even just within the queer community, despite the fact that our trans-cestors literally threw (very warranted) bricks.

When we are included, it’s usually in a way that contributes to the tokenization of our community. You know, those token acts to get recognition that don’t actually make us feel better or solve the problem—kinda like your friends who post “wear a mask” on their feed, but then you see them inside at bars every night in their story?

The intersex community is usually only recognized once a year, on October 26th or “Intersex Awareness Day.” I sit here writing this on Indigenous People’s Day and I’ve seen so many posts about erasure of identities, and reducing a community to a 24-hour period each year, and a lot of the feelings are relatable. Just like re-posting one Native person’s thoughts to a platform that disappears in 24 hours isn’t enough, neither is reading one intersex person’s blog post. There are so many of us that you can follow, all year long, to learn more about the struggles we face… And not just white, cis-passing intersex folks like me—black, trans femmes like @queen_johnny_; latinx, non-binary queens like @rivergallo; and downright legends like @pidgeon.

I hope this pandemic has been an eye-opening experience for folks, as it has for me. I hope it’s been a needed reminder of how interconnected all of our struggles are, and how we can each do better by one another in ways that are pretty low-bar, all things considered (washing your hands really isn’t that hard…) And I hope that perhaps reading this might be the same—that y’all won’t close out of this blog this then wipe your hands clean [pun intended] of the fight for the intersex community, but rather commit to educating yourself more fully on threats to fellow members of your global community’s health and wellbeing, and adjusting your own actions accordingly. We all deserve the same rights and autonomy over our bodies and decisions, and yet some of us are still struggling to access some of those most concepts.

So the next time you hear about immigrants being force-sterilized in camps at our border and post about abolishing ice, maybe throw in some acknowledgement that intersex kids are force-sterilized across our country everyday in our neighborhood hospitals. Or the next time you fight for trans kids to access gender confirmation surgeries, take a second to remind folks that intersex folks have similar procedures forced upon us without our consent. And please: vote, and wear a mask while you do it. The sooner we all realize our simple actions can make momentous change, the faster we’ll all be free—from oppression, and from our own damn couches.

Alicia Roth Weigel
@xoxy_alicia
www.xoxyalicia.com