"The goal is just being able to make your own choices."
Intersex people are born with sexual anatomy that doesn't fit the boxes of "male" and "female," and they want to decide themselves whether or not to change that ...
Intersex people are born with sexual anatomy that doesn't fit the boxes of "male" and "female," and they want to decide themselves whether or not to change that ...
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00:00So I'm intersex, I was discovered pretty early on, I went through a few surgeries that I kind of was forced into and my parents were kind of tricked into.
00:10The only way to really make this right and make this safer is just to do nothing.
00:15The intersex umbrella is expansive, there are so many different experiences, there are so many different ways that you can realize that your body is different.
00:32It's very different to be a person who's assumed female at birth versus assumed male at birth.
00:37So whether you're someone who has immediately unique genitals at birth, that's some people, or whether you're somebody who never goes through puberty, or who goes through puberty in an unexpected way, or even finds out that you have internal differences later on, these are all very different.
00:52And of course, with intersex, it's all about talking about those differences.
00:56What the f**k is happening? What the f**k is happening? What the f**k is happening? What the f**k is happening? Guys, what the f**k is happening? What the f**k?
01:13If you're comparing it, if you're using the framework of different alphabet letters, LGBT, those groups were stigmatized, but they had places to meet, they had places to go, they had in-person communities even before the internet.
01:26But with intersex people, either your parents were lied to, and you never knew, back in the 50s, there's a big generation where that was the case, so you started off with lies, you started off in secrecy, you started off being told, you know, never tell anyone, burn the medical records, skip town.
01:41So you're at quite a disadvantage in terms of your time to build up activism, your time to build up community, and that just started changing in the 90s with the advent of the internet.
01:56What is the impact of the internet on intersex people?
02:08Often the result has been a reduction in agency for intersex people because doctors are still able to say, we're the authority, this is a disorder, and we know best, so here is a recommendation for genital surgery, clitoral surgery for your infants.
02:23We know how to fix them, and that is in our jurisdiction.
02:26Within medicine, sex variation has become very stigmatized, more so in the previous decades since the 50s, but treated as somewhat of a social emergency, because it's very threatening to the social order.
02:40Like, how do you know how to raise a child, how do you know where they fit in in patriarchy and all of these other systems?
02:45What is the impact of clitoral surgery on children?
02:53The fact remains that most major genital surgeries that are done to change appearance are done on kids that are under two.
03:01So someone has a larger than average clitoris, their recommendation might be to cut or move or whatever euphemism they're using, because girls are supposed to have small genitals.
03:11And the second case is when someone is born with a penis, but the urethra comes out somewhere else, so at the bottom, they're passing urine in a way that would make it so that they're not peeing standing up, and boys are supposed to be standing up.
03:23It's about some of these social expectations with surgeries that actually carry a very high, very documented high risk in outcomes like sexual function, needing future follow-up, very high risks, complications, and often families aren't told that if they're the decision makers, you know, someone's under two years old.
03:42And we have no idea of knowing if that's what the kid would want, or if the individual would even be able to tolerate those risks at all, would say that that was worth it for them.
03:53What are the risks of having a penis?
04:07Someone should always be able to opt in to a significant medical procedure or intervention.
04:12And it's politically very complicated, because unlike, you know, LGB or T, where you realize these things about yourself, and it's maybe a more individualized process that you have more control over the timing of, with intersex people or with visible bodily differences, you don't have that same, any luxury of timing.
04:34So often your parents, doctors, authority figures will know before you do.
04:38Intersex activists have been asking for exactly the same thing for probably about 30 years, saying that the only way to really make this right and make this safer is just to do nothing.
04:48Like, theoretically, that shouldn't be hard. We're asking for less, but we're met with a lot of different responses to that.
04:55The goal is just being able to make your own choices.
04:57I think quickly you learn that you can do anything you want still being intersex and you create your own world and your own.
05:04I kind of embraced my uniqueness.