Today, November 8th, is #Intersexdayofsolidarity. While I can’t say much about it, I’d like to link to some sources, that raise awareness and can give you a bit of an insight.
Intersex means that you are born with an anatomy that doesn’t fit typical binary notions of female and male bodies.
A good read is Their Time. It documents the current movement in the US to end surgeries on intersex kids.
If you’d like to read something about the experience of being or growing up as intersex, have a look at What is it like to grow up intersex? A quote, “It’s crazy that the same health services that prevent trans people from having hormone blockers is the same health service prescribing surgeries on intersex babies and children without their consent.”
Also have a look at the website Intersexday.org. It’s a collection of experiences and articles about being born intersex or what the intersex movement is doing internationally.
Last but not least, I watched the documentary Growing up Coy on Netflix and that really moved me. It’s about a transgender kid. Being transgender has nothing to do with being intersex. A transgender person does not identify with the sex they were assigned to at birth. You could argue that a doctor who performs a genital surgery on a child born intersex, is assigning a gender to this child, instead of accepting that the biological sex is ambiguous. The documentary deepens the understanding of how strong the feeling in a child can be to identify as a different gender than they were assigned to. How early this can be clear to a child. And therefore, it reaffirms the question whether we should perform genital surgery on babies/toddlers without their consent. Should we rather raise those kids without surgery?
Purple Noiz 