[ID: A tweet by “ribeiro 🍉 COMM SLOTS OPEN” that reads: “Ppl gotta stop seeing testosterone and estrogen as male and female hormones bc every single human produces them just in different amounts.” END ID]

This is especially important for intersex representation. Intersex people often need hormones that seem to go against their desired gender presentation - that's because gender and hormones have very little to do with each other. Hormones are about sex characteristics, bone density included. I am a woman who needs to take low dose testosterone to function day to day. It took years longer than it takes a perisex trans person to get that testosterone because even trans doctors are intersexist. If we don't identify correctly to society, we are denied our life-saving hormones. There are men who need estrogen and women that need testosterone. All the time!! It's super common in menopause!

This version of the progress flag legitimately looks so nice

Gilbert baker rainbow, huge intersex circle, the design is cluttered but in a good way 10/10

[ID: A version of the progress pride flag with a large purple intersex ring outlined in gold, looping through pink, blue, brown, and black chevrons on the side, which have a base of white. The horizontal stripes are: pink, red, orange, yellow, green, light blue, dark blue, and purple. End ID.]

It's happening the morphing into Ohio

Girls. That's the original image. We've come full circle. It's always just been the state of Ohio

you only need to look at the way being intersex is often referred to by doctors and by TERFs to understand the damage the "sex is biological" rhetoric does

in case you're not familiar, the term I'm referring to specifically is DSD or Disorders of Sex Development

to someone who truly deeply believes that sex is natural, being intersex will always be disordered or defective. they insist on continuing to label us (intersex folk) as "men with DSD" or as "women with DSD" in order to reinforce the sex binary. they will not let intersex people be proof of the truly social nature of sex as a category, because they will not even see us as intersex. delete "sex is biological, gender is social" from your vocabulary. please and thank you

As a physiologist let me say a few words.

I don’t care about sports. I don’t give a damn about the Olympics for other reasons I won’t talk about. But I’m pissed now.

If we are to disqualify the people from the Olympics, we should be 100% fair. No biological advantages allowed!

Believe or not, the professional sport is based on anomalies and mutation. That’s the selection. It sucks and it’s not fair but it is what it is.

Also, having these mutations doesn’t mean you’re automatically great at sports - I’m shit at gymnastics while being hypermobile as fuck. So it’s still unfair even to us expressing these traits, lol.

There are XY AFAB women!!!

This happens during the pregnancy if the child has male chromosomes but there is not enough male hormones in the development of the baby resulting in the baby being assigned female at birth. It’s a form of intersex, but there is literally no physical difference between such child and XX AFAB baby.

Those are cis women. Not trans men. Not even trans men.

The people screaming about the Olympics being a disgrace and the proof of collapse of the society are literally the people who are usually like “there are two genders based on what’s in their pants”. Now it’s the chromosomes you’re checking?

Maybe you are an XY-woman, maybe your sister is. You don’t know.

Stop using biology for spreading misinformation about intersex people, transgender people and women in general.

too high to write. have screenshots from threads.

TERFs on trans men having parties to celebrate getting top surgery:

Their entitlement to our bodies truly knows no bounds.

Weren’t people criticizing this exact sentiment with the “I <3 Boobies” bracelets for breast cancer? Where they care more about the boobs than the person they’re attached to?

Are TERFs actively admitting that they view our tits and our wombs as more deserving of respect and humanity than us? Our thoughts are irrelevant. Our feelings mean nothing. Our voices might as well be hot air flowing through the room. Only our tits and ability to function as baby factories. But now instead of misogyny, it’s transphobia! Or perhaps a mix of both, seeing as this obsession with our bodies is based on the false idea that these body parts make us women and that’s exactly where their entitlement comes in.

I’m bringing this back cause there’s TERFs crawling about in my notes mad that I suggested that medical forms that had checklists for what anatomy you have and don’t have would help cis women as well as trans people and intersex folks. They’re so hung up on the idea of certain anatomy “supposed to be there” with the bizarre idea that this 1) matters when the person is aware of it and is fine with it, and 2) this totally won’t lead doctors to mistreat their patients under the idea that they’re “missing” something or have something they “shouldn’t.” I’m never going to ignore why they’re obsessed with what “should” be there. It’s because my tits and pussy are more valuable to them than me as a person.

ok so about that last addition.

I am intersex, but have yet to be diagnosed with anything.

All my symptoms and experiences suggest that I was born with a uterus and possibly even ovaries despite being "male" I have also spent countless hours scouring every source I could find from vague medical site to actual scientific journals about the subject. I have even asked intersex orgs for advice.

I have tried getting help to get a diagnosis just to know how my body works as well as to be sure I don't have a body part that could turn cancerous.

I have been met with nothing but comments that it's too rare to even bother checking for sure, and that well you're born male so you don't have those parts.

I have even brought actual bloody mentrual pads that I have used to soak up the blood I menstruate, and I still got turned away because my doctor said that couldn't happen, so I must be making things up.

She claimed it clearly wasn't blood(despite very very obviously being blood)

And she wouldn't even refer me to a urologist to check the blood penile discharge.

I have spent 4 years doing this so far.

What OP is mentioning about anatomy that is "supposed to be there" isn't just some hypothetical problem that could occur. It is very real and it is ruining mine, and countless other intersex people's lives

I literally had my pussy sewn shut I deserve k cup tits as compensation

right forgot most of my followers wouldn’t know this so

TW for medical trauma and child abuse

when an intersex baby is born and they have what’s called “ambiguous genitalia” aka they have an intersex condition which causes them to develop a mix of traits from both male and female genitals, doctors will just pick which one it’s closest to and without consent from the parents and obviously without consent from this living human person that just got born, perform a permanently scarring cosmetic surgery to force the baby’s genitals to align with societies perspective of either male or female genitals. these surgeries cause lifetime medical issues and sexual dysfunction and are only performed because our medical understanding of intersex people was written by a bunch of bigoted genicidal monsters. And yes it’s genocide they are removing our ability to conceive children in almost all cases of these surgeries, on top of generally erasing us from public view by hiding our own existence from everyone Including us from birth. these surgeries aren’t well known about because parents literally aren’t told (my mom only managed to figure it out cuz she overheard the doctor talking to a nurse about it when she came down off her painkillers) and scientific literature on it is not only hard to read it sounds like fucking nazi shit so obviously most medical establishments don’t want it in public view. I had one of these surgeries performed on me, I literally don’t even know exactly what it was cuz it’s not on my medical records anymore but I have the scarring and still have uterine tissue so in compensation for our current human society systematically mutilating my body and genociding people like me I think I deserve some banger bazhoingas i think that’s fair

I hope you don’t mind me adding this @werewo1fbutch I wanted to offer resources in my original post but I’m still looking for my own so this is really appreciated

But Wait, There's More! everything i'm about to say is secondhand experience from an intersex friend i have known for years, who i will not be identifying for safety reasons. not only can they just completely remove it from your medical record, many hospitals are in practice of straight-up lying to the parents to excuse why they're taking the baby in for surgery. an extremely common excuse is saying the baby has a heart condition. if you or a loved one were taken into surgery for a heart condition at birth and the parents had no idea anything was wrong until said birth, i HIGHLY recommend inspecting your genitals for scarring and speaking with a gynecologist or urologist(depending on which you usually rely on) if something seems fishy. they can also mark you as the wrong sex on your birth certificate because of this, which can barr you from treatment you are legally entitled to! worse than that, getting that corrected is extremely difficult. even if the doctor who edited your birth was LITERALLY THROWN OUT FOR MEDICAL MALPRACTICE, the hospital - and state - will continue to refuse acknowledgement of the mistake and no correction will be made. this is a very notable issue in the UK, especially if you were wrongfully marked Male. another thing people are often unaware of is the rampant issue of medical CSA that occurs if an intersex child is decided Female. There's a medical procedure called Dilation where a hole is carefully stretched wider over a period of time for various reasons; on its own, this is not a bad thing, and can be necessary for several reasons. however, many "female" intersex children are put through Vaginal Dillation at a disturbingly young age. the idea is that because their vaginas are shallow or more closed off, it's better to stretch them for a few years so that they'll be able to have sex properly when they get married. the thing is, there is no wrong time to start dilation. if you start at 18, there is no drawback; in many cases it would actually be safer, and it only takes between 1 to 3 years to reach a desirable state, depending on the person. and yet, this is often done to children FAR below the age of consent, explicitly with the future marriage reasoning in mind. this is sometimes started at infancy. let's really think about that. a young girl who is too young to consent and may not get any say in the matter is taken to a doctor over and over again to have her vagina stretched out because it is expected that when she's older she'll marry a man and have sex with him. there is no non-creepy way to put that. there is no way to explain this that is not BLATANTLY sexual assault on a fucking child. and the worst part is, this is not legally recognized as SA or abuse in the majority of juristictions. and ALL of this should be given the extra consideration that a large chunk of intersex children begin to identify differently than they were assigned at birth, often BEFORE hitting puberty. intersex people make up roughly 2% of the world population by modern count. that's twice as many intersex people in the world as there are redheads.

i know this is long, and i'm not going to guilt anyone into reblogging; you're not a bad person for keeping upsetting stuff off of your dash. but if you're able, i do gently request that you reblog this. it's important that more people know this is happening. stay safe all, and i wish every intersex person loads of moneys and whatever body they wish for.

want to add that also in the UK, you are not allowed to get your incorrect assignment corrected as an adult (i.e. to transition) either. i don't mean "there are barriers to transition", i mean "it is an explicit NHS policy that intersex people are not allowed to receive any transition care". did they perform a vaginectomy on you as a baby? you are not allowed to get vaginoplasty to get your vagina back (trans women who were born without a vagina, though, are allowed to get a vagina if they jump through all the hoops; for trans women born with a vagina that was surgically removed, this is not allowed under any circumstance). did they perform a penectomy on you against your consent? you are not allowed to access phalloplasty to get your penis back (trans men born without a penis, though, are allowed to get phalloplasty on the NHS if they jump through all the hoops; for trans men born with a penis that was surgically removed, this is not allowed under any circumstance).

similarly, cross-sex hrt (where "sex" refers to the sex you would've been coercively assigned, e.g. for cafab intersex people "cross-sex" means testosterone, for camab intersex people "cross-sex" means oestrogen) for intersex people is not allowed, because intersex people are not allowed to be seen by gender clinics. this is despite the fact that many intersex adolescents are forced to take hrt to align with the sex they have been forcibly assigned. note that, if you have testes, taking any kind of exogenous hormones can fuck up your native hormone production forever, so for the intersex children with testes who were forced to take hrt of any kind, they may no longer have the ability to endogenously produce their own hormones and then become reliant on the type of hrt the nhs is willing to prescribe them, because the type of hrt they want/need is considered "cross-sex" and therefore denied to intersex people.

gics (gender identity clinics) literally discharge you if they discover you have an intersex diagnosis.

for any trans people in the uk who didn't know this and are considering getting a diagnosis of an intersex condition, please don't. not unless being diagnosed with an intersex condition is more important than your ability to transition on the nhs.

(intersex people can still transition privately and do diy hrt, but paying for surgery out of pocket, especially bottom surgery—which is more likely for intersex people to need given the commonality of infant genital mutilation for intersex babies which will need correction later on in life—is unaffordable for the vast majority of people, and especially for people below the poverty line who may live paycheque to paycheque and could never ever save up that amount of money in their lives.)

look. the thing is. nothing is 100% biological. humans are meaning-making machines, and this includes things we typically think of as "biological realities". even in the labelling of something as "biological", we are interpreting and categorising the world around us, and nothing about that process is natural. that doesn't mean it isn't *real*. what it means is that it is *constructed*, and therefore open to contestation

when I say that I'm sick of the phrase "sex is biological", I don't necessarily mean that sex isn't biological, I mean that the phrase carries a lot of specific political meanings that are antithetical to intersex justice, trans justice, BIPOC justice, and disability justice. and I don't believe shifting towards "sex is biological, it's just not binary" necessarily solves all the underlying issues with the "sex is biological" claim

when someone says "biological" or "natural", this is usually shorthand for "thing that is objectively real and true", and usually carries positive implications. "natural" is held up as the opposite as "constructed", and is often used alongside ideas of purity or being untouched

so I hope you can understand why someone who has had "biological reality" weaponised against them would be wary of anything that tries to draw these kinds of distinctions, yeah?

Also sex is a spectrum

yes, that's (kind of) true*, but you're missing the point

it's not necessarily helpful to move from "sex is biological" to "sex is biological BUT [series of caveats]", if you're still carrying the same assumptions about what it means for something to be biological

the word "biological" (as applied to human categories) has history that it carries with it. famously, race is often considered a biological category, but talking about race as a series of naturally assigned biological features is fundamentally linked to race science. regardless of what is or isn't true about human bodies, it is humans who give those truths social meaning. and the social meanings we ascribe to biological characteristics are linked to histories of oppression, because that is what is politically convenient

science isn't an objective series of facts that emerged naturally from the ground up. science coevolved with human society. the history of science IS the history of politics and philosophy, but expressed in a different way. and appealing to science is a way that people attempt to hide the political nature of claims they want to make about how the world works. Linda Tuhiwai Smith has a lot of good shit to say on this

in some ways it Does Not Matter how we redefine sex if we insist on clinging to a sense of biological reality. if that makes sense

*I think it's actually more useful to understand "sex" as a group of different spectrums that tend to line up with each other in various ways, but don't always (i.e. "sex" = the interaction between where you are on various hormonal spectrums + external sex characteristics + sex chromosomes). but as I said. that's beside the point

Looks for theatre ➡️ OBGYN visit

It's nasty hot today. Wish me luck that the cool nice OBGYN gets me where I wanna be with the correct hormones for my intersex body 🤞🏻

Guess who is getting combo T and E ❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥 getting low dose cis girlie T cream dose that post menopausal women get to increase their sex drive :3

Tbh this is actually a big deal. I was denied access to a gender affirming endocrinologist in 2022 by a nonbinary doctor after stopping the estrogen that I was coerced into taking that made me sick. I was sent to a doctor who spent an hour trying to convince me I had to be a man to be okay looking the way I do. I've fought long and hard against medical intersexism to get here!

Intersex people don't get to celebrate medical success often and we are often denied hormones that would make our bodies FUNCTION. We are often forced into whatever hormone socially aligns with the gender we were assigned, even if that goes against our physical and chemical need. Wanna lean into your intersex traits or transition at all? You have 50 more hoops to jump through than perisex people.

It's big that I got the hormones I've been demanding for two years while refusing to change my gender identity for bigoted doctors' comfort. It's huge!

LGBT activists have been vocal about intersex issues for several decades, because establishing the legal right to bodily autonomy for intersex persons is basically inseparable from establishing the right of trans persons to that same legal autonomy over their own bodies. many intersex persons prefer not to be grouped together with LGBT causes; however, the vast majority of LGBT activists would agree that performing "corrective" surgery on intersex infants - to force them to adhere to a largely fictional gender binary - is pretty fucking evil.

[Image IDs: a series of tweets from #EndIntersexSurgery (@/ Pidgejen) reading: Anyways, let's start with what I thought I once knew about myself. When I was 18, I discovered I wasn't like other girls. My medical records read "male pseudo-hermaphrodite 46 XY" & other BS terminology that pathologized my healthy/beautiful intersex body.

I discovered then that I had been diagnosed with partial androgen insensitivity syndrome (PAIS); my XY body couldn't fully utilize androgens (like T) and so I developed mostly like a typical female person externally.

For me, this meant I had a somewhat "ambiguous" looking body (aka a non-binary body) and the doctors performed 3 unnecessary cosmetic surgeries to make me look more like a "normal girl"

(peanut emoji) gonadectomy (scissors emoji) Clitorectomy (kitchen knife emoji) vaginoplasty

Not to mention, they lied to me about All Of This and then forced me to take Premarin (a low does of estrogen made from extracting the hormone from a pregnant mare's urine (horse face emoji, crying face emoji)

Anyways, I got in touch with a new endocrinologist recently thanks to my therapist at @/ RuchMedical who suggested I see him.

He did something no other doctor had ever done. He asked me if he could see my medical records, all of them, and then took time to read of them.

He even reached out to other experts in his field when he was confused by something.

Wow, We love humility in medicine.

Anyways, he ended up suspecting something is up and that perhaps my PAIS diagnosis is wrong.

He then orders me a genetic (dna emoji) test. Thanks to covid it took almost half a year to get the results, but a month or so ago I got them back.

Turns out, I don't have PAIS. I actually have something else known as NR-5A1. Now this is big news mostly because 1. It supports my thesis that docs who deal with intersex kids don't know shit...

And 2. P/AIS intersex folks are believed to not be able to utilize androgens and wo we're often only given estrogen (never T), forcibly "feminized" with fucked up "cosmetic" surgeries, and forcibly assigned female.

Doing what they did to me was fucked up enough, but now realizing that they didn't even have the diagnosis right—and that I *can* utilize androgens—is fucking infuriated beyond belief.

We need to #EndIntersexSurgery y'all like yesterday. /End IDs]

More people need to hear this

You can't change someone's body without their consent

Pour one out for a real one.

Reading up on him, he was a pretty cool guy. He was one of the first people to stand up to John Money about his theories of gender development and position that intersex infants should receive surgery and never be told about it using his abuse of David Reimer as ‘proof’, asserting that Money didn’t have the evidence and standing his ground even when Money straight up started screaming at him. And then later he was proven right when he got into contact with David Reimer, not only discovering proof that Money was wrong but also how abusive and horrific Money had been. He then went on to write advocating for intersex and trans rights and to avoid unnecessary procedures on intersex people without full informed consent and that intersex people are part of natural human variation and that we deserve acceptance and not to be treated like a disorder.

A quote I really like from him: ‘Nature loves diversity, society hates it’

I've seen trans guys discuss being unwelcome in queer spaces the more they pass as men and I believe it not only because listening to other people's experiences is important, but bc I'm an intersex cis woman who passes effortlessly as a cis man and the same has been true for me. I am a femme dyke who makes other queers uncomfortable bc they perceive me as a man, or more masc than them. Times I've put myself into queer only spaces have often been awkward or uncomfortable or isolating.

Someone else mentioned they can't even make being a femme trans man work for them at least to be in irl queer spaces without fear from others bc they're fat and balding and that's the wrong way to have a gender. The same has been true for me! When you're fat and hairy but the head hair is thinner and you wanna dress femme, you're seen as a pig freak even by queer people. And you're automatically a threat to anyone more feminine than you, no matter what.

It's crazy how much I relate to so many experiences from trans women and men both. Do yall ever think about how much you relate to intersex people? Do you ever think about how these things affect intersex people outside of the lense of transphobia specifically? Do you ever consider your experience with transphobia "misdirected intersexism"?

I feel so... down whenever I want to watch queer or trans videos because I know in the back of my mind that none of the current large queer content creators' content or community is safe for people like me, intersex people.

I love their work otherwise, but it hurts badly to hear them toss around casual intersexism in their videos constantly when discussing queer and trans issues and nobody ever mentions it.

And because these are large, popular creators, nobody has ever listened when I've tried to ask they adjust their language. My dms go ignored or unseen and my public comments get drowned out by fans defending their intersexist comments. It's emotionally draining and exhausting, I just want to be included in my own community.

Genuinely asking if you are comfortable sharing, but what are some examples of "casual intersexism"? I'm honestly less read up on it than I should as someone who is intersex. Feel free to ignore this though should you not feel like it or anything.

Instead of saying sex isn't real, we really need to put emphasis not only on the spectrum of sex and gender, but on the following:

Human beings have been falsely classified as sexually dymorphic for ages

Humans are sexually omnimorphic. Say it with your chest and support intersex people. Happy pride month y'all.