A fascinating and informative article that illustrates the difficulty (not to mention inhumanity) of trying to force everybody into a gender binary.
Love & Liberty,
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I'm Neither Male Nor Female: Growing Up Intersex
• Amanda Mannen
• June 11, 2016
• 616,993 viewsCongratulations, society, we've come a long way from the halcyon days of 2012, when being transgender was considered a mental illness. We have at least one popular TV show about a transgender person and even a prominent transgender Republican. North Carolina's HB 2 is proof that transgender rights have a long way to go, but progress has been made. Yet one group of people have been left out of the most recent conversations on gender: the intersex -- people who are biologically neither male nor female. Yes, it's exactly as complicated as it sounds. To clear up any confusion, we spoke to Emily, CJ, and Allison, who are all different kinds of intersex. Wait ... there are different kinds?
Yes, There Are So Many Different Ways To Be Partially Male Or Female
When you think of someone neither physically male nor female, your mind probably goes to the hermaphrodite of Greek mythology and porn fame (they so often go together). It goes way beyond just having one set of each, though. Get a group of intersex people together and it's unlikely to find any two who are the same. Many intersex conditions, such as Swyer syndrome, are the result of genes interacting wackily with each other, like the romantic leads in an indie rom-com. Emily has this condition.
"This means that I have XY [male] chromosomes," she says. "However, the SRY gene or one of the other testes-determining regions on the Y chromosome is nonfunctional, so when I was a fetus, my proto-gonads -- the structures that become ovaries in typical women and testes in typical men -- didn't become testes. They just stayed proto-gonads. Now, the differentiation of the proto-gonads is the first step in the masculinization process. The next step should be that the testes release testosterone and other androgens into the fetus' body and cause it to develop typically male structures. When that doesn't happen, however, the 'default' development is female. So I developed female physical structures, aside from my undifferentiated proto-gonads, and I was born looking physically female."
Spoiler: None of this is going to be as cut and dried as looks.
Others have no discernible cause, like MRKH syndrome, which CJ says "is where a child born female is born without a womb," among other things, while still others are the result of your genes and your hormones violently disagreeing with each other, as is the case with congenital adrenal hyperplasia, the condition Allison has.
"Because of something to do with the adrenal gland, I make far too many androgens, so what it comes down to is I have full female anatomy but I cannot produce estrogen and only produce androgens and testosterone," they explain. "The overproduction of androgens and testosterone gave me what doctors refer to as 'ambiguous genitalia.' In my case, because I didn't have adequate estrogen production in puberty, my vagina is basically the vagina of a prepubescent girl. It's very small and not very elastic, and my clitoris is very large, which is referred to as virilization."
Allison says, "There's not a lot of research on CAH," so there are parts of their body that still confuse them. "I did develop breasts during puberty, rather large ones, and I'm not sure exactly why," they say. It's a mixed blessing, to be sure -- of their superhuman clitoris, Allison jokes: "No one can ever use the excuse that they can't find it!"
Sex And Gender Are Way More Complicated Than You Think (Even If You Think They're Complicated)
Did you notice that we're using the typically plural pronoun "they" referring to a singular individual? We hear your cries of agony, grammar Nazis, but there's a reason for that. Let Emily explain:
"Katrina Karkazis (a medical anthropologist who studies intersex people, among other things) describes sex, which societally we think of as being an either-or proposition, as having five components: chromosomal sex, gonadal sex, primary sex characteristics, sex hormones, and secondary sex characteristics," she says.
Yet another reason those two stick people on that sign should be rendered irrelevant.
Well, Emily has a different answer for each of those questions: "Chromosomally, I'm male. In terms of primary sex characteristics, I'm female. My gonadal sex is indeterminate, and my sex hormones and secondary sex characteristics would also be indeterminate (because they're determined by the gonads) if I didn't take artificial hormone replacement therapy."
So, if you ascribe to a pretty strict gender binary, as most Western people do, riddle us this: What the hell is Emily? Even she couldn't have told you at one point. "I'd heard so many people, whether or not they knew about my condition, expressing the idea that infertile women are somehow broken or not completely women," she says. "By the time I got to college, it had really started to bother me, so I sort of just said, 'Fine -- if my womanhood is invalid, then I'm just going to be something completely different, my own thing!' I kind of didn't even mean it at first, which sounds horrible -- but eventually I realized how stifled I'd felt while living as a woman."...
There's much more of the article than what I copied and formatted here – you can read the rest at I'm Neither Male Nor Female: Growing Up Intersex | Cracked.com