Being Intersex  --  More Than a Diagnosis

Catherine Graffam has written an interesting article on being intersex over at Huff Post.

Intersex, in humans and other animals, describes variations in sex characteristics including chromosomes, gonads, sex hormones, or genitals that “do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies”.

Graffam writes:

When intersex people are given a “diagnosis” we are often left with more questions than answers. Since the abolition of using “intersex” in medical contexts, it has become more difficult to destigmatize intersex traits. The new umbrella terminology, “Disorders of Sex Development” or DSD, makes it easier to pathologize and “treat” us since a disorder is generally considered something that should be fixed. This lands the doctors office faaaaar away from the access to a powerful identity and community.

It is absolutely crazy that the medical establishment has renamed intersex as a disorder at the same time as transgender is no longer considered a disorder. What is wrong with these so-called “experts”? Please stop trying to put the diversity of nature into your tiny boxes, please!

More here!

Being trans does not mean you have to give up on your life, your friends, your career or your achievements

sallymolay:

Crave Music writes:

“I’m going to continue exactly what I was doing before and I’m going to be fucking awesome.”

“I learned early on to be ashamed of it and keep it a secret. And I did a really, really good job of hiding it from everybody, including myself in a lot of ways.”

It was while on a tour in the UK in 2014 that Jordan reached breaking point, deciding that she no longer wanted to deny her true identity. “I decided that if I wanted a shot at a happy life and a happy future, then I needed to transition.” After coming home in October 2014 and telling her family, friends and bandmates Benny Davis and Lee Naimo, Jordan started the transition process in March 2015.

She revealed that she was fearful of giving up the life she knew and loved as a performer, and engaged with stories of fellow transgender entertainers like Lana Wachowski and Laura Jane Grace.

“Being trans does not mean you have to give up on your life, or your friends, or your family, or your career or your achievements. I’m going to continue exactly what I was doing before and I’m going to be fucking awesome.”

Read the whole story!

See also the video: What’s Happened To Jordan’s Beard? where Jordan comes out as transgender.

Yes, You're "Trans Enough" to be Transgender

Great blog post by Mia on who has the right to call themselves transgender.

I used to believe the myth that to be transgender you must be absolutely miserable, suicidal even. Garbage documentaries love to force-feed the same tired narrative that trans women spend their days flipping through catalogues and crying over dresses, as if femininity is measured by how much you want to look like a 1980s Barbie doll. Meanwhile trans men are similarly held to ridiculous standards and non-binary people are erased altogether.

Together the media perpetuates a damaging fallacy that keeps a lot of us sat in denial and ignorance for years.

What finally started to help me accept the truth about myself was reading the words of trans people who intentionally spoke out against the stereotypes.

I realised things which now seem painfully obvious, but when you’re scared, lonely and disconnected from other trans folk, it’s a lot harder to learn these things.

So in the interest of helping anyone questioning their gender or asking ‘Am I transgender?’ here are some things I wish I knew back when I was in your position:

Read her arguments over at OhMiaGod.

Photos: IPGGutenbergUKLtd

We trust children to know what gender they are – until they go against the norm

Diane Ehrensaft, Director of Mental Health at the Child and Adolescent Gender Center , University of California, makes some really acute observations about children and gender in this article. 

She writes:

The main issue that brings children to our clinic is a child in the family who says: “Hey, you’ve got it wrong, I’m not the gender you think I am” or “I do not want to conform to the rules I see around me about how boys are supposed to be boys and girls are supposed to be girls.”

Some of these children are very upset about their gender conundrums; others skip happily outside the gender boxes that were outlined and filled in for them by the culture around them. Yet they all share something in common – feelings about their gender – and depending on how these feelings are negotiated by the adults who care for them, they will either rejoice is their “gender creativity” or suffer from the ill-fit between the gender everyone expects them to be and the gender they know themselves to be.

Ehrensaft sees that when acceptance and allowance of the child to live in their authentic gender replace negation or suppression, the child will have room to find and develop its own identity. And it is much happier for it.

Illustration by hello_meni

Biological sex is not binary | Feminist Times

Interesting write-up on biology, sex, gender and gender identity by Malin Ah-King.

Malin writes:

Psychologist John Money, who became very influential for the treatment of intersex children from the 1950s and onward, considered gender identity to be only dependent on the social circumstances and that there was no innate basis for it. Successful treatment would lead the child to psychologically developing into an unambiguous gender, and as part of this it was essential that both the parents and the child believed that the child had a true sex that only needed medical intervention to get it right.

The assumption of the all over-shadowing social influence, however, has not been without critics. This is especially true following Money’s showcase example of John/Joan, a boy who accidentally lost his penis and was brought up as a girl, who turned out to reject his assigned sex, transition to male and later take his own life. 

In 1965, Milton Diamond suggested a competing hypothesis, namely that the influence of hormones provides a predisposition for gender identity and behavior that sets limits to the social influences. 

Later, evidence accumulated of intersex individuals rejecting their medical sex assignment and, as more and more intersex individuals give their stories and interpretations, the still controversial debate has become more nuanced. Yet intersex children are still regularly treated to conform to current binary gender norms, despite there being no medical reason to do so in most cases.

Read the whole article here!