Who are intersex people and how intersexity manifests itself

Who are intersex people

Intersex Intersex: MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopedia is a condition in which a person's sex characteristics do not fit into standard beliefs about women or men. Previously, intersex people were called hermaphrodites, but today this definition is considered outdated.

This phenomenon is quite common. Roughly How common is intersex?, one child in a hundred is born intersex.

Most likely, you talked at least once in your life What Does Intersex Look Like at Birth? What to Know with an intersex person. But neither you, nor even, perhaps, he himself had no idea about his condition.

This is due to the fact that outwardly intersex people are no different from standard men and women.

How intersexity manifests itself

Sometimes intersexity can be recognized by the structure of the external genital organs. Here are some common options for What Does Intersex Look Like at Birth? What to Know:

a large elongated clitoris, similar to a penis;
very small penis;
lack of a vaginal opening;
the penis without an opening of the urethra at the tip (the opening of the urethra is at the same time under the penis, in the area of the perineum);
accrete labia, resembling a scrotum;
an open scrotum that resembles the labia.

However, the genitals of an intersex person can be completely normal. In this case, the unusual is hidden inside. For example, a completely standard-looking man has a uterus and ovaries. Or a woman, whose external genitals look absolutely normal, may not have a uterus in the small pelvis, but there is a prostate and seminal vesicles.

There are even more confusing cases. For example, manifestations of the so-called mosaic genetics What is intersex? when some cells in the body have a female chromosome set (XX) and some have a male chromosome set (XY). Or even more interesting: a person can have only one sex chromosome (such cells are designated as XO) or three at once instead of the standard two (say, XXY or XYY).

Such surprises are often diagnosed only in adulthood, when a person has problems conceiving children and turns to specialists to find out the reason. Sometimes intersexity also manifests itself during puberty: for example, a boy's chest suddenly begins to grow, and a girl's voice grows coarse and outwardly she looks more and more like a young man.

However, all these manifestations are completely optional. Some people live and die with intersex anatomy that no one (including themselves) will ever know about.

Why intersex is okay

Because the division of people strictly into men and women is just an artificially constructed social stereotype. Experts from the Intersex Society of North America explain this by drawing the analogy What is intersex? between the sex spectrum and the color spectrum.

We all know that there are waves of different lengths in nature. They are converted to colors that we see as red, yellow, orange, blue, green and others. All colors are generally the same, equal. But sometimes, due to specific needs, we divide shades into two categories. For example, when choosing paints for an interior, we begin to divide colors into "warm" and "cold". Or here's a social example (hello, Black Lives Matter): we differentiate people into "black" and "white", although their skin color can actually be pink, beige, almond, chocolate.

The same applies to gender perception. In a sexual sense, we are all born different: someone has a large penis, someone has a small one, someone has a voluminous breast and a noticeable clitoris, and someone has almost no visible one or the other. There are a million options. But once upon a time, humanity needed to simplify the entire gender diversity of people into two categories: men and women.

It is only recently that science has begun to recognize that this spectrum is much broader than M and J. Intersex people are absolutely normal in between.

Where do intersex people come from?

Intersexuality is an innate quality. Someone is born as a standard girl, someone is a boy, and someone receives an intermediate set of chromosomes and an unusual combination of external and internal sexual characteristics.

The reasons for intersexity are often impossible to determine. They are too complex and include a huge number of Intersex: MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopedia factors that influence the formation of a person's future.

Intersexuality can be established at the time of conception due to the characteristics of the egg or sperm. It can develop due to a deficiency of certain enzymes or congenital decreased sensitivity of the fetus to certain hormones. Sometimes the cause is a failure at the stage of formation of internal organs - for example, the adrenal glands, which synthesize various hormones.

Either way, intersexity cannot be prevented. This is an individual congenital feature, like hair color, left-handedness or penis length.

Can intersexism be cured?

To reiterate, intersex is a variant of the norm, not a disease. Therefore, there is no therapy for such conditions. What Does Intersex Look Like at Birth? What to Know.

Only health problems that can arise from intersexity can be treated. For example, if there is a uterus, but there is no uterine opening, during adolescence, a person may experience painful periods and accumulation of blood inside the body. In this case, surgery will be required to open the hole. But this is not an intersex cure. This will be the solution to the problem of a closed uterus.

However, since social stereotypes are still strong, doctors, having discovered signs of intersexity in a newborn, often suggest that parents "choose gender." And it is recommended that the baby be operated on to make his genitals look more masculine or more feminine.

But again, this is not a cure. This choice can lead to serious problems as the child grows up. For example, the following questions may arise before parents:

What if, as an adult, the child realizes that the wrong gender was chosen for him in infancy? And because of this mistake, he, who feels like a girl, has to live in a male body, or vice versa.
But what if we remove the micropenis, but during puberty, the girl's body starts producing a large amount of male sex hormones?
Do we have the right to change the physiology of a child at all without medical indications - just to please our ideas about what is "right"?

These are difficult questions. And so far the society has no definite answers to them. They are only looking for. So, in some states of the USA What Does Intersex Look Like at Birth? What to Know in the Gender column of ID cards, use X instead of the usual M (male) or F (female). Passports with the indication of the third sex or gender-neutral are issued in Germany, the Netherlands, Canada.

The world is slowly moving from denial of intersexity to acceptance: "This is the norm." But how long this transformation will take is hard to say.