Intersex Erasure

Reposted from mariedippenaar.tumblr.com

Researchers determine Y-chromosome mutations reveal precariousness of male development

There are so many issues with this article that are subtle enough that it would typically go completely uncriticized. I actually ran across this article linked from Sam Killerman, who’s an LGBTQ activist and educator… For the sake of discussing issues that are usually completely overlooked by LGB people/allies and not necessarily for legitimate criticism:

1) It is astounding how easily this article accepts feminine gender in women with Swyer syndrome, given its tone and the way it dances around binary, adamantly refusing reference to intersexuality. Sex, like anything, is a relatively arbitrary system of categorizations. The line between “male” and “female” is located somewhere along the criteria of genitals, chromosomes, secondary sex characteristics, and internal sex/gender, and it’s not just one homogenous entity, as most believe. More often than not, the latter is completely ignored and the rest is assumed to extend from secondary sex characteristics, with genitals most certainly at the center of attention. Many people coming at this kind of discussion from the angle this article is choose to prioritize chromosomes and become conflicted about calling these women “daughters” or “she” … This one actually feels defensive, like it’s trying to catch people before they know what’s going on with the insistence that people with Swyer are girls before people have a chance to imagine that they (and all of us) might be something more complicated than that.

2) So let’s talk about the conflation of sex and gender. It’s fascinating to me with what frequency super intense and highly-technical biological descriptions of this sort can be given without any sign that they’re remotely aware that they’re speaking within a social context. A queer social context. Now, I get that intersex people are kind of in their own world sometimes because their condition’s hidden from them and all that, but the mere existence of intersexuality is so subversive of mainstream assumptions about the way that sex and gender and sexuality work that this kind of article really can’t afford to steer as clear as it does without sounding a little funny and clueless.

What this means is that after this big ol’ super complicated awesome explanation about hormones and the biological relationship between the SRY gene and embryonic hormone production and gonadal development/dysgenesis to… (paraphrased) “Intersex people were evolutionarily advantageous to prehistory because they broadened populations' spectra of social competencies and helped challenge conservative traditions.” 

WAT. Just what. I’m guessing that intersex women in prehistory would mostly have been vulnerable to early deaths due to bone fractures and osteoporosis… or various sexual abuses… And in any case, I’m guessing that ambiguous sexual anatomy would not have lead to any more gender variance than this author allows for in their own article.

It literally spends the entire article assuming that these people are daughters and women and female and all this, and then they’re like, NOPE GUESS WHAT THEY DEFINITELY HAVE DIVERSE GENDER AND THAT’S SPECIAL.

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