Inarguably, the intersex community was not dealt an easy hand to play with. The secrecy, shame and social marginalization they deal with has built a kind of camaraderie that those who undergo sexual assignment surgery often face: guilt for leaving their comrades, PTSD and difficulty adjusting to their new life.…
1. What is intersexuality? Intersexuality is a group of medical conditions that blur or make nonstandard the physical sex of the individual intersexual. They include Klinefelter’s Syndrome (XXY chromosomes), congenital adrenal hyperplasia, androgen insensitivity syndrome, and a host of other syndromes. Some intersexuals are born with genitalia that…
Not all people come into the world as boys or girls. Little is known about intersex people and some sketchy information is circulating. Moreover, such information is not scarce. Intersexual individuals have bodily sex characteristics that cannot be classified as merely masculine or feminine. These are defined as variations of…
Many Native American indigenous cultures have traditionally held intersex, androgynous people, feminine males, and masculine females in high respect. The most common term to define such persons today is to refer to them as Two Spirit people, but in the past feminine males were sometimes referred to as “berdache&…
The following definitions form a helpful guide to understanding issues around gender dysphoria. Physical Sex: To what sex do the organs of the body match, i.e. male, female or hermaphrodite. Gender: is expressed in terms of masculinity and femininity. It is largely culturally determined and effects how people perceive…
According to Prof. John Money, who has carried out extensive work within the field of gender identity, as many as four per cent of people are born with neither a clear male nor a clear female identity. This would mean around two and a quarter million people in Britain may…
There is a growing tendency to assume that all the varieties of phenotype (apparent physical sex), gender identification and sexual orientation are all merely different shades in one large rainbow. It is becoming increasingly common to hear people lump together transsexual, intersexual, transgender, gay and lesbian in the one sentence…