Material World: Intersex Fertility

transdyke:

angrybrownbaby:

My daughter was not of woman born. That is a concept that has fascinated people through the ages. My daughter’s gestation was perfectly “natural,” I should point out—but I carried her, and I was never of the female sex; I am a so-called “true hermaphrodite.” I was assigned female at birth, and was living as such when I gave birth to her, but I never identified as a woman, and am now legally male. A lot of myths circulate around the topic of intersex fertility, many of them perpetuated by doctors. They all relate to the current Western insistence on the ideology of sex dyadism. That ideology holds that there are two and only two sexes, and that this is required by “nature” in order to perpetuate the human species.

In fact, sex is a spectrum (see here and here for more information). About one in 200 people has some intersex characteristic. However, in contemporary Western society we are hidden away, medically “corrected,” erased. And often this erasure is bound up in rhetoric about fertility. One way in which medical textbooks frame intersex people as “tragic” is by presenting us as usually infertile. I’m not going to spend time critiquing the idea that a person must procreate to be a fully mature and valid adult, though I certainly don’t believe that to be true. What I want to address from an intersex perspective is the fact that many of us are capable of reproducing.

via Intersex Roadshow

Finally.

Yay!

(via transqueery)