So-Called "Intersex" Individuals

 This particular post on Substack by Dr. T is good enough that I reprint it in full. In my comment there I noted that when I worked with Turner Syndrome and Klinefelter Syndrome patients in the 90's, the former were always clear that they are female and the latter that they are male.  They are a large percentage of the folks that trans advocates like to call intersex and imply that they are ambiguously gendered, but they do not in fact undermine the binary.  Dr. T assured me that this is still the case.

 Having accused my argument of being reductionist, simplistic and outdated, the SubStacker I quoted in my previous note went on to accuse my argument of an even worse transgression.

“[Your argument] also willfully ignores the existence of intersex individuals, whose biological reality defies your rigid binary, as well as the progress made in countries like India, where legal recognition of identity is increasingly based on lived reality rather than just chromosomes…”

I did not “wilfully” ignore “the existence of intersex individuals”.  My note did not mention disorders of sex development (abbreviated as DSDs) because the existence of congenital biological conditions (present at birth) in which the development of chromosomal, gonadal and/or anatomical sex is atypical do not challenge the binary (female/male) and immutable (unchangeable from birth until death) nature of biological sex in the human species.

In common with most biological scientists and health care professionals who treat people with DSDs, I do not use the obsolete term ‘intersex’ for a number of reasons.

First, the term ‘intersex’ is stigmatizing because it implies that ‘intersex’ is a person’s identity (as in, “she is intersex”).  In contrast, the term ‘DSD’ refers to an often debilitating biomedical condition that a person has from birth and throughout their life, not who a person is.  The use of DSD in place of intersex seeks to put the person first, as we do when we say that a person has a disability, rather than saying that the person is disabled.

Second, calling people who have DSDs, “intersex”, is both scientifically indefensible and an insult to the humanity of these people.  The people who used to be called “intersex freaks of nature”are not located somewhere on a sex continuum between a woman (a female person) and a man (a male person).  Nor do these people have a sex that is other than female or male.  The claim that DSDs create a variety of sexes, other than female or male, usually ranging from three to six other sexes, but even extending to a multitude of other sexes, is scientific sophistry serving the transgender political agenda.

Third, the social and biomedical challenges faced by people with DSDs have been weaponised by transgenderists in their war on the material reality of biological sex.  By including the letter ‘I for intersex’ in the LGBTQIA+ acronym, transgenderists claim that people with DSDs have ‘a queer gender identity’.  This has done a great disservice to people with DSDs and their families who are focused on ending the ignorance, stigma and trauma associated with DSDs and who do not want to serve as clown fish in scientifically ludicrous attempts to disprove that sex is binary and immutable in the human species.

The main source of the ignorance, stigma and trauma associated with DSDs is the mistaken belief that all people with DSDs are sexually ambiguous, meaning that, at birth, they can not be classed as either female or male and so need to be arbitrarily assigned a sex by their birth attendants.

DSDs encompass over 60 different congenital biological conditions and are relatively common, affecting approximately 2% of live births, but the vast majority of these live births are unambiguously sexed either female or male in terms of their chromosomal, gonadal and anatomical sex, even though one or more of these determinants of sex are atypical to some extent.  Less than 0.018% of live births are affected by a rare DSD that either causes a mismatch between chromosomal (male) sex and anatomical (female) sex or results in anatomical (mainly genital) sex that is so malformed that it is not classifiable as exclusively female or male, but is never both.

The former type of DSD involves disorders of testicular development or disorders affecting the synthesis of testosterone produced by the testes.  In the absence of the masculinising effects of testosterone, a foetus will follow the female developmental pathway in utero.