Intersex Bodies Research Articles

Intersex human rights, sexual orientation, gender identity and the Yogyakarta Principles

Abstract Background Intersex people are at risk of human rights abuses because their bodies do not fit medical and social norms for female or male bodies. The 2006 Yogyakarta Principles aim to promote good practices in protecting the rights of LGBT and intersex people by applying human rights law in relation to ‘sexual orientation' and ‘gender identity'. They were ineffective in protecting the rights of intersex people, including due to an inappropriate framing around sexual orientation and gender identity. In the same year, a group of clinicians published a ‘consensus statement' reframing intersex traits as ‘disorders of sex development', reinscribing medical authority over intersex bodies. In 2015 a first country (Malta) enacted protections of rights to bodily integrity and physical autonomy and freedom from discrimination, associated with a new attribute of ‘sex characteristics'. Methods In January 2017, the International Service for Human Rights and ARC International issued a call for submissions to supplement the Yogyakarta Principles, and brought together a drafting team. The Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions and United Nations Development Program also held a gender- and geopolitically-balanced conference to mark a decade of the original Principles and produce recommendations. An expert meeting was held in Geneva in September 2017 to agree the update. Results The ‘Yogyakarta Principles plus 10' elaborated a new attribute of sex characteristics and recognised rights to bodily integrity, truth and legal recognition. These directly respond to the human rights situation of intersex people, with relevance to intersex populations, healthcare workers, advocates, and policymakers. Conclusions Adoption of the new attribute and attention to the new Principles can help address the human rights of people with intersex variations within health, education, and other social policy settings.

Engaging peers and future parents, creating future turbulence: activist biocitizenship practices and intersex transgression in the classroom

ABSTRACT This study aims to develop a more fully theorised concept of biocitizenship as part of the teaching of intersex in critical approaches to sex education. It advances a perspective in which the options of students, as future parents and as biocitizens, are not limited to compliance to biomedicine, but one in which formal education experiences might prepare them to be neighbours and parents who, as allies of intersex family/community members, can engage in political activism to effect change where deemed necessary. Data take the form of classroom talk drawn from a study based in an Aotearoa/New Zealand secondary school, focusing on transgressive acts of citizenship by an intersex activist visiting the sex education classroom and assisting students with social justice projects. Transcripts of audio-recorded classroom interactions are analysed using a version of critical discourse analysis that directs attention to semiotic modes such as visual cues of bodies as well as affect. Findings reveal that biocitizenship can also include those who accept intersex bodies, altering established practices to accommodate those bodies and the people who live them.

Comprehensive sexual health education and intersex (in)visibility: an ethnographic exploration inside a California high school classroom

ABSTRACT Although marked by discourses of progressivism and revolutionary change with regard to the protection of civil rights for LGBTQIA+ people and equitable educational policies, California’s institutionalised discriminatory ideologies against intersex people influence public school sexual health education. Focusing on one high school health classroom, both in-person and after moving online, this study provides a look at curriculum and instruction during one comprehensive sexual health unit. Analysis of materials and student interviews illustrates a lack of representation and perceived pathologisation of intersex bodies, people and lived experiences. Now more than ever, schools have a critical responsibility to rethink inclusive sexual health education and actively engage in the education and advocacy to end intersex marginalisation and erasure.

Intersex lived experience: trauma and posttraumatic growth in narratives

ABSTRACT Intersex people have diverse bodies and identities but are unified by experiences of pathologisation, enduring human rights violations, stigmatisation, and mental health issues stemming from shame and secrecy. Medical interventions aimed at mitigating inferred psychosocial or parental distress occur without substantial evidence of their benefit and have been found to be themselves, stigmatising. Medically unnecessary and non-consensual interventions have been identified as human rights violations. Access to psychosocial and peer support for intersex people has been inconsistently facilitated by clinical multidisciplinary teams and intersex people are at danger of epistemic injustice in healthcare settings. A manuscript of 26 collated narratives written and illustrated by people aged 18–87 with intersex lived experience (N = 17) was examined using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Four superordinate and 13 constituent themes emerged describing experiences of trauma and posttraumatic growth. Narratives depicted how experiences of systematic pathologisation of intersex bodies were negatively internalised and affected sense of self, family function, and social agency. Posttraumatic growth was facilitated through overcoming epistemic injustice, developing self-acceptance and increasing social connection. The findings are discussed in terms of posttraumatic growth and their implication for development of affirmative healthcare services for intersex people and the importance of psychosocial support as a primary intervention.

Appalling Bodies: Queer Figures before and after Paul’s Letters by Joseph A. Marchal

Reviewed by: Appalling Bodies: Queer Figures before and after Paul’s Letters by Joseph A. Marchal Teresa Hornsby joseph a. marchal, Appalling Bodies: Queer Figures before and after Paul’s Letters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). Pp. xi + 311. $99. I have always been an admirer of Joseph Marchal’s work; I often refer to him as the Robin Williams of biblical studies. His work is brilliant, at times manic, evocative, provocative, exhaustive, and at times exhausting in its depth. The introduction to Appalling Bodies (“Prelude: Before and After”) and the first chapter (“Touching Figures”) are excellent resources that give genealogies/trajectories of how M. sets out to grapple with the intersections of history and queer theory, while looking forward to the potential of disruption found through the lens of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. M.’s emphasis here is that, while [End Page 153] various approaches to “queer” subjects in biblical studies (i.e., historical [Bernadette Brooten], or queer theory [David Halperin, Judith Butler]) have been necessary, they have not been effective in disrupting the biblical proliferation of heterosexist essentialism, or of the “untroubled use of the Bible as timeless, eternal, primordial” (p. 23). M. sets out to juxtapose those queer beings launched by Paul (androgynes, eunuchs, slaves, and barbaric foreigners) with more recent marginalized and punished identities: “drag kings or trans butches, or people with intersex conditions, or those engaged in BDSM practices, or those targeted as terrorists” (p. 28). Each chapter thereafter deals with “touching” these figures within and beyond Paul’s letters: androgyny and female masculinity in Corinthians; eunuchs and intersex conditions in Galatians; the slave and the sexual bottom in Philemon; and foreign barbarians and terrorists in Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians. M. seeks to expose the crevices and instabilities in Paul’s literary bodies and to manipulate those instabilities by connecting Paul’s appalling bodies to our present marginalized bodies; this is to illustrate that biblically constructed norms can be “malleable, contestable, and . . . transformable” (p. 24). Further, the anachronistic juxtapositions seek to form coalitions for undoing what has been done by “the biblical.” (Briefly, “the biblical” troubles the kind of periodization with which historians can be obsessed—the term encompasses all that the Bible has touched—past, present, and future; see discussion of “the biblical” on pp. 17–18). Each chapter adeptly weaves modernist historiographical methods with postmodern critique. In the second chapter, “A Close Corinthian Shave,” M. draws upon biblical historical works on the women prophets in Corinthians, then augments this with his own considerable examination of androgynes in the ancient world through the lens of postmodern sex and gender theory. This provides an elegant segue to the topic of female masculinity as observed in more recent “gender-troubling figures, including butch lesbians, female-to-male trans men, transgender butches, and drag kings” (p. 50). By juxtaposing, anachronistically, the Corinthian women prophets with recent figures of feminine masculinity, M. seeks to highlight their shared features “shaped by their practices of gender, sexuality, and embodiment that depart from oppressive perspectives (then or now)” (p. 66). Not only does observing the Corinthian women prophets inform interpretations of “dyke boys,” and so on, but dyke boys and so on should also inform constructions of the Corinthian women. In the third chapter, “Uncut Galatians,” M. uses the juxtaposition of castrated bodies (Paul’s sarcasm of cutting in 5:12) and intersex bodies that have been made to conform to a constructed binary through cutting. Within this conversation comes a word of caution: these “touches across time” can damage as much as heal (p. 111) just as biblical texts always have. M. builds upon the central tenet that the biblical is a cog of the machinery that produces norms that denigrate some bodies in relation to others, and the anachronistic juxta-positions are necessary to trouble that production. That “troubling” is increasingly complex in chap. 4, “Use,” where M. demonstrates the ubiquity of the sexual utility of slaves. Again, M. engages in solid historical inquiry that demands that ethical readers confront the horrifying atrocities, including the glossed over sexual use of enslaved people that Paul condones in Philemon. M. writes, “[I]nterpretative depictions of a benevolent Paul and a...

Hidden Worlds

This art project examines non-binary and transgender identity through training machines to generate art based on Greek and Roman statuary. The statuary is binary in nature and appeals to the concept of pinnacles of masculinity and femininity but what of those of us who fall between, what of transgender bodies, gender non-conforming and non-binary bodies and intersex bodies? Image recognition algorithms have a difficult time classifying people who fall outside the binary, those who don’t pass as cisgender and those who present in neutral or subversive ways. As image recognition becomes more prevalent, we need to have a past and a future for everyone who doesn’t fit neatly into one of the only two boxes on offer. We need to open up the categories, allow people to self-identify or to scrap the concept of gendering people mechanically all together. As a spatial installation, Hidden Worlds also explores the embodiment of interactive augmented reality bodies in the space between physical and digital worlds. I have worked with a classifier and some deliberately abstract figure works, generated by machine, to explore where gender is assigned in the process and what it looks like when you aren’t neatly classified, and the disconnect that is felt when misgendered. The generated captions have flipped around gender and as the figure resolves and each section is submitted to the narrative writer you see a different set of pronouns, a disconnection between what you see and what you hear. I will explore the assumptions we make about classical art; the way it can inform how we represent gender minorities going forward and how art can illustrate the gaps that exist in the training of these important machine learning systems.

Hidden Worlds

This art project examines non-binary and transgender identity through training machines to generate art based on Greek and Roman statuary. The statuary is binary in nature and appeals to the concept of pinnacles of masculinity and femininity but what of those of us who fall between, what of transgender bodies, gender non-conforming and non-binary bodies and intersex bodies? Image recognition algorithms have a difficult time classifying people who fall outside the binary, those who don’t pass as cisgender and those who present in neutral or subversive ways. As image recognition becomes more prevalent, we need to have a past and a future for everyone who doesn’t fit neatly into one of the only two boxes on offer. We need to open up the categories, allow people to self-identify or to scrap the concept of gendering people mechanically all together. As a spatial installation, Hidden Worlds also explores the embodiment of interactive augmented reality bodies in the space between physical and digital worlds. I have worked with a classifier and some deliberately abstract figure works, generated by machine, to explore where gender is assigned in the process and what it looks like when you aren’t neatly classified, and the disconnect that is felt when misgendered. The generated captions have flipped around gender and as the figure resolves and each section is submitted to the narrative writer you see a different set of pronouns, a disconnection between what you see and what you hear. I will explore the assumptions we make about classical art; the way it can inform how we represent gender minorities going forward and how art can illustrate the gaps that exist in the training of these important machine learning systems.

Psychosocial approaches and discursive gaps in intersex healthcare: findings from an Israeli–German action research study

In the past several decades, conflicting discourses have coexisted in the field of intersex studies, including the pathologising discourse of the biomedical disciplines and the affirmative, subjective psychosocial discourse of people born with intersex bodies and their advocates. Intersex activists call for a positive discourse on intersex bodies and a humanistic healthcare approach that accepts and protects intersex bodily autonomy to replace continuing harmful, traumatic treatments aimed at normalising variations of sex characteristics (VSC). Our awareness of the biomedical discursive dominance prompted us to initiate Inter-Care and Awareness, an intercultural German–Israeli action research project. This paper introduces the project and explores intercultural approaches to psychosocial intersex care using an action research framework. We describe how the project’s goals, processes and outcomes created educational material on intersex which uses positive language, explores intersex in the Jewish tradition, improves the support offered to parents of intersex children, and examines cross-cultural differences that arose in the encounters between the Israeli and German participants. The analysis points to sociocultural themes that reflect intersex people’s current status in Israel and Germany. Implications regarding the implementation of similar projects in other countries are discussed.

Intersex human rights, sexual orientation, gender identity, sex characteristics and the Yogyakarta Principles plus 10

The 2006 Yogyakarta Principles apply human rights law in relation to sexual orientation and gender identity. Created outside the UN system, their aim was to promote good practices in protecting the rights of LGBT and intersex people. They were ineffective in protecting the rights of intersex people, including due to an inappropriate framing around ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’. In the same year, a group of clinicians published a ‘consensus statement’ reframing intersex traits as ‘disorders of sex development’, entrenching medical authority over intersex bodies. It was not until 2015 that the first country (Malta) sought to enact protections of rights to bodily integrity and physical autonomy and freedom from discrimination, associated with a new attribute of ‘sex characteristics’. In 2017, an update to the Yogyakarta Principles known as the Yogyakarta Principles plus 10 incorporated the new attribute and recognised rights to bodily integrity, truth and legal recognition. These principles have direct relevance to the human rights situation of intersex people. This paper addresses reasons why the earlier Yogyakarta Principles were ineffective and presents the goals of the update process, inviting adoption of a new attribute of sex characteristics and new principles relevant to intersex populations, advocates and policymakers.

Identidades que importan. Trans e intersex, la ley argentina y la irrupción de la ciencia

Como resultado de las luchas de las disidencias sexogenéricas se han aprobado leyes en todo el mundo que garantizan el reconocimiento de las identidades generizadas. La Ley de Identidad de Género argentina (2012) ofrece una definición de “identidad de género” opuesta a los enfoques biológicos y a la patologización y que respeta la voluntad individual y niega todo lugar a los refrendos de terceros “autorizados”. Esta ley regula el acceso a prácticas médicas para intervenir libremente los cuerpos. Ahora bien, los principios científicos del dimorfismo sexual sobre los cuales descansan esos procedimientos suelen denunciarse por reprimir, normativizar y patologizar en especial los cuerpos intersex. Analizaré la cuestión de las identidades de género a la luz de esta tensión; por último, argumentaré que la identidad es transformativa, relacional y biotecnológicamente producida.

“Where the Mysterious and the Undefined Breathes and Lives”: Kathleen Winter’s Annabel as Intersex Text

Kathleen Winter’s Annabel (2010) tells the story of Wayne Blake, a hermaphrodite born in the village of Croydon Harbour on the southeast Labrador coast. In this land of extremes, Wayne’s body defies classification, and its multiplicity not only signifies “the emptiness of signs” but also unhinges the narratives of the people and the land that come into contact with him. His intersex body defies the social norms of his parents’ societies, the linguistic parameters of self-identification, and the supposed laws of nature by which so many of these characters live their lives. Yet as the novel progresses, almost everyone and everything in this landscape come to share Wayne’s multiplicity. As a result, this article argues, Annabel is an intersex text in which everything is revealed to be more than one thing at any given time, a philosophy of people and places also found in the ecocriticism of Glen A. Love and Lawrence Buell.

Beauvoir's Ambiguity and Unruly Bodies

ABSTRACT The aim of this project is to account for why we often denigrate intersex and trans bodies as disruptive and threatening. Within a binary understanding of sex and gender, we might call these bodies unruly. They deviate from what is normal but also challenge the very conceptions of normality. Appropriating Simone de Beauvoir's concept of ambiguity as the “paradox of man,” I argue that intersex and trans bodies unsettle us because they reflect the freedom of the body and our associated responsibility in choosing how we live the body. We denigrate these individuals from within a spirit of seriousness, claiming that sex and gender are absolute to abdicate any responsibility for them. That is, we denounce unruly bodies in an attempt to flee from the freedom and responsibility of our own bodies.

MECHANISMS OF REPRESSION OF INTERSEX BODIES IN FILMS XXY AND EL ÚLTIMO VERANO DE LA BOYITA, AND REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES OF RESISTANCE

This paper deals with representation of mechanisms of repression of intersex bodies in film, and representational strategies of resistance to those mechanisms, developed in two films XXY and El último verano de la boyita, by two argentine directors, Lucía Puenco and Julia Solomonoff, respectively. It is a discursive analysis of the narratives and analysis of technical aspects of the two films, which aims to determine in which ways are representational strategies of resistance constructed, how they interpret relations between medical and social norms about sex/gender, medical and social violence against intersex people, and form critiques of medical and scientific discourse.

Intersex Activists in Israel: Their Achievements and the Obstacles They Face.

This article focuses on the dynamic between the medical policy on intersex bodies and intersex activists in Israel. Recently, in many countries changes have taken place in medical guidelines regarding intersex patients and laws that regulate medical practices and prohibit irreversible surgeries for intersex babies for cosmetic reasons and without the patient's consent. In Israel, intersex activists are limited by several factors. On the one hand, they are influenced by the achievements of intersex activism around the world but on the other, the pathologizing medical discourse and socio-medical practices, which include early diagnosis, early irreversible surgeries, and secrecy surrounding intersexed bodies, present obstacles to achieving bodily autonomy for intersex individuals and social recognition of different sex development. Nevertheless, intersex activists are attempting to find different social and media spaces in which to achieve public acknowledgement and future bodily autonomy for intersexed people and seeking medical professionals' cooperation. Recently, the Israeli Ministry of Health published a new circular for intersex/DSD patients, and while it does not clearly forbid irreversible surgeries, it provides information about the complexities of intersex people and their experience.

Comparing contemporary medical treatment practices aimed at intersex/DSD bodies in Israel and Germany.

Recently, new laws and medical guidelines in many countries have prohibited early genital surgeries and irreversible medical treatment for intersexed babies. Following the passing of the German law that allows parents to register intersexed babies with no sex/gender, and after the establishment of new medical guidelines for intersexed patients in Israel, this study aims to examine the current medical policies regarding intersexed bodies at DSD centres and hospitals in Israel and Germany. How, if at all, have they changed the previous medical guidelines? This is a narrative study that includes 62 in-depth interviews with medical professionals, parents and intersexed people from Germany and Israel. Three main controversial themes are examined, including the situated diagnostic medical gaze, the surgical practices for normalising intersexed bodies and the concealment of intersexed bodies. I find that in Israeli hospitals, early irreversible surgeries for 'ambiguous genitals' and the removal of internal sex organs are taking place frequently, whereas in Germany, the three DSD centres examined offer psychological counselling for parents instead of early surgeries for their babies. While in Israel concealment practices are embodied in the medical policy, the DSD centres in Germany encourage openness and peer group support.

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Afterword: Genitals are history

This afterword explores the spatial and temporal aspects of intersex medical treatment by juxtaposing the contemporary intersex body against the medieval Hereford mappa mundi. Taking inspiration from how the map records the touches of mapmakers on animal vellum, the essay argues for a non-representational understanding of the postsurgical intersex body as a record of medical touches that try to make intersex disappear.

The Isle of Hermaphrodites: Disorienting the place of intersex in the Middle Ages

What is the place of intersex in medieval studies? How have non-binary bodies been oriented and reoriented as marginal by medieval literature and history? Might medieval intersex studies disorient such mappings of power? To provide inroads to these questions, this article puts medieval studies and intersex studies into conversation. Affirming the premise that non-binary scholarship offers necessary insights to the history of non-binary bodies, this critical analysis of the intersexual bodies on the Hereford Mappa Mundi and in the Book of John Mandeville utilizes the theoretical frameworks of Cheryl Chase and Hilary Malatino. In so doing, the essay proceeds to first orient the place of intersex using medieval pilgrimage as an experienced and imagined practice, generating and using objects such as Mappa Mundi to position certain places and communities as spiritual centers, loca sancta, eschewing other locations and peoples to the margins. Second, this essay unpacks how the second half of the Book of John Mandeville reorients relations to the margins through a sort of “boundary-lust,” imaginatively embodied by the Isle of “Hermaphrodites;” a medieval conception of intersex invoking the ancient parentage of Hermes the God of Travel and Boundaries and Aphrodite the God of Lust and Sex. To conclude, the passages describing the intersex bodies in Mandeville’s Book are close read alongside intersex and queer studies to conceive of how non-binary bodies disoriented the universality and centrality of binary gender for medieval writers and readers in much the same way that intersex continues to de-centralize the flow of power in modern mappings of gender and sexuality.

Time matters for intersex bodies: Between socio-medical time and somatic time

This article focuses on the dynamic relationships between time and intersex bodies that exist, on the one hand, in medical policy on intersex bodies and, on the other, in intersex people's subjective experiences. Time, from a sociological perspective, is a biosocial agent that establishes diagnostic practices, regulations, and treatment policy regarding intersex bodies. The systematic construction of timeframes by biomedical professionals aims to rapidly diagnose and treat intersex patients and is deeply rooted in the “dimorphic soma-gender order” (DMSGO), the imagined unified relationship of female bodies to femininity and male bodies to masculinity. From a socio-phenomenological perspective, I describe the concept of somatic time, which involves the relationship between time and the soma, the body's own particular clock and rhythms, according to which it grows, changes, and develops, and the body as a time capsule that stores experiences. I will illustrate the somatic time of intersex people and their subjective embodied experiences of the soma-gender relationship, and explore how their somatic time challenges biomedical timeframes. This qualitative study is based on narrative interviews with biomedical professionals, parents of intersex children, and intersex adults from Israel and Germany.

The “Normalization” of Intersex Bodies and “Othering” of Intersex Identities in Australia

Once described as hermaphrodites and later as intersex people, individuals born with intersex variations are routinely subject to so-called "normalizing" medical interventions, often in childhood. Opposition to such practices has been met by attempts to discredit critics and reasserted clinical authority over the bodies of women and men with "disorders of sex development." However, claims of clinical consensus have been selectively constructed and applied and lack evidence. Limited transparency and lack of access to justice have helped to perpetuate forced interventions. At the same time, associated withthe diffusion of distinct concepts of sex and gender, intersex has been constructed as a third legal sex classification, accompanied by pious hopes and unwarranted expectations of consequences. The existence of intersex has also been instrumentalized for the benefit of other, intersecting, populations. The creation of gender categories associated with intersex bodies has created profound risks: a paradoxically narrowed and normative gender binary, maintenance of medical authority over the bodies of "disordered" females and males, and claims that transgressions of social roles ascribed to a third gender are deceptive. Claims that medicalization saves intersex people from "othering," or that legal othering saves intersex people from medicalization, are contradictory and empty rhetoric. In practice, intersex bodies remain "normalized" or eliminated by medicine, while society and the law "others" intersex identities. That is, medicine constructs intersex bodies as either female or male, while law and society construct intersex identities as neither female nor male. Australian attempts at reforms to recognize the rights of intersex people have either failed to adequately comprehend the population affected or lacked implementation. An emerging human rights consensus demands an end to social prejudice, stigma, and forced medical interventions, focusing on the right to bodily integrity and principles of self-determination.