Understanding Intersex with Blaire Ostler

In this week’s episode of In the Den, Jen joins guest Blaire Ostler to discuss intersex conditions. As an intersex person herself, Blaire is uniquely positioned to not only share information about many aspects of intersex conditions, but also give personal insight into life as an intersex person.  The discussion ranges from when intersex conditions are most often diagnosed to the potential impact of trans legislation on people with intersex conditions to the problematic nature of surgeries done on intersex infants and children. Don’t miss this valuable introduction to a better understanding of what it means to be intersex. 

Special Guest: Blaire Ostler

Blaire is a philosopher specializing in queer and Mormon studies, and is a leading voice at the intersection of queer, Mormon, and transhumanist thought. She is the author of “Queer Mormon Theology: An Introduction.” Blaire is also an artist and poet, and spends her spare time hiking, painting, writing, and bickering with her friends about almost any topic imaginable. Blaire lives in Utah with her husband and their three children.  

Links from the Show:

• Blaire’s website: http://www.blaireostler.com/
• Find Blaire on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/blaire.ostler
• Blaire’s Book: https://www.amazon.com/Queer-Mormon-Theology-Blaire-Ostler/dp/1948218410 
• Join Mama Dragons today at: www.mamadragons.org 

In the Den is made possible by generous donors like you.

Help us continue to deliver quality content by becoming a donor today at www.mamadragons.org.

Transcript

JEN:   Hello and welcome. You are listening to In the Den with Mama Dragons. I’m your host, Jen. This podcast was created out of our desire to walk and talk with you through this journey of raising happy, healthy, and productive LGBTQ humans. We are so happy that you’re here with us.

When we use the longer acronyms for the LGBTQIAP+ community, some people might wonder what the *I* stands for.  And today, we have got you covered.  “I”  is for intersex.  Sadly, this part of the community is often ignored even though it is so completely relevant and much more common than one might expect.  Upper end of estimates indicate that the rate of intersex individuals is similar to the rates of natural redheads. I am not an expert on this topic but our guest today is and I am so super excited to welcome Blaire Ostler today In the Den.

Blaire Ostler is a philosopher specializing in queer and Mormon studies, and is a leading voice at the intersection of queer, Mormon, and transhumanist thought. She is the author of “Queer Mormon Theology: An Introduction.” Blaire is also an artist and poet, and spends her spare time hiking, painting, writing, and bickering with her friends about almost any topic imaginable. Blaire lives in Utah with her husband and their three children.  Welcome Blaire!  We are so excited to have you here today.

BLAIRE:    Thanks so much. I’m thrilled to be here.

JEN:          We are obviously going to take a deeper dive into the entire topic, but can we just start off with a super high level, elevator definition of the word intersex so we’re all kind of starting with the level ground.

BLAIRE:      And that’s actually the most difficult thing to do, defining what is “Intersex”. And basically, I would say, it’s someone who’s biology doesn’t fit the standard definition of male or female. And that’s a totally loaded topic in and of itself if you don’t fit one of those binaries biologically speaking.

JEN:            Some people think that being intersex is related to or maybe even the same thing as being transgender.  Can you compare and contrast those two different things to help us understand how they're related and how they're not the same thing?

BLAIRE:      Yeah. Absolutely. So there are some overlaps and there are some differences. For intersex people, they may identify as a cisgender man or woman. They may also identify as intersex. However, somewhere along the way, their biology was something atypical of a man or woman. And when I say atypical, I don’t mean that with any stigma. I just mean a deviation from the standard answer or the typical norm, so to speak. So I’m not saying that with any stigma. But it’s atypical, meaning it’s rarer. 

Now, for someone who’s trans, the definition of trans is just you identify with something you were not assigned at birth, okay? So if you were assigned male at birth but you identify as a woman, you are a trans woman. So, with intersex people, everything starts to get really gray and fuzzy and where do our definitions fall short and how are they servicing us. So an intersex person can be trans and an intersex can be cisgender depending on what they were assigned and depending on how they chose to identify.

JEN:            So, if a person for example is identified as intersex at birth, for example. And they continue to identify as intersex their whole life, that would be somebody who’s not trans, right? Cisgender, they are assigned at birth and they continue. But there’s some nuance in that. So somebody might be intersex and trans, or they might be just one, or they might be just the other, right?

BLAIRE:      Yes. And then, on top of that, you have people who don’t find out they’re intersex until later in life. Some major moments in life where someone usually finds out about their atypical biology, birth is not the only time someone finds out if they’re intersex. Usually at birth it’s usually because your atypical genital anatomy because that’s what doctors are looking at, what people are measuring. They’re not measuring your internal reproductive organs or your hormone levels, right?

JEN:            Nobody’s doing chromosome testing on babies.

BLAIRE:      Exactly. Exactly. So you could have a condition called, androgyny sensitivity syndrome in which you could have the chromosomes of what we would biologically call male, but yet, you would present your phenotype, your body would present as a woman. So, at birth, no one’s testing any of that. The child comes out and they look at the genitals and they say boy or girl based on that. Now, if it’s somewhere in between that and you have what I call, “nonbinary genitals'' the medical community calls them “ambiguous genitals.” I’m like, “There’s nothing ambiguous, they’re just nonbinary, okay? That’s the first indication of maybe an intersex condition.

But intersex conditions extend way beyond just genitals. We’re talking about chromosomes, we’re talking about hormones. We’re talking about your Gametes. Your gametes are like your ovum or your sperm. We’re talking about internal reproductive anatomy. We’re talking about all sorts of things that go into these, I’ll call them, biological sex differences. With that being said, birth is only one part of the intersex variations that exist. People who have nonbinary genitals and are assigned that at birth. 

The next phase is usually around puberty when you start going through a lot of changes in your body and things like that. For girls, this could be menstruation. Some intersex conditions could be there’s this young man, and he’s about sixteen years old, and he started experiencing some severe abdominal pain. And the doctors couldn’t figure out why. They went in and did an ultrasound and everything, found out he was intersex, he had a uterus and was trying to menstruate, but he had no vaginal canal. And so menstruation doesn’t work that way. Anyway, he had his uterus removed. And it wasn’t until puberty that he realized he had an intersex condition.

          The next phase of life, beyond puberty, is usually when you go to try to reproduce because our biological sex assignments are based upon the idea of, “You put this part and this part together and you create a new life”, right? You have man and woman, they come together and they make a baby. So it’s not just aesthetics, like, looking at genitals, it’s like biological utility. Can we create more human beings with these two anatomies? And so for a lot of intersex people, when they go to reproduce, they may think they’ve been cisgender their entire life and totally “Normal” or “Typical”. I’m using air quotes there.  And then find out, “Oh, my goodness, there are some abnormal biological things happening there.

A lot of intersex people will have trouble with conception, with delivery, sometimes with sex itself, all sorts of things because, again, intersex collides with this idea of biological utility, right? There’s going to be problems with fertility there. Often it is the case, but not always. So some intersex people can reproduce. Some intersex people can’t. And depending on what that is, you can pass that genetic variance onto your child. And with medical advancements, more intersex people are not dying. So some people are like, “Why are all these queer people – and I’ll say specifically intersex?” It’s called the medical marvel of intersex people being able to reproduce now, and not die. 

I was one of them. I would have  died trying to reproduce the natural way. I joke about I’m a technological cyborg because I’m half woman, and half machine. And the machine gave me all the woman stuff I didn’t have. And so I was able to reproduce. Now, I may pass these genetic variances onto my children, but before that wasn’t possible because I would’ve just died in childbirth, as would my child. But now that more people are living, SURPRISE, more queer people get to live too. And I think that’s great news.

JEN :            That is great news. I love how you talk about the nonbinary genitals that you mentioned. For many decades I thought that was the only version of what intersex was. And I think I considered it, maybe, like even a birth defect or a mistake sort of situation. But the more I learn about intersex, the more I realize it’s just this natural, normal variation of the human condition. And I like how naturally you speak of it like that. Like there’s this big realm of sex is not binary like we sometimes want to believe it is. It’s this big giant spectrum and just normal, natural variance which is beautiful.

BLAIRE:      Absolutely. And the interesting thing about that, too, is when people think about the binaries, it’s not the negation of the binary. Some people are like, “Biological sex is binary.” And I just want to gently correct the terminology. It’s bimodal. Bimodal means most people are going to fall into one of those two groups, male or female biologically speaking. Most people will fall in there, but not everyone falls in there. If everyone did, it would be binary. If most, it’s bimodal like a statistics chart, right? You’ve got two humps on the outer sides, most people fall in that one or that one. But there’s a variance between there, that doesn’t have to be a mistake. It’s only a mistake because we mistakenly thought it was binary. We mistakenly thought that. 

And so our concepts and ideas of this is a mistake is something subjective that we just projected onto intersex people. Is it a mistake if you don’t have a uterus if you never want to have children? Well, for that intersex person, they’re like, “Well, woo-hoo I don’t have a uterus and I never want to have children. This is just free birth control for me. Yay.” Is it a mistake for someone who desperately wants to have their own child and have that. Well, maybe for them it is. And they’re like, “Yeah. I would like to figure out uterine transplant situation. How can we make this happen.” So the concept itself of mistake or right or wrong or this idea of how a body is supposed to function, needs to be up to the individual. And this applies to the trans community too. Like, is that woman’s penis a mistake? Well, they get to decide that. That’s not for us to decide, that’s for the trans person to decide. Is that part of your body a mistake or not? That’s for them to decide. It’s for me to decide what’s right for my body.

JEN:          A bimodal is a super new word for me. I love it. I’m going to use it all the time because I’m constantly thinking about binaries and the lack of binaries in reality. In this realm, just touching on this real fast before we leave this topic. I want to remind our listening audience that it is NEVER, ever, ever, ever appropriate to ask any other person about their genitals.  So, if we are wondering if someone’s intersex or trans and we’re talking about this woman – does she have a penis, does she not have a penis – we just don’t ask. It’s none of our business. We don’t ask. If you’re maybe going to have an intimate relationship with them, that’s a valid conversation somewhere along the lines. But other than that, just that little reminder to our listeners that we do NOT ask about other people's genitals.

BLAIRE:    Amen. Amen. Thank you for that disclaimer. That’s between you and your partner and then if you have children who need help still, that’s about it.

JEN:          I’m interested, you touched on this a bunch. But, I’m interested in a little more depth about the medical aspect that might impact some intersex people. I know that historically we’ve done things differently. So I’m hoping you’ll talk about this across time, like, historically what did we do as a society with intersex people and currently what are we doing?

BLAIRE:    Yeah. It depends on how far back in history you want to go. It was totally fine to throw an intersex baby off the bridge because they were considered mutilated, a defect, or whatever. But, of course, in cultures they even did that to female babies too. So, the concept, again, of mistake is rooted in patriarchy and white supremacy. So intersex people were a part of that too. So historically, it was perfectly fine to postpartum abort your intersex child. It slowly over time, and depending on cultures, has changed significantly. A lot of what I would say that transition happened about was, again, medical information, medical technology, and better understanding just the human body in general, and taking away some of that superstition. 

In some cultures, though, intersex people are revered and thought of to have special qualities and powers to bring to the community. But basically, right here in Western American culture, I would say the general temperature is, “Intersex is there. It’s not their fault. But it is a condition and a mistake.” So that’s generally the attitude right now with that. Now, that attitude is beginning to change as more intersex people speak up about it. One thing that’s been really hard, specifically for the intersex community to advocate for is because – and this goes for a lot of the queer community – is that you’re taught to hide this thing about yourself. There’s so much shame involved in it. If someone found out your secret, if someone knew, if someone whatever, you wouldn’t be worthy of love, you wouldn’t be attractive. No one’s going to want you as a partner. 

So there’s no incentive for the intersex person to advocate on their behalf if the advocacy and disclosure of having an intersex condition comes with, “You’re unworthy of love.” So that’s been a huge hurdle to get over in order to get intersex advocacy and intersex rights. The more we’ve taken the shame out of that, the more intersex people have been able to come forward. 

Another thing that has changed is, again, medical advancements and technologies. Again, recognizing, “Oh, intersex isn’t just about genitals. There’s way more to it than that.” We didn’t have ultrasounds or ways to gauge hormone levels or measure secondary sex characteristics in certain ways. We have those tools now. So it’s like why do more intersex people exist, well part of it is we have the tools to gauge and understand what was already there before. And also, we’re not killing them. And also, they’re not dying as much in child labor and things like that. Also, with that, I would say that there has been a lot of advocacy work on behalf of parents, which is huge being able to get parents involved in recognizing, “Hey maybe we can wait on some of these intersex procedures, medicalizations, and interventions because maybe there’s nothing wrong with your kid to begin with.

JEN:          I’m old. So it seems to me like I was talking about before with this ambiguous or nonbinary genitalia was just automatic surgery.

BLAIRE:    Right.

JEN:          Like ‘60s or ‘70s and automatically you want to fix this kid so that they can have this “normal” life. And I see that a lot among intersex advocates to quit doing that. Quit operating on babies. Can we talk about why? Why is that a problem?

BLAIRE:    Absolutely.

JEN:          Why don’t you want to fix your kids and make them “normal”?

BLAIRE:    Yeah. There’s a few reasons. And when you talk about in the ‘60s and ‘70s, they actually had a ruler to measure the clitoris because the clitoris and penis are homologous organs, meaning they share the same tissue. And, as they develop, the penis will extend and the clitoris generally doesn’t extend as far as a penis does. And they would have an actual ruler. And if it doesn’t measure up, you clip it to make it look like a clitoris. So we’re literally medicalizing someone’s biological sex without their consent, right? Part of the problem is with some of these procedures too, sometimes they can have long term negative impacts on a person's ability to have sex, to achieve orgasm, things like that. And a lot of the reason I think intersex people advocate on behalf of non-necessary medical interventions. I’m not saying that, no, medical interventions are not necessary.

JEN:          What are some of the things that require surgery when we’re talking about intersex?

BLAIRE:    I would say things that are going to physically harm your body and prevent you from doing most basic functions. So, for example, let’s say you have a baby who’s vaginal canal and urethra start to overlap. So, for men, the urethra functions as the place for urine to come out and for semen to come out. And there’s a little door here that prevents both from coming out at the same time. For girls, we have a vaginal canal – Sorry. For biologically assigned girls, apologies – you have a vaginal canal and a separate urethra. Sometimes those will overlap and if you get urine up into your uterus, you can cause UTIs, all sorts of problems and things like that. So that’s maybe a surgical intervention you want to intervene on. If your child can’t urinate without harming themselves, this is an issue. We should probably step in, even though the child is not of the age of consent to do that because you’re trying to allow them to have the most basic functions, right? The bigger problem is when you’re intervening on an aesthetic claim. It doesn’t look binary. It doesn’t look normal. It doesn’t look typical.

JEN:          You guys can’t see all the air quotes.

BLAIRE:    I have all these air quotes when I say normal and typical. And the thing that happens is – and I just want to first affirm and respect parents who come into it with the best of intentions – we just want our kids to have a safe, happy, normal life, right? But sometimes with those best intentions, we can become their first bullies that says you’re only going to make friends if you get this surgery. You’re only going to be worthy of love and companionship and marriage and all these other things if we don’t make you look more binary, if we don’t take away some of this ambiguity. 

And if we could get parents onboard with the idea that I’m not going to be your first bully, I’m going to be your first protector. Anyone who comes after you, who says you’re not worthy of love because of your genitals, because you have extra body hair, because of your sex characteristics not being what someone else thought they should be, I’m going to be your first defender. I’m going to back you up. I’m going to be your Mama Dragon, right? And so we would love to have more Mama Dragons onboard protecting their kids, not through, “We have to cut you to make you worthy of love.” You know what I mean?

JEN:          And I think in that realm of being a Mama Dragon, you and I talked about this earlier. But empowering other parents, right, when you have a friend whose got a child with these situations to be able to say, “You know what? Your kid is perfect. They’re welcome at our house. We would be delighted for them to be friends with our children. And none of that stuff matters. They’re humanity is what we care about and they’re a beautiful child.” And supporting each other because I do think that secrecy thing that we mentioned – I know several people who are intersex who’s parents knew, made decisions when they were infants, and never told them. And so, not only are people protecting themselves, but I think there was these decades of not even telling the intersex person themselves and this person is growing up going, “I take these pills. I’m not sure why. My parents just told me I needed them, but puberty was hard.”

BLAIRE:    Right. That’s why it’s so important to establish this relationship of trust with child and parent and this relationship of, “I’ve got your back no matter what. And I’m going to help support you in your decisions.” Now, for some intersex people, they may want to transition, which transition is a tricky word in the intersex community, right, because it may or may not always be binary. Just like nonbinary transition, but it’s not always as hard binary as we might be imagining in our heads. So I’ve transitioned to a feminine presentation, right? I’ve had thousands of dollars of plastic surgery. This goddess before you was purchased, okay. 

And so intersex people go through certain transitions too. But that should be up to them, just like it should be up to trans kids. Put it in their hands to let them choose the kind of life and direction they want to live. Again, so long as it’s not medically necessary in the sense – not medically necessarily in “You don’t look like a girl – but medically necessary like you can’t urinate. These are essential. Or you’re menstruating and you have no vagina. We’ve got to get rid of the uterus, you’re going to get hurt. So, again, it’s not totally binary. People are like, “End all intersex dah, dah, dah.” It’s like, “Well, hold on. Some people are going to die if you do that.” And then and guess what, “We need to intervene on all intersex.” Well, that was totally unnecessary. You didn’t need to clip that child’s clitoris because it looked somewhere between a penis and a clitoris. You didn’t need to do that. And maybe they never have an orgasm because of that, okay. So everybody just calm down. Let’s just talk about it and just recognize it’s very much a nonbinary approach to sex.

JEN:          I’ve thought a lot about the connection with trans issues too. And the trauma that individuals must experience when they’re feeling that their presentation forced on them was perhaps female and they identify as male. And then learning that their natural body actually had a lot of male presentation to it, but that was surgically removed without them even knowing. And they’re trying to reverse surgeries or reverse hormonal treatments or whatever.

BLAIRE:    Absolutely. I call that de-transitioning of the intersex community. And so people talk a lot about de-transitioning in the trans community to say, “Oh, look at these people de-transitioning. Doesn’t this de-legitimize the trans experience if people detransition?” I’m like, “Look at all the intersex people who have had to detransition medical interventions and things that had happened to them without their consent. And let’s just make one more other thing clear, we are all in transition through various aspects of things in our life, in our beliefs and understandings. Maybe we can just support each other whether we’re transitioning or detransitioning. Whether we’re trying out these pronouns or we’ve figured out those pronouns weren’t the right ones for me. Why don’t we just support people in our journey? And I think, if we supported more people in their journey step-by-step, we’d solve so many problems of just accepting people as they are and how they want their bodies to be.

JEN:          So, since you touched on that, I’m going to ask. It seems really obvious. But pronouns are a huge topic in the trans world. Can we talk about intersex pronouns?

BLAIRE:    Yeah. Definitely. So there’s not so much different than they are in the trans community and/or cis community in a lot of ways. So, again, the intersex population is so diverse in their experience. In the bimodal distribution, the statistical bimodal distribution, some people more sit in the middle and some people start to go towards the ends, more towards a male or female assignment. And these are just assignments. Whatever you want to do with you, I support that. These are just assignments. So some people sit more on those sides. So for some people, they were assigned a sex, for some intersex people, they were assigned a sex. They were assigned pronouns. They’ve been transitioning to that end of the binary. And that 100% worked for them. They never changed their pronouns. They never detransitioned or anything like that. And there are tons of intersex people that do that and they walk through the world and everybody just assumes like, “There goes that cisgender person” I’m sure that’s what they’re thinking in their head at Target. “There goes a lovely cisgender person.”

JEN:          How proud. They’re so brave to be out and about.

BLAIRE:    And then there are other people who are going to start to detransition and be like, “Actually, no. I was assigned intersex female and pushed that way, and it did not work. And I’m going to detransition or transition towards the male end of the spectrum.” And they may play with pronouns and change pronouns and things like that. So, for an intersex person, though, it’s always tricky because even our language is binary. Like this idea of transitioning or de-transitioning. For some intersex people, they’re one in the same. De-transitioning and transitioning are one in the same, you know?

JEN:          That’s a really good point.

BLAIRE:    And so for intersex people, sometimes they’ll say, “Are you cis or are you trans Blaire?” And I’m like, “I’m both. I’m in transition and I have transitioned in many, many ways.” But I transitioned to what I was assigned to, at least aesthetically the way people would look at me or engage with me. And I’m like, “So that’s kind of cisgender.” So it’s just not binary for intersex people. It’s usually an and-and-both situation.

JEN:          I love that comparison to natural redheads too, because we talked before about how intersex is largely invisible and so easily erased because when you’re walking, like you said, through the grocery store you’re going to see someone with red hair. If you go to Ireland, you’re going to see a lot of people with red hair. So we know that they exist. It would be totally bizarre to take a school full of children and be like, “Alright, all of you, if you have blonde hair, go here. If you have brown hair go here.” And then just leave it there and expect the red heads to figure it out on their own or fake it or constantly dye their hair because it’s so visible. But with intersex people, we’re not like, “That person really looks like they have androgen sensitivity syndrome. Or that person clearly had some surgeries as an infant because there was some uncertainty about what was going on there.” Like, these are all things we don’t see super naturally. 

We do see people who we believe are women who might be a little more masculine, or people we believe to be men that are a little more feminine. But it’s so easy to erase people when they’re topics that you can’t necessarily see. So I’m hoping that you’ll talk about, like your example of the boy with the stomach pains whose body was trying to menstruate and wasn’t able to. Can you talk about some other examples, like the diversity of even just things you’ve personally talked to people about or read about, like some examples of what it might look like in real life to be intersex?

BLAIRE:    Right. So there’s over a hundred different intersex variations. I mentioned five categories earlier and these are usually – they cluster together towards a male or female assignment. The categories are external genitalia, internal reproductive anatomy, your gametes – meaning your sex cells like sperm or ovum – you have your gonads and you have your hormones. So normally those all line up for most people. For intersex people, something in one of those categories or more, didn’t necessarily line up. 

So it could literally be anything within those five categories, basically. But also more things as well. So Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome is one of them. Your body basically has the testosterone but doesn’t utilize it. And so, because it doesn’t utilize it, it just kind of sits there, I guess you could say, dormant. And with that, this person who has testosterone and X and Y chromosomes, looks so feminine, so gorgeous, so beautiful. But if you did a chromosomal exam, people would be like, “Oh, this is a boy.” And it’s like, this doesn’t look like our perceptions of boy is. So it’s completely invisible. Now for someone with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, they may also go their entire life never knowing they have it either.

JEN :          I was just going to say, “How would you even know?”

BLAIRE:    So, usually people find out about an intersex is usually one of those three points, is like birth, puberty, and reproduction. Because that’s usually where it comes up. Not always, but usually. And so it’s hard also to get a gauge of just the total number of intersex people. We estimate it’s the same as red-heads. But we have no way of knowing because people will live and die their entire lives being intersex and have no clue. And that’s fine too. That’s in no way an argument to be like, “Yeah. If they don’t know, why is it a big deal? Why is it an issue?” Well, for that person it wasn’t. But for this person over here, it was a really big issue. They have non-consensual genital surgery without any knowledge of what was going on. So that’s a problem for them. For this person, maybe not so much a problem, maybe convenient birth control. Who knows. 

The other thing about intersex conditions is politics gets involved sometimes and people have political agendas about what it is, what counts as intersex, who gets to be intersex and who isn’t. And, generally, those who narrowly define it are trying to promote the idea of a binary. And those who broadly define it are trying to deconstruct that idea of a binary. And so part of the issue is we’re working with different definitions too. So, some people say your sex is determined by your chromosomes. And it’s like “Okay. If that’s it, that’s the only thing that determines your sex. Fine. We’re just going to ignore people with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. We’re going to ignore all this.” 

And then other people are like, “It doesn’t matter about chromosomes. It’s purely your genitals.” And I’m like, “Great. So a trans person who had gender confirmation surgery, is now biologically female for all intents and purposes if that’s who we’re going to define it.” And they’re like, “Well, no. It has so much to do with reproductive utility and your gametes.” It’s like, “Well, some people have ovo-testies in which the ovaries and the testes didn’t take a binary approach. So, where are these people? And so when we go through all of these different variations of what intersex people could be like, you couldn’t just pin it down to just one thing because biology is so much more diverse and beautiful than that. And most the science and people in the community know this already and, especially biologists. They’re like, “We see intersex everywhere in the animal kingdom.” Humans aren’t the magical, only binary, species out there. It’s way more complicated than that. But it’s just helping people understand that there's way more variance than the story we’re being told.

JEN:          As I’ve personally become more aware of intersex people over the last decade or so, I have become particularly mindful of legislation and how legislation tends to largely ignore them. So laws directed at trans people or laws that enforce a binary biological sex, often leave no space for intersex people to exist. Every once in a while, like the Idaho Trans Health Care bill included, “But not intersex people. They can do whatever they want,” sort of a situation. But largely, like when you’re trying to legally enforce a biological binary, intersex people just don’t exist in that world. They’re completely erased. Can you speak to this a little bit and ways that we can be mindful of intersex people while we’re advocating politically for the entire community?

BLAIRE:    Absolutely. I’m so glad you brought that up because legislation is an issue because that’s, in a lot of ways, what gives parents and doctors the right to give people non-consensual procedures purely for just aesthetics just for the looks of it. So, a lot of time with legislation, again, like so many politics, I think there’s a lot of misinformation out there about just the facts to begin with, before we even start formulating opinions and then legislations. So, I always like to start with just a little bit of facts first, just to make sure. Intersex people exist. And, now, we may dispute how many there are or what conditions count, but intersex people exist. Legislation that is often directed towards limiting trans rights and trans procedures often do two things. One, they leave caveats for the intersex community. And those caveats give intersex people access to health care and services and insurance companies. And, often, people do that because this is the attitude of, “Intersex people exist. It’s not their fault. But we need to help them transition to the binary.” 

For however good intentioned that is, those accessibility doors are opened for intersex people. When they are opened for intersex people, it makes you wonder why some people will say, “Oh, we just care about children having access to irreversible procedures. People under the age of 18 shouldn’t have access to irreversible procedures like that.” and if that’s the case, you just let intersex people do that, but you didn’t let trans people do that. And I’m guessing that’s because you think intersex people should transition to where trans people should not transition. And there is a simple word for that. It is “Transphobia.” Because intersex people having options to transition but trans people not having options to transition, plan old sexism. This body can do it, but this body can’t do it. And it’s like, “Okay, so much for freedom. That kind of went out the window there for a second.” 

Some people will be very consistent about it and be like, “No. No irreversible procedures for anyone under the age of 18.”  And that, at least, makes cohesive sense. However, I think we also need to leave open the opportunity for people to have autonomy over their bodies even before they’re 18. I mean, if you can drive a car, if you can have a job, you should have more say over what’s going on in your body. And I think there’s a lot of fear mongering involved too, to where people will be like, “Oh, if you start your kid on hormones or something, then all these other things are going to happen, like a slippery slope.” And I’m like, “Yeah. But not medicating them is also an irreversible procedure. Puberty itself is an irreversible procedure to where, if you take puberty blockers, it gives you some time, some doors, some options. So, when we think about legislating other people’s bodies, especially minors, I get it. We’re all concerned. We want safe, happy, healthy children. Part of that is giving them access and the right to accept and the right to deny, to accept and deny care. Bell Hooks said it best. And Bell Hooks said, “True oppression is lack of options.” So let’s just give people options. I love freedom. I love freedom so much. Let’s give people options of what they want to do with their bodies.

JEN:          I wonder sometimes if intersex gets exceptions because of that weird lie that parents are forcing their kids to be trans. But parents are traumatized by their kid being intersex.

BLAIRE:    Exactly.

JEN:          Which are lies on both sides, right. There’s no reason to be traumatized if your kid is intersex. They’re just intersex and they’re glorious the way they are. And if they're trans, that’s equally true and you didn’t pick or cause or create either situation. But I wonder sometimes if those lies are what give this, like you’ve mentioned, this empathy for intersex people and also their parents, where the parents of trans kids get a whole lot of, “You’re a pedophile. You’re a child molester. Why would you do this to your kid.” Nobody says that to parents of intersex kids.

BLAIRE:    Yeah.

JEN:          That’s like they see it as more medical instead of more just part of, like I said, a normal variance of the human condition.

BLAIRE:    This is the medicalization of the sex binary. It is medical. It is necessary to be in the binary. And so you’re absolutely right. And I just, I do want to just express empathy for a second for all the parents of all the queer kids, especially if you’ve never been through this yourself. There’s no, like, all the sudden, “Hey you have an intersex kid. Here’s the manual on how to do it right. Here’s a trans kid. Here’s a manual on how to do it right.” No matter what you do, there’s going to be a government there to judge you. Your child’s going to grow up to judge you. Your community is going to judge you. Religious people are going to judge you. Everyone is going to judge you. So I just want to express empathy right here for all the parents who have a queer kid and you’re just figuring this out step-by-step along the way. You’re going to make mistakes. I’ve made mistakes. You’ve made mistakes. We’re all going to make mistakes. But we’re learning and growing in this together.

JEN:          Not only is there not a manual, but sometimes the manual you were, kind of, given is inaccurate.

BLAIRE:    YES.

JEN:          So you kind of got a manual, but it’s full of lies. So you have to unlearn. Which is different then when you get a baby and there’s no manual. At least people aren’t trying to lie to you about what it means. Where with queer kids, they’re like intentionally lying to you your whole life about what it means. And you have to learn, that’s kind of a soap box issue for me.

BLAIRE:    Right. And the funny thing is too, the more we learn and understand about various queer identities, queer conditions, queer biology’s and things like that, is recognizing certain biological components. So, with intersex people, some of this can be passed down. Can you pass your gayness down to your kid, your transness. And some of it, it’s actually complete bologna this idea that, like, did I make my kid queer any more than I made my other kids straight. I didn’t pick anything for either of them. They kind of came that way. And they’re just blossoming and growing. I didn’t really pick it for me. I didn’t pick it for them. It just kind of happened. So you’re absolutely right. This idea that we’re creating trans kids or that you are a bad parent or even legislating against parents who help their children transition into being abusive in some kind, is just absolutely misinformation. Very misinformed.

JEN:          I probably should’ve asked this at the start. But I’m going to ask now. Can we talk about the word, hermaphrodite?

BLAIRE:    So the idea of hermaphrodite is actually someone who contains both biologically reproductive male organs and biologically reproductive female organs, which actually doesn’t exist within the human species. Hermaphrodite came from Greek mythology, Hermes and Aphrodite. But it’s the concept that you have both male and female reproductive organs. And it’s just not accurate to intersex conditions because it doesn’t exist in the human species. So, for example, hermaphroditism exists in like banana slugs. Meaning, when two banana slugs decide to get together and make a baby, they both get each other pregnant and they both get pregnant. They have both male and female reproductive, functional organs. So when you find, when a banana slug is looking for someone to reproduce with, gender isn’t the question. It’s all uni-gender and they’re all just getting each other pregnant. So that’s hermaphroditism in the biological sense. It doesn’t exist in the human – I’ve never heard of it ever existing in the human species. It’s more folklore and myth. Another thing with hermaphrodite is that some people have used it in a derogatory way. And because this term has become derogatory for a lot of people, intersex is a more commonly used term. Actually, even the term intersex is beginning to fall out of favor as well.

JEN:          Oh, I didn’t know that.

BLAIRE:    IN some places, yeah. And, again, there’s a lot of different reasons for that. I don’t take any offense to any of those labels because maybe I’ve deconstructed the English language enough to be like, “These aren’t offensive to me anymore. They’re just words.” But another reason is because now they’re moving towards disorders in sexual development instead of intersex. And so, disorders in sexual development also comes with its own stigma, that if you’re not part of the binary, you’re a disorder. So, linguistically, it makes sense. If you’re not in the order, you’re not of the order. You are in the disorder. But instead of changing our order or categories, we’re just going to call you a disorder into where it’s like it didn’t have to be a disorder. We didn’t have to call it that. 

However, here’s another thing where it goes back to legislation, insurance, and access to care. So, if you can diagnose someone with a disorder, that opens up insurance companies. That opens up doors to access to medications and all sorts of therapies and treatments. So, if you can diagnose a disorder, so some people are like, “Oh, yeah. It’s a disorder. Insurance companies, pay for this.” And that makes perfect sense. I’m like, sure, call it a disorder so I don't have to pay full price on my hormones that I take every day, you know what I mean. So it’s tricky, this idea of hermaphrodite, intersex, disorders in sexual development and the different stigmas that come along with these terms and why these terms continue to change. And a lot of that has to do with, you can’t take it outside of our capitalistic system in which people have to pay for healthcare and how people acquire access to their insurance benefits. 

So if, for someone who is trans, may argue for a medically diagnosable condition of transness because that’s going to open up the doors for insurance companies to be able to pay for these things. If it’s not diagnosable and it’s totally fine, why is anybody paying for it? You know what I mean? And so it’s the same thing with intersex people. Intersex people it has been deemed by the gods of all things binary that, “Yep. You get to have access to medical care so that you can transition to one of the binaries. Congratulations. Thank you. We’ll help you on that journey. But we’ll do that for intersex people but not cisgender people or transgender people.” A cisgender person who wants to have a breast augmentation, they’re not going to help her on her gender transition or her gender augmentation. She’s going to pay out-of-pocket for that. And they do the same thing oftentimes for trans people that’s changing legislation, insurance companies, and again, this all has to do with corporate capitalism and what the benefits cover and things like that. So the systems in which we live in are also influencing our diagnosis.

JEN:          I don’t want insurance companies to be in charge of these things. So, if somebody was talking about it, do they call it DISD?

BLAIRE:    I don’t know what the acronym is, but it’s Disorders in Sexual Development. And I do have mixed feelings about that. I have a lot of problems with the idea that we continually have to take natural variances as disorders. But, at the same time, we do live in a system in which insurance companies – they get a little number from your psychologist that says, “Yep. Now, this person can have ADHD medication. Yep, this person can now have hormone therapy. Yep. This person . . .” So the psychologists are working within a framework in which also their insurance company won’t pay for it unless you jump through these hoops. So there’s social stigma over here of a disorder. But there’s money and medical access over here if I do have a disorder. So, sure, I have a disorder in sexual development. That’s fine. Can you pay for my hormones, now? I don’t care. 

So I’m just really pragmatic that way as far as just for me personally in my journey. I recognize everybody else is going to have different perspectives on that, and I honor that especially for all the gender variant people out there just trying to get basic medical care. Because it is a nightmare, it is a nightmare as an intersex person. There’s medical trauma to worry about every time I walk into a doctor’s office, still today, as a 40-year-old. I still walk in and I’m like, “Is this doctor going to hurt me or help me. Is this doctor going to help me get what I need or are they going to like, -- you just never know.” And trans people go through that, too, times 10. And so it’s just recognizing, over here we’ve got insurance companies and capitalism, and corporate greed. Over here we have legislation. Over here we have philosophical concepts like autonomy and freedom and equality. And over here we have actual biological facts. And all these things are working together to give to you today, intersex people who get their hormone therapy and trans people who don’t get hormone therapy.

JEN:          It’s nuts.

BLAIRE:    It’s a rat's nest. It really is.

JEN:          I want to make sure we hit this before we move onto, like you’ve mentioned the word cis a bunch of times as the opposite of trans. And the word developed, right, in the 1990s because otherwise the conversation was between trans people and normal people, which is horrible. And we use that term a bunch in our little air quotes, like atypical or typical or normal or whatever. So can you talk about the word, and I think it’s endosex for people who are not intersex. Is that correct?

BLAIRE:    Oh, I don’t know what it is. I’m learning something new right now? Is it endosex? I kind of want to Google it, now.

JEN:          I Googled.

BLAIRE:    Well, if you Googled it. Gosh, I never even thought of that. Yeah, I guess endosex. I just call them binary. But maybe endosex is a better word for it. So, I’m going to do some research on that word. Thank you, Jen.

JEN:          As I’m having this conversation with you, there’s got to be a better way than saying “Normal”. Because I think I’m endosex. I might not be. I have never had my chromosomes checked but I assume that I am. But I’m certainly not any more normal than you are. In fact, there’s a lot of people who would say that you are a lot more normal than I am. So that’s why I started searching. Like, I’m not going to go around telling people, “I’m not intersex. I’m not intersex.” Because we don’t want to define ourselves by a negative.

BLAIRE:    Right.

JEN:          But I think it’s endosex and I was going to ask yoyu about it. But maybe that’s an irrelevant . . .

BLAIRE:    You know what,  I love that. I’ll Google it. I’m going to look into it. But I may start using this word, endosex, respectfully of course. But that could be a very helpful word in terminology. In that, I think also, that you mentioned defining yourself as something you’re not, which is actually quite beautiful, especially the idea of cisgender. And some people are like, I don’t like the word cisgender when cis really just means same. So it means, same gender. And I was like, “Oh, maybe we should’ve called it homogender. I’m the same as gender. And heterogender meaning opposite of?

JEN:          I like it.

BLAIRe:    I was like, because maybe , then, cisgender people if they identified as homogender, maybe it would be easier to say homosexual. I don’t know. I just want people to . . . 

JEN:          I was going to say, they’re not going to like that better than cis.

BLAIRE:    I know they’re not. But I just, I’m just wondering how we can just see more of ourselves in other people and see other people in ourselves as well. And honestly, that’s one of the things I love most about being intersex is because I do share a lot of interesting qualities with people who are endosex or people who are cisgender. But I also share a lot of qualities with trans people. I mean, we take the same medications. We go through a lot of the similar hoops to get these things. And, Yes, I’m treated differently, so it’s not the same. But being able to share so many qualities with different people really gives you a level of empathy to be able to go, “Hey. I see you and me, placing me in you, recognize we’re working through this together. Maybe we could come up with mutually beneficial solutions so that people can get the things they need.”

JEN:          So you’re actually so right on top of my last questions that I wanted to ask you before we go. Out of all your experience and your research and your connections what do you see as the best things, the things that we genuinely as a community can celebrate about associating with and having intersex people or even being intersex ourselves? What are the most beautiful parts?

BLAIRE:    So I love this question so much. And it may not be a popular answer, but it is my answer, two things really. One thing that I think is beautiful about being intersex and being in transition between two bimodal distributions is being that rare transition. It’s kind of cool being atypical. I hope people who have red hair are like, “I kind of love having red hair. It’s beautiful. It’s unique. It’s different. It’s lovely.” And I’ve really come to accept my biology. At some points in my life, I did not feel this way about being intersex. I wanted nothing more than to be, air quotes, normal. And a lot of that was peer, family, religious driven and realizing maybe I didn’t need to be all those things that I was told I need to be. 

But recognizing that these beautiful transitions. And the analogy that I go with and the analogy in my book – I wrote a book about Mormonism and my experience in theology – but is the idea of we have day and night. But we also have sunrise and sunset. And intersex people are those rare transitions between day and night. We are the sunrise. We are the sunset. And people wake up hours early and hike to the top of Timpanogos, just to get a glimpse of the sunrise over the beautiful mountains. And that’s what I see intersex people as. We are this beautiful, rare transition that, if people would just take a second to look at not as a mistake. Is a sunrise a mistake? No. It’s not a mistake. It’s beautiful. And recognize that just because sunrise is, “Ooh, is it morning, is it night, where are we at? I don’t know. It’s kind of cool. I don’t know. Let’s roll with it.” If we could appreciate that and how unbelievably beautiful that is.

The second thing is for intersex people is one thing we really didn’t even talk about. Is intersex people in sports and recognizing how often, intersex women particularly this is the one place we will naturally excel and be exceptionally good at. With our natural born biology, untampered by medical care, untampered by anything else, our natural born biology is that we’re going to be, generally speaking, probably pretty athletic or good at sports. Not all intersex people, but a lot of intersex women athletes are very good. And I can’t tell you how many times people have tried to take away medals, take away achievements, take away goals and things from intersex women who have competed, but we want to clip intersex wings because they flew too high. 

And this is the one place in their life where they’re going to soar, intersex women are going to soar. I’m 40, and I can tell you right now, I guarantee you I could beat most women in an athletic competition because I’ve got testosterone surging through my veins unlike most women do. And that is an advantage for me, but that’s my natural born biology. Don’t clip intersex people’s wings just because you created binary categories.

JEN:          That’s so perfect. There’s Castor Semenya, where they told her, “If you want to compete, you have to take testosterone suppression medication. You have to suppress your natural body.” Which is so the opposite argument we keep hearing when it comes to fighting against trans people. You want to stop trans people because they have quote/unquote natural hormones in their bodies. And then, there’s this other woman, who they’re like, “Oh, that’s natural for you. Also, we don’t like that.”

BLAIRE:    Exactly.

JEN:          So we want you to control it if you want to participate. And it points to this hypocrisy almost where there’s this forced binary that isn’t real. And so you can’t hold consistent positions, when you’re trying to enforce it, you kind of have to make up the rules as you go along.

BLAIRE:    Exactly. And it’s not cohesive. It would be like tell, Shaq we need to chop his legs off at the knees. You're natural, you’re a little too tall. It’s not fair to the rest of the people. And it’s like, well, Shaq was born this way, literally. When you talk about the concept of born this way, intersex people are born this way. And I love seeing intersex people excel in sports. I love seeing them excel in their bodies and appreciating all the benefits that come from being intersex because there’s so much other stigma out there and so many people ready to clip your wings, to slow you down, and try to tamper you to put you into a binary box that you just don’t fit into. And I just love seeing intersex people fly out of that box. Always.

JEN:          That’s so lovely. That super power, like we talked about, is it a mutation or a defect. The X-men are the mutants in the story. They all have a superpower.

BLAIRE:    Oh my gosh. And I love that analogy too, because the mutants, some of them recognizing that their powers are really harmful so they have to pull their powers back and then learning how to use those powers and things like that. Because for some intersex people, again, let’s say you’re a woman who doesn’t want to have kids and you don’t have a uterus. I love this super power! But for someone else, it’s a big hindrance. So, again, it’s just recognizing this super power, the hindrance, the weakness, the strength. All of that, again, just let people be who they are and help them in who they want to be. Transition, de-transition, don’t transition,  don’t de-transition. Be who you want to be. And, for goodness sakes, just let people who are naturally born a way that you didn’t like, just leave them alone. Just leave them alone.

JEN:          I love all of this. This was such a beautiful conversation. We will include links in our show notes for ways that people can find you and find your work and your efforts. But for those who are listening, can you talk to us, just for one second, about the best way to find your work?

BLAIRE:    Yeah, absolutely. You definitely would want to check out my website. It has all my peer reviewed articles and research and things like that that I’ve done. My website is blaireostler.com. And also have links and stuff to my book, “Queer Mormon Theology”. And I’m on the social medias, but I’ve been taking a little bit of a hiatus the last year. So definitely stick with my website and my emails. And everything is on there.

JEN:          Perfect, Blaire. Thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your knowledge and your experience. We’ve actually wanted to do an episode on the intersex community for a couple months now, but we’ve been waiting to find the perfect guest. And I feel so lucky that we were able to do just that. Thank you so much for coming.

BLAIRE:    Thank you so much for having me.

JEN:          Thanks so much for joining us here in the den. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with your friends. We’d also love it if you could take a minute to leave us a positive rating and review on whatever platform you’re listening to us on. Good reviews make us more visible and help us reach more folks who could benefit from listening. But, review or not, we’re glad you’re here. For more information on Mama Dragons and the podcast, you can visit our website at mamdragons.org or follow us on Instagram or Facebook. And if you’d like to help Mama Dragons in our mission to support, educate, and empower the parents of LGBTQ children, donate at mamadragons.org or click the donate link in the show notes.