For most Americans, the past few days have felt like a whirlwind; for intersex Americans like myself, the past week has been one of unimaginable whiplash. On Jan. 16, then President Biden’s department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a groundbreaking report on the health inequities our community suffers—believed to be the first ever federal policy acknowledging the existence of, let alone challenges faced by, intersex individuals in the United States. Flash forward to Jan. 20, and President Trump signed an executive order that attempts to negate our very existence.
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Trump’s executive order on “Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” intended as an attack on transgender Americans and disingenuously disguised as “defending women,” erases the biological reality of intersex people like me. I was born with physical traits—external sex anatomy, internal reproductive organs, hormones, and chromosomes—that don’t fit neatly into the binary “male” or “female” options on a birth certificate, and I’m not alone. As the extensively data-driven HHS report references, more than 5 million intersex Americans were born with differences or variations in their sex characteristics or reproductive anatomy, roughly the same number as those born with naturally red hair. Trump’s executive order, however, states that it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes—male and female—and dictates that sexes are not changeable, rather “grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”
Unfortunately for Trump, the reality of intersex Americans like myself are increasingly visible. However, the fact that you may have just learned the word “intersex” yourself is likely due to the fact that we often undergo nonconsensual sex “normalizing” surgeries that attempt to obscure our god-given traits from a society that is more comfortable with binary boxes, such as the only options available on most birth certificates. This is evidenced in the United Nations’ groundbreaking Intersex Rights Resolution which was announced in April of last year, and reaffirms that medically unnecessary surgeries performed without consent violate our rights—as multiple U.S. Surgeons General and the World Health Organization (WHO) have long corroborated. The same day Trump issued his gender-binary executive order, he also mandated that the U.S. withdraw from the WHO.
Despite intersex invisibility in broader society, our incontrovertible existence demonstrates that Trump’s order is neither based in reality nor biology. Countering current medical doctrine and millennia-old literary references, the new executive order makes numerous false assertions that contribute to our erasure, one of which directly pertains to my own lived experience. “‘Female’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell,” reads Trump’s executive order. I was born with internal testicles and an external vagina. I have XY chromosomes and my birth certificate has always said Female. I never produced the “large reproductive cell” and only produced the “small reproductive cell” until I was sterilized without my consent as an infant, in order to fit my body into this scientifically unsound sex binary the executive order seeks to falsify into law.
A subsequent clause also prescribes a tax-funded effort to update our personal documentation to force fit this invalid rubric. So my question for the President is this: when you tell me to adopt documentation that “accurately reflects the holder’s sex,” what should it say on mine?
Trump’s executive order flags specific resources not to teach—among them, a 2021 Department of Education document titled “Supporting Intersex Students: A Resource for Students, Families, and Educators.” The administration’s dogged insistence that intersex people should not be discussed suggests that the confusion generated by Trump’s mandate is intentional–unsurprising, because we disprove some of the major tenets of the ideology that keeps him in power. Indeed, the President’s executive order institutionalizes a right-wing Christian nationalist view of gender rooted in a fictitious “biology” that intersex people debunk.
Intersex bodies have often been used to justify the transgender experience: If some people have physical traits don’t fit squarely into male or female categories on a form, perhaps other humans can’t be so neatly sorted either. Intersex and transgender changemakers such as Delia Sosa, incoming director of the Medical Student Pride Alliance, and AC Goldberg, assistant professor at Northeastern University, show how these identities aren’t always mutually exclusive either. Many intersex individuals are also transgender—whether because they were surgically coerced into the wrong type of body in their youth, by misguided medical practitioners, or simply because many humans are born that way.
Intersex people are also impacted by anti-trans legislation, but too often we are the unmentioned casualties. We are constantly caught in the crossfire of culture wars or used as the “gotcha” moment in arguments to uplift others’ humanity, even as the painful discrimination our community faces—and the authentic beauty of our presence—remains hidden in plain sight. Long a vital element in the case for someone else’s truth, we are also tasked with defending our own. Intersex people are human beings too and deserve dignified lives beyond just proving bigotry wrong. We don’t exist to prove a point; we exist because we do.
It took decades for the powers that govern our country to acknowledge us as the citizens we are and the rights we should be afforded. But less than a week after one President finally published a roadmap to help us access those rights, a new President now claims we are not real.
The clearest path forward is for our community to share our stories in our own voices and to have the public commit to witnessing and believing them. While Trump’s order attempts to shield the public from acknowledging our existence, intersex people are used to dispelling the shadows we’ve been relegated to with the undeniable light of our truth, biological or otherwise.
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