What it means to be intersex Susannah Temko
Transcriber: Leslie Gauthier
Reviewer: Krystian Aparta
I have a confession to make,
right off the bat.
I don’t know what you were doing at 16,
but I’m a really big fan of “Harry Potter”
and was waiting way too long
to receive my letter
inviting me to Hogwarts School
of Witchcraft and Wizardry –
I could have gone for sixth form.
I was also waiting
for an invitation to the Jedi Temple
or a tap on the shoulder
to invite me to the X-Men.
I was that kid.
When I was 16 years old, I got my wish.
I was taken into a doctor’s office
and told that I am in fact
part of a group of people
who are still largely invisible
and misunderstood.
I am intersex.
That’s my superpower.
For many of you in this room,
it will be the first time
you’ve even heard the word “intersex.”
Intersex is anatomy.
It refers to people
who were born with one or more
of a variation of sex characteristics.
That’s your genitals,
your hormones, your chromosomes
that fall outside of the traditional
conceptions of male and female bodies.
In other words,
the most basic assumption
we’ve made about our species –
what we’re taught in schools
that sex is binary,
just male and female –
is not correct.
Like most things in this world,
it is much more complicated than that.
Intersex people who fall
outside of this false sex binary
have always existed,
throughout human history.
Like the wizards of “Harry Potter,”
we are pretty much invisible.
Some of us don’t even know
that we are intersex.
Like the X-Men,
some of our traits are obvious at birth
and others turn up around the time
when puberty is supposed to kick in.
When we find out we are intersex,
some of us believe
we are the only ones in the world.
Me, specifically, I have XY chromosomes,
which you may have understood
to be typically male.
I was also born with gonads
instead of ovaries.
Standing here on this stage
would have been my worst nightmare
only five years ago.
It would have been impossible.
I use the metaphor of the superhuman,
but really, we are just like you.
Intersex people are thought to make up
to 1.7 percent of the population.
That means more, depending
on where you are in the world,
but you get the picture.
We are in front of you, getting coffee;
we are sitting next to you on the train;
we are swiping you left and right
on dating apps –
(Laughter)
So why haven’t you heard of us?
If we are so common, why don’t you see us?
How has the world responded to us?
We often think of disciplines
like medicine and the law
as supposedly neutral –
immune to bias.
The law is “reason free from passion.”
The doctors' Hippocratic oath states
that “warmth, sympathy and understanding
may outweigh the surgeon’s knife
or the chemist’s pill.”
In truth, these disciplines
that touch our lives are impressive,
but they are filled with our prejudices.
They are not immune,
just as we are not immune
to the effects of that prejudice,
which can be devastating.
In medicine, intersex babies
who are born with ambiguous genitalia
are routinely operated on without consent,
without medical need,
irreversibly,
in order to make their healthy anatomy
appear more “normal.”
This is before they’ve even said
their first words,
indicated a sexuality
or a gender identity.
Many people are never told the truth
about their intersex traits,
and those who are are instructed,
often, not to tell anyone.
Secrecy is enforced
and shame is a close shadow.
In the law,
intersex people fall
outside of categorization,
and more importantly, protection.
This concerns the banal tasks –
if you can imagine the number
of forms you’ve filled out
that you had to check “M” of “F” on –
to lacking protection under any law,
specifically, the Gender
Recognition or Equality Act.
And intersex people
cannot correct the sex classification
they’ve been given at birth
unless they declare they are transgender.
After decades of activism,
these life-altering problems
are starting to be addressed.
So why does this matter
to those of you who aren’t intersex,
who don’t have variations
of sex characteristics?
I imagine many people
in this audience have,
in the privacy of their own bathrooms,
wondered …
“Are my labia too long?”
“Are my testicles uneven?”
“Is my penis too small?”
“Is my vagina too wide or too shallow?”
Nothing that hurts or gets in the way,
just aesthetically:
“Are mine ‘normal?'”
I imagine that many people
in this audience have those small concerns
but generally go about their lives
not thinking about it.
These variations in our bodies,
like the color of our eyes
or the size of our feet,
rarely affect our health, materially.
To put it another way,
to give you an idea
of the intersex experience,
what if when you were an infant,
your parents or your doctors
looked at your labia,
your penis, your testicles,
and thought,
“They’re healthy, feeling,
but they’re not ‘normal,'”
even before you knew
what you wanted to do with them,
or you know, want to put them.
(Laughter)
What if they went so far
as to assign you a different sex
based off these measurements …
And then they lied to you
about what they’d done?
What if these surgeries sterilized you?
What if they resulted
in immense pain and scarring?
What if you had to take medicine
for the rest of your life
to replace the healthy
organs they took away,
and you had to pay
for that medicine yourself?
And then every time you went
to a doctor’s office for a cold,
you were questioned about your sex life,
your gender identity,
what your private parts looked like.
And then more doctors
and medical students were invited
to add to these questions,
ask you to drop your trousers
or submit to an unnecessary medical exam.
This is a picture of what is happening
to the intersex community –
people like me, every day,
around the world.
Our community is not
antimedicine or antisurgery.
We are for the right to make
decisions about our bodies
and our lives.
The current approach to intersex people
stems from a now-debunked academic study
from a man who, over 50 years ago,
believed that you could
raise a child in any gender
by changing their genitals,
never telling them
and reinforcing that gender
over and over again.
It also stems from referring to healthy
intersex variations as abnormal
or disordered.
This makes sense.
If you refer to something as a disorder,
it suggests there’s a fix.
It also stems [from] the fear
and stigma of being intersex,
from homophobia, transphobia, sexism
and ultimately, our colonial past.
I am not here to say that the categories
of men and women don’t exist.
I’m saying, like most
things in this world,
it is more complicated than that.
The world is complex,
and we can choose
to see that as beautiful,
or we can choose to continue
to deny the existence of that complexity,
push people into artificial, binary boxes,
fix what isn’t broken
and restrict our own field of vision.
One of the challenges
that intersex people face today
is making ourselves visible
and making ourselves safe
at the same time.
By that, I mean we are appealing
to the humanity of lawmakers
to make us safe
whilst putting ourselves
into the public eye,
sharing our stories,
trying to build community
with people like us …
Even when it isn’t safe to do so.
For parents of intersex children
listening and watching,
for those in the audience
who may become the guardians
of intersex people,
I want you to know I love my life,
but it has not be free of issue,
especially in relation to being intersex.
No life is free of issue.
All coins have two sides.
On the one side,
I have been humiliated
in doctors’ offices.
I have stood in front of prospective
partners and felt afraid
and so not good enough.
I have watched other women
pass me in the street
and imagine the ways
that they were more woman than me,
more human than me.
I have questioned whether I have
a place in this world.
On the other,
I have been deeply loved
for everything that I am,
in friendship and romantically.
I have learned compassion and empathy
for a wider range of society.
I have taken the time to love my body
and not judge the bodies of others.
I have developed a strength and a hope
that would have been impossible
without this particular life.
The instinct to protect children
is instinctive and it’s admirable,
but the truth is that love, acceptance
and refusing to bathe that child in shame
will protect them more than trying
to fix something that isn’t broken.
This is why it is in our interest
to protect intersex people
and make them visible.
For as long as societies reinforce
one form of acceptable,
of “normal,”
everyone will face insecurity
for being different in any way.
Simply trying to erase
variation, difference,
builds shame.
Being intersex has not
materialized the powers
that I wished for as a teenager …
beyond being able to see
where this false sex binary harms us all.
It is my belief
that if intersex people can gain equality,
can be seen,
can be accepted
and can be loved,
then we all will.
Thank you.
(Applause and cheers)