Sexuality cannot be tied to binary or dichotomous models. There are not only heads or tails. The orientation of desire cannot be explained solely with homosexuality and heterosexuality, leaving aside bisexuality or asexuality. Gender cannot be reduced to male and female either, forgetting androgyny and all its mixtures. Nor are the labels man and woman sufficient to explain all identities. It is a fact that there are those who do not identify with any of them and feel like non-binary people.
Intersex points in this same direction. They are people who are born with sexual characteristics – genitalia, gonads, hormone levels, chromosome patterns – that do not seem to fit the typical definitions with which the sexes have been divided on the basis of anatomical or physiological structures.
For example, a person may be born with typically female genitalia, but have internal testicles. Or being born with genitalia that appear to be in an intermediate state between typically male and female. A baby can be born with a clitoris that is larger than considered “normal”, or lack the vaginal opening, or have a common duct where the urethra and vagina open; or with a scrotum that is divided so that it more closely resembles labia. Or one can come into the world with a genetic composition called “mosaic”, that is, some cells have XX chromosomes and others have XY. It is even possible that their chromosomes are XXY or X0, as Laura Inter, project coordinator and blog Brújula Intersexual, explains.
Camino Baró, an intersex psychologist and activist, points out that, “according to the latest United Nations file, the prevalence of intersex people would reach a percentage of 1.7%. So, surely, you know more intersex people than redheads. There are more intersex realities than is supposed ”.
Not a third sex, not in the middle of anything
Intersex people are not a third sex, nor are they in the middle of anything. Neither, necessarily, they have to be installed in the vagueness. They are men, women or non-binary people, who are also plural in terms of their desire orientation and erotic preferences. They laugh, love, dream, get angry, play, work, study, have families, get emotional, cry …
Hence it is a mistake to assume that they will be easily recognizable by their appearance. It is not possible, but it is also not necessary. As stated by Mauro Cabral –cited by Núria Gregori in her doctoral thesis–, “they go unnoticed among the people because they are those people: the heterosexual neighbor, the priest giving mass, the gay man who is holding the hand of his partner, the acquaintance of the bar, someone’s sister-in-law … ”. And he adds that “those who are called intersex are, in general, men or women who embody one difference among so many.” Intersex is a characteristic of the person, it is not their only condition. It can be, at the same time, many more things.
As with everything related to sexuality, intersex are also surrounded by diversity. For this reason, Baró proposes that “the term be used in the plural, as an umbrella that welcomes all of them and that it is avoided to name them together with the word syndrome. It proposes that ” our bodily diversity be recognized and that, although some of these conditions involve clinical complications and require ongoing treatment, intersex should not be considered a disease .”
These realities have always existed and in the same proportion. Hirschfeld, founder of the Berlin Institute of Sexology in 1919, already raised his theoretical concept. Later, it was developed by Gregorio Marañón in his book The Evolution of Sexuality and Intersex States (1930). In it, he writes that “intersex states are originally phenomena of the purest normality.” And that “the masculine and the feminine are not two opposite values, but successive degrees.”
However, today the issue is still surrounded by silence and stigma. Ignorance is great, and, consequently, the intersex group feels excluded. Two examples: there is not a single mention of this reality in the textbooks of all compulsory education and there are also no intersex people in the public sphere who have openly recognized their condition, and with whom others could identify.
Baró believes that, in addition to education and visibility, there are other urgent demands such as “ending non-consensual treatment of intersex minors. —And he adds—: To this day, gonadectomies (mutilations) or clitoral reconstructions (ablations) are still being performed on babies and adults with some body diversity. Many of these interventions are carried out from a medical criterion based on the pathologization of the bodies that do not fit into the binary norm ”. Thus, this expert considers that “multidisciplinary teams are necessary within hospitals and referrals to reference centers where they can receive all the necessary information to empower themselves in decision-making.”
Other demands of the group are to end discrimination in sports or in access to certain jobs, such as the army, and review the procedures for registering sex in the civil registry.
In the end, everything is much easier. As Rigoberta Bandini sings in Too Many Drugs, “everything resides in looking, that inside I have a royal palace, full of rooms where to skate”. It is true that intersex people are peculiar in their development, in their genital structures or others related to their anatomy or physiology. But all human beings are. We must claim and share the same objectives as the rest, know each other, accept each other and express our eroticism in a satisfactory way.
Stigma, silence, ignorance or exclusion do not help. But if these four barriers are removed, the playing field would be the same. People with diverse bodies, homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual and asexual, with many and few erotic desires, with a partner, without a partner or polyamorous, with an erotic repertoire full of routines or adventures, focused on the genitals or walking through every pore of skin . They are just people who try to be happy with their sexuality, like everyone else.
