Intersex Day of Remembrance

Today, November 8th, is Herculine Barbin’s birthday. Herculine is a French intersex person that was assigned a female gender at birth. After an affair with a woman Herculine was seized, examined and reclassified as male.

Today, November 8th is Intersex Day of Remembrance/ Intersex Day of Solidarity.

Today we also remember the countless intersex lives destroyed by societies, churches and surgeons that butcher and reclassify our young bodies to suit their needs and whims.

You’ll hear people like jk Rowling and the family research council dismiss intersex existence in their war on trans people, but of course people that are both transgender and intersex exist.

Not all trans people are intersex and not all intersex people are trans, but when surgeons are assigning 1 of 2 genders with little more than a coin toss mistakes will be made.

Mostly we are discarded after surgeries in infancy. It’s a set-it-and-forget-it system where we are assigned a gender, operated on, and discarded into the wild so to speak.

Unless of course we aren’t growing or acting in accordance with those surgeries. Then we are subjected to further surgeries and hormone treatments often wrapped in lies.

As adults many of us wrestle with the repercussions and side effects of those childhood surgeries for the rest of our lives. For some people, doctors get it right. For others it haunts us.

We make up as much of 2% of the population. That’s almost 140 million people walking around that have had surgeons assign a gender and perform irreversible surgery for largely cosmetic reasons.

It’s past time surgeons put down the scalpel and spoken with us. Normalize and destigmatize the existence of intersex bodies. Stop operating on us until we can tell you what gender we are and can consent.

Surgeons must stop operating on our young bodies for purely cosmetic reasons until the intersex person is old enough to understand the ramifications of being medically sterilized to fit in a binary.

Parental pressure isn’t a good enough reason to operate on young intersex bodies. Not all parents have their children's best interests at heart. Surgery does not prevent bullying and help you fit in, believe me.

Surgery is forced on us as children and denied us as adults. We can be on waiting lists for years as adults hoping to see endocrinologists and urologists so we can do things most take for granted like sleep and pee.

In 2021 my hope and prayer for the intersex community is that surgeons will finally listen to us and engage with us and follow the lead of Lurie Children and Boston following the amazing work of @IntersexJustice
#intersexdayofawareness #herculinebarbin #endintersexsurgery