JOY 94.9’s Word for Word interviews intersex Hobsons Bay Mayor Tony Briffa in My Intersex Life - click to download this MP3 file.

Internal link:

• The Intersex Network – Please stop using the language of disease to describe intersex if you wonder why medicine wants to “cure” intersex

BOTH the Kaleidoscope Trust’s website and that of the now renamed – note the plus symbol – LGBT+ Liberal Democrats are still heavy with the intersex-excluding acronym LGBT, but there are signs that intersex inclusion is slowly occurring in both online locations, and one hopes within both organizations. We wrote an article here when we first noticed the +.

It should be noted that intersex people continue to have no rights in the so-called “developed world” as well as throughout the rest of the so-called “developing world”.

LGBT+ Liberal Democrats: Lib Dem MEP Sir Graham Watson urges EU to stand up for LGBT rights in developing world - click to read this article.

South West Liberal Democrat MEP Sir Graham Watson has contributed an item to the LGBT+ Lib Dems website that alternates LGBTI with LGBT, paragraph to paragraph. Does he mean to fully and equally include intersex in the initiative about which he writes? It is hard to tell, but we certainly hope so. Thank you, Sir Graham!

The Kaleidoscope Trust appears equally uncertain as to the inclusion of intersex people in its work. One page only uses the intersex-inclusive acronym – LGBTI – and the word intersex – the About us page. So far all other pages in the Kaleidoscope site and the activities reported upon are LGBT-only.

That omission aside, it is good to see Kaleidoscope appears to be listening to OII’s constant, global plea for the rights attributes formula of “sexual orientation and gender identity” to be expanded to “sex, sexual orientation and gender identity”. Only thus will intersex people be included in the law reform efforts of human rights defenders and organizations everywhere.

The Kaleidoscope Trust works around the world to promote diversity and respect for all regardless of sex, sexual orientation or gender identity.

Note:

As noted here, “Slowly, slowly catchee monkey” comes from the days of British colonialism when many far eastern countries were under British rule. Soldiers posted there used to try to catch monkeys to keep as pets and despite all their efforts were not very successful. Many natives spoke a pidgin English which was a simplified form of English. They showed the soldiers how to catch monkeys by demonstrating a simple but effective method.

British rule also spread discrimination against LGBTI people around the world. The United Kingdom lags behind much of the “developing world” in its overt intersex inclusion. LGBTI human rights organizations are common throughout that “developing” world.

Poster, After Homosexual: The Legacies of Gay Liberation.

MORGAN, OII Australia board member, wrote and presented this paper at the After ‘Homosexual’ conference in Melbourne on 4 February 2012. The conference marked the fortieth anniversary of Dennis Altman’s book Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation. The 10-minute presentation was delivered as part of a curated panel on intersectionalities.

Introduction

I’d like to pay my respects to the indigenous owners of the land, and their elders past and present.

I’m speaking today as a member of OII Australia, a local intersex activist organisation that’s aligned with the LGBTI movement because of our common experience of homophobia, and misogyny. It’s clear at the conference that there’s no settled view on the inclusion of the ‘I’, so I’m going to present a few stories, mostly public ones, and a little history – to illuminate some of the intersections between intersex and the rest of the LGBTI communities.

Firstly, though, what is intersex?

Intersex is where a person’s biological sex is not clearly male or female; a person might have characteristics of both or neither. It’s always congenital. Someone can find out or be discovered to be intersex at birth, puberty, when trying to conceive a child, or serendipitously.

It’s not an identity: it’s not in our heads, although some of us will opt out of the gender binary. It’s typically carved into our bodies.

Two stories about heterosexuality

Hanne Blank, a fat activist and writer of a new history of heterosexuality called Straight was recently interviewed in Salon magazine. It reports:

While Blank looks like a feminine woman, her partner is extremely androgynous, with little to no facial hair and a fine smooth complexion. Hanne’s partner is neither fully male, nor fully female; he was born with an unconventional set of chromosomes, XXY, that provide him with both male genitalia and feminine characteristics. As a result, Blank’s partner has been mistaken for a gay woman, a straight man, a transman — and their relationship has been classified as gay, straight and everything in between.

Phoebe Hart is a young, married, Australian woman with male chromosomes and Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, which means that her body doesn’t respond to testosterone in a typical way. Her autobiographical movie, Orchids: My Intersex Adventure, screened on ABC1 last weekend and is still available on iView for another week. It has also screened during queer film festivals around the country and overseas.

About half an hour into the movie, she asks her husband, James, how he felt when she told him she was intersex. He says:

…once I found out what AIS was, I was confronted with the fact that I thought I might be gay myself. Genetically you’re a male! But I think you can fall in love with the person. Whether that person is male or female doesn’t really matter.

As a side note, I had a similar discussion with my then long-term male lover just after diagnosis, with a very different outcome.

Phoebe had internal testicles that produced testosterone. These were removed in adolescence due to a slight risk of cancer. What Phoebe doesn’t say in her movie is that risk is less than the cancer risk associated with having breasts. So why aren’t breasts routinely removed? The reason has to be that women are not supposed to have testicles. It’s a matter of shame, a secret.

But bodies need sex hormones, to mature, to maintain a libido, prevent osteoporosis and a host of other reasons. Removing her functional gonads means that she now needs lifelong hormone replacement treatment, with all the risks associated with that.

Medicalisation

Medicalisation goes back centuries, and for much of that time there was no clear differentiation between LGB, T and I.

Michel Foucault presented the case of Herculine Barbin, in nineteenth century France.

Mogul, Ritchie and Whitlock state:

Siobhan Somerville in Queering the Color Line reports “as late as 1921, medical journals contained articles declaring that a physical examination of [female homosexuals] will in practically every instance disclose an abnormally prominent clitoris” and that this is “particularly so in colored women”.

A key change happened in the 1950s, when New Zealand doctor John Money declared that sex equals nurture, not nature, and that the “brain is an object for behavioural engineering“.

His (now discredited) work led to standard medical protocols that still result in cosmetic genital surgery on infants and children with intersex variations. Even now, in Australia, these are performed to prevent social and familial discomfort, despite medical research that shows poor satisfaction with surgery.

The trauma associated with these surgeries led to the establishment of an intersex movement, initially through a magazine advert and later online. The immediate priority of the movement, led by the Intersex Society of North America, was to engage with the medical profession, and this led in 2006 to a “consensus statement” that changed the terminology associated with intersex. It introduced the term “Disorders of Sex Development” or DSD.

The aim was to create a non-pejorative, value-neutral term to replace “intersex” and “hermaphrodite”. In a very literal sense it was homophobic: it aimed to eliminate a parental and social fear of homosexuality and queerness in an attempt to improve patient outcomes.

It failed.

Current rationales for infant genital surgery

Dr Dix Poppas, working at Cornell University, describes his current “rationale for early reconstruction” on infant genitals as including,

… minimizing family concern and distress, and mitigating the risks of stigmatization and gender-identity confusion…

Prenatal treatment to prevent homosexuality and masculinisation in CAH women

CAH, Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, is a manageable salt wasting condition that requires lifelong treatment. In women, it’s also associated with higher levels of prenatal testosterone, and a degree of physical and mental “masculinisation”.

In 1999, Columbia University psychologist Heino Meyer-Bahlburg published a paper entitled What Causes Low Rates of Child Bearing in CAH?:

CAH women as a group have a lower interest than controls in getting married and performing the traditional child-care/house-wife role. As children, they show an unusually low interest in engaging in… maternal play, motherhood…

Meyer-Bahlburg proposes that “treatment with prenatal dexamethasone might cause these girls’ behaviour to be closer to heterosexual norms”.

In an analysis that clearly shows the homophobic nature of these concerns, Alice Dreger tells how Meyer-Bahlburg and Dr Maria New of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in NY published research in 2008 stating:

Most women were heterosexual, but the rates of bisexual and homosexual orientation were increased above controls… and correlated with the degree of prenatal androgenization.

Dreger describes, in 2010, New and fellow pediatric endocrinologist Saroj Nimkarn (Weill Cornell Medical College) to be “constructing low interest in babies and men – and even interest in what they consider to be men’s occupations and games – as “abnormal,” and potentially preventable with prenatal dex”.

Dexamethasone is a class C steroid that, in tests on sheep, has been shown to result in reduced mental capacity. It’s also linked to low birth weight, a greater incidence of cleft palate and other issues.

Dr Maria New began clinical trials on pregnant human mothers in 2010 to reduce masculinisation effects on CAH girls.

Dexamethasone has no impact on the salt wasting associated with CAH.

Terminations

Genetic screening is now available for CAH and XXY, via amniocentesis. OII Australia is currently examining the effects of this in Australia, and preliminary research shows a drop in number of live births with these intersex variations.

Conclusions

The shift to DSD failed to change the system. It’s failed to change medical protocols.

It has also come close to destroying the intersex movement. We’ve had to start almost from scratch.

It is almost impossible for us to engage with the medical profession directly.

In many ways, the experience of intersex people shows what happens when a group of “disordered” people are found to be “born this way”.

Being trans remains a disorder, while no treatable biological cause has been established. Being gay or lesbian is no longer a disorder to doctors in most countries, even though this remains contentious in some major political and religious institutions.

The big weakness in the early intersex movement was a failure to organise around the causes of this medical treatment – homophobia, misogyny. We have to focus on the human rights and ethical case for liberation.

Intersex people are aligned with the “LGBTI” movement because of the nature of our oppression.

We seek the right to be ourselves as we are, in the context of infant and adolescent surgery, adult relationship and medical issues. Even “straight” intersex people and their partners have to question and address issues with their sexual orientation and gender identity.

We’ve been here all along, and we need to be included – especially in campaigns around health and social services practices and policies, employment protection, and other frameworks for our LGBTI communities.

Notes

1. OII Australia does not support the establishment of a third gender category, but does seek the ability for all adults to opt out of the gender binary and use neutral sex or gender markers on legal documents. For more on the 2003 and 2011 ‘X’ passport reforms see here.

2. Intersex is about an experience of the body, not identity. Nor is intersex synonymous with androgyny. Any person, intersex or otherwise, may feel more comfortable with a non-binary identity such as intergender, or genderqueer.

3. There are many more intersex variations than those mentioned in this presentation.

4. We reject pathologising language, such as “disorders”. Intersex variations are a natural part of the human condition.

5. Mention of Poppas was omitted from the panel talk at time of delivery due to time constraints.

6. With thanks to Gina Wilson, chairperson of OII Australia, Hida Viloria, chair of OII, and Gavriel Ansara for help during the researching of this paper. The article includes some minor changes post-delivery at the conference.

7. Republishing this presentation is subject to written consent on terms available by request. (Sharing the link is, of course, ok).

UGANDAN LGBTI human rights activist David Kato was brutally murdered just over a year ago and fellow African LGBTI activist Sokari Ekine writes a letter to the man who was so beloved and continues to be remembered by many.

New Internationalist blog: A year without David - click to read this article.

In the face of the widespread exclusion of intersex people from human rights reforms in the so-called global north, it is truly inspiring to see how intersex-inclusive human rights activists in the so-called global south continue to be. Let us hope that the north’s intersex exclusion will not be exported to the south.

Surely David you would have loved to see all these splendid outbreaks of revolutionary love. We still have a long way to go before LGBTIQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex and Queer) people are wholly included in these uprisings, but there is more hope today than yesterday.

Dear David Kato Kisule – we miss you, we miss you but your spirit is strong enough for us not to forget.

* David Kato was bludgeoned to death on January 26th 2011 in his home in Kampala Uganda. He was an out gay Ugandan LGBTI activist and human rights defender and founding member of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG).

A number of erstwhile allies of intersex people have supposed – apparently without bothering to actually ask – that intersex people want the legislative creation of a third gender or a third sex.

Sex – male and female under the sex binary belief system, and gender – man and woman under the gender binary belief system, are two very different though related things.

The reality is that intersex people do not want a third sex or gender category and the reality is that third genders or sexes lead to a whole new set of problems and oppressions of difference. Note the comment by OII’s Gina Wilson under the article.

World Policy Blog: Dividing by Three: Nepal Recognizes a Third Gender - click to read this article.

Observers of Nepal’s LGBTI rights movement sometimes claim the category was created in line with contemporary Nepali politics. Listing the third gender as a comprehensive LGBTI category, they claim, means the movement can swell its numbers and gain clout—and eventually form a political party. Nepali language media have referred intermittently to Pant as a third gender, despite his open identity as a gay man. Others place the identity category into gender-ambiguous cultural tropes such as hijras (who often categorize themselves as a third gender in other South Asian countries). With 102 ethnic groups officially registered in the country and less than half of its citizens identifying Nepali as their mother tongue, dozens of words linked with sexual and gender identities are associated with the third gender category.

External link:

• República – Transgender facing discriminations

THE Scottish people and media continue to impress us with their ability to say the word intersex and to pronounce intersex-including acronym LGBTI. That the people of Scotland and its media are not too frightened to say intersex and LGBTI and to cast them in print or pixels is an object lesson to the people and media of the rest of the United Kingdom as well as its government and lawmakers, especially those located in England.

The Journal: Lord Provost asked to end gay discrimination - click to read this article.

Scottish Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender & Intersex (LGBTI) organisations have launched an appeal to Edinburgh’s Lord Provost, the Rt Hon George Grubb, to oppose discrimination against homosexuality.

They hope the Lord Provost can use the city’s ‘twinning arrangement’ with St. Petersburg to urge that city not to pass a bill that would threaten the LGBTI community’s freedom of expression and right to protest.

Refusing to say intersex or LGBTI actively contributes to the common, widespread silencing, exclusion and erasure of intersex people and actively supports the work of the medical eugenicists striving to disappear intersex from the face of the planet.

Refusing to write intersex and LGBTI contributes to intersex genital mutilation – IGM – and the denial of human rights to intersex people everywhere.

Announcement: Transitioning Africa

GENDER DynamiX (GDX) and the Support Initiative for People with atypical sexual Development (SIPD)  have taken their collaboration in the Exchange Programmes in 2010 and 2011 a step further and, together with Transgender and Intersex Africa (TIA), will concentrate its efforts mainly on advocacy in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Forming the tripartite will further solidify and strengthen their work in Africa and a specific mission and vision for the new partnership has been formulated.

The main focus of this new entity is to support a growing transgender and intersex movement and to engage regionally in advocacy for the human rights of transgender and intersex people.

While forming a platform for all regional work of the three organisations, Transitioning Africa is not a new NGO but will remain a formal partnership of the three organisations and thus retain autonomy locally and regionally and the capacity for its activities will be provided by the three organisations in the implementation of its activities, such as capacity building workshops, advocacy support to other organisations, exchange programmes and mentorships.

The vision of Transitioning Africa is to see a strong transgender and intersex movement in Sub-Saharan Africa, based on human rights principles, while the mission is to strive for gender recognition within social movements in Africa.

It aims to build transgender and intersex leadership and capacity, by supporting both individual transgender and intersex activists, as well as transgender and intersex organisations on the continent.

The mission further states that Transitioning Africa will advocate for transgender and intersex issues within regional and international platforms, directly, and support local advocacy efforts when invited.

It will also aim to document the history of the transgender and intersex movement in Africa.

An Advisory Committee will advise Transitioning Africa on its work.

This Committee will consist of 6 members, including the Directors of the 3 partner organisations.

Three members will be recruited strategically to bring in knowledge and/or skills for the benefit of Transitioning Africa.

External link:

• Behind the Mask – Transgender and Intersex Groups Form Pan-African Alliance
• Magnificent - Challenging Gender Roles in the Motherland: Could Transgender and Intersex Activism Unite Africa’s Movements?
• Pambazuka News – Announcement: Transitioning Africa
• The New Age – Transformative leaders wanted

OVER at the Open Society Foundations Lydia Gutermnan asks the question “Why Are Doctors Still Performing Genital Surgery on Infants?”

The answer is simple – so long as journalists, doctors, commentators, bioethicists, parents, erstwhile allies and intersex people ourselves continue to pretend that intersex is a “condition” or a DSD then doctors will continue to cut up intersex genitals without our consent.

Open Society Foundations - Why Are Doctors Still Performing Genital Surgery on Infants? - click to read this article.

Ms Guterman may as well have asked why are doctors still performing their job? We are constantly dismayed that people cannot see the fundamental logic beneath all this.

If you describe something as an illness, then medicine will attempt to provide a “cure”.

Using language describing intersex as a “condition” or a “disorder”, even as a developmental difference, is no different to labelling it as a disease, a sickness or an illness.

Having done so, how do you think that doctors feel obliged to repsond? By getting out their needles and their knives and the rest of their panoply of medical treatments to offer them up in your service. To perpetrate intersex genital mutilation – IGM – upon intersex bodies and lives.

We call on everyone who apparently unthinkingly applies the language of medical conditions, of the disease model of intersex, to stop and think before opening their mouth.

There are more truthful words and phrases to use instead of “condition” and the like.

Consider other natural biological variations like the colour of one’s hair, the height of one’s body, the size of one’s feet, the colour of one’s eyes or one’s skin. All of these things are variations, not “conditions”.

So please, may we suggest using the word variation instead? We do. Intersex variations – isn’t that so much better? More honest and truthful?

One thing we know for sure is that the word variation does not cause doctors armed with needles and knives to go rushing at individuals with some variation in order to “cure” them of it.

IT was recently reported that The White House will be presenting a number of conferences on LGBT health around the country, with the first in the series to be held in Philadelphia on February 16 2012. The Philadelphia White House LGBT Conference on Health will feature remarks from Secretary of Health & Human Services Kathleen Sebelius.

The White House - White House LGBT Conference on Health - click to go to this page on The White House website.

The conferences, running from February to June 2012 inclusive, are being organized by the White House Office of Public Engagement - OPE. Activists, community organizers, students, grassroots leaders, advocates and others are invited to take part in the conferences. That list of invitees includes intersex people and the OPE would like very much like intersex people to apply to attend.

White House LGBT Liaison Officer Gautam Raghavan informed us that “this conference is open to the public and we plan to accept RSVPs until we reach capacity” so all intersex people wishing to attend should apply via the form illustrated in the above screenshot as soon as possible.

Mr Raghavan then said that “The conference will address the entire range of health issues including access to health care, aging, youth, mental health, HIV/AIDS prevention, and cultural competency. In addition, we are dedicating a couple of hours to an ‘Open Space’ process by which we will invite participants to identify and form breakout sessions around issues that are not otherwise addressed by the conference. I hope you (or others who attend) will use this time to organize a session on specific health issues that impact intersex people – I think it would be of great benefit to our ongoing conversations about health for ALL Americans.”

External links:

• The White House – Patient Centered Care: Equal Health Care Rights for All Americans
• Washington Blade – White House to host LGBT conferences across country

AN intersex activist in the United States of America has placed a petition online, asking for the end of intersex genital mutilation - IGM - in that country. Female genital mutilation – FGM – is illegal in the US but intersex genital mutilation continues unabated.

Melissa Lynn’s petition is directed at Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 

ForceChange: Stop Doctors From Mutilating the Genitals of Intersex Children click to go to this petition.

…these surgeries were rarely successes.  Many children spent years of their childhood getting more and more surgeries in order to “correct” their bodies when nothing was medically wrong with them from the start. The children are constantly being told that there is something wrong with their bodies, leading to feeling intense shame, guilt and depression. More so, the surgeries often end up reducing the person’s sensation in order to make the genitals look more standard.

Intersex genital mutilation is also known as nonconsensual cosmetic genital surgery and a myriad of other terms, but IGM is direct and to the point.

PSYCHOLOGIST Paul Martin has written a short article about the widespread neglect of intersex:

Our communities rarely talk about or even understand intersex which is a part of our ‘LGBTI’, so it may as well stand for ‘invisible’. There are more intersex people out there than you think -the statistics show that almost 2% of the general population is intersex.

Q News: Intersex: the Neglected - click to read this article.

IN a worthy move on behalf of our LGBT allies within the LGBTI community, United States Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Secretary Shaun Donovan has announced a new HUD rule, Equal Access to Housing in HUD Programs – Regardless of Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity. The rule does not include intersex.

The HUDdle: Ending Housing Discrimination Against LGBT Americans - click to go to this article.

Intersex people are as discriminated against due to homophobia as the rest of LGBTI, from birth to the end of life. The attributes formula “sexual orientation or gender identity” does not include intersex on the grounds that intersex is a range of common, natural biological variations in sex, not sexual orientation or gender identity.

Despite widespread systemic discrimination against intersex people, the word intersex does not appear anywhere in the HUD website. Typing the word intersex into the HUD website’s search field yielded this result:

Sorry, but nothing matched your search criteria. Please try again with some different keywords.

We sincerely hope that Secretary Donovan and the HUD will begin to work on behalf of this much neglected, heavily discriminated-against section of US society, many of whom live in impoverishment and deprivation. We look forward to the amendment to this new rule on behalf of intersex people so that it is for all of LGBTI, and the expansion of its title to Equal Access to Housing in HUD Programs – Regardless of Sex, Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity.

Download the Equal Access to Housing in HUD Programs – Regardless of Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity final rule PDF:

• http://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/documents/huddoc?id=5359-F-02EqAccessFinalRule.pdf

External link:

• ACLU – New HUD Rule Delivers for LGBT Americans