[INTRO MUSIC]
Oh hi, Internet!
Let's talk about intersex,
a.k.a. disorders of sex development.
Before we can really talk about and understand intersex
we have to talk about sex.
Are you ready to get science on?
I sure hope so!
Sex has four primary characteristics:
your genitals on the outside,
your sex organs on the inside,
your chromosomes (part of your DNA),
and your hormones, which are secreted by your glands into your blood.
These primary sex characteristics are typically present when you're born
and they work together to produce your secondary sex characteristics.
Those come a little later during that notorious hormone party
known as puberty. [KIDS CHEERING]
Secondary sex characteristics are things like chest hair, facial hair, pubic hair,
larynx size, which determines the pitch of your voice,
height, menstruation, muscle-to-body-fat ratio -- a whole bunch of stuff.
Based on what we observe human beings sort ourselves into two sex categories:
male and female.
But as it turns out there are actually more than two sexes.
And that brings us to intersex.
Intersex is an umbrella term. It's used to describe people who don't fit
in to the typical definitions of male and female because of variations in their
sex characteristics. About one in every 2,000 people is intersex and there are
lots of different forms of it. Genital variations! A person might [penis labia??]
a very tiny penis or a very large clitoris. Sex organ variation! Your ovaries
may not be fully developed or there's something of a vulva on the outside
and testes on the inside. Chromosomes! A person might have a penis and XX
chromosomes or XXY or X or XX and XY all the Xs and a little bit of Y; and
hormones! Their cells may not respond to testosterone. And when you take all these
variations that can happen into account it's easier to see how sex is actually a
continuum with male and female at the ends. It's not just too strict categories, right?
A little word about categories: our brains naturally categorize things.
It helps us to simplify information so that we can more easily draw conclusions
about the world and save our brains a lot of energy. But it's important to
remember the sex categories of male and female are actually generalizations and
those generalizations are created by us, by humans. These generalizations are
sometimes medically helpful but particularly when we're talking about things like puberty,
pregnancy, menopause, menstruation, your risk for certain diseases and cancers,
you know, breast cancer, prostate cancer, heart disease --
all those things are affected by your sex but there's still no boundary
there's no checklist about what qualifies someone as female or male
and that has created a whole lot of problems for people who exists on the sex continuum.
When a beautiful little intersex baby comes into the world,
doctors and parents are eager to assign it a sex and a gender. These assignments
are based on babies' genitals whether they have something that looks more like
a clitoris or more like a penis.
Now for some intersex conditions you can't even tell by looking, you know, it
might be chromosomal and the person doesn't know till much later in their life.
So they get assigned male or female and they go on their way, but if it's not so readily
obvious, doctors will just sort of arbitrarily pick a sex usually based on
whether or not they think that your genitals could penetrate something that
is what makes a male, which when you think about it is a really weird.
More so in the past, but still to this day, doctors will perform surgery on
infants to make their genitals look more normal and that is a big problem.
One, an infant can't give informed consent. Two, there is really no
normal. Even dyadic genitals which fit into the sex binary have so much
variation. Three, and this is key there's typically no medical need to operate.
And four, it can compromise the person's sexual pleasure functioning and sense of
agency down the road.
For these reasons and more it's crucial to leave intersex babies genitals alone
if there's no medical necessity
So what's with the surgeries anyway?
Intersex gives people a lot of anxiety because it poses this paradox.
People think that sex and gender are the same thing when really they are two different things.
Sex -- male, female, intersex -- pertains to biology.
Even though the ways that we understand that biology is socially constructed
Gender, on the other hand, refers to the interactions between our psychology, our
culture and socialization, and our identities. But in a society where sex
and gender are treated as the same thing, if a parent can't discern their child's sex
they can't discern their child's gender, and that poses a lot of social,
cultural questions about how they will raise the child, and this is an important
question that I think all parents should ask themselves, not just the parents of
intersex children. How can we raise children without strictly prescribed gender roles?
Without all these expectations based on their genitals?
I'm a challenge for you internet
I wanna know y'all think down below
Love y'all very much
[KISSES]
I'll see you next time
*sings* Peace be with everyone.
*sings* Except your mom, oh.
What?