Reading the many diaries over the past day and the preceding weekend, I've seen intersex issues trying to be introduced into the argument about the Federal
Hate Marriage Amendment. Most of the efforts here have been crude but understandable because intersex seems to still be a great mystery to many despite the many websites and activism taking place in the area. Hopefully I can help you understand exactly where intersex fits or doesn't fit in the whole marriage spectrum and this pandering to the right. Knowing the correct information will be helpful as you talk to your friends, family, and neighbors about it.
Just to qualify myself to write on the issue here, I'm a well-known intersex advocate amongst those who pay attention to the issue. I founded and run an organization that focuses on peer-support issues and we work quite closely with other organizations on the other issues. I've spoken all over the world on it and am regularly cited in the MSM as an expert when the issue arises. In fact later today, I am scheduled to teach a class on it to hungry for knowledge college students.
I was also born intersex and have written about it here previously. See
Shame and Secrecy: Genital Mutilation in the US and
We're Here, We're Queer, We Got The Gene. If you have the time, both of these diaries will give excellent background on what intersex is and to help you understand where I am coming from in this diary. I don't want to try and reinvent the wheel here so that is your background reading asssignment. Don't feel bad about it; it's something widely misunderstood even by tons of people and even more so by those who never had any personal exposure to it.
In a nutshell, intersex is simply a big umbrella term. At the most basic level, it's any variation of phenotypic (physical---reproductive or genital) and/or genotypic sex that varies from what is considered standard male or female. It may simply be an aberration or it may be genetic. It may be as simple as a female newborn with a large clitoris or a male newborn with an extremely small penis. There are about 72 known types and the incidence is commonly thought to be about 1:2000. To put that into perspective, it's about the same number of babies born with cystic fibrosis or Down Syndrome, or used to be before it became routine to test for it in-utero. There's some schools of thought that put the number much higher, as high as 1:250. Then there are others who give intersex a much stricter definition and claim it's closer to 1:17000. The organization I run and those we work closely with go with 1:2000 which is from data by Ann Fausto-Sterling. Part of the problem is that many people are never actually or knowingly diagnosed. If they never come before a doctor for related medical issues, or are lied to by those doctors, they don't know. So, it makes it difficult to put a hard number on it.
Within the intersex movement, most of our activism has been focused on the issues of non-consensual surgeries and hormones forced upon children born with intersex but the marriage issue is not one that has escaped us.
Part of the problem is no one, and I mean no one in this fight has attempted to put forth any data on how they plan on defining male or female. Will it be a genetic thing...xx meets xy? A genital thing...penis meet vagina? A gender presentation thing...boy meet girl?
Each of these are a problem--or sometimes just kind of or not really--for intersexed people.
Most born with intersex identify in the gender designated on their birth certificates. The problems arise when you consider genotypes or those who were subjected to sex reassignment surgeries as children without their consent and who now seek to reclaim what was stolen from them. Most with intersex are heterosexual; it only seems otherwise because many LGBT groups found it convenient to add an I, much to the chagrin of intersex organizations but that's another diary.
I'm reprinting here an article I did for Soulforce in 2004 which hopefully crystallizes some of the issues the proponents of this stupid amendment are not thinking about. I have no clue how they will attempt to legislate what is male or female when it can be open to so many challenges based upon how people are born. We aren't simply talking about same gender marriages but heterosexual ones which may appear to be same sex ones due to genetics or bad choices by parents during infancy. It's a bad place.
Bodies Like Ours: Intersexuality and the Marriage Debate
Defining One Man - One Woman
The arguments in opposition to marriage for gays and lesbians are being framed around the basis of a "one man - one woman" definition. From the very onset, the attempts are farcical because they are trying to legislate what exactly defines a man and a woman.
How we identify ourselves to others is not always a simple binary mechanism for the many thousands of individuals in this country who were born with an intersex condition. Intersexuality in its pure medical definition is a congenital variation of the sex and/or reproductive organs and /or chromosomal make-up that differs from standard male and female.
An intersex person may be born with ambiguous genitals that make determining the sex of the baby at birth impossible; or with a chromosomal make-up that is a variation of the standard XX for female and XY for male.
For example, some individuals are born XXY, and some XXXY. And then to confuse matters even more, individuals with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS) are born XY yet emerge from the womb looking quite female, are generally pronounced female in the delivery room, and may identify as female throughout their entire lives. While these examples are in no way exhaustive, they should present enough of a basis in fact to muddle any attempts to legally define what makes us male or female (or both for that matter).
Should a woman who is born with AIS and is heterosexual be denied the right to marry the man she loves because it would be a union of two XY individuals?
How should we classify an XY individual born with genitalia that didn't fit "male standards" and so was subjected to a sex-reassignment surgery during infanthood without his consent? If this person identifies in their gender of rearing, which will not match their genetic make-up, who can they legally marry? And if this person decides at some time in his life that he should've been left alone - without surgical reassignment - and transitions back to his birth gender of male, the answers don't get any clearer. Would marriage prior to gender transition (remember, this person was born male but underwent sex reassignment in infanthood to female) to someone appearing to be of the opposite gender be acceptable even though both partners are XY? How about marriage to that same person after he transitions back to his birth gender? What appeared at the onset to be a heterosexual relationship now becomes a homosexual one if we are to base gender on appearance. If based purely upon genetics, it was a homosexual relationship all along. It gets pretty convoluted trying to keep intersex people neatly classified, much less legislated.
Will individuals born XXXY be prohibited from marrying anyone, thus sentencing them to a life without any form of equal protection under the law? Perhaps they will be the true winners in this silliness by being given the green light to marry whomever they desire.
Sometimes it may take several days or weeks before sex is determined or gender of rearing is decided upon by someone other than the child. Let's hope those doctors and the parents make the right choice because if they don't, it could mean little Johnny or little Jane will be constitutionally prohibited from getting married to their heterosexual lovers someday; but wait, even if "the right choice" is made, little Johnny and little Jane may still be constitutionally prohibited from equal protection under the law due to narrow definitions of what makes us male and female.
Some religious arguments against marriage for gays and lesbians have centered on the basis of procreation. Pity the poor girl born without a vagina and uterus because she won't be procreating anytime soon and under that definition of one man-one woman, she could be excluded from heterosexual marriage. Based upon the procreation argument, we should ask all individuals to proceed immediately to the clerk of the court for genital and fertility checks to make sure God's will of heterosexual sex for procreation is being adhered to.
Nor can we try to define male and female based upon genitalia present at birth. Boys are born without a penis every day, just as girls are born with a clitoris that resembles a penis.
Suppose the parents respect the child's right to choose for his or herself any cosmetic genital surgery, and the person decides that their genitalia are fine the way they are. Will legislation attempt to deny them their basic right to heterosexual marriage because their genitals don't match their gender identification?
In the few cases outlined above, any legislation that attempts to define one man - one woman for the purpose of marriage could cause thousands of individuals unnecessary angst and grief. While some intersex people identify as gay or lesbian based upon their gender of rearing, not all do.
However, most intersex people clearly identify as male or female, it's just that their gender identification may not match their genetic marker of XX or XY or XXY, or XXXY or XXO or XXYO. Can a gender identity ever truly match a genetic marker of XXY or some variation thereof? Some intersex individuals may very well confuse the issue even further for lawmakers when they declare that they are intersex only and identify as neither male nor female, or perhaps identify as both male and female. If they have the genetic make-up to do so and that is how the government defines us, what will keep them from entering into what appears to be on the surface a homosexual marriage but genetically is really neither?
If the legal definition of male and female comes down to whether we are XX or XY, the law will effectively be prohibiting heterosexual marriage in many instances. If it is based it upon gender identity or genital appearances, any such legislation may in effect be giving the green light to marriage for "genetic homosexuals" according to the government's own definition.
There are hundreds, if not thousands of intersex people in loving heterosexual relationships and marriages that could be called into question due to one partner having a chromosome make-up that doesn't match their gender. Then again, there could be thousands of gay and lesbian intersex individuals lining up to get legally married based upon these futile attempts at legislating and defining male and female. If such a law is to be enforced, accommodations for genetic testing to determine gender and genital checks may need to be written into the grand plan to keep us safe from the imagined dangers of marriage for homosexuals.
The danger is not from people in loving homosexual relationships getting married, the danger is coming from attempts by the government and religious institutions trying to define the concept of one man - one woman.
Medicine has for decades been trying to surgically force intersex children into a male or female box according to their narrow definition based upon the genitalia. Those attempts are now under sharp criticism and debate.
We can only hope that Washington doesn't further antagonize those often futile attempts through misguided legislation trying to define one man - one woman through a constitutional amendment. Such legislation which would only serve to further the stigma thousands of intersex people face from the moment they are born by extending it into legally defined marriage.