Library and Academic Services: Gender and Sexual Diversity: Intersex

What does Intersex mean?

The I in 2SLGBTQIA+ stands for “intersex.”

A general term used for a variety of situations in which a person is born with reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn't fit the medical binary of “female” or “male.”

Image source: Morgan Carpenter (SVG file simplification by AnonMoos), CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Library Resources

Intersex Narratives by Viola Amato (verst.)
Location: ebook
Publication Date: 2016
This book explores representations of intersex - intersex persons, intersex communities, and intersex as a cultural concept and knowledge category - in contemporary North American literature and popular culture. The study turns its attention to the significant paradigm shift in the narratives on intersex that occurred within early 1990s intersex activism in response to biopolitical regulations of intersex bodies. Focusing on the emergence of recent autobiographical stories and cultural productions like novels and TV series centering around intersex, Viola Amato provides a first systematic analysis of an activism-triggered resignification of intersex.
Between XX and XY: intersexuality and the myth of two sexes by Gerald N. Callahan
Location: ebook
Publication Date: 2009
Providing a fascinating look at the science of sex and what makes people male or female, this book explains dozens of intersex conditions--such as hermaphroditism, Klinefelter syndrome, and androgen insensitivity syndrome--and includes personal interviews with people living with these conditions telling their surprising and often heart-wrenching stories. Even doctors and scientists are not entirely sure if external genitalia, internal sex organs, chromosomes, DNA, environment, or some combination define a person's sex, but this examination shows that sex is not an either-or proposition...
Contesting Intersex: The Dubious Diagnosis by Georgiann Davis
Location: ebook
Publication Date: 2015
A personal, compelling perspective on how medical diagnoses can profoundly hurt, or help, the lived experiences of entire communities When sociologist Georgiann Davis was a teenager, her doctors discovered that she possessed XY chromosomes, marking her as intersex. Rather than share this information with her, they withheld the diagnosis in order to "protect" the development of her gender identity; it was years before Davis would see her own medical records as an adult and learn the truth. Davis' experience is not unusual. Many intersex people feel isolated from one another and violated by medical practices that support conventional notions of the male/female sex binary which have historically led to secrecy and shame about being intersex....
Intersex Matters: Biomedical Embodiment, Gender Regulation, and Transnational Activism by David RUBIN; David A. Rubin
Location: ebook
Publication Date: 2017
Intersex Matters analyzes the medicalization of people diagnosed as'intersex,'which is an umbrella term for individuals born with sexual anatomies various societies deem to be nonstandard. Through an examination of medico-scientific, scholarly, political, and popular archives from the mid-twentieth century to the present, Rubin argues that the medical regulation of atypical sex is fundamentally a feminist and a queer issue, and an intersectional and transnational one as well. Critical attention to intersex lives, bodies, narratives, and activisms profoundly reconfigures contemporary paradigms of sex/gender, race, health, normality, biopolitics, and human rights. Rubin charts the emergence of intersex rights activism in the global north and global south, thus demonstrating the value of understanding intersex experience when rethinking the vicissitudes of body politics in a globally interconnected world.

Webpages, media, and other resources

What is Intersex?
A list of frequently asked questions about Intersex.
What is intersex? (Intersex Society of America)
Intersex is a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male. For example, a person might be born appearing to be female on the outside, ...

What I’ve learned from having balls. | Emily Quinn | TEDxProvidence

Emily Quinn has balls, literally. At age 10 she found out she was intersex (that her biology isn’t strictly male or female) and she was told not to tell anyone about it. In this brave, vulnerable talk Emily shares what it’s like to carry the burden of shame while navigating a world where nobody understood her body. Her experience teaches us that bodies are a lot more diverse and complicated than we make them out to be, and leaves us with one question: what's so bad about being different?

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