Bodies Like Ours Girlfriends Article Page 5

Most likely, this shared sense of oppression is what makes the queer community a safe space for intersex adults. "The NGLTF's Creating Change conference was happy to have ISNA participate," says Hillman, and "some of our biggest allies have been LGBT people. That's where our first grants came from." Gay visibility and even Will & Grace's popularity has opened minds. "My students realized that being gay doesn't make you a monster," Dreger reports, "just like being intersex doesn't make you a monster."

Plus, it turns out--and probably for reasons more complex than the lesbian-big-clitoris theory--intersex people have a much higher chance of turning out to be queer. Particularly, says Monica Casper, "we know that girls with CAH are much more likely than other girls to grow up to be lesbian, but we are not sure of the exact numbers." No one, even doctors, knows exactly whywomen with CAH have such a high rate of lesbianism. Some think it's a result of the virilizing "bath" of male hormones that CAH fetuses receive in utero. This extended exposure to androgen often causes an enlarged clitoris, a closed vagina, and "tomboyish" personality traits later in life. But others conjecture that it's not about biology. Many non-intersex women, after all, also end up lesbian, and it's important to note that there are intersex-related conditions other than CAH in which heterosexuality is more prevalent. This leads some activists to believe that the link between intersex and lesbianism is a social one. As Casper puts it, "The LGBT community understands what it's like to be different in a world that tries to normalize everybody." (If the intersex community has a high proportion of homosexuals, it is also predominantly female. Most likely this is due to the fact that more intersex babies are assigned female than male because, as one Johns Hopkins doctor put it, "It's easier to dig a hole than to build a pole.")

Despite the demographic overlap, Janet Green of Bodies Like Ours notes that the lesbian community is not always "as supportive of our issue as they possibly could be. In women-born-women-only spaces, it can be an issue, even though girls that have CAH are absolutely girls, women in every sense." In San Francisco's queer community, however, Thea Hillman says that acceptance "is actually pretty widespread. I know several people with intersex conditions. Some present as butch, one has transitioned to male, and one plays with her gender all the time. Each of them has been part of the dyke community."

THE FUTURE OF INTERSEX

This year marks the tenth anniversary of ISNA, and intersex activists have not only mingled with LGBT community figures, they've learned from the strategies of the gay liberation movement. In particular, intersex activists point to the efforts of gay and lesbian activists during the seventies to convince the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from the list of mental disorders. "They tried to de-medicalize homosexuality and we're trying to de-medicalize intersexuality," says Dreger. ISNA and Bodies Like Ours are also trying to build relationships with other movements, much like the gay community has built bridges to the transgender and women's movements.

Activists are also exploring their options in court. Ideally, Thea Hillman says, there would be "some kind of legal environment where the threat of being sued makes it so doctors can't do these surgeries anymore." (That doesn't mean that the intersex movement advocates against parents picking a sex for the child. As Monica Casper advises, "Based on the evidence you have, pick a sex. But don't do surgery. . .. A parent's distress shouldn't be treated by surgery on their child.")
Luckily, there are a growing number of medical professionals who feel the same way ISNA and Bodies Like Ours do. Many medical students, gay and straight, are questioning the treatment of intersex patients. Hillman warns that for the most part, "the old guard is training the new guard," but some alternative medical protocols are in place. Even researcher Amy Wisniewski of the Johns Hopkins Children's Center, who worked on the 2002 intersex study, acknowledges that "if we ran this study again in fifty years, we hope none of the participants would report a lack of understanding about their condition."

Ending the isolation and misinformation will aid intersex people in coming out and understanding themselves. But society needs to understand intersexuality as well. "Overall, it would be great if society could see that intersex is just a variation, like hair color," Hillman says. "These are healthy functioning bodies; there's no reason to change them just to assuage people's fears." Alice Dreger puts it even more succinctly: "Ideally, we would love it if we became obsolete."

Jen Phillips is the Associate Editor at Girlfriends.
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