Born in '65, he lost his penis in a circumcision error. Parents and doctors were like "Oh, just remove it, he's too young to know the difference, raise him as a girl, it will be fine..."
Kid grew up with major mental health issues "knowing" they were "really" a boy. Took decades of therapy to work out. He ended up killing himself at the age of 38.
Yeah, just a tragic story and even more fucked up than it appears superficially. The Doctor needed to have his license revoked at best and at worst, criminal charges.
This is so important. Even if Trump comes in and wrecks everything, the work is there, and the work will become less memory holed because of the prominence of the people presenting it. The information is already out there, and there will be those who will preserve it until their last breath to ensure it's not forgotten.
We've got to stop allowing people to pretend that biology is in any way binary and this kind of important work helps that happen.
Anyway yeah this is pretty huge and honestly a bit unexpected. Admiral Rachel Levine, MD kicks so much ass for this.
I still hear MAGA reference the boxing match where "a man hit a woman" when in fact both failed gender eligibility tests due to abnormal physiology, not gender reassignment.
Biology is not binary? Social construct is not binary, I get that, but reproduction pretty much gates biology as binary (in mammals anyways)
Edit: the key word being BIOLOGY. Gonads vs Ovaries.
I understand that some people have both or none, I am not claiming that intersex people don't exist. But good luck reproducing a mammel without a gonads and an ovary, a binary system.
Geesh, take a biology class people
Out of curiosity, does this new-age biology concept also apply to all mammals, or are humans special?
Intersex people are born with sex characteristics (such as sexual anatomy, reproductive organs, hormonal patterns and/or chromosomal patterns) that do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies. Experts estimate that up to 1.7 percent of the population are born with intersex traits.
What you said is like if you just took an algebra 1A class in high school and said there are no curved lines because you’ve only done linear equations.
Just because your introduction into an extremely broad subject matter did not go into other details to not mean they do not exist. Especially in science, holy hell do we dumb down SO much in science to teach it.
But please, don’t be discouraged, people are wrong all the time, it’s cool. Just learn from it.
It seems that way if you don't look closely, but there are outliers that don't fit the binary in some way or another. Around 1 in 200edit: apparently this has been revised from the 0.5% number I'd heard in the past, and is closer to 1 in 5500 people are born intersex - meaning something about their biology makes them not fit within the biological norm for their gender. For example, there are people born with a Y chromosome, but are born with only female genitalia. Some are born with both sets of genitalia (historically when this happened the parents would pick a gender and the baby would be operated on to remove the other genitals). Biology really only fits into our perfect boxes of gender until we look at the rare outliers, and see the nuance.
This is part of the reason that Trans rights matter, because while some would have you believe that it's all just people who were born in one box, wanting to have been born in the other box (which IMO is still a choice people should be able to make), there's also people who genuinely, biologically don't fit in our neat little boxes either who have just as much right to exist as those of us who do.
I’m pretty sure that when OP said “biology is not binary” they meant “biology does not mean that you are either 100% male or 100% female” (true) as opposed to “people with Z chromosomes exist” (false)
Nope, because in their eyes they need to enforce heteronormativity which means erasing intersex existences through forced sex surgeries on babies (you know, like they always have done).
It's about power, control, and enforcing their worldview on others, it's not about truth, justice, reason, evidence, or having a fucking soul.
My stepmother is a fundamentalist Christian, and when I pressed on her black-and-white views of sex and gender she told me that intersex people exist because of sin in the world.
Just psychopathic to think that God punishes a baby for things other people did.
Note that I don't see intersex as a problem aside from potential medical complications and societal pressure to conform.
Yeah, I was about to say they're sure gonna be disappointed when they find out the details of the "stopping gender reassignment surgeries on children" details.