ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Who Counts as Intersex? Definitional Debates and Intersex Numbers in American Intersex Sexology and Activism

• In Event: Beyond Binaries in LGBTQI+ Histories of Sexology: Bi, Trans, Intersex

English Abstract

Since the 1990s US rise of intersex studies and activism, fundamental premises of anti-intersex sexology have been challenged. In addition to criticizing nonconsensual genital surgery and hormonal intervention on intersex newborns, infants, and children, pro-intersex scholarship and activism has pressed the conceptual boundaries between “intersex” and “endosex” (non-intersex).

Focusing on the scholarship of Anne Fausto-Sterling and the educational newsletters of groups such as the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA), Klinefelter Syndrome and Associates (K.S. and Associates) of Roseville, California, and the Androgen Insensitivity Support Group (AISSG) of the United Kingdom and, then, of North America too, this paper builds an expansive and elastic “critical intersex studies definition” of intersex and biological sex in light of the ongoing sexological history of intersex. I examine why the AISSG, a UK group for a common hormonal intersex variation, came to use the language of intersex and connect with the ISNA before the California chapter of K.S. and Associates, a group for a common chromosomal intersex variation located around a mere 100 miles from the ISNA’s San Francisco, CA base.

Various numbers have floated around that have aimed to capture the frequency, categories, and/or scientific realities of intersex: 5%, 4%, 1.7%, 5 (Fausto-Sterling’s “five sexes”), etc. These “intersex numbers” are always social and political, as STS scholars and scholars of quantification and metrology have argued. Using STS literature on “boundary objects” and “boundary-work,” I argue that intersex has been and continues to be both a successful and failed boundary object, depending on whom you ask. When reduced to a smaller prevalence, intersexuality becomes a failed boundary object for sexologists, lending itself to eugenic intersex eradication via boundary cleansing and in the twenty-first century to the reconceptualization of intersex as “disorder of sex development” (DSD).

Author

• Matthew Marciello, George Washington University