akemi’s Reviews > Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex > Status Update

Medical experts were soo trapped in heteronormativity, that they believed hermaphroditic traits (such as lactating breasts on 'men') could have arisen from deviant sexual practices. That homosexuality could physically invert one's body to become more feminine or masculine, than one's 'true sex'. What binary sex does to a mf—revert back to medieval ontology. These guys were pulling at straws their entire careers, huh?

This is so funny. Medical men kept trying to locate true sex but every body part they turned to kept producing ambiguous, nonbinary expressions. The more they looked at gonads, the more indiscernible ovaries and testes appeared to one another. The more they looked at semen and mensuration, the more cases of men menstruating and women ejaculating appeared. They just couldn't find a stable referent to fix sex to.

The more medical men examined a patient of 'doubtful sex', the more uncertain their consensus became, because science ascribing to cisgendered assumptions simply couldn't place intersex patients. Their blindspot was the assumption that 'true sex' was binary, easily partitioned into two gendered roles, with concomitant heterosexual desires. Hence their mutilation of children who were surgery alerted to be 'natural'.

So, there's a form of hermaphroditism where someone born with XY chromosomes lacks androgen receptors. Unable to respond to testosterone, their body develops into the feminine ideal, looking more woman-like than XX women, who do have androgen receptors. In other words, intersex can appear *more* binary sexed than binary sex, completely rupturing sex dimorphism as a normal or coherent principle of organising sex.