In the summer of 1996 a small group of people met in northern California to share their experiences with intersex variations. One participant, Heidi Walcutt, said that doctors surgically reduced her clitoris as a young child “to more closely approximate a normal female appearance.”
This resulted in nerve damage that would blunt sexual sensation later in life, as well as stigma that made Walcutt feel at times like hiding in the closet and at other times intensely angry. Others in the group similarly reported shame, confusion and anger resulting from their medical treatment.
The encounter was archived in a documentary created by the Intersex Society of North America, which was founded just three years earlier by an activist using the name Cheryl Chase, whose experience paralleled that of Walcutt. (Chase’s name is now Bo Laurent.)
Intersex is an umbrella term for variations in reproductive or sexual anatomy that may appear in a person’s chromosomes, genitals or internal organs, and it has been estimated to include about 1.7 percent of the population. There are more than 30 medical terms for different combinations of sex traits that fall outside of the typical “male” and “female” paths of development.
WATCH THE FILM
In the second episode of Scientific American’s documentary series A Question of Sex, we look at how people with sex variations are challenging longstanding notions of the sex binary in medicine.
In a survey conducted in 2020 by the Center for American Progress, nine in 10 LGBTQ+ intersex individuals reported some level of poor physical health. Of the majority who reported experiencing discrimination in the year prior, more than four in five said it had affected their financial well-being.
While international human rights groups widely condemn medically unnecessary intersex surgeries on minors, science has been slow to follow.
Genital surgeries on intersex youth first became commonplace in the 1950s, when a psychologist at Johns Hopkins University argued that a baby with genitals that looked neither clearly male nor female should be assigned a sex in early age and that their body should be altered to match. If a penis or a clitoris was deemed too small or large, respectively, it was shaved down.
