The Intersex Issue TSQ: An introduction

In the inaugural issue of TSQ, “Postposttransexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First-Century Transgender Studies,” Iain Morland (2014) provides a nuanced genealogy of “intersex.” He notes that the term has a range of definitions, even in clinical contexts. Often popularly conflated with ambiguous genitalia—“external sexual anatomy that cannot be easily described as entirely female or male”—an intersex diagnosis can refer also to “attributes that are not apparent on the body’s surface, including XXY sex chromosomes or indifference to the hormones that produce the effects connotative of masculinity” (111). Morland perspicuously surmises that what such intersex diagnoses share is not a common genetic, biochemical, or physiological etiology. Rather, intersex diagnoses share a failure to classify the body as male or female. That doctors would medicalize this failure of classification—a failure, that is, to fit the body into a sexually dimorphic sociolinguistic schema—may seem, on its surface, shocking and absurd. As Morland puts it, “That such a failure would be problematic is not obvious, nor is its medicalization” (111). We use the term “medicalization” to refer to the treatment of people as problems that can only be solved by specialized biomedical observation, diagnosis, treatment, and management. In the case of intersexuality, medicalization has produced shame, secrecy, silence, and trauma—especially but not only for intersex people. Intersex studies offers intersex, trans*, nonbinary, and cisgender folks language and tactics for interrogating and rerouting medical regulatory technologies that typically presume binary gender and heteronormativity as ideal aims. As Morland argues, critical intersex study is a study of liberal humanism’s failures.