intersex blog
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Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! I love it when I can get a line into an essay–especially a serious one–that makes most people laugh out loud. See if you can find the one in my latest, “The Privilege of Pleasure.” 🙂 Big thanks ILGA-Europe​ for their amazing advocacy work for LGBTQIA people (and yes, they actually…
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One of the icons of the queer community once said, “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” I’m talking about the Western world’s first openly gay diva, the one and only, Oscar Wilde, whose wise words make me feel much better about missing last week’s blog post (as well as the “Wednesday” target this…
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So I went to a baseball game for the first time in about 35 years yesterday, because the person who invited me is so cool she inspired some formerly nonexistent interest, and I actually had a great time! (Such a great time that this blog is being posted on Thursday, rather than the typical Wednesday,…
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Given my newfound commitment to weekly Wednesday blogging , not every blog will be a well thought out exploration of topics deeply intergral to being intersex. Some weeks’ posts are bound to be just the random, shallow but hopefully funny musings of your typical intersex chick next door. I think this is one of them.…
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I’ll never forget seeing the cover of a 1950’s lesbian novel called The Third Sex. It’d been made into a postcard, and was on sale at one of those touristy gay stores in Manhattan’s West Village. The cover was alarmist, calling homosexuality “society’s greatest curse”, and featuring a picture of two women about to make…
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Nowadays, the preferred-gender-pronoun question comes up quickly when I speak about being intersex. I see it as a positive indication that we’re moving beyond Intersex 101, and folks are starting to wonder what we’re actually like, as people. I tell them that, just like non-intersex people, we have a wide range of gender identities and…
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Hi everyone! I thought I’d apologize for and share that the reason it’s taken me SO long to write something new is that my mom passed away this year. Being a sensitive, emotional type, and her death being unexpected, it knocked me for a loop. And then another. And another. Now however, I feel her…
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In 1987, I was outed to my parents by my older brother in a scene straight out of the hysterical queer comedy But I’m a Cheerleader: dad yells, “Why can’t you be more like your sister!” gay son replies, “Guess what? She’s a lesbian!” I hadn’t told my dad because I was afraid he’d stop…
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I’ve been meaning to write a review of Abigail Tarttelin’s novel Golden Boy, about an intersex teen, since it was released late last month, but a few things got in the way: 1. I find writing reviews kind of weird. 2. It’s even weirder when my review is meant to provide an insider opinion —…
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The LGBTQI Pride Parade was today in Los Angeles, and instead of riding with the Dykes on Bikes, or watching with friends and then going to Booby Trap, the queer women’s pool party, I found myself blissfully biking down to the beach, then along the beach… then texting cancellations. Basically, I’m more into chill activities…
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Recently, I’ve been thinking about what motivated me to be an intersex spokesperson and activist. For starters, there’s inspirational role models like the incredibly brilliant, badass Angela Davis. She took the racist establishment on head first, eloquently and bravely, jeopardizing her career as a university professor and spending 18 months in prison as a result. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh49nbTq268…
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Last week, before my okcupid-induced outing, I realized I was going to have to come out again, but not in the usual way. I’d found my date in a “girls who like girls” online search, so I obviously didn’t need to come to her as queer. But if I wanted to be able to…
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Today, I want to talk about my favorite new idiom: well-hung woman. As most English speakers know, “well-hung” is slang for a man with a large penis, so you might be wondering how a woman could be well-hung? Well, if you know something about intersex people, you may have already figured it out; but in…
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A few days ago, I received an excerpt from an article-in-progress by a law professor that stated that intersex is increasingly included as a subcategory of transgender. I’m grateful that she contacted me for feedback, and confident that she’ll edit this out, but I’m shocked at how much people continue to obfuscate intersex. Why oh…
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A friend of mine recently relayed that she told some friends about my intersex activism, and me, and they said, “She’s just doing that for attention, that doesn’t exist.” Yes, intersex is to today’s two-sex system what the idea of the world being round was to the dominant earth-is-flat view: something most people couldn’t imagine–…
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I’ve received a scholarship from ILGA — the world’s largest LGBTI organization, which is “Intersex”/”I” inclusive — to attend both their Intersex Forum & their Annual World Conference in Stockholm, Sweden this December. Yay for raising more Intersex awareness and connecting with LGBTI allies! http://ilga.org/ilga/en/index.html
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