Intersex Resources: Books, Art, Videos

Here's a list with some resources to learn about intersex community, history, and politics! These include some academic sources and some community sources. I'd love to add sources in other languages and that focus on countries besides the United States, so if anyone has recommendations, please let me know. Continually updating and adding sources.

Reading list:

Intersex History:

"The Intersex Movement of the 1990s: Speaking Out Against Medical and Narrative Violence" by Viola Amato.

Hermaphrodites with Attitude Newsletters.

Jazz Legend Little Jimmy Scott is a Cornerstone of Black Intersex History By Sean Saifa Wall

"Hermaphrodites with Attitude: Mapping the Emergence of Intersex Political Activism" by Cheryl Chase

Chrysalis Quarterly: Intersex Awakening, 1997.

"What Happened at Hopkins: The Creation of the Intersex Management Protocols" by Alison Redick.

Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex by Elizabeth Reis.

Intersex Politics

“A Framework for Intersex Justice.” Intersex Justice Project

"Creating Intersex Justice: Interview with Sean Saifa Wall and Pidgeon Pagonis of the Intersex Justice Project." by David Rubin, Michelle Wolff, and Amanda Lock Swarr.

"Intersex Justice and the Care We Deserve: ‘I Want People to Feel at Home in Their Bodies Again." Zena Sharman.

Critical Intersex edited by Morgan Holmes.

Envisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine by Amanda Lock Swarr.

"Intersex Human Rights" by Bauer et al.

Morgan Carpenter's writing

"I Want to Be Like Nature Made Me: Medically Unnecessary Surgeries on Intersex Children in the US." by Human Rights Watch.

Cripping Intersex by Celeste E. Orr.

"From ‘Intersex’ to ‘DSD’: A Case of Epistemic Injustice" by Ten Merrick.

"Did Bioethics Matter? A History of Autonomy, Consent, and Intersex Genital Surgery." by Elizabeth Reis.

Intersex Community

"Normalizing Intersex: Personal Stories from the Pages of Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics." edited by James DuBois and Ana Iltis.

Hans Lindhal's blog.

InterACT Youth Blog.

Intersex Justice Project Blog.

"What it's like to be a Black Intersex Woman" by Tatenda Ngwaru.

Intersex Inclusive Pride Flag by Valentino Vecchietti.

The Interface Project founded by Jim Ambrose.

Intersex Zines from Emi Koyama

Teen Vogue's Intersex Coverage

YOUth& I: An intersex youth Anthology by Intersex Human Rights Australia

Intersex OwnVoices books collected by Bogi Takacs.

Memoirs:

Nobody Needs to Know by Pidgeon Pagonis.

Inverse Cowgirl by Alicia Roth Weigel

XOXY by Kimberly Zieselman

Fiction:

Icarus by K Ancrum.

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

Video/Audio

Every Body dir. Julie Cohen.

Hermaphrodites Speak! 1997.

Liberating All Bodies: Disability Justice and Intersex Justice in Conversation.

"36 Revolutions of Change: Sean Saifa Wall."

Inter_View: An Intersex Podcast by Dani Coyle

Hans Lindhal's Youtube channel.

What it's Like to be Intersex from Buzzfeed.

Emilord Youtube channel

I'm intersex-ask me anything from Jubilee

What it's like to be Intersex-Minutes With Roshaante Andersen.

Pass the Mic: Intercepting Injustice with Sean Saifa Wall

Art

"Hey AAP! Get your Scalpels Off Our Bodies!" 1996.

Ana Roxanne's album Because of a Flower.

Intersex 1 in 90 potraits by Lara Aerts and Ernst Coppejans

Anyone can be Born Intersex: A Photo-Portrait Story by Intersex Nigeria.

Pidgeon Pagonis "Too cute to be binary" Collection

Juliana Huxtable Visual Art

Koomah's art

Please feel free to add on your favorite sources for intersex art, history, politics, and community !

There's now an Intersex Wiki! 🎉

So I got tired of the Sisyphean task of trying to make existing wikis like Wikipedia more informative about intersex. I also was feeling that there isn't really one central place for intersex content to get archived, especially if Tumblr goes down. It felt like it was time that we the intersex community had our own wiki.

And, it's live! You can find it at intersex.wiki!

It's still very young and under development, but we just passed the 100 article mark 🥳 and I thought I'd share! Here's our glossary page as a starting point:

It would be really lovely to get some more regular contributors to the wiki! If you have anything you'd like documented about your intersex variation, knowledge about intersex history, local intersex organizations, or intersex representation, it'd be appreciated! 💜

I've been mostly focusing on growing the number of articles, and which means that the main article on Intersex could really use some expansion and refinement. 💜

Proofreading is also appreciated. 💜

Please note that:

If you have any questions let me know! 💜

hey boy don't kill yourself. green's dictionary of slang is available online and allows you to explore 500 years of english vulgarity. you can search by part of speech, source, time period, etymology, and usage. there's a whole category for gay slang. they even have specific citations listed so you can see the exact context for yourself. boy did you know that in 1927 "to kneel at the altar" was slang for "to sodomize"

some other hits:

Also a lot of early 20th century vulgarity is recorded in Letter from My Father, which is a collection of letters published by a man who's dad was, in short, a major slut and human disaster who wrote about his sex life for his son. It's insane. You can find copies of it online & it's a wild fucking read (literally!) and I think a really interesting look at the life of a person who goes against our stereotypes of what people in the past were "supposed" to be like.

Anyways feel free to add y'all's favs to this post. & if you use this for gay historical fanfic please share with the class

how do i search for "My Father Letters" on google and get my desired answer?

Here's the whole book on Internet Archive!

"Where were transmascs during Stonewall?" Across the street throwing lit mattresses at cops and chanting "gay rights, gay rights, gay rights!" from the windows of the Women's House of Detention, asshole.

Npr article on this

the top one is the recent one, i just wanted a little collection of "parents can support their trans kids and no one went on fire or died"

and one for siblings:

don't forget about dwyane wade and gabrielle union supporting their daughter Zaya

oh hell yeah i hadn't seen this!!!

I know that HRT gives you secondary sex characteristics in one direction or another, but we HAVE to stop telling nonbinary people that they “can’t pick and choose.” Of course, you can’t tell your testosterone that you’d rather not grow chest hair, but there are things you can do!

You could go on T so your voice drops and start shaving so you don’t grow a beard. You could start HRT and then stop once you get the permanent changes you like. You can pursue sterilization instead of bottom surgery. You can get top surgery without being on T. You can go on E and work out a bunch to bulk out your muscles. You can pursue laser hair removal or electrolysis to remove unwanted hair, with or without HRT. You could even just start hormones to see if you like it and then stop if it isn’t to your taste.

Obviously, you can’t order secondary sex characteristics a la carte, but we have to stop being so awful to nonbinary people. We should discuss the options we have, not shut down the conversation with “that’s what you get.”

this 2020 research paper is all about HRT options for non-binary people. it's what convinced me to start HRT, because, indeed, i could "pick and choose".

idk im really tired of 15-17 year olds who have never interacted with the gay community irl and spend too much time on tiktok trying to act like the authority on all that is lgbt+ 

  mean this in the kindest possible way. if you are too young and unsafe to go to your gay community center or pride here’s some ways you can connect to gay history.

since it was suggested in the tags

anything that moves

the bisexual manifesto

the Samuel Proctor oral history project

a masterpost of lesile feinberg’s works by @genderoutlaws

more to come

for today’s update:

There's a lot more academic literature about asexuality now than there was a decade ago, which is so cool!

My favorite studies I read today were about aces who engage in BDSM (Sloan, 2015) and about how aces experience intimacy in their lives (Dawson, McDonnell & Scott, 2016). You can find both articles in shadow libraries.

An interesting point from the Sloan (2015) study is that the negotiation involved in BDSM offers aces a space where they can directly say that they have no interest in sex and/or what kinds of sexual activities are (hard) limits. Some of the participants framed it as "sex is just another kink".

The other study emphasizes that the way we construct and maintain intimacy as aces is not unique to us, we may just rely on certain forms of intimacy more or exclude some forms entirely. This includes the ways in which asexual people navigate sex in romantic relationships. And it's a disservice to asexual people when our intimate actions (inlcuding sex) are judged without looking at the relationship as a whole.

Hi! I wrote a medium article!

If you've been at all interested in what I've been posting about historical sex work and FTM crossdressing, that's what this is about. I go over three examples of this in ancient Greece, Renaissance Venice, and 19th-20th-century San Francisco, and talk a bit about my thoughts on how these stories tie in to transmasculine erasure (& specifically the erasure of gay transmasculinity).

Unfortunately only found out about this after publishing, but this is another example in the realm of "FTM crossdressing being seen as highly sexual and obscene" (w bonus intersexism and racism because all oppression is intertwined):

I know I already posted this quote elsewhere but I wanted to place it in this context:

— Rosa, lesbian and sex worker rights defender El Salvador, quoted by the Human Rights Watch

Happy birthday to revolutionary communist and trans pioneer Leslie Feinberg ♥️ May hir memory be for a blessing.

If anyone is interested in reading hir work, here are free links to all hir writing

Journal of a Transsexual (1980) [transcript]

Transgender Liberation (1992)

Stone Butch Blues (1993) [epub version here]

Transgender Warriors (1996)

Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue (1999) (you need an account for this one, but it’s still free)

Drag King Dreams (2006)

Lavender & Red (2004 - 2008)

Rainbow Solidarity: in Defense of Cuba (2009)

While a Hostile Relative Rewrites My Life (2011)

Casualty of an Undeclared War (2011)

"Feminism is for Everybody" By bell hooks PDF

"Stone Butch Blues" by Leslie Feinberg PDF

The Lou Sullivan diaries PDF

Do your homework, know your history. I am begging y'all. These are free online.

If you have a problem with the term transandrophobia being used after having read these, I have many questions for you.

Additional PDF to another bell hooks work

"Polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS, is a common yet severely misunderstood disorder that affects millions of people worldwide. If you’ve been struggling with PCOS, then you aren’t alone. Despite its prevalence, more than 70% of people with PCOS remain undiagnosed, as their symptoms are often misconstrued as signs of normal hormone fluctuations. Living with PCOS can be frustrating and overwhelming. But here’s the truth: PCOS is more than just missing periods or unexplained weight gain. It’s a complex metabolic and endocrine condition that impacts your health and life. So, how do you recognize the signs, take control of your health and decide when to seek medical attention? This PCOS guide [by Ashrene Rathial] can help you do all of that."

a good guide even for trans men and nonbinary people: no misgendering dysphoria in it

A lot of us learned certain theory terms--intersectionality, compulsory heterosexuality, Death of the Author--on social media. It's great to be able to discuss them! But it's important to know what you're discussing.

Kimberlé Crenshaw was the Black feminist scholar who coined the term "intersectionality." You can read her initial article coining and describing the theory "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics" (1989), her follow-up article expanding on it "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color" (1991), and a (shorter and easier to read) interview with her about what she meant and what she thinks about it "Kimberlé Crenshaw on Intersectionality, More than Two Decades Later" (2017).

Adrienne Rich was the lesbian feminist scholar and poet who coined the term "compulsory heterosexuality" in her article "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" (1980).

Roland Barthes was a French literary critic who coined the term "death of the author" in his essay "La mort de l'auteur" (The Death of the Author") (1967). This one is 6 pages long.

These are available on the internet - I highly recommend reading them and going straight to the source of what the authors said, and decide how much you agree with them and the uses they get put to!