PCOS and devastated to be called intersex

Well I've gone through the menopause so if I take HRT I guess I am intersex too?

OP, come and join me on the FUCK RIGHT OFF bench. We have wine.

OP, frankly your “friend” is mental.

like, mad as a box of frogs.

No logic, no sense, no critical thought, just plain old lunacy / stupidity.

Please please do not sit and cry about someone saying something that has zero sense or logic to it. Something which is in fact totally and utterly barmy.

PCOS makes you intersex - honestly never heard such a load of old shit.
I couldn’t be friends with someone so deluded and daft.

Don’t give this friend your time and energy, it’s like you crying over her saying that because you have hair you could be considered a gorilla.

She’s a loon.

The fact is that any man can call himself Barbara, wear lipstick, a dress and high heels and demand that everyone defers to him as being a woman and allow him to use women's toilets and he can even take hormones, have breast implants and have his penis removed.

But after he's dead and buried if he's dug up they are going to find a MALE skeleton.

You are not intersex, you are a woman with a medical condition.

The person who you called a friend is deranged and is suffering with delusions and is mentally incapacitated.

Point one: your former friend is a cruel dishonest idiot. I'm sorry you had to suffer because of that.

Point two, something as common as red hair is pretty rare anyway. There's little or no red hair in China, Asia, Africa and among indigenous Americans or people from Oceania.

Ugh, sorry this ignorant, wrongheaded 'friend' upset you so much, OP. Grossly unkind... that's one of the ways you can tell she knows full well you're a woman, the TRA #bekind never applies to us, only to the male colonisers.

I have/had PCOS too. All it meant in my case was irregular periods, getting bad acne when I came off the pill to TTC and then a couple of rounds of clomid to help me ovulate. Of course, like every other person in the world with PCOS, I'm 100% woman.

Joining in the chorus here OP.

Of course you are female. You are a women with polycystic ovaries. You have a medical condition where your ovaries don’t quite function as they should.

You have absolutely NO ambiguity around your sex. Activists are leveraging your condition to expand what they call ‘intersex’.

Insulin is a hormone, so I suppose she would say that any T1 diabetics who take insulin to stay alive are undergoing hormone therapy, and therefore intersex?! And what about about all the women taking The Pill? That's packed full of hormones, so they must be intersex as well. But if they stop taking it then they turn back into female......??

In short: bollocks. Or ovaries.

That is horrendous, cruel and completely stupid. Please never, ever speak to her again.

This op.

i hope id have been able to reflect her words back at her and say that i found it astonishing that someone could have such a poor grasp of basic human biology that they considered a woman with xx chromosomes to be intersex.

Sorry to digress but I've just read the link re DSD and redheads and discovered that the definition of a "real man" would, according to one person, include "a penis between 2.5 and 4.5 cm at birth"

now I've seen a lot of baby boys with their nappies off, thanks to doing paediatrics and then lots of baby clinics - and a newborn with a 4.5 cm long penis? That's nearly two inches! In a newborn! What planet is this person on?

To summarise, your friend is a bonafide fuckwit.

You have a medical condition. Blokes wanting to be women have an imaginary condition. That is the difference.

Your friend is a capital C.

Not only is your friend a weapons grade bellend, not only is she absolutely factually incorrect, but she chose to weaponise a medical condition she knows you have to beat you over the head with to make her “point”. Knowing that it was upsetting you, and also not listening to the person with the actually condition who would know more about it than she does.

what a shit. You are better off without her.

Your friend sounds ghastly, OP. Of course you're not intersex!! What a horrible thing to say, she's just trying to hurt your feelings and is lashing out.

She thinks people with PCOS are encouraged to medicate to reinforce the gender binary. Rather than to, you know, reduce some of the symptoms of PCOS. She clearly has an agenda.

Of course you are female. Only women have PCOS!!

Your 'friend' is an absolute shit. I'd block them on everything and never see them again. They are completely wrong. And as thick as shit.

Well, probably not the last. But there's a breakdown at https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/intersex-is-not-as-common-as-red of the conditions that some try and include under the 'intersex' umbrella.

Hint: very few of them are anything other than very clearly male, or very clearly female.

Nobody with more than a few brain cells would class someone with PCOS as intersex. She is being antagonistic and deliberately hurtful to you.

You can only have PCOS if you are a biological woman, ffs. Some people are idiots (and deeply unpleasant for using your medical history to upset you)

Remember the only reason you even know you have PCOS is because these issues are distinct to females! You ARE a woman or there'd be no need to diagnose your symptoms.

A bloke in your shoes would be sent home with a very quick and easy diagnosis of maleness!

Honestly what a moron.

This is kind of a small-scale version of "those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities". Those who buy into this stuff will say the most mind-bogglingly offensive stuff. Sometimes justifying it on the basis of how it's "what some people think". Um, but you're the one saying it, and using it in an argument!

One of their other favourites in the same vein is about how black women don't look like proper women.

Your "friend" is so ridiculously wrong that I am almost embarrassed for her.

By no medical definition are you "intersex" (which is an outdated term anyhow, and one which your oh-so-trendy-and-right-thinking friend would not be using if she actually knew 1/10 of what she thinks she knows).

Women with PCOS are women; when they were young they were girls; when they get older, they will be older women. You can't have PCOS without ovaries, and you don't have ovaries without being of female sex (except for a tiny number of people who do actually have both ovaries and testicles - this is really, really rare).

PCOS is not anyone's choice. Unlike "intersex" (or disorders of sexual development), it's not congenital. It is however a fluctuating condition and potentially reversible - at least for some women - as there is a strong link between PCOS and obesity (in a rather chicken-and-egg manner). Women can sometimes struggle to conceive due to PCOS, undergo assisted conception, then find that they conceive a subsequent child quite easily as the PCOS has righted itself. It's a medical condition, linked to other medical problems (eg diabetes) and nothing whatsoever to do with sexuality or gender.

I am a doctor; in 30+ years of medical practice, I met many, many women with PCOS; quite a few, male and female, with a variety of congenital problems with their genitals; and only one who was a true DSD person - she had a uterus, vagina etc but no ovaries, only testes, and turned out to have male chromosomes.

I don't know of any doctors who would call someone with PCOS "intersex". It would never even enter my head. I really hope that helps you feel a bit happier again.

OTOH your "friend" is clearly so fixed in her erroneous beliefs that there's no point arguing with her. You can't educate someone who has blindfolded themselves and put their fingers in their ears.

I have PCOS. I am/we are not intersex. Your 'friend' is a dopey shit and you need to dump her.

Just to demonstrate how stupid she is, even if PCOS was redefined as a DSD (Difference in / Disorder of Sexual Development - Intersex is not used any more), you would still be female, in every cell of your body, including those pesky ovaries over-producing testosterone. Because every cell of your body has two X chromosomes.

Would any other malfunctioning reproductive organ put you in this fictional category? Erectile disfuction? Infertility? Irregular period? Gestational diabetes? Not being glowwy enough during pregnancy?