Intersex + transgender?

[Piplette]

Firstly, I have no desire to offend anyone /cause controversy and am genuinely curious and looking for views on this.

If an individual is intersex (xxy), has lived 40 odd years as male but then chooses to live as a female including changing their official gender would they be classed as transgender? And would you consider them now female?

That was an interesting case and I would caveat very rare. But the individual was XX with uterus and ovaries but external functional penis, living as a man.

So a very rare example of a female penis!

I think Lady Colin Campbell was brought up as a boy - or is that a nasty rumour?

People with DSDs have repeatedly disassociated themselves from the trans debate and asked others to respect that. They are thoroughly sick of being used as some kind of "gotcha" by TRAs trying to argue that sex isn't binary.

If DSDs had any relevance to trans identities then transmen and transwomen would be born with such conditions - and they overwhelming aren't. It would also help with diagnosis, but medicalising trans identities is transphobic apparently.

Not for the first time, medical conditions are both relevant and irrelevant to trans identity ideology simultaneously. Even Schrödinger's cat is getting confused by the cognitive dissonance.

@Piplette please use the correct term DSD.

My understanding is some people with DSD may not be aware until they hit puberty. People with DSD always have a sex, male or female, for some this may change if their sex at birth was incorrectly observed. They don’t change sex, their sex remains constant, it is the identification at birth was incorrect.

As with any cohort of people, I would expect population norms to apply e.g. skin colour, eye colour, race, religion, disability, sexual orientation etc. I would therefore not be surprised to find people with DSD have the same % of people with gender dysphoria as the population as a whole I.e. 0.2% or less.

As pp have said the trans lobby keep trying to drag people with DSD under the trans umbrella. People with DSD have repeatedly asked not to be conflated with the trans movement, we should all respect that.

My understanding is that klinefelters is a dsd

You can have DSDs where the bio sec is female but they have Clitoromegaly so they present as a boy until puberty. There’s a whole host of issues caused by the excess androgens that cause this so it’s usually picked up at birth and parents know and raise their child as a girl but obvs it’s confusing/upsetting for the children who have a difference but I think it’s more like having a disability (particularly given the whole range of health issues caused by Endocrine issues ie height/weight, complex medical requirements/ops etc) than body dysmorphia/trans. The children overproduce testosterone and some don’t produce female hormones or have ovaries so it can be thought of as hormonal intersex.

I don’t think intersex groups are offended by the term intersex, there’s lots of advocacy groups that use this term.

People with DSD have repeatedly asked not to be conflated with the trans movement, we should all respect that.

This!

it’s true, but she says she never had anything really penis-like, just ambiguous genitals and the doctors told her parents to chose and they chose boy for traditional sexist reasons. The mistake was discovered well before puberty and she had a very simple op to correct fused labia.

She’s talked about it loads.
As is usual with DSDs she was unable to have bio kids and adopted her two sons as a single mum.

If DSDs had any relevance to trans identities then transmen and transwomen would be born with such conditions - and they overwhelming aren't.

Yes, actual DSDs and trans identification have been shown to not correlate.

However, it is quite common for trans people to claim to be "intersex" in some way (often vague or biologically impossible, or sometimes just picking something off a list they don't really understand) - certainly far more common than the actual DSD incidence rate.

So if any trans person claims to be "intersex", and you have no other information to go on, it's far more likely that they're making it up than it be true.

As is usual with most DSDs (some 5ARD men can father children with help, and women with MRKH have had children via uterus transplants but it’s a very small number)

Thanks for the explanation @EmotionalSupportHyena

Have a look at the DSD Families website, it's very informative, and also I quite like the Paradox Institute on YouTube, really informative and easy to understand, well it's in small chunks so you can watch it a few times as some of it is a bit complicated (that might be just me).

I know that - at least in the Anglosaxon sphere - people with DSD speak up against being conflated with the trans issue Blaueblumen. There was a very knowledgeable and outspoken DSD-woman on Twitter some years back, whose conversations with TRAs I enjoyed very much - I forgot her name.

Which is why I was surprised that The Umbrella is now termed LGBTQI+ (did I miss something?). Was the I hijacked or is the inclusion in that acronym ok for the DSD community? (Assuming that the I Stands for Intersex) Does anyone know?

It adds an air of scientific credibility to the claims that people can change sex. It's like a gotcha. Sex is binary - but what about people with both ovaries and testes, and unless you can say - that's not true, foetal material doesn't work like that. There are only about 150 babies born in the UK every year with ambiguous genitalia, some DSD only affect men or women ie XXY or X chromosomes.

It is deliberate obfuscation. I learnt the hard way and went away a did some digging so I didn't get bogged down in that argument again.

How can you identify as intersex? That's like identifying as having heart failure or diabetes

Fuck the identify as shite....you either are or you aren't.

Really interesting, thank you for starting this thread

I've been lurking a lot on this board and this is an area that seems really significant in the gender debate. I've learnt a lot from posters here about DSDs and seeing this thread made me revisit Google. I've been surprised to see the NHS has recently updated its DSD page - it reads to me that Klinefelter Syndrome IS included as a DSD. Now I'm thoroughly confused . Has this always been the case?

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/differences-in-sex-development/

People who have Klinefelter Syndrome (XXY) are male. If they present in stereotypically feminine clothing they’re still male and may or may not consider themselves transgender.

With modern chromosome testing the idea that a doctor decides on a child’s sex based on the appearance of their genitals and where that is ambiguous assign a sex and hope they’re right is outdated. If there is ambiguity then it is straightforward to do a genetic test and find out for certain what the child’s genotype is. There are some DSDs where the genitals may not be ambiguous at birth but the issue becomes apparent during puberty when androgenisation occurs (as in Caster Semenya’s case). These are generally very uncommon.

I have looked after a couple of men with Klinefelter Syndrome, both gay men. One who for some time had confusion around his gender identity because he wasn’t stereotypically macho and fell into the the sexist idea that this meant he was a woman. He seems to have moved on from that.

Some men with the condition have low testosterone levels and may experience infertility. They often need testosterone injections to reduce risk of long term complications and to help with things like erectile dysfunction.

Thank you @Faffertea I am clearer now. Apologies to anyone with any of these diagnoses, if I am clumsy with my words as I learn about this. What does seem clear is that transgender ideology is entirely unrelated to DSDs.

You're wrong. The condition where both testes and ovaries are present, is here.

https://rarediseases.org/rare-diseases/ovotesticular-disorder-of-sex-development/

That's the same condition discussed in the link I included. In my link:

Ovotesticular DSD (OT-DSD), previously known as true hermaphroditism, describes individuals who have both testicular and ovarian tissues, with an overall incidence of 1 out of 100,000 live births.[3]

The rarity of that condition shows that it's unrelated to the supposed 1 out of 200 people who, according to the most recent UK Census, are trans.

@deepwatersolo Apparently Stonewall just ignored people with DSD and added the I.

They have a definition on the website that begrudgingly acknowledges after discussions it doesn’t currently include DSD issues in its remit.

“Intersex
A term used to describe a person who may have the biological attributes of both sexes or whose biological attributes do not fit with societal assumptions about what constitutes male or female.
Intersex people may identify as male, female or non-binary.
Stonewall works with intersex groups to provide its partners and stakeholders information and evidence about areas of disadvantage experienced by intersex people but does not, after discussions with members of the intersex community, include intersex issues as part of its current remit at this stage.”

I know a man with an extra X chromosome. He only found out when trying to start family. He is still male

Surely if someone has XXY sex chromosomes they have a DSD (difference of sexual development)?
The term ‘intersex’ is outdated and offensive to many born with a DSD. Everyone born with a DSD is either male or female. No one has an ‘official gender’, we all have a sex, which is either male or female.

So to answer your original question OP, if a male with XXY chromosomes decides to identify as female then yes, he is transgender.