Confusing statement about treatment for intersex being a victory for trans community

[IwantToRetire]

I feel a bit bad about making this a thread topic as it is clearly quite something to win the Women's Prize for fiction with your first novel.

And I am not meaning or wanting in any way to make this a personal attack.

But surely calling this trans treatment isn't right? Or have I got it wrong?

Van der Wouden revealed in her acceptance speech that she is intersex. “I was a girl until I turned 13, and then as I hit puberty all that was supposed to happen did not quite happen, or if it did happen it happened too much,” she said. “I won’t thrill you too much with the specifics but the long and the short of it is that hormonally I am intersex.”

“This little fact defined my life throughout my teens until I advocated for the healthcare that I needed. In the few precious moments here on stage I am receiving truly the greatest honour of my life as a woman, presenting to you as a woman and accepting this Women’s prize and that is because of every single trans person who’s fought for healthcare, who changed the system, the law, societal standards, themselves. I stand on their shoulders.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jun/12/womens-prize-debut-yael-van-der-wouden-the-safekeep-rachel-clarke-the-story-of-a-heart

And this isn't the Guardian twisting her words, because other papers have posted snippets and this seems the fullest.

So my confusion is whether it is true that the treatment for a biological women with DSD has only become (more) available since medical intervention for men who want to transition has become more common.

If she wants to identify as part of the trans and queer community that's her right.

I am just hoping someone with the right medical knowledge can explain what she might be referring to.

Sorry if this is a really ignorant question.

...many instances are also unlikely to show on an ultrasound, and may need karotype testing to confirm.

www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jun/13/womens-prize-winner-yael-van-der-wouden-its-heartbreaking-to-see-so-much-hatred-towards-queer-people

"On the question of the supreme court ruling on gender rights, she adds: “To subject that to law feels baffling to me, especially as it is accompanied by legal, verbal and physical violence.”

🙄

This silly twit is not intersex. Because there is medically no such thing. She has presumably a dsd. A named dsd which clearly defines her as either male or female. She sounds confused or more likely disingenuous

I'm very confused. How can you be hormonally intersex anyway? Surely you'd just be a woman with high testosterone or a man with high oestrogen. I'm sure DSDs relate to physical development not aligning with your genetic sex. Hormones alone wouldn't be a DSD, right?

"Hormonally intersex" is nonsense on its face.

I have a huge amount of sympathy for someone who found out at puberty that their genetic make up means that they are technically the opposite sex to that which they (and everyone in their life) believes they are. I can 100% see why someone would wish to use hormones/ surgery to prevent having to change their percieved sex after living 'as a woman' since birth. If my teen 'daughter' received a DSD diagnosis and wanted to remain presenting as female / keep a female name / pronouns etc I would support them.

I think this is a world away from a middle aged man, enjoying male privilege while simultaneously claiming to believe they are (meant to be) a woman.

If women writers are overlooked for awards it's not because of their chromosomes but because they are believed to be women/ look like women / becasuse society has certain expectations of their writing. Up until the point that this author spoke out about their personal medical situation they had experienced all the prejudice that women writers do.

AidaP · Today 03:35

Grow up, eh? What's so mature about posting misinformation about trans suicide rates?

Hormonally intersex sounds awfully like someone who classes PCOS as intersex.

Unfortunately the discourse has been muddied by activists so much, the term intersex is meaningless. Which is probably what they wanted.

If that was indeed what happened to Van der Wouden @BunnyOnTheOnion then I think that's a fair point.

I don't suppose anyone knows whether Van der Wouden had spoken publicly before about having this medical condition? Anyway I will ponder what you've said.

I think people talk about hormones because, when a girl's periods don't start, the first thing you can do is look for circulating T. Its presence if high is indicative of being gonadally male.

The age she became aware of an issue suggests it’s not CAIS. If I remember correctly, they don’t investigate the absence of periods until 17 or so.

So something happened around 13 that raised concern. That’s not going to be female puberty beginning.

Those studies fail to control for high comorbidity of other mental health conditions, including depression, anxiety, OCD, and self harm practices such as anorexia, bulimia, and cutting. When these factors are controlled for THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE IN SUICIDE RATES. “Gender affirming care” is NOT “life saving”. Correlation does not equal causation. Please stop using bad research to justify these sorts of extreme, fear mongering statements.

The description of being "hormonally intersex" sounds like BS to me. What does that actually mean?

Sorry, I see a few PPs have already made this point.

I'm not sure that Swyer Syndrome fits with the "some things happening too much" comment.

Which would mean every woman who's ever been pregnant with a boy (or two or three) would be 'hormonally intersex' because of the slightly raised levels of testosterone in our bodies while we're carrying said boys.
Am I right in thinking some women will PCOS have elevated levels of testosterone too?

Am I right in thinking some women will PCOS have elevated levels of testosterone too?

Hyperandrogenism is essential to a diagnosis of PCOS. You don’t actually need cystic ovaries. So yes, all women with PCOS have elevated testosterone. The average is around 2.4mmol/l, at the upper limit of the normal range for women, so not excessively above, but can be higher than that.

The ‘hormonally intersex’ grift is used to prop up the ‘I’m hormonally female’ claim.

Since the SC ruling, there has been frothing about the use of the term ‘biological sex’ without provision of a definition of ‘biological sex’. This is often paired with claims that when taking cross sex hormones in quantities that match natural production for the opposite sex, this results in being classifiable as the opposite sex.

IW and DU have both publicly claimed that they are biologically female because they are biological (not robots) and identify as female, so biologically female.

Michael Foran has written some great posts explaining that the definition of ‘biological sex’ has been established through case law (he cites 3 cases). The definition refers to gonads, chromosomes and external genitalia. Hormones don’t even get a mention!

It’s not trans related but I watched a really interesting ted talk from a person who found out they had no uterus and internal testicles at age 10. Initially at the time surgeons were very much of the whip ‘em out perspective which does seem to have changed as knowledge has grown.

https://www.ted.com/talks/emily_quinn_what_i_ve_learned_from_having_balls

Lots of medicine has a convoluted history, Are diabetes patients expected to be grateful to those having weight loss injections as lots of money/,research pouring in?

Meanwhile trans women wishing to compete in women's sports must get their testosterone levels below 10mmol/l, a level which no female person can ever achieve even by doping. A female athlete who raised her testosterone levels to 5mmol/l by doping would be banned from competing (not just in the same category, but at all).

Females can get their testosterone levels above 10. Gender doctors target the lower male range, 10-15nmol/l. There was the case of the female whose levels were 40 or something crazy.

Anyway, I'm pretty confident "hormonally intersex" is bollocks. It reminds me of the folk medicine you get on trans reddit, where people claim that, after being on CSH for a year, all the male cells in your body will have been replaced by female ones or vice versa.

Which isn't to say this woman doesn't have a DSD, or maybe just some hormonal condition that wouldn't be classed as a DSD, but she's been pretty obscure about it, and I suspect deliberately so.

@NotBadConsidering I’ve never read any figures remotely like that. I have PCOS (and have never had my testosterone levels checked but my silverback hairiness and high sex drive certainly suggest they are on the high side) but the figures I’ve seen show a big gap even between levels for women with PCOS and men with testosterone so low that medical treatment might be considered in some countries.

Off the top of my head normal levels for women are 0.2-2 and for men are 8-28. A woman with PCOS might go as high as 5 I think? A woman with a testosterone level at normal levels for a man is seriously unwell with a pituitary tumour.

@PermanentTemporary Which post are you referring to? But in terms of testosterone in PCOS:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42000-020-00210-0

and serum total testosterone level (2.34 ± 0.58 nmol/L vs 1.57 ± 0.60 nmol/L, p < 0.001) compared with women without PCOS.

Most women with PCOS have testosterone levels that aren’t as high as one might think. Of course there will still be women higher.