Intersex is not a self-diagnosis |
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Suzan Cooke at ‘Woman Born Transsexual’ has a great piece on the perennial problem of trans people self-diagnosing as intersex, usually because they think it is more socially acceptable. She notes:
In the early days of Sex Reassignment Surgery they decided if one were intersex or transsexual based on one of the cruder tests, a buccal smear and slide stained to look for Barr Bodies, the inactivated x chromosome found in females but not males. For obvious reasons the majority of these tests came back negative. Nonetheless many doctors including Dr. Benjamin as well as the Doctors at Stanford where I had my SRS looked at some of us and said, “There is definitely something going on here that our tests are not finding. You were too feminine before starting hormones for there not to be. Matters like pelvic structure etc.
But as early as 1970 Doctors had become wary because they had been burned badly in a case circa 1960 at UCLA by someone known in the literature as Agnes. Her case is documented in Harold Garfinkel’s book Studies in Ethnomethodology. For those not familiar with the story of Agnes, Agnes was a transsexual to female person who got SRS at UCLA Medical Center in the late 1950s or early 1960s. She presented herself as an intersex person with male genitals and “spontaneously appearing” female secondary sexual features. She claimed these secondary sexual characteristics just developed and swore she did not take any legally or illegally obtained female hormones.
Full article:
Alien Abductions and Claims of Improbable Intersex Conditions in Online discussion Groups
http://womenborntranssexual.com/2009/10/14/alien-abductions-and-claims-of-improbable/