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Comment by gravypod | Hacker News Reader

Isn't someone being defined as being intersex someone who is transitioning to another sex?

Wouldn't it just make sense to let the person choose if they would like to be defined as their current sex or what they are transitioning to? So for example, if the person is MtF and they want the government to call them F, they can just ask the government to switch their sex status.

Having a "T" class doesn't make much sense since it doesn't really model what is happening. T is not in itself a sex, it's the representation of people transitioning from one sex to another. That inherently means it is not a state but instead it's a mutation.

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At the moment, if you are born with abnormal chromosones your genitals can be ambigous at birth, doctors to this day will perform a "corrective" surgery to make you "right"

Intersex people are not a fan of it for the most part and are calling for the practice to be illegal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

What you are describing is transgender people which is not intersex people, however both could have an ambigous gender.

Intersex people do not have an ambiguous gender, they have an ambiguous sex based on genitalia. However, "In humans, biological sex is determined by five factors present at birth: the presence or absence of a Y chromosome, the type of gonads, the sex hormones, the internal reproductive anatomy (such as the uterus in females), and the external genitalia".

So really none of it is that ambiguous.

> Intersex people do not have an ambiguous gender, they have an ambiguous sex.

Intersex people may have an ambiguous socially ascribed gender, and are probably more likely than most to have unclear gender identity. (Given that gender identity, while obviously highly personal, is also clearly influenced by social cues, including both ascribed gender and social expectations about the relation between gender and physical sex traits.)

>Intersex people may have an ambiguous socially ascribed gender, and are probably more likely than most to have unclear gender identity.

That's interesting, because of the numerous population studies in intersex people, this has never been one of the conclusions. Same sex attraction is more likely, however.

I think you have a misconception regarding intersex people -- their presentation aligns with their birth sex. I.e. if they are a female, they will have female secondary sex characteristics.

At least until you have an understanding of what gender is, how you yourself fit into that social construct and can articulate it, gender is ambiguous for everyone, intersex or not.

There's a simple answer here: gender is a social construct, and trying to define yourself with any of these categories just doesn't make sense.

Do you think that none of this has to do with socialization? Should we avoid any potentially gendered toys/activities (that are masculine or feminine) lest we ruin the child's natural, inborn gender?

Or should we take the much saner approach and not try to categorize children based on ridiculous buckets of traits?

All that self-identifying with a gender does is perpetuate the harmful stereotypes that surround the socialization for children of that sex.

No. Intersex means born with genitalia that aren't formed in a way that's clearly identifiable as either male or female, but rather somewhere developmentally in between.

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