Homosexuality and Hermaphroditism

http://bahairants.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/intersex.jpg

If hermaphrodites were exceedingly rare, then ambiguously sexed patients were simply men or women who needed to learn their true sex. Of course, that knowledge could lead to trouble. Suppose, for example, patient X was living as a male in sexual intimacy with a woman. If a doctor decided patient X was not a man, but a woman, X's relationship was homosexual. Hermaphroditism thus might foster homosexuality and, since homosexuality was a prohibited "vice," perversity and immorality.
-Chapter 3 of Bodies in Doubt, page 59

Intersex people carry the burden of a severe stigma with them throughout their lives today, let alone in the nineteenth century and even earlier. Their bodies alone have been enough to have them plastered in medical books that have called them all sorts of names, and most of them -- especially in older times -- have not been pleasant. When you add their sexual preference into the mix, results are clearly disastrous, as stated above. What one may perceive as a healthy and normal heterosexual relationship that functions well, a doctor can easily tear down with labels of "perverse" and "invalid" just by bringing a person's sexual organs into the spotlight for medical scrutiny.

Nowadays people are becoming more open-minded about gay relationships when partners have "normal" bodies, but trans* bodies and intersex bodies are still looked at as a "gray area" and they are not taken seriously as a result. If one's chromosomes are mixed with both masculine and feminine facets, their straight relationship is still questioned by onlookers today. As some stereotypes and stigmas have fallen away over the years due to scientific advances and general knowledge about these issues, one's sexuality in connection with their body and its genitalia is still up for debate to many. Christian groups such as this and also this have offered plenty of their own commentary on this, speaking on behalf of God to tell the intersex community how they should feel and what they should do.

My question is this: who cares?

Why are we so obsessed with other people's bodies, especially when we know how harmless they really are? Why do we go out of our way to talk about and analyze and criticize what is, at the end of the day, a non-issue? Why do we preoccupy ourselves with what is happening in other people's bodies and bedrooms? Who are we to tell someone that their identity and relationship are not only wrong, but also immoral? Why do we care so much about something that doesn't actually matter?

The reason I picked out this particular passage as opposed to others is because I have been asking myself these questions ever since I became interested in feminism, roughly three years ago. These questions do not necessarily pertain to intersex and trans* bodies; female sexuality has been a topic of debate over what is "right" behavior versus what is "improper and/or immoral" since the beginning of time most likely. I vaguely understand the rhetoric that anti-sex misogynists use in order to keep a woman's sexuality repressed, but I never understood why people were so obsessed with the need to interfere with other people's personal lives. I always wondered, and I still wonder, why can't we just leave these people alone and let them live their lives? Now, after finishing Bodies in Doubt, I am asking these questions on behalf of intersex people as well. I believe that they apply equally.

It is true that people react to these sorts of things for two main reasons: they fear what they cannot understand, and they are trying to make themselves feel superior to anything else they find inferior. A physical defect is a perfect source to pick on a person because it is something that is out of their control and makes them stand out in a group of people, even if you can't always see how they are different. These superiority complexes that drive anti-intersex bigots to judge and criticize are completely useless. They run around preaching hatred, spewing insults. They go out of their way to make perfectly adequate people feel inadequate and abnormal, like something is wrong with them for being a little bit different in a way that doesn't even matter in the long run. Yet at the end the bigots always come up short as they channel their own insecurities of their inadequacies through easier targets: the minorities. They make sway culture to believe that being intersex and engaging in such a "homosexual" relationship is wrong, but at the end of the day, they are the ones who are wrong.

It is hard not to get angry when analyzing this topic because while I am not intersex, I find myself taking these judgments personally. If my own body were to be criticized in such a manner I know my self-esteem would be irreparably low. To add insult to injury, making me feel guilty for my sexual preference -- a private matter that should not be scrutinized in the public eye -- would be too much to bear. It is no wonder that so few intersex people speak up even today, since the topic is still controversial and "corrective" surgeries are forced upon non-consenting newborns in order to "fix" something that isn't even bad. It is unfair for the public to tell someone their relationship is illegitimate or perverse just because they do not adequately understand that person's medical condition.

Labels in the twenty-first century have become antiquated and arbitrary. They are a way to divide people into sects rather than bringing together humans on a whole, something that has needed to be done for a very long time. An intersex person's identity and sexual orientation are not things that should not be made into issues because, in the grand scheme of things, they don't actually matter. It is one thing to use labels as a means to celebrate identity, but because these labels are almost always used against people in order to make them feel inferior, it would only make sense to do away with them. It should not matter what a person is, but rather who they are and what they stand for. Once we start measuring people's worth in that manner, the world will be a much tolerable place to be.