Intersex people have always existed. How they first started to find each other, build community and forge a movement against medical erasure is a story that’s mostly gone untold. 

A new book aims to change that. “Hermaphrodite Logic: A History of Intersex Liberation” by writer, comedian and historian Juliana Gleeson was released in June by Verso Books. It’s a roughly 230-page dive into the very brief history of organizing for intersex rights from the 1990s to present day. 

Approximately one out of every 100 people is born intersex or with a sexual characteristic that does not fit neatly into the binary of male or female. Despite the prevalence of intersex conditions, Gleeson demonstrates how doctors’ views on gender evolved in relationship to intersex bodies, explaining that the history of intersex people is one marked by medical censorship. 

For much of the 20th century, doctors have been operating on intersex babies to assign them sexes, often without fully explaining the consequences to their parents. After those surgeries are complete, the children can be left with painful irreversible conditions and a loss of sexual sensation. 

Pediatric intersex surgeries, such as clitoral reductions or hypospadias repairs to move the position of the urethral opening, are performed routinely at children’s hospitals today. But as Gleeson notes, starting in the 1990s, intersex activists started to raise the alarm about the procedures and the devastating physical and mental toll many reported experiencing as a result of them. 

The Intersex Society of North America, which shaped the early intersex rights movement, was founded in 1993. Today, its work is carried on by national nonprofit InterACT.

Gleeson admits that writing about contemporaries makes the story complicated to tell. 

“I guess writing histories of living people is quite challenging, because they can contradict or undermine me very easily,” she told the 19th. 

But Gleeson said she wanted to tell a story where intersex people, not their doctors, would be the protagonists. As a community, intersex people started to find each other and organize in the 1990s. So, that’s where Gleeson’s story starts, too. 

“The truth of their treatments was left impossible for intersex people to reach individually, but was easily recognised when they gathered,” Gleeson wrote. “Then, they could intuitively grasp the shared wounding and neglect that previously isolated intersex people.” 

As a result, intersex people started to name the harms they had experienced. Then, they dragged those into public view, shaming the doctors who had hurt them and sometimes even abandoned their ongoing care following those first surgeries.

“Few doctors would keep in contact with intersex children as they became adults,” Gleeson wrote. “So both medics and parents would be left balancing unknown harms done against sexist fantasies.” 

According to Gleeson, those fantasies had little to do with research based on the lived experience of intersex people. Rather, they were rooted in the fears about what “might be encountered in the ‘locker room’ (or much later in the marital bed).”

Gleeson’s text details just 30 years during which intersex people went from being largely discounted by doctors to recognized and celebrated by President Joe Biden’s White House with an Intersex Awareness Day proclamation in 2023. The book does something that few others have aimed for: It speaks to intersex audiences, even if it is readable by the larger public. 

“It’s addressed to intersex people and partly addressed to everyone who’s grappling with the history of sex, which is to say, all of us,” Gleeson told The 19th. 

In the past five years, several hospitals have stopped performing intersex surgeries on infants, and intersex advocates have found growing support among the American public to halt the practice. 

Gleeson’s book comes amid discussions of sex and gender prompted by Republican politicians aiming to push transgender people further from public life. The debate about gender often reverts back to rudimentary ideas about sex and the American understanding that there are only two of them. But the intersex movement, often overlooked and under-reported, exposes the reality that even sex can be a messy spectrum. 

As Gleeson writes, “Far from being founded in decisive clinical science, these decisions were based more on crude assumptions, and eyeballing genitals. Medics would base surgical decisions on speculations concerning intersex children’s potential integration in locker rooms or performance in marital bedrooms.” 

Gleeson hopes “Hermaphrodite Logic” becomes intersex history 101.

“I think there’s also a lot of original thinking, a lot of original points and observations, analysis and so on, which just comes from me [in the text],” she said. “I’m just interested to see where it goes.” 

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