Any child—intersex or not—may decide later in life that she or he was given the wrong gender assignment; but children with certain intersex conditions have significantly higher rates of gender transition than the general population, with or without treatment.
Being intersex doesn't mean you need any special treatments or care. But some people who are intersex choose gender affirmation options if their gender doesn't match the one they were assigned at birth.
Intersex people can be any gender, be that non-binary, a man, a woman, agender, or anything else!
Most commonly, the male intersex has a markedly hypospadiac penis, undescended testes, a cleft scrotum, and an enlarged prostatic utricle; a complete uterus and fallopian tubes may be found, with the vagina opening into the posterior wall of the urethra.
Or a person may be born with genitals that seem to be in-between the usual male and female types—for example, a girl may be born with a noticeably large clitoris, or lacking a vaginal opening, or a boy may be born with a notably small penis, or with a scrotum that is divided so that it has formed more like labia.
Many people might not even be aware that their bodily experiences fall under the intersex umbrella. As these stories show, many teens are only told medical terminology, and later come to the word “intersex” through finding online resources.
Likewise, if an intersex person has a uterus, they may be able to become pregnant. While many intersex differences may result in infertility, not all do. However, making the decision to have surgery performed on an intersex child who cannot consent to the surgery themselves may render them infertile.
Intersex is a general term used for a variety of situations in which a person is born with reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn't fit the boxes of “female” or “male.” Sometimes doctors do surgeries on intersex babies and children to make their bodies fit binary ideas of “male” or “female”.
Intersex variations are not abnormal and should not be seen as 'birth defects'; they are natural biological variations and occur in up to 1.7 per cent of all births. Most people with intersex variations are not born with atypical genitalia, however this is common for certain intersex variations.
Overview. Ambiguous genitalia is a rare condition in which an infant's external genitals don't appear to be clearly either male or female. In a baby with ambiguous genitalia, the genitals may be incompletely developed or the baby may have characteristics of both sexes.
The person has the chromosomes of a man, but the external genitals are incompletely formed, ambiguous, or clearly female. Internally, testes may be normal, malformed, or absent. This condition is also called 46, XY with undervirilization. It used to be called male pseudohermaphroditism.
The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) opposes medically-unnecessary genital surgeries performed on intersex children. Scientific evidence does not support the notion that variant genitalia confer a greater risk of psychosocial problems later in life.
THE SURGERY QUESTION
In rare cases, intersex babies need emergency surgery when they are born — for example, if they are unable to urinate properly. But in the vast majority of cases, the operations are done to prevent a child from suffering presumed psychological distress later in life, experts said.
There are more than 30 different intersex variations that can affect you in different ways.
Background: There are 11 reported cases of pregnancy in true hermaphrodites, but none with advanced genetic testing. All known fetuses have been male. Case: A true hermaphrodite with a spontaneous pregnancy prenatally known to have a remaining portion of a right ovotestis, delivered a male neonate.
An intersex person is called a Khunthaa in the books of Fiqh. Intersex medical interventions are considered permissible to achieve agreement between a person's exterior, chromosomal make-up or sex organs. They are regarded as treatment and not the altering of Allah's creation or imitation of the opposite sex.
J.L. REFORM 713, 768 (2010) (“While the ADA expressly excludes transgender persons from the definition of disability, it makes no exclusion for intersex individuals.”).
It is estimated that up to 1.7 percent of the population has an intersex trait and that approximately 0.5 percent of people have clinically identifiable sexual or reproductive variations.
Sex assignment at birth usually aligns with a child's anatomical sex and phenotype. The number of births with ambiguous genitals is in the range of 1:4500–1:2000 (0.02%–0.05%). Other conditions involve atypical chromosomes, gonads, or hormones.
Intersex people can have any gender identity and sexual orientation. Potential causes of intersex traits include random genetic variations, changes in a person's number of sex chromosomes, gonadal differences, natal exposure to unusual levels of sex hormones, or different responses to sex hormones.
The true hermaphrodite has both testicular and ovarian tissues present in either the same or opposite gonads. Both the external genitalia and the internal duct structures display gradations between male and female. The initial manifestation is ambiguous genitalia in 90% of the cases.
True hermaphroditism, the rarest form of intersex, is usually diagnosed during the newborn period in the course of evaluating ambiguous genitalia.
For example, a person may not identify as female, but a DNA test might show that they have an XX pair of chromosomes. A person might identify as male, but when tested is shown to have chromosomes that suggest they are intersex. At Identilab, we treat all clients with respect, honesty, equality and integrity.