Intersex, infertility and the future: early diagnoses and the imagined life course

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via the DOI in this recordInfertility is often recognised as a status that is medically identified in adulthood after unsuccessful attempts to conceive. This paper develops existing literature by illustrating how current conceptualisations of infertility do not incorporate a full range of experiences. Drawing on detailed, reflective diaries and in-depth interviews with five participants, I explore how infertility is experienced and understood by women with variations of sex characteristics (VSCs) or intersex traits. I argue that greater consideration needs to be applied to intersex people and the circumstances of an infertility status that may be received in infancy, childhood or adolescence, before or outside of attempts to conceive, and without undergoing fertility treatment. Through discussions of time and futurity, this paper seeks to explore how visions of the future coalesce with an infertile status that is received in combination with an atypical sex status early in life. The paper indicates that early infertility can hinder some intersex children and young people’s ambitions. However, infertility is not understood to be pathological or consistently prohibitive throughout the lives of everyone affected. Intersex women's conceptions of a potentially childless future are varied, complex, ambivalent, and in some cases transitional throughout the life courseEconomic and Social Research Council (ESRC

LGB+ and heterosexual-identified people produce similar analogies to intersex but have different opinions about its medicalisation

Qualitative researchers have long observed that rationales for medical interventions on intersex characteristics, or variable sex characteristics (VSC), invoke heteronormative ideals. Such medical interventions are controversial and described as infringing human rights. Recent survey research has confirmed that support for medical intervention, and opposition to its legal limitation on human rights grounds is predicted by (1) identifying as heterosexual and (2) endorsing gender binary beliefs. We replicated both findings here among 59 LGB+ and 61 heterosexual participants. Opinions about medical interventions on intersex characteristics were additionally predicted by belief in heterosexual complementarity among all participants, and by strength of heterosexual identification among heterosexual-identified participants. Participants read excerpts from three published interviews with a medical professional, a parent of a child with intersex characteristics, and an adult with intersex characteristics and generated analogies to these experiences. Participants who generated more diverse analogies endorsed the gender binary and medical interventions less, and supported legal limitations more. The results are discussed in relation to the formation and distribution of public attitudes to the controversial medicalisation of intersex characteristics

Making sense of ‘Intersex’ and ‘DSD’: how laypeople understand and use terminology

Various umbrella terms refer to sex characteristics that do not fit typical binary notions of somatic sex. Key terms include Intersex, reclaimed by 1990s activists, and Disorders of Sex Development (DSD) used in medicine since 2006. Professionals across diverse disciplines express strong preferences for specific terms, making assumptions about what those terms do. Here, we draw on 10 focus group-interviews (41 participants without particular knowledge of Intersex/DSD), and semi-structured face-to-face interviews with 33 parents and 22 young people with personal experience of Intersex/DSD to examine how diverse laypeople understand and use these two umbrella terms and their alternatives. Most participants agreed that ‘DSD’ was problematic. Most young people and parents used ‘descriptive explanations’ of how the body looked or worked. Many parents and young people also found ‘Intersex’ problematic, whilst a majority of focus group participants did not. We conclude that as ‘experts by experience’, young people and their parents use language pragmatically and flexibly in everyday life to a degree that people unfamiliar with their experiences can easily underestimate. We further conclude that prescriptive discussions on terminology in this area may be needlessly constraining for people with such personal experience