Hermaphrodite Logic: A History of Intersex Liberation

Historian Gleeson debuts with an impressive overview of the intersex rights movement. Intersex people first began to connect in early 1990s chat rooms and online newsletters, where they could “come to terms with their shared treatment in relative anonymity.” Most had endured life-changing surgeries as children—“carried out with little regard for their consent, then usually concealed from them”—that had led to scarring and “lifelong numbness.” Gleeson traces the movement’s conceptual evolution from the “gallows humor” of the ’90s through 2000s efforts to transition to more conventionally appeasing, NGO-led patient advocacy and more successful recent attempts to appeal to universal human rights. Not only focusing on the West, Gleeson shows how the Global South, especially Africa, pioneered some of the most impactful advocacy. She also vividly depicts the movement’s main antagonist as a medical field that understands itself as the “enforcers of binary sex,” and points to how the internet has allowed intersex activists to become fluent in the obfuscating jargon that previously gave “medics the upper hand.” Along the way, firsthand accounts bring to life the trauma caused by secret childhood medical interventions; one subject expresses the shock of looking at male and female anatomy in a textbook at 12 years old (“The floor under my feet disappeared in just one second, and I didn’t know who I was”). This is a galvanizing study of an underdiscussed movement. (June)