Hi, Welcome to Full Frontal! I'm Samantha Bee.
Happy Pride Month! I will be celebrating as I celebrate every parade: riding the f*** in on
Santa’s sleigh. I believe in two things: equality and telling children they don’t
deserve gifts. But as much progress has been made with LGBTQIA+ rights in this country, there’s
one segment of the community that’s still far underprotected: intersex people. Unfortunately,
like knowing what’s chuegy, there’s a severe lack of awareness about what it means to be intersex.
And being intersex is way more common than most people realize. Experts estimate that as many
as 1.7% of the population is born with intersex traits, which is roughly the same number of people
with red hair, or about the same number of people who’ve seen the band 98 Degrees live. So like,
not everybody, but definitely people in your life. - Intersex is an umbrella term that refers to
people who carry variations in their reproductive and sexual anatomy that differ from what’s
traditionally male or female. They might have some XX chromosomes and some XY chromosomes.
- People who are born with differences in their chromosomes, gonads,
ovaries, testes, internal organs, external organs, hormones. The list goes on and on. There are over
30 different ways somebody could be intersex. So let’s start with some basic science. Unlike
what gym teachers taught us in sex-ed classes, sex is not binary. It’s a spectrum. And by the way,
those gym teachers were also wrong when they said that the only safe sex is sex with a banana.
It’s actually one of the least safe ways to have sex—as I found out the hard way.
But I do see the a-peel. While the majority of humans appear to exist at one end of the sex
spectrum or the other, the word “intersex” refers to anyone who doesn’t fit the typical binary.
- While intersex people might identify under the LGBTQ+ acronym, intersex conditions are not a
sexual orientation or a gender identity. - Just like you’re left-handed or maybe
you’ve got red hair. It’s just a natural biological variation.
It’s a natural biological variation—just like seeing the band 98 Degrees live on March 28, 1999
in Edmonton at the Dinwoodie Lounge on the Heat It Up Tour. I was there. I was there. And just like
that, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being intersex. And for most people, it isn’t medically
harmful. The biggest problem is the stigma. - Our society is so afraid of people who are
different. We shame or shun anyone who doesn’t fit our definition of normal. And intersex
people spending their entire lives sometimes not talking to another person about their
life, their story, their body. That is heartbreaking. The only people
who should ever have to hide themselves are the mole people who live in the sewers. And that’s
really just for their own safety because the sun will melt their eyes. Even worse, for decades,
parents of intersex children have been pressured into allowing medically unnecessary cosmetic
surgeries to quote-unquote “fix” their child. - When parents have a newborn, intersex kid,
they’re told their kid has a deformity of the genitals. Those are the words that are
used. And then the doctor comes in and says, “This is easy to fix. One or two
surgeries. Kid will never know.” So of course, nervous, frightened young parents of an infant
are going to say, “Absolutely.” - New parents with an intersex
baby are often desperate to have their child “fixed”—surgically turned into a
boy or a girl as fast as possible. - This model for dealing with
intersex children was developed in the 1950s by psychologist Dr. John Money.
Dr. John Money. Wow. I guess money really is the root of all evil. Dr. Money’s ideas about
gender were bull****, but that’s not the only problem with intersex surgeries. They can also
cause serious medical and psychological damages. - A lot of people had their genitals surgically
altered in ways that left them with pain, with incontinence, with reduced sexual sensation,
with all sorts of problems. - That has long-term psycho- and social
effects, wondering if your body is normal, feeling like you needed to be fixed, and really feeling a
lot of shame and stigma around your body can have some pretty lasting effects as you can imagine.
- The narrative they were crafting for my parents was that
I was like an underdeveloped female child and that all the procedures they would do would help me
develop into a fully developed female child. - Pidgeon Pagonis was 18 when they learned
the truth about their medical history. - It was like getting kicked in the stomach
and just feeling like your whole life is a lie. Thankfully, these days, in many American
hospitals, teams convene multiple health care specialists, including mental health providers,
and disclosure to the child is now widely recommended. But intersex rights
advocates argue that even more informed surgical decisions are still decisions
being made for them without their consent. - That child is going to have to live with
the consequences of the medical decisions that were made for them for the rest of their lives,
as opposed to making that decision on their own terms when they’re much older. Now,
I don’t think that everyone who has experienced these surgeries are traumatized. But a good deal
of us have felt like we have lost—, we’ve lost something—, we’ve lost a part of ourselves.
- There’s no modern medical evidence to support that these surgeries can’t be delayed
to an age where people can meaningfully participate in conversations and
choose the surgery for themselves. Yes! Everyone should have the right
to make their own choices about their body, just like I had the opportunity to decide whether or
not I should get a face tattoo to show how bad*** I am. I did, but for reasons I can’t explain, TBS
is CGI-ing it out. Late last year, in an historic first, 36 states from around the world called
on the U.N. Human Rights Council to urgently protect intersex persons and for governments
to investigate human rights violations against them. Among those nations, not the United States.
Not surprising, but to be fair, Austria only did it because they wanted the attention.
Everyone knows they’re Europe's thirstiest country. Despite how relatively far we’ve
come in terms of LGBTQIA+ rights in this country, intersex people are still extremely vulnerable.
So far, only one hospital in the United States—the Lurie Hospital of Chicago—has pledged to
completely end medically unnecessary intersex surgeries. Activists see Lurie Hospital as the
first step towards a nationwide medical system that actually cares about them. The United States
needs to end non-consensual and medically unnecessary surgeries on intersex people,
and we need to provide them with better support and care. Intersex rights are human rights.