Genital cutting and infant clitorectomies are happening in all 50 states. These procedures are performed daily on intersex children, who are born with sex traits that break social understanding of sex as a binary. Some of us are born with healthy, functional genitals a urologist or surgeon might want to “correct” because they fall outside of a “typical male” or “typical female” appearance. Others have chromosomal, gonadal, or hormonal differences that show up later in life. There are many ways to be intersex, but all of us are united by the dangers we face: To be born intersex is to experience violence at the hands of a medical system determined to erase you, literally cutting your intersex parts away for the sake of “normalcy.”

Though not all intersex people identify with the LGBTQ+ community at all, by virtue of their intersex status alone, the “I” has started to make appearances in the LGBTQ+ acronym. For some of us, proximity to the acronym is an issue of safety. When dealing with conservative family members, conservative governments, and doctors who force our bodies into heteronormativity, distance is sometimes necessary. Still, our struggles with shame and secrecy as a sexual minority tell us that intersex and LGBTQ+ communities have more in common than not. 75 percent of current members of interACT Youth, the country’s only hub for young intersex activists, identify as LGBTQ+ in addition to being intersex.

The question is: Are queer spaces ready for us? I am a queer nonbinary intersex person, and I am still searching for a place to belong. I exist in a gray area somewhere between cis and trans that I don’t know how to name or navigate. Even living in San Francisco, many of my interactions in non-intersex queer and trans spaces have been disappointing, isolating, or at worst, fetishizing. Intersex narratives are barely acknowledged in many queer spaces. When they are, we risk our identities being co-opted.

Queer spaces are wonderful, and well-renowned for their members’ empathy and emotional fluency. I’ve had many positive experiences, too, but the ignorance hurts. I’ll never forget my first queer zine fest, when a nonbinary person came up to me to say, “Oh, you’re intersex? That’s my favorite argument.”

Sure, plenty of us love smashing binaries, but intersex people do not exist to be arguments. We’ve got enough to do fighting for our own basic human rights. We’re not here to validate anyone else’s identity. You’re valid with or without us!

At another event, I overheard a nonbinary trans person wishing they had “ambiguous genitalia” a la the book Middlesex, which was written by a non-intersex cis male author with no input from the intersex community. This comment hurt. Many people who are actually born with such genital differences face PTSD, sexual violence, scarring, inability to orgasm, and forced infertility at the hands of the medical industry.

Intersex people, especially those of us who carry trauma from forced normalizing treatments, inherit anxiety. Are queer partners ready for our bodies and the traumas they carry? The questions and comments that keep us up at night usually come from others in our queer communities. My friends and fellow intersex activists have heard it all.

Are you really a lesbian if you’re intersex?

You're intersex and nonbinary, so your body matches how you feel, so you're cisgender.

You need to add a trigger warning for body horror when discussing your body.

You're masculine and nonbinary and have breasts? Who are you going to date?

The medical industry tells us we are our diagnoses; that our bodies need to be altered. Society tells us our bodies are not our own. Many of us ask ourselves, Who do I date? Who will love me? We desperately need room in queer spaces to explore, to heal, and to self-identify.