But Wait, There's More!
everything i'm about to say is secondhand experience from an intersex friend i have known for years, who i will not be identifying for safety reasons.
not only can they just completely remove it from your medical record, many hospitals are in practice of straight-up lying to the parents to excuse why they're taking the baby in for surgery. an extremely common excuse is saying the baby has a heart condition. if you or a loved one were taken into surgery for a heart condition at birth and the parents had no idea anything was wrong until said birth, i HIGHLY recommend inspecting your genitals for scarring and speaking with a gynecologist or urologist(depending on which you usually rely on) if something seems fishy.
they can also mark you as the wrong sex on your birth certificate because of this, which can barr you from treatment you are legally entitled to! worse than that, getting that corrected is extremely difficult. even if the doctor who edited your birth was LITERALLY THROWN OUT FOR MEDICAL MALPRACTICE, the hospital - and state - will continue to refuse acknowledgement of the mistake and no correction will be made. this is a very notable issue in the UK, especially if you were wrongfully marked Male.
another thing people are often unaware of is the rampant issue of medical CSA that occurs if an intersex child is decided Female. There's a medical procedure called Dilation where a hole is carefully stretched wider over a period of time for various reasons; on its own, this is not a bad thing, and can be necessary for several reasons. however, many "female" intersex children are put through Vaginal Dillation at a disturbingly young age. the idea is that because their vaginas are shallow or more closed off, it's better to stretch them for a few years so that they'll be able to have sex properly when they get married. the thing is, there is no wrong time to start dilation. if you start at 18, there is no drawback; in many cases it would actually be safer, and it only takes between 1 to 3 years to reach a desirable state, depending on the person. and yet, this is often done to children FAR below the age of consent, explicitly with the future marriage reasoning in mind. this is sometimes started at infancy.
let's really think about that. a young girl who is too young to consent and may not get any say in the matter is taken to a doctor over and over again to have her vagina stretched out because it is expected that when she's older she'll marry a man and have sex with him.
there is no non-creepy way to put that. there is no way to explain this that is not BLATANTLY sexual assault on a fucking child. and the worst part is, this is not legally recognized as SA or abuse in the majority of juristictions.
and ALL of this should be given the extra consideration that a large chunk of intersex children begin to identify differently than they were assigned at birth, often BEFORE hitting puberty.
intersex people make up roughly 2% of the world population by modern count. that's twice as many intersex people in the world as there are redheads.
i know this is long, and i'm not going to guilt anyone into reblogging; you're not a bad person for keeping upsetting stuff off of your dash. but if you're able, i do gently request that you reblog this. it's important that more people know this is happening.
stay safe all, and i wish every intersex person loads of moneys and whatever body they wish for.
