Today, November 8th, is Herculine Barbin’s birthday. Herculine is a French intersex person that was assigned a female gender at birth. After an affair with a woman Herculine was seized, examined and reclassified as male.
Today, November 8th is Intersex Day of Remembrance/ Intersex Day of Solidarity.
Today we also remember the countless intersex lives destroyed by societies, churches and surgeons that butcher and reclassify our young bodies to suit their needs and whims.
You’ll hear people like jk Rowling and the family research council dismiss intersex existence in their war on trans people, but of course people that are both transgender and intersex exist.
Not all trans people are intersex and not all intersex people are trans, but when surgeons are assigning 1 of 2 genders with little more than a coin toss mistakes will be made.
Mostly we are discarded after surgeries in infancy. It’s a set-it-and-forget-it system where we are assigned a gender, operated on, and discarded into the wild so to speak.
Unless of course we aren’t growing or acting in accordance with those surgeries. Then we are subjected to further surgeries and hormone treatments often wrapped in lies.
As adults many of us wrestle with the repercussions and side effects of those childhood surgeries for the rest of our lives. For some people, doctors get it right. For others it haunts us.
We make up as much of 2% of the population. That’s almost 140 million people walking around that have had surgeons assign a gender and perform irreversible surgery for largely cosmetic reasons.
It’s past time surgeons put down the scalpel and spoken with us. Normalize and destigmatize the existence of intersex bodies. Stop operating on us until we can tell you what gender we are and can consent.
Surgeons must stop operating on our young bodies for purely cosmetic reasons until the intersex person is old enough to understand the ramifications of being medically sterilized to fit in a binary.
Parental pressure isn’t a good enough reason to operate on young intersex bodies. Not all parents have their children's best interests at heart. Surgery does not prevent bullying and help you fit in, believe me.
Surgery is forced on us as children and denied us as adults. We can be on waiting lists for years as adults hoping to see endocrinologists and urologists so we can do things most take for granted like sleep and pee.
irishtimes.com/news/social-af…
“The greatest deterrent to sex buyers is the risk of arrest and public exposure.” And what do sex workers with no clients face? Starvation and eviction.
“The law also sends a clear message to society in general that the purchase of sexual access to vulnerable individuals is not tolerated in a country that values women and girls.” Since when?
Bear in mind too that Ruhama is founded and run by religious orders that literally enslaved women until 1996 and trafficked their children. So much respect!
So for those that don’t know, TORL stands for Turn Off the Red Light. It was a campaign in Ireland to eradicate sex work by criminalizing clients spearheaded by NGOs founded and run by nuns that ran Magdalene laundries with a recent (1996) history of trafficking.
The Irish government in recent months has twice recently refused dealings with SWAI because our values are not in alignment with TORL, which again is spearheaded by Magdalene NGOs.
This doesn’t bode well for the outcome of the Swedish model review. This law failed in every regard save for making those the law was supposed to protect more vulnerable therefore more dependent on those that pushed for these laws, whose funding benefits from our vulnerability.
The law criminalized the purchase of anything deemed to be sexual services.
Senior gardaí in charge of trafficking told us all intel disappeared after that date both from clients and sex workers, two groups best positioned to report suspicious activity.
Imagine if an organization with a history of human trafficking started an NGO to “end trafficking,“ but instead of sex workers it was construction and manufacturing workers, dangerous jobs and 47% of all trafficking victims.
Imagine they were so worried about construction workers that they pushed for laws that made it illegal for construction workers to work together for safety.
Imagine continuing to push for these laws after the workers they "care“ about got lengthy sentences solely for working together.
We in Ireland are experiencing the Nordic model in all of its glory.
Under NM we are routinely evicted.
We have our funds seized.
We are arrested, imprisoned and deported.
We hear weekly of SWers targeted for working alone and brutally robbed, left with no recourse as turning to the Gardai will make their circumstances worse.
This is what it was designed to do.
When friends and associates warned @FitzgeraldFrncs that SWers would be harmed, she reportedly responded that perhaps the risk of harm might discourage them.