Online Intersex Communities: Virtual Neighborhoods of Support an ...

Kessler and Wendy McKenna, in their study of culture and gender, laid out a number of expectations that society has regarding gender, all of which the intersexed person disrupts:

1. There are two, and only two, genders.

2. One’s gender is invariant.

3. Genitals are the essential sign of gender.

4. Any exceptions to the two genders are not to be taken seriously.

5. There are no transfers from one gender to another except ceremonial ones.

6. Everyone must be classified as a member of one gender or the other.

7. The female/male dichotomy is a natural one.

8. Membership in one gender or the other is natural. (Preves 17)

Assuming that these expectations constitute the ideology behind our culture’s discourses surrounding gender, sexual identity, and intersexuality, it is easy to understand how intersexuality, by its very existence, constitutes a kind of social deviance that must be considered far worse than other conditions or behaviors, such as public nudity, that are also regarded as unacceptable. For although Americans may look upon public nudity with shock and react in ways that tell the violators that their behavior is not acceptable, we react to intersexuality in a far more systematic, authoritative, and conclusive way. So severe is the deviation the intersexed person’s body perpetrates that we alter that person’s body, and his or her sexual identity, if need be.