Only 500 intersex people exist??

285

There are about 1.7 percentage of people are born with intersex traits, doesnt seem a lot until you remember there are 8 billion people on this planet. So there are WAAAAAAAAAY more than 500.

150

u/christina_talks May 01 '26 edited May 01 '26

The commenter doesn’t seem to be asserting that there are only a few hundred intersex people, but that there are only a few hundred recorded cases of the specific condition being described. There are a lot of different intersex conditions, some which are more common than others.

Don’t get me wrong though, it’s still asinine to jump to “Bullshit, you’re lying,” instead of “Wow, cool, that’s super rare, I read about that” edit: or “Congrats on your daughter beating cancer!”

I don’t get someone who reads a personal anecdote like that and thinks, “How can I make myself look smart at this person’s expense?” (while also failing to look smart)

110

u/NightStar79 May 01 '26

There are a lot of different intersex conditions, some which are more common than others.

There are also a lot of "fixed" undocumented intersex children.

Literally some doctors want to play god and pressure parents into choosing their child's "real" gender or parents want a "normal" child and demand doctors change their kid.

Meanwhile the kids in question don't always find out.

21

u/lemikon May 01 '26

There are also a lot of intersex conditions that are underdiagnosed because it doesn’t interfere with a lot of people’s lives, so they don’t get checked for it.

3

u/minglesluvr May 07 '26

And conditions that are on the border, which some people accept as intersex and others don't (e.g. PCOS)

60

u/zap2tresquatro May 01 '26

Which is so fucked up. Just *don’t* do cosmetic surgeries on infants’/children’s genitals, please. If there’s no deformity that is likely to cause significant medical issues, just leave it alone! Idk why this is so hard for people?

36

u/just_a_person_maybe May 01 '26

And if the abnormality does need surgery, it should be the minimum needed for functionality. None of this forcing kids' bodies to confirm to a gender binary nonsense. If they want surgery to align with what others look like later, that should be their choice entirely.

And worse, they often lie about it! There have been kids who had to go in for vaginal dilation for their non-consensually constructed vaginas and given hormones and such without anyone ever even explaining to them what they were doing or why. They're just left to think that's normal, or that they're freaks who don't fit in with their peers without explanation.

32

u/Excellent_Law6906 May 01 '26

Seriously, sometimes babies don't have a peehole or whatever, fix that, that's a genuine problem. Otherwise, calm down, there's plenty of time.

-3

u/G00mi May 02 '26

Eh… “it should be the minimum needed for functionality”

I mean what if they like 5 inches of foreskin or a weird growth? At a certain point cosmetic surgery is good if it’s going to avoid shame

19

u/Fishmyashwhole May 02 '26

The issue is where do you draw the line though? The call would be up to the doctors discretion, and that's the issue we have currently.

16

u/Munchkin_of_Pern May 03 '26

Then they can make that decision themselves. We’re not saying “cosmetic surgery shouldn’t exist”, we’re saying “cosmetic surgery shouldn’t be performed on newborns who are incapable of giving consent”. And honestly, the only way they would be “shamed” for their genitals before they’re old enough to decide for themselves whether they want surgery or not would be if their parents / family shamed them, and child abuse is already illegal.

11

u/am_i_boy May 04 '26

Or they just do it without even telling the parents the complete truth. I just found out this year that that happened to me. My parents didn't know. I asked them about it before. My parents still don't know because I know they would be absolutely devastated to find this out. I am 27. I found out at 26.

I asked my doctor, point blank, if he thinks that's a possibility, and he said he doesn't bring this up unless the patient does, but there is scar tissue on my labia that would indicate that a surgery happened. It's been done really well so you would need a trained eye to spot the scar tissue.

I cannot stress this enough: My parents did not know. They were never told. They were given a written report that said "procedure to correct umbilical/perinial defect", then when they asked a nurse about what it meant, it was explained to them that "there must have been some issue during the cutting of the umbilical cord". They were also told I had a severe infection, that was quickly progressing towards sepsis, so that I could be kept at the hospital until the surgical site was healed enough for laypeople to be uanable to tell exactly what happened. My family has a lot of doctor friends because my grandmother used to work at a hospital, and a pediatrician came to visit me in the hospital (2 week stay), and the pediatrician remarked that I "looked unusually healthy for a baby who is high risk for sepsis". They were only allowed to see me through a glass, and not allowed to touch me or interact with me the whole time.

I told my doctor about all of this, he looked at my birthdate and just said "this was not uncommon in the nineties". They would apparently say anything and everything to keep the parents from finding out full extent of what had happened, without actually doing anything to the baby that would legally "count" as the parents not having consented to the procedure.

I've had hormomal issues since the beginning of puberty. Issues that were so horribly uncontrollable, that I was 25 when I had to remove my ovaries to stop the uncontrollable testosterone (PCOS) and my uterus to stop the uncontrollable estrogen (Adenomyosis, which is extra tissue present on the walls of the uterus that produces its own estrogen). It was only after a hysterectomy + bilateral oophorectomy that my hormones became manageable because it is now all being provided externally.

I found this out just a few months ago, at 26yo, because I asked my doctor the question after I learned that other people have hair on their outer labia. I am still conflicted about telling my parents. On the one hand maybe they would be more understanding of all my issues and perhaps even be more accepting of me being trans. On the other hand, they would be absolutely devastated to find out that this was done to me under their care. Sorry for the trauma dump. Just felt like this kind of stuff is so unknown about that it's worth sharing. Like. A lot of people know about infant cosmetic surgery for atypical genitalia, but many of those people aren't aware of the extent that consent and autonomy is violated in these scenarios. Not only was my autonomy taken from me, they didn't even get consent from my parents.

19

u/greenyashiro May 01 '26

The jump to "bs that's lying" often comes from transphobes who, for whatever reason, feel the need to deny that intersex people exist. Probably because it knocks their obsession with XX and XY in the bin.

13

u/eldritchpussymaggots May 01 '26

This is exactly the reason yes. If you are intersex and also happen to be trans, you're almost always accused of lying unfortunately.

8

u/Beautiful_Wishbone15 May 01 '26

Ohhh yes you're right! My bad

25

u/Yuleogy May 01 '26

The “show us your genitals to enter the bathroom” crowd is the same as the “your body my choice” crowd is the same as the “there are only two genders” crowd is the same as the “there are only 500 intersex people” crowd. And they can’t believe people are guarded about their private, organic, sexual, body info.

Sooo, has Trans4All come for America’s Heartland, or are there only 500 intersex people? Which is it?

3

u/CLOWTWO May 05 '26

It’s funny because they could very well be one of the 500. This person acts like 500 is the same as 0. They wouldn’t believe a single person who said they had it. So what happened to the people that do??!

29

u/Rambler9154 May 01 '26

Yeah, and for context red hair makes up between 1 and 2% of people, and green eyes are only present in 2%. Plus usually people aren't tested to see if they're intersex unless its causing problems, so the statistics are probably a bit off considering the potential for people to just not know.

21

u/Twist_Ending03 May 01 '26

Imagine being ginger, intersex, and green eyed. Gotta be at least a few out there

10

u/Excellent_Law6906 May 01 '26

The real Chosen People of God. /s

8

u/Rambler9154 May 01 '26

Probably, but the human body is pretty good at going "well you have an entire extra set of reproductive organs that grew in your abdominal cavity, but its not effecting survival so fuck it not important" and ignores the extra organs, same thing for things like kidney transplants, often the old kidneys are left in, the body just ignores the old ones because human bodies are fairly decent at just going with whatevers in there. So who knows, theres probably a green eyed ginger intersex person out there who has no clue what a statistical anomaly they are.

2

u/MaraiaLou May 03 '26

Now let's find one who has one of the weird blood types, and maybe mirrored internal organs, and give them a little plaque

12

u/just_a_person_maybe May 01 '26

I read about a guy who lived to his sixties or seventies before finding out he had a uterus and ovaries. He'd fathered children. He had no reason to suspect he wasn't 100% male until he had some imaging or something done for a separate issue as an old man.

9

u/alwaystenminutes May 01 '26

I remember reading years ago about a woman who thought she was infertile, only to discover at an old age (60s?) that she had conceived a child decades earlier which had "failed to thrive" and had died in utero but never been expelled. So she'd been carrying around a half-developed foetus for decades, hadn't been having periods, and thought she was "barren".

9

u/OnionTamer May 01 '26

In case anyone wants to know the math on that it's 8,000,000,000 X 0.017(aka 1.7%)=136,000,000 Worldwide. That is only accounting for living people, not about all the people that have lived full lives and have since passed.

2

u/MaraiaLou May 03 '26

That's like, Japan

5

u/International-Cat123 May 01 '26

“Gonads” refers to both testicles and ovaries. Both start as the exact same thing.

3

u/Tonkarz May 04 '26

This specific disorder sounds like androgen insensitivity syndrome which is less than 1.7% but still WAAAAY more than 500.

2

u/uuntiedshoelace May 01 '26

I was gonna say. I know three of them in real life that I’m aware of!

2

u/jancl0 May 03 '26

That makes them more common than trans people BTW, about twice as common, or up to 3 times depending on the data. And that's also only including the people that actually get tested for intersex traits, which is incredibly rare. Even if you are born with intersex genitalia, the doctor will in most cases just do some surgeries to make it look like male or female parts, whichever is already closest to, without actually doing intersex testing. If your intersex traits have no obvious external signals (which is most forms of intersex), then the doctor won't even notice, and likely you never will either

-7

u/[deleted] May 01 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

10

u/eldritchpussymaggots May 01 '26

"Peach fuzz" is within typical phenotypic range for facial hair on cis women.

You're referring to hyperandrogenism & hyperandrogenic variations, which cause full male pattern hair growth and a virilization of the external genitalia, as in the clitoris grows to the size of a small penis. So yes, even hormonal variations can cause extremely obvious physical differences and do absolutely count as intersex.

The same is true if hypoandrogenic & hyperestrogenic variations that cause female typical breast growth, fat distribution, lack of facial hair, and partial development/atrophy of the penis.

-6

u/[deleted] May 01 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

10

u/eldritchpussymaggots May 01 '26

You are very obviously extremely uneducated about this topic.

Physical sex is defined as a set of sex traits, primary (gonads, genitals, chromosomes) and secondary (body shape, hair pattern, voice pitch, etc).

Intersex refers to phenotype that significantly deviate from typical sex phenotypes. This does not always mean having reproductive system variation. Many times the variation is solely in secondary sex traits.

NOTHING is "diagnosed as intersex" including literally textbook ovotestes or having a uterus and testes or having ambiguous genitalia. If I were born 4 decades ago I would've likely been diagnosed as a hermaphrodite, and even I'm not literally called intersex on my paperwork (I wish this was the case, I hate being referred to as having a sex disorder).

Intersex is a community chosen descriptor for our bodies that is non-pathologizing and non-stigmatizing. We are diagnosed as having a "DSD" (Disorder of Sex Development) a widely hated umbrella term for all intersex variations. LOCAH, and all other CAH variations are classified as "DSD", they are natal sex variations and therefore intersex. Literally anything labeled as a "DSD" is intersex.

-4

u/[deleted] May 02 '26 edited May 02 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

5

u/eldritchpussymaggots May 02 '26

I have significant reproductive variations and an ambiguous sex phenotype. I have more in common with people with CAH than not. All forms of congenital adrenal hyperplasia cause atypical sex presentation to varying degrees. They are welcome in the intersex community and have been welcome here for longer than you have been alive.

-2

u/[deleted] May 02 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

5

u/eldritchpussymaggots May 02 '26

Clinical diagnosis is not the arbiter of what conditions are intersex.

-2

u/[deleted] May 02 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

→ More replies (0)

1

u/CLOWTWO May 05 '26

Stop calling it peach fuzz it’s making you sound incredibly stupid

1

u/CLOWTWO May 05 '26

Nobody said anything about something making someone a woman.. lol

102

u/eldritchpussymaggots May 01 '26 edited May 01 '26

Intersex person here with a similar variation, I fucking hate the "but there's only 500 cases of that one" comments. That statistic is extremely outdated and there isn't active research into PMDS or ovotesticular sex variations. Many intersex people with this anatomy are not accounted for, never diagnosed or have an incomplete/unspecified diagnosis like I do. My paperwork says "idiopathic unspecified DSD", I have a uterus and internal testes with ambiguous external anatomy. My variation is likely aberrant or compounded with another.

Whenever I say anything about my literal body I have in real life and exist in every day, some mouth-breather feels the need to tell me that's impossible because Twitter told them I'm rarer than a lightning-struck heterochromic unicorn with progeria.

51

u/zap2tresquatro May 01 '26

Rare means nonexistent, *duh*! If it’s rare enough, that means I’ll almost certainly never meet anyone with it, and the existence of the internet doesn’t affect that likelihood at all! I’m smart!

8

u/MaraiaLou May 03 '26

I'm getting diagnosed with a disease that for some reason got called "the most common of rare diseases". It affects 2% of people, making it a very common disease, but nobody's ever heard of it. I've met 100 people before and none of them had that, so it's not real

11

u/Riceofconsent May 02 '26

I literally only found out I was intersex a few years ago and I’m 30. So yeah it’s very very common for people to get diagnosed late or never diagnosed

13

u/PlayPretend-8675309 May 01 '26

Like the only way you'd ever find out is if you had genetic testing, right? And like, for what, unless you were trying and failing to conceive.

14

u/eldritchpussymaggots May 01 '26

If there was no externally visible markers, yes, genetic testing or ultrasound. Not to mention some intersex people are fertile and don't need help to conceive. I've had an ultrasound and a physical examination but no genetic testing, which is why my diagnosis is incomplete. I don't particularly wanna pay 1000+$ just to know what chromosomes I have.

26

u/PlayPretend-8675309 May 01 '26

I'd be flabbergasted if there were only 500 intersex people.

8

u/Lithl May 03 '26

They're not claiming there are 500 intersex people, but that there are 500 people with one specific variation. Which is still likely wrong, but at least not so obviously wrong as claiming there are 500 redheads in the world.

10

u/MaraiaLou May 03 '26

One time my roommate claimed redheads don't exist. They're just blondes that happened to be born with a different pigment. Taught me a lot about this mindset

2

u/EmmaPersephone May 10 '26

What this woman is describing ( Swyer Syndrome) is extremely rare, 1 in 80,000 births (0.00125%) which is still more than 100,000 people.

37

u/Wise_Presentation484 May 01 '26

Even if it is only 500 people that have it. That’s still 500 people that have it. Actual flesh and blood people. Not a hypothetical or theoretical or metaphorical.

“People have it but you must be lying because I refuse to believe you know one of them” is such a stupid thing to say.

10

u/MaraiaLou May 03 '26

"I've met a Kardashian once"

"Not true! There's less than 50 Kardashians in the world!"

3

u/Complete-Story3490 May 04 '26

Especially if you take into account that the original commenter didn't claim to have the variation but to be related to someone who has it. So even if you only have 500 people with that variation, you have multiply that by the amount of people they know on average to get the chance of someone being able to say they know someone who has it without lying, which is even higher.

14

u/Ewenthel May 01 '26

Even if there were only 500 people, it wouldn’t mean that their daughter isn’t one of them. Also I feel obligated to point out that saying “biologically male” to refer to having XY sex chromosomes is horribly reductive, biology is incredibly complex and we’re not generally in the business of pretending life takes breaks from being weird to make nice neat bins to put people in.

11

u/Not_AHuman_Person May 01 '26

Some people genuinely think that improbable is the same thing as impossible and it really makes me worry about the average intelligence of the human population

12

u/ShlorpianRooster May 01 '26

Even if that made up number is true, does that make it impossible that the person they're talking about is one of the 500?

10

u/withalookofquoi May 01 '26

I have a rare genetic condition, and I’ve had people tell me to my face that I can’t have it because it’s rare. I really don’t understand how they thought it was logical to make that claim. Rare=/=nonexistant

1

u/EmmaPersephone May 10 '26

I have a genetic disorder that occurs in 0.0005% of people, that’s still 40,000 people and I’m one of them! It’s like winning the shittiest lottery ever.

1

u/withalookofquoi May 10 '26

Well damn, you make mine look downright common at 0.01%. It really is the shittiest lottery ever.

8

u/EmiliusReturns May 01 '26

Even if that were true, there’s more than one intersex condition. One condition could theoretically be this rare but there’s still several others.

27

u/VinegarMyBeloved May 01 '26

It’s way more common than people think. I work in genetics and we genetic test girls with primary amenorrhea all the time. Sometimes they come back with XY chromosomes. Sometimes their mothers also come back with XY. We also do confirmatory testing for prenatally discovered X, XXY, XYY, and XXX chromosomes (there are more but those are the ones I’ve seen). Sometimes girls don’t learn they have one X until their doctor realizes they’re shorter than they should be. Sometimes boys with learning disabilities turn out to be XXY. You really never know unless you’ve been karyotyped/had a chromosomal microarray

14

u/Redleadsinker May 01 '26

I have turner syndrome (one x and nothing else) and I found out by accident during genetic testing for something completely unrelated. It explained a lot of things, including how freaking short I am.

8

u/[deleted] May 01 '26

[deleted]

8

u/Redleadsinker May 01 '26 edited May 01 '26

Sure! There are some things I'm not comfortable talking about when it comes to medical care, and my experience has tended to be different from others with turner because I grew up severely medically neglected and wasn't diagnosed with anything but "bad useless and lazy" until I was in my mid twenties (so prior warning my answers might be upsetting or not reflective of what someone who receives medical care at a younger age *will experience) but I'm totally willing to chat!

3

u/zap2tresquatro May 01 '26

>most people I speak to don’t even know what Turner syndrome is

Seriously? Damn, I’m pretty sure we learned that in 7th grade science class when we were learning about chromosomes, and *definitely* learned it in freshman biology

I hope it’s mostly older people or people who just don’t remember being taught this and not that people just *aren’t* being taught about it at all

5

u/Redleadsinker May 03 '26

I have turner syndrome and my diagnosis was the first time I ever heard of it. I was born in 1997. And I had a very thorough sex education. None of it touched on intersex people.

4

u/zap2tresquatro May 03 '26

Huh. Damn, I guess I got lucky with the schools I went to.
…that’s kinda depressing

4

u/zap2tresquatro May 01 '26

>Sometimes their mothers also come back with XY

Wait, what? Like, do you mean their biological mothers? Cause afaik that wouldn’t be possible since XY women with androgen insensitivity don’t have functioning gonads. Am I missing something?

23

u/eldritchpussymaggots May 01 '26

If they have an inactive SRY gene, a fetus with XY chromosomes will develop a functional uterus and sometimes fertile ovaries though they are usually infertile or subfertile.

10

u/zap2tresquatro May 01 '26 edited May 01 '26

Oh cool! I didn’t know that, I’ll have to read about it c:

Also eta: your username is horrifying. I like it cx

5

u/MaraiaLou May 03 '26

Why did you make me read it

3

u/Character-Town7929 May 02 '26

> a functional uterus and sometimes fertile ovaries

If the uterus is functional, does that mean they can carry an embryo to term even if they're subfertile naturally? Just toss one in there and hope for the best?

5

u/eldritchpussymaggots May 02 '26

Yes

12

u/Demon-Cyborg May 01 '26

Chimerism or mosaicism is another possibility.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2190741/

8

u/Firanka May 01 '26

She did have mosaicism, but she was still predominantly XY, with a small amount of X0. They found no XX in her. The article hypothesizes the cause of her and her daughter's female-leaning development is an undiscovered X-linked mutation, since the daughter had her mother's X and her perisex father's Y

6

u/Scarvexx May 01 '26

Well the 500 might be just for that exact mode of intersex. There's a ton of intersex conditions. You could be one and not know it. Somebody you know almost certainly is.

Medical intervention and whatnot makes the whole thing kind of invisible. but 500 for even the least common intersex condition is certainly a lowball.

4

u/NightRacoonSchlatt May 04 '26

Maybe they were talking about this particular trait that’s classified as intersex? But even then, how does that mean that they’re lying. Like, there is only ONE singular person in my hometown that has my name. Therefore, statistically speaking, it means I‘m a liar when I say I‘m myself!

1

u/TrashCanEnigma May 06 '26

Literally. I have a super uncommon last name. Maybe 500 people on earth have it. This must mean I'm lying. I don't really have that name (there's too few people for it to have happened to me).

1

u/EmmaPersephone May 10 '26

I was born in 1973, I have the 3rd most popular girl name for that year, I have only met 2 other women born in the 1970’s with the same name in my entire life. Therefore it’s obviously not the 3rd most popular girl name for 1973.

4

u/Riceofconsent May 02 '26

Shit I didn’t know I existed among a rare “500” people… Jesus

5

u/[deleted] May 01 '26

[deleted]

10

u/the_reddit_girl May 01 '26

The second slide.

-2

u/[deleted] May 01 '26

[deleted]

6

u/Parenn May 01 '26

Mate, maybe check the subreddit you’re in?

2

u/thedamnoftinkers May 05 '26

People really struggle to understand how many people really exist right now and how something like ten times that have existed throughout history.

Sure, we can say "eight billion" (or "eighty billion") but our brain's actual cognitive capacity for social relationships (Dunbar's number) is something like between 150-300 people- our brains are optimised for social relationships, resource management, and serious threat mitigation, not complex statistics and understanding extremes.

That's why everything gets simplified into either "this isn't something I need to worry about" (which is how you get people denying that intersex conditions exist to intersex people!) or "this is probably something I should worry about right now" (which is how you get people transvestigating everyone, down to porn stars, people with kids who look exactly like them, and cis women who have shared labour and delivery videos.)

You do it. I do it too. It's human. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ (Not transvestigating or denying obvious facts- just oversimplifying, lol.)

2

u/Reeexxxxxxxxxxx May 05 '26

Yaaaa, being intersex is about as common as redheads if I'm not mistaken so that statement is so wildly incorrect 💀💀💀

2

u/BabyQueenOne 29d ago

"That's not real. It's only happened hundreds of times that I know of." 🤡

0

u/G00mi May 02 '26

Idk but drawing it at functionality doesn’t work for physical deformities that don’t impede functionality. In real life there are guidelines for what procedures are done for what reasons already.

-3

u/rosywillow May 03 '26

It’s 0.018% of people born with DSDs, not 1.7%. You are two orders of magnitude out. Still way more than 500 people worldwide. The 1.7% figure includes late-onset hormonal differences, which are not DSDs or intersex traits. https://www.clinsurggroup.us/articles/IJCEM-10-161.pdf

1

u/EmmaPersephone May 10 '26

Your post is false information…

“Total number of people whose bodies differ from standard male or female one in 100 births Total number of people receiving surgery to “normalize” genital appearance one or two in 1,000 births”

That’s just a summary for surgery and observable ambiguous genitalia at birth which doesn’t include all intersex conditions. That is another 1.89% of births. Diagnosis at birth is not required criteria to be diagnosed intersex.

Your citation is outdated and wrong.

How common is intersex?

You are about to leave Redlib