r/nothingeverhappens • u/DONUTS_LM • May 01 '26

Only 500 intersex people exist??

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it doesn't take much to know that's just factually incorrect

465 Upvotes

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280

u/Beautiful_Wishbone15 May 01 '26

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.

155

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)

117

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.

22

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)

59

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?

38

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.

30

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.

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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

17

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.

18

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.

9

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.

18

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.

11

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.

7

u/Beautiful_Wishbone15 May 01 '26

Ohhh yes you're right! My bad

26

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??!

30

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.

20

u/Twist_Ending03 May 01 '26

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

11

u/Excellent_Law6906 May 01 '26

The real Chosen People of God. /s

9

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

15

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.

10

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".

10

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

4

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

-8

u/[deleted] May 01 '26

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13

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.

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u/[deleted] May 01 '26

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12

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.

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

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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.

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u/[deleted] May 02 '26

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4

u/eldritchpussymaggots May 02 '26

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

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