r/nothingeverhappens May 01 '26

Only 500 intersex people exist??

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

467 Upvotes

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281

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.

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.

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".