Whats the history behind the intersex rights movement?
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, medicine became the primary means for dealing with intersex. Before then, the vast majority of people with intersex conditions went unnoticed by legal, religious, or medical establishments and only a few cases per year came to the attention of authorities. Presumably other people with so-called “abnormal” sex anatomies lived average lives, either because their anatomical variance was undetectable or was not considered especially important. When a newborn had a high degree of genital ambiguity, midwives, grandmothers, and other local elders appear to have assigned the sex. (In terms of sexual orientation, all people were expected to then have sexual relations solely with those who had been identified as the “opposite” sex; in many places, violation of this rule was punishable by violent, sometimes fatal means.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, medicine became the primary means for dealing with intersex. Before then, the vast majority of people with intersex conditions went unnoticed by legal, religious, or medical establishments and only a few cases per year came to the attention of authorities. Presumably other people with so-called “abnormal” sex anatomies lived average lives, either because their anatomical variance was undetectable or was not considered especially important. When a newborn had a high degree of genital ambiguity, midwives, grandmothers, and other local elders appear to have assigned the sex. (In terms of sexual orientation, all people were expected to then have sexual relations solely with those who had been identified as the “opposite” sex; in many places, violation of this rule was punishable by violent, sometimes fatal means.) However, by the late 1800s, through gynecological sciences and numerous wartime military medical examinations, doctors gained a much bet
