Ten intersex women incorporate new statements and meanings about intersexuality.
Intersex people are those born with physical sex characteristics—chromosomes, hormones, or genitalia—that do not fit typical definitions of “male” or “female.” Too often treated as medical cases, they have been silenced, pathologized, or made invisible.
This book breaks that silence. Ten intersex women speak in their own voices, sharing intimate, moving testimonies that transform intersexuality from an “object of study” into a lived reality and a collective political subject. These testimonies do not stand alone. They dialogue with dominant discourses: medicine, which has long defined intersex people as pathological; and feminist and gender studies, which question binaries and link intersex struggles to feminist and LGBTQIA+ movements.
Both testimony and theory, personal and political, 21st Century Hermaphrodites makes visible a collective process of deconstruction—and the birth of a new political subject with the power to act, to resist, and to demand social change.
I was with my mother, a woman with very little schooling and deeply scarred by the fact of carrying a gene that passed on intersexuality. One day […] she pulled a slip of paper from her handbag, handwritten in ballpoint by the family doctor, on which it read: “María Luisa is a hermaphrodite.” My mother could not bring herself to pronounce that word, and that was how I found out. I won’t say it was liberating, but I think it did put me at ease. […]. I also learned that when I was born, faced with genitals they didn’t quite know how to classify, my family decided that “to spare me from military service, it would be better for me to grow up as María Luisa.”