Personal comment (page 4 of 4)

Personal opinions

Chris Somers XXY, self portrait, 2013

Chris Somers xxy, Tracy Reibel and David Whyatt: Intersex and androgyny and implications for provision of primary health care

Chris Somers xxy (vice-president of OII Australia) and colleagues present an analysis of intersex issues for primary healthcare providers. Chris Somers xxy is a national and international intersex activist with a M.Ed. By Research (UWA); concerning Androgyny; B.Ed. (Melb); Hons Dip Creative Photography (Trent Polytechnic now Trent University, UK); who has worked in a number…
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quotation by Warren

Patricia Nell Warren: “The IOC and gender inquisition”

Opinion piece by Patricia Nell Warren, reprinted with kind permission from the author. While the IAAF has been backing and filling on the Caster Semenya case, many of us have been waiting for the IOC shoe to drop. Yesterday the shoe dropped. In Miami Beach, a panel of so-called “experts” convened by the IOC and…
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OII Australia founding president, Gina Wilson

Gina Wilson: “Ms Semenya, I Never Knew You”

The events surrounding the gold medal run by Ms Caster Semenya in August of this year have created a perfect storm of speculation around intersex. I know little about Ms Semenya save that she has, by winning a gold medal, brought the full force of sex binary enforcement and intersexphobia down on her apparently unsuitable…
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The Silent, LOTL, June 2009

Karin: “The Silent”

LOTL have published a feature by OII Australia member Karin on “The Silent”. PROFESSOR Milton Diamond of the University of Hawaii’s Pacific Center for Sex and Society estimates the prevalence of intersex – having biological characteristics both male and female – as 1 in 100. Some academics believe the ratio of intersex people in the…
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Photo by Karin

Karin: “Fact, fiction and intersex lives”

In a world as heavily mediated as ours, where the boundary between reality staged for entertainment and reality documented for information is blurred, and sometimes lost altogether, works of fiction often encroach upon the territory of fact – the danger is that we may not be able to tell the difference. That certainly happens when…
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Photo by Karin

Karin: “Church brutality”

What can be said in the face of this? I heard many rumours about this kind of thing going on in Western Australia for years, where many Irish Christian Brothers and Sisters of Mercy, and nuns from other orders, run boarding schools. My own mother was in the care of nuns, in another state. She…
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Max Beck in Middle Sexes

Karin: “Middle Sexes”, not all the same

Intersex people are often represented as being all the same, or as slight variations on a uniform theme. So, too, are trans men and women. Likewise, the Hijras of India and Pakistan, or the Kathoey of Thailand, are depicted as being near-identical clones of each other. It’s a new form of an old trope –…
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detail of cover image

Karin: Lili Elbe’s autobiography, Man into Woman

Download a copy of this book review as a PDF Published autobiographies written by intersex people are rare. Socially-imposed guilt and shame at being born intersex have led to fewer such books being published than one might wish for – we can learn so much from how others like us have lived. I’d always known…
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