I urge people not to hitch the wagon of trans rights to the idea of inborn, dyadic, neurological differences. Brains are extraordinarily complex and shaped by culture and experience over time. Gender identities are multiple, gender roles constantly evolving, and gender expression varies widely from individual to individual. Intersex people face huge obstacles, and framing us as the lucky group to be emulated denies our suffering. The solution to transphobia is not neurology, but political activism.

Cary Gabriel Costello, “On Trans Gender Identity and the ‘Intersex Brain’”

Prof Costello is a sociologist and an intersex trans man.

In a later essay, he writes:

The intersex community is particularly hidden and closeted, because the U.S. medical profession treats our intermediate birth sex as a shameful “defect,” teaching us and our families to keep our differences secret. Surgeries are often imposed on us as children, in an attempt to make our genitals look more like those expected for the sex we are assigned on our birth certificates–from the strange perspective that only invisibility and secrecy will allow us normal lives. Some of us, like myself and my wife [who is also intersex], do not grow up to identify with the sex we were assigned at birth, meaning any genital surgery performed on us as unconsenting children has taken away exactly those physical characteristics with which we identify. But even for those intersex people who are ipso gender (meaning they identify with the binary sex they were assigned on their birth certificates, though this was not their birth sex), imposed childhood genital surgeries are often deeply resented, because they reduce or eliminate capacity for sexual sensation […]

As an intersex person, I find it both sad and ironic that people who are transphobic and oppose gender transition are often those most wedded to the idea that intersex bodies must be altered to fit binary sex ideology. “God makes no mistakes,” they say in fighting elective gender transitions–yet our intersex bodies they deem birth defects. Every person, intersex or not, deserves the autonomy to determine and live in the gender with which they identify. Medicine should support our identities, not try to impose identities upon us.

Cary Gabriel Costello, The New York Times

Note

This post has been edited to add the second quote and photo of Costello from 2015.