The son of a librarian, Chris M. Arnone's love of books was as inevitable as gravity. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Missouri - Kansas City. His cyberpunk series, The Jayu City Chronicles, is available everywhere books are sold. His work can also be found in Adelaide Literary Magazine and FEED Lit Mag. You can find him writing more books, poetry, and acting in Kansas City. You can also follow him on social media (Facebook, Goodreads, Instagram, Bluesky, TikTok, website).
In case you weren’t aware, intersex people are under attack. Not so blatantly as transgender people in the United States, but we are. Our very existence undermines the attacks levied against transgender people. How can anyone claim that sex is binary when intersex people exist, after all? They cannot, so they are trying to erase us.
One of the best ways to fight this erasure is through books. Books are how we record our past and how we envision the future. It is through so many powerful books (as well as museums, teachers, and so on) that we do not forget the tragedies of war, slavery, and genocide. Through books, we tell the stories of the struggles of LGBTQIA+ people. And while fiction books are wonderful, those personal accounts known as memoirs are vitally important.
While there is a veritable sea of memoirs for gay, lesbian, and transgender folks, where are all the intersex memoirs? As I started writing my own such memoir, I asked this question, and I sought out and read every single one of them. Here’s the list—to the best of my knowledge.
Born Both: An Intersex Memoir by Hida Viloria
Hida Viloria was born with ambiguous genitalia, and unlike so many other intersex babies, they did not undergo any surgeries. Their story is one of intersex joy paired with hiding who they really are for a long time. With their sex and gender blending liberally, they helped create so many of the great intersex movements of the last few decades.
Intersex by Aaron Apps
This tiny book is a hybrid memoir. In many ways, it’s a very long essay, and numerous excerpts from it were published in major outlets. It asks questions about life with ambiguous genitalia, about a so-called “normal” life, and about the nature of gender and personhood.
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Intersex (For Lack of a Better Word) by Thea Hillman
This Lambda Literary Award-winning memoir is structured more like a series of narrative essays, each focused on a different part of Thea’s intersex life. Topics like drag, queerness, and sex populate this book. Hillman brings her usual flair for eroticism, gender, and sexuality to new life in this memoir.
Inverse Cowgirl by Alicia Roth Weigel
Alicia Roth Weigel is an intersex activist and writer born with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, or CAIS. As an infant, she underwent surgeries to remove her undescended testicles after doctors falsely claimed they would become cancerous later. Now in her 30s, she struggled with hormones, osteoporosis, and visibly fighting for intersex rights in the notoriously red state of Texas.
Nobody Needs to Know by Pidgeon Pagonis
Pidgeon Pagonis wound up fighting to make Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago the first hospital in the USA to ban surgeries on intersex children. But they weren’t born a fighter; they were born intersex. Their family hid their body from the world, pretending Pidgeon wasn’t different. But eventually Pidgeon blossomed into the great intersex activist that they are today.
XOXY: A Memoir by Kimberly Zieselman
Zieselman didn’t know she was born intersex for a long time. In fact, she was a mother and suburban housewife by the time she made the discovery. This is her story of self-discovery, self-examination, and rising up to become one of the most well-known activists for intersex rights and visibility in the world.
That’s right. I cannot even make a top-ten list with the options available. There are a couple more memoirs out there that are partly about being intersex, like The Race to be Myself by Caster Semenya and the forthcoming Five Star White Trash: A Memoir of Fraud and Family by Georgiann Davis. There are likely others I don’t know about—but the number is still too few.
I get it. Intersex folks are rare. According to Brown University, we make up about 1.7% of the population. While some intersex people like me know we’re different from birth, some don’t know until puberty or even later in life. We’re an understudied and underrepresented sliver of the population.
But there’s also a dire need for education around intersex people. Most of us recall the viral moment in the Texas state house when Rep. Andy Hopper showed his complete lack of knowledge around intersex people, claiming all intersex people have either XX or XY chromosomes. Then, his associate leaned in, whispering into his ear and a hot mic, “Andy, that’s not true.”
There are some other books to be found about us. In my own research, A Comprehensive Guide to Intersex by Jay Kyle Petersen has been very helpful. It’s more like a textbook but includes a lot of valuable information. I, Sean/a: The Story of A Homeless Intersex Woman Who Inspired A Community by Dr. Kirsten Viola Harrison and Sean/a Smith is mostly a biography and textbook with a little memoir thrown in. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides is famously wonderful, though Eugenides is not, himself, intersex. And while great, I have some issues with that book. Very recently, Juliana Gleeson’s Hermaphrodite Logic: A History of Intersex Liberation has come out, telling the story of the larger intersex struggle for recognition.
The TL;DR of this is that we need more books about intersex people, preferably by intersex people. While I’ve pointed out some books by intersex people before, we’re still oh, so underrepresented, particularly in the memoir and autobiography department. Come on, fellow intersex folks, let’s get to writing. As for the rest of you, get to reading these great books and show publishers that we want and need more of them.
English (US) · 