Intersex Awareness Day highlights a fight for rights that’s far from over

On October 26, 1996, two intersex people, 26 self-proclaimed transsexuals and a hastily-printed box of T-shirts changed history around the world. 

October 26 is now known as Intersex Awareness Day, and the surrounding days are increasingly celebrated as Intersex Awareness Week. It is internationally honored through social media campaigns, storytelling and events, but not widely known. The day has inspired tremendous change even if the intersex rights movement is still in its nascency. And most importantly, while many Americans are still fuzzy on the concept of intersexuality, October 26 is a day when they are reminded that sex is not necessarily binary, that our histories are more complicated than just “male” and “female.”

What eventually became Intersex Awareness Day started as a protest outside a Boston medical conference and became an international observance years later thanks to Betsy Driver, credited as the day’s co-founder. 

Growing up, Driver knew she was different. She was born with both female and male sex characteristics, and she thought of herself as an anomaly and secret, pretty sure there was no one else on earth like her. 

“You’ve got this body that you know doesn’t conform,” Driver told The 19th. “You’re being told you’re the only one, and there was no additional social help, psychosocial help, anything to talk about that as well, or anyone to talk about it with.”

Her first computer in 1999 changed that. Online, she learned there were people “like” her, and they were intersex. They made up about 1.7 percent of the population. Some were born with varying reproductive anatomy of sex traits, while others developed them later in life. They had started to find each other and rewrite their stories. 

Since the 1960s, intersex people had been treated as a problem to be fixed, often through excruciating and life-altering surgeries from infancy. The surgeries, intended to spare them from the shame of not neatly fitting into a single sex, could rob them of all sexual sensation and fertility, and sometimes resulted in lifelong pain and incontinence. Some people were told by parents or doctors they had been born with cancer, a lie. Others were simply told they were different and should never disclose the secrets of their birth. 

In the 1990s, as intersex people started to find each other, they untangled fact from fiction regarding the surgeries, concluding they were not only painful but unnecessary. The operations were intended to “normalize” them, but left them permanently scarred psychologically and physically. 

In 1993, activist Cheryl Chase, who also goes by the name Bo Laurent, founded the Intersex Society of North America to challenge the medical establishment’s treatment of intersex people. The organization marked the start of a movement for intersex justice, and its newsletter, “Hermaphrodites with Attitude,” would give voice to thousands of intersex people starting to push back against the medical violence of surgeries and other treatments. Laurent found allies in another group fighting for bodily autonomy: transgender people. 

One day, Laurent attended a reading by transgender activist and author Riki Wilchins. The two connected on their shared goals of gender liberation. Wilchins recalled a night that they talked into the late hours on a stoop in the West Village of New York.

“I remember thinking our struggles are intertwined with one another,” Wilchins told The 19th.

Wilchins had co-founded her own group, Transsexual Menace, with Denise Norris in 1993 to protest the exclusion of transgender people from Pride marches. Wilchins knew how to cause a stir and get publicity. And she knew intimately what it meant to be written off by the medical establishment. Transsexual Menace had successfully held dozens of protests all over the country. They had picketed the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival over its refusal to allow trans women to attend and held vigils for murdered trans people like Brandon Teena, a trans man whose violent murder set off a firestorm over inaccurate news coverage of his death.

Wilchins was eager to help raise awareness about the medical violence facing intersex people. She suggested that Laurent hold a protest to get the word out.

Wilchins was eager to demonstrate. Laurent wasn’t so sure. 

“I hesitated to create an adversarial relationship with doctors,” Laurent said in an email to The 19th. “After all, we needed them to listen to us.” 

Sexologist Anne Fausto-Sterling, who was instrumental in early intersex studies, convinced Laurent that doctors weren’t listening to intersex people anyway. They should protest. 

The group settled on the 1996 meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics in Boston. Laurent couldn’t attend. In fact, only two intersex people could — Morgan Holmes and Max Beck. Wilchins agreed to bring a handful of people from the Menace. 

“The problem is, you know, half a dozen people kneeling on the sidewalk with some signs, it’s not a visual,” Wilchins said. She dashed to a printer and had them hastily make T-shirts that said “Hermaphrodites with Attitude” in a variety of sizes. 

On October 26, a group of 28 people, most of them transgender, picketed the American Academy of Pediatrics on behalf of intersex people. They passed out fliers that read “Keep Your Scalpels OFF Our Bodies.”

Newsweek magazine was there to capture the protest. Wilchins pushed Beck and Holmes to the front for the photos. 

 The intersex rights movement was born.

A few years after Driver got her computer and made her own online organization, Bodies Like Ours, she would build on this legacy. As Driver learned more about her intersex community, she wanted a day to raise awareness. In 2003, she and fellow activist Emi Koyama started to kick around ideas for dates.

Koyama suggested October 26, the day of the Boston protest. The two settled on it.

“The purpose of it was really just to raise awareness, maybe get some headlines, maybe generate a few news stories, perhaps generate some speaking engagements,” Driver said. 

It worked, although perhaps not as intended. 

Driver sent out press releases marking October 26, 2004, as Intersex Awareness Day. 

“There used to be a franchise that would like to be a little space filler in newspapers called ‘News of the Weird,’ and they picked it up,” said Driver, adding that editors evidently thought it was a joke. “At first, I was a little taken aback, but then I realized, shit, this is great publicity.”

Driver and Koyama had launched an international movement, with people planning events across the world. 

More than that, intersex people were taking back their power.

“It’s important to remember how much courage it took for intersex people, who had been burdened with crippling shame, to stand up and tell our stories, to demand that these harmful practices be stopped,” Laurent said.

Activists have returned to October 26 time and again when looking for a foundation from which to launch protests in the name of intersex justice. Beck has since passed. Holmes could not be reached to comment for this piece. 

In 2016, intersex advocates Pidgeon Pagonis and Sean Saifa Wall needed a date to anchor their demonstrations against Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, which was performing pediatric intersex surgeries. They chose Intersex Awareness Day. After years of protest, their group, the Intersex Justice Project, convinced Lurie to partially cease some of its intersex surgeries. 

On October 26, 2021, President Joe Biden hosted the nation’s first roundtable discussion on intersex awareness issues, the first time the White House had acknowledged the day. 

Koyama had mixed feelings about it.

“I’m like, ‘Oh, shit. Now the State Department is using us to, like, push American values on other countries,’” she said. 

For the most part, however, Intersex Awareness Day has remained niche to intersex organizations and people, with LGBTQ+ organizations sometimes acknowledging the day. Increasingly, groups celebrate the week leading up to it.

And momentum for intersex justice has substantially slowed since that time. Backlash to trans rights has also ushered in stricter gender rules for everyone, and intersex people have borne many of the consequences, often silently. 

Hundreds of anti-trans bills have flooded state legislatures. Quietly tucked into most of the measures have been exemptions that specifically greenlight the kind of pediatric intersex procedures that Koyama, Laurent, Wall, Driver, Pagonis, Beck, Morgan and Wilchins fought so hard to stop. 

President Donald Trump has amplified attacks on transgender Americans and in defining gender and sex binarily male and female, largely erased intersex people not just from definition, but from visibility within the LGBTQ+ movement. 

Earlier this month, Wall announced that he was sunsetting the Intersex Justice Project. In its place, he has co-founded the Strategy Lab for Intersex Movements. 

Wall said he wants to think ahead about the intersex movement, instead of reacting to far-right attacks. 

“What does a radical vision look like 10 to 20 years from now?” he asked. “And how can we work toward that vision that actually centers and prioritizes intersex people in a moment where intersex people are being erased.” 

Pagonis also has a new project, The Intersex Healing Club, a free space for intersex people to access self-care resources to recover from the medical traumas inflicted upon them.

Who will take up the mantle of organizing around October 26, and what they will accomplish next remains to be seen.

“It’s our North Star,” Pagonis said of Intersex Awareness Day. “It’s the people that came before us. It’s a legacy before us. It’s an inspiration… When you’re scared, you look back, you’re like, ‘Well, they did it, and so we could do it too.’”