Intersex Visibility

Intersex Visibility

I feel that for the intersex community to have any visibility that it must be accompanied by cultural and artistic visibility!

To just speak or write about our condition is dangerous.

With this kind of activism we remain monsters speaking as monsters.

Other people and medical specialists could say that we are poor pathological beings who need to be reassigned within the current sex binary as male or female.

Some artists in Europe, like Olan[1] or Del lagrace volcano[2] are performing with their bodies. It’s an extreme form of body art, but an art which fosters visibility! And in fact Intersex people are all artists and living art works.

Intersex culture in my opinion must be communicated by art!

In France and other French speaking regions of the world, I speak at universities, on the radio and in other media. I am an activist.

But that’s not enough! I work with artists about gender identity in the theatre with our Musical comedy Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

I work with young photographers like KAEL[3]. I work also with a really young photographer, Nijule[4] 22 years old, who created an exhibit of trans and intersex bodies.

He took anthropometric black and white photos similar to those of the 19^th century. He took eight photos for each model, four faces and four profiles. Two photos are in work uniform, two in usual cloths, two in clothes chosen by the models and two naked.

Being part of the media spotlight is part of our responsibility as activists and an integral part of our activism.

Our bodies are beautiful because, like the poet Charles Baudelaire said: beautiful is always bizarre!

In cinema, all gender roles are in fact, for me, intersex roles because actors who portray them are not necessarily the actual gender of the characters!

Films about gender such as Trans America (I think this is a good film about transsexual life), as well as others fictitious accounts about Trans identity (Pricilla Queen of desert, Rocky horror picture show, Hedwig and the Angry Inch…) are from a more gay perspective about the difficulty of living their lives with the condition and ambiguities of their bodies.

They are not trans producers, trans artists …

They are fiction created by gay people for gay people about transsexual issues and their lives, as if, gays could not accept their gender identities and must draw abstractions from those of transsexuals in order to speak about their own gender identities.

In their abstract portrayal of trans lives they have produced an artefact (a trans body, a trans story…) but the characters thus produced cannot be actual transsexuals because they are the idea of their creators’ (thinking or not thinking) – that is, gay men with their masculine attributes and in fact males with a body issue (within the binary construct of sex and gender in our societies).[5]

I also think that heterosexuals who do an artistic performance about gender are not able to think beyond their own viewpoint.

A heterosexual who speaks about trans identities or gay/lesbian identities does not become transsexual or gay. They most likely are transferring their own viewpoint onto the subject.

Which group of people have to pretend to be people who are not living in their own body?

Which group of people must artificially create another gender identification for themselves?

Which group of people are faced as part of their daily living with social sex/gender codes to make them recognisable within the system?

Which group of people must constantly make up their own identity with each act or behaviour?

Create their own gender, their own sexuality, their relationships, their whole universe, alone and with no pre-existent example for their identities?

The answer: those who are intersex, intergender and transgender.

Transsexuals and homosexuals are not (generally) involved in reconstructing or deconstructing gender.[6]

The intersexed and intergendered must first learn to recognize the binary construct which is not essential to their own embodiments and reorganise it while intellectualising it. When doing an artistic performance involving gender, it is the same. For this reason, I think that artistic creators should use intersex people in portraying these creative depictions rather than gays/lesbians and transsexual stories, if their intent is to portray the underlying elements of gender and sex with all the intricate and complicated constructs which can move beyond the simple binary.

[3] Kael is a young FTM who has been on exhibit in the US and Europe. His body photos are essentially about FTM young people. http://xxboys.20six.fr

[5] I’ve never seen FTM fiction, but I think that the same construction would apply if they are created by lesbians

[6] I thing that transgender people are into deconstructing gender and for this they are very important for IS/IG people?