Intersex

Our system's body is intersex, and while not all headmates in the system are intersex individually, or intersex in the exact same way that the body is, I am an identity holder for our intersex condition and what it means for other aspects of our identity.

We have PAIS - Partial Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. People who have this condition have XY chromosomes, but other aspects of their body can vary.

The bodies of people with PAIS do not process testosterone as well as other people's bodies do, and this means that, when they develop in utero, a body that may have had the DNA to develop a "standard" male body might form with a vagina, or with ambiguous genitalia (e.g. a sex organ that is larger than a typical clitoris but smaller than a typical phallus).

We were assigned female at birth and raised as a girl, but we were born with ambiguous genitalia that were "corrected" likely at birth as well as later on in childhood. We were most likely born with a genital that was ambiguous between a clitoris and a penis, as well as with ovotestes.

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For a long time, we thought we were a perisex trans man, but when we went on testosterone in 2020, we realized our body was not reacting to it as strongly as we would expect it to, and that it affected one side of our body more strongly than the other.

Five years into our transition, our body was clearly not responding "correctly" to testosterone, so we took to the internet to ask why. It was overwhelmingly suggested that we had an intersex condition, specifically AIS.

We already knew we had had a childhood history of unexplained surgeries, including ones that our adoptive family get very angry about whenever we try to ask what they were for, denying that the surgeries happened despite our memories being so vivid. We were also vaguely aware of having been given medication as a child that we didn't know what it was for, and during a period of memory flooding in early 2026, we got back much clearer memories of the medication, including being forced to take it and told it was something it definitely wasn't.

We also recovered headmates who remembered being intersex in their timelines, but these headmates were from our childhood before, in surface memory, we knew much about queer things at all. We also have memories of odd gender-related abuse that don't bear full disclosure on this site but that, suffice it to say, made the most sense if you assumed that our biological father saw us as a boy in some way.

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From our perspective, we are biologically an androgynous male, and we likely developed ambiguous genitalia in utero after the ultrasound was taken and our adoptive family were expecting a girl. While our biological family would have allowed us to be any gender we wanted to be, our adoptive family were much more rigid and conservative, and thus they raised us as the gender they "wanted" us to be.

Some members of the system regard themselves as cis men who were raised as girls. While our experience wasn't the exact same as that of someone with a body that is usually unambigously considered male who is raised as female for any reason (e.g. after a botched circumcision), we had learned about such experiences in childhood, and some parts of the system felt strangely convinced that that had happened to us. From our perspective, with our intersex history, these suspicions are closer to the truth than to being completely unfounded.

We view our transition as both retrotransition and laterotransition. Retrotransition is transition that an intersex person does to undo the effects of forced corrective procedures or forced puberty. Laterotransition is transition that an intersex person does that is neither in accordance with their body's natural state nor with a gender that was forced upon them.

Some of our physical transition is in the interest of undoing some of what was done to us, but we see our identification as fully male, and not a mix of male and female, as incongruous with our "biological gender" (insofar as that concept exists, which it can to intersex people about their own bodies). We see going on the level of testosterone we are on as being equivalent to an intersex cis man who goes on testosterone, and who would have grounds to consider himself "AMAB transmasc".

Despite not being androgynous in gender identity, we ARE androgynous in gender PRESENTATION. Furthermore, our gender presentation is a part of our gender to us. This is why we treat GNC as a gender modality.

We prefer identifying as intersex, genderqueer, or even gay over identifying as cisgender or transgender. However, different parts of the system may individually consider themselves more cis-leaning or more trans-leaning depending on various factors, including what they remember from either their timelines or our actual life.