If we’re to speak honestly about biological reality, consider the lives of intersex people

I am very concerned about a society that encourages diversity in every life form but our own. Human nature is more expansive than the binary categories we are limited to. In reality, there are more physiological patterns that disprove binary sex and gender than support it.

Approximately 1 out of 2,000 children are born with sex or reproductive anatomy considered atypical, and 1 out of 1,666 people have nonbinary chromosomes (XXY, XO, XYY, XXYY, or mosaic).

The damage such limited thinking does has rallied millions of intersex survivors to speak out about nonconsensual, nonemergent genital surgeries we were subjected to as children to reinforce this binary myth.

The United Nations has even linked those medical protocols to forms of torture, and Human Rights Watch has raised concern. As a survivor of such protocols, I wholeheartedly agree.

ESTHER LEIDOLF

Jamaica Plain

The writer is president of the MRKH Organization, a patient-run network for women with Mayer-von-Rokitansky-KusterHaüser’s Syndrome.

Despite Alan Sokal and Richard Dawkins’s authoritative tone in making pronouncements about sex and gender and their concern over the growing use of the phrase “sex assigned at birth,” they apparently know little about people born with various intersex syndromes.

Sadly, many physicians also know little about this reality and perform medically unnecessary operations on newborns to make their anatomy conform to existing “norms.” The surgeries performed on intersex newborns inflict lives of pain, repeated surgeries, anguish, and, often, sexual dysfunction.

SUSAN JACOBY

Jamaica Plain