In most European and North American nations, by the mid-20th century visibly intersex children were routinely subjected to nonconsensual surgeries, hormonal injections, and invasive examinations including medical photography featuring ‘forced stripping’. These procedures were hidden from intersex people themselves, and intended to hide their physiques from those around them. By convention (not by birth), sex as a twofold split could accept no exceptions. How did this become controversial?

The intersex movement began at the latest possible moment in the 20th century counterculture: emerging through private channels (especially emails) between 1990-1994, building as a clandestine community through the mid-1990s, then finally erupting as a political force in 1996. This historical moment was both rich in renewed prospects for international community building (through then-nascent internet channels and other breakthroughs in cheap publication technologies), while barren for truly internationalist policial prospects. True to this moment, the intersex movement was profoundly edgy, while enjoying much more constrained horizons than earlier movements had enjoyed around depathologisation (especially 70s GayLib). The result was what Hermaphrodite Logic terms the aesthetics of “90s edgy”—quick to demonstrate a fluency in previously authoritative clinical language, while favouring a certain dispassionate coldness over more obvious appeals to public displays of pathos, or appeals to popular sympathy.

This lecture will examine two artifacts from the intersex liberation movement’s unlikely birth during the 1990s—the ‘mutilated Rudolph’ that appeared in the first issue of Hermaphrodites With Attitude magazine (Winter 1994), and the The Murk Manual: How to Understand Medical Writing on Intersex (published in the Chysalis special issue on Intersex in 1997). These two glimpses of intersex satire (from before and after the movement’s first public appearance, in 1996) will provide an entry point to the argument made throughout Juliana’s debut book Hermaphrodite Logic. The book’s history of the intersex movement advances a fully responsive philosophy of sex (which Juliana argues the movement reveals to be labile and expressive, while those outside its dyadic strictures are left hidden away, by circumstance of birth and conditioning of upbringing). These two movement artifacts provide a glimpse of each moment.