Seen But Not Heard: Early Intersex Activism in the US and Germany

This paper for the first time compares and contrasts early critical intersex movements across countries. It focuses on activism in the 1990s in Germany and the United States and traces the activists’ views on medicalization and their demands by using a most-similar case design and two unique databases compiled from the main intersex groups’ websites. In both of these democratic states intersex activists organized in the 1990s to protest medical interventions on children with varieties of sex characteristics. Both movements criticized the medical field for their zeal to “fix” intersex children without their consent. But in the process each group headed into opposite directions: While US activism went mainstream and began to collaborate with the medical establishment to change definitions and procedures from the inside, German activists stayed more confrontational, radical, and remained outside the medical system. Instead, they reached out to political parties for support. I explain this divergence in the direction of intersex activism largely with the political opportunity structure of each state, which made certain paths seem more promising than others. In the end, activists in both states had only a very limited number of options and few allies, no policy successes, and dissolved around the same time. But on the plus side during their existence each group challenged the existing medical framing and its lack of consent, constructed new and visible intersex identities and communities, raised public awareness, and began to garner selective support that laid the basis for the next wave of more impactful activism in the 2000s.