The article presents results of a qualitative study conducted on biographical embedding and configuration of sex-characteristics-altering treatment experiences by intersex people in adolescence and adulthood. It analyses the intersecting modes in which transition processes of intersex individuals are structured by medicalization, mistreatment and violence. The study reconstructs the exclusions produced within intersex and trans healthcare as well as the experiences related to both positionalities, which can sometimes be intertwined.
Biographical experiences of intersex people are often characterized to a large extent by institutional categorizations and heteronomous interventions shortly after birth. In this context, intersex people experience violent bodily alterations both by medical as well as other institutions. Similar experiences are made during puberty, but also in the context of other age-related physical changes later in life. These forced modes of transition can be followed by more self-determined modes in which a process of becoming intersex is realized through a potentially self-empowering and transformative processing of former harmful experiences.
The relationship between institutionally regulated, heteronomous and more self-determined transitional processes in the lives of intersex people is examined in detail in the article on the basis of excerpts from two biographically reconstructed life stories. The use of a transitional concept (referring to H. Welzer) will serve in the context of the first case history to describe and analyze the biographer's becoming intersex, in contrast to a parallel medical categorization as transgender. In the context of a second case, it describes the intertwining of becoming intersex and trans*, which is also constituted against the background of experienced institutional categorizations. The transition processes in both case studies illustrate, from different perspectives, the challenges faced by bodily and gender non-normative people in the context of medical categorizations, mistreatment and exclusions.
