What it means to be intersex — and how the false sex binary harms us all

August 27, 2020 Mike Zonta 1 Comment

Susannah Temko|TEDxLondon

For intersex people — those born with sex characteristics outside the traditional definitions of female and male — the stakes to appear “normal” are high. Drawing on her personal experience, Susannah Temko reveals the shame, prejudice and harm faced by the intersex community, as they’re forced to conform to a binary understanding of sex that ultimately hinders their health and well-being. She calls on us all to discard outdated notions of biological sex and accept the complexity within humanity.

This talk was presented to a local audience at TEDxLondon, an independent event. TED’s editors chose to feature it for you.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Susannah Temko · AdvocateSusannah Temko advocates for intersex individuals to be viewed and accepted as part of the beautiful complexity of humanity.

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One thought on “What it means to be intersex — and how the false sex binary harms us all”

Sarah Flynn says:

August 27, 2020 at 1:21 pm

I listened to this the other day and thought it explained the topic in very understandable terms.

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“It is so respectful to not get involved in somebody else’s angst.”
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“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
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“We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.”
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“Loneliness is the poverty of self, solitude is the richness of self.”
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“Man will not be satisfied until he is everywhere equally present.”
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“Human consciousness is how the universe understands itself.”
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–Brian Wallenstein, H.W., d.

“There is NO gender to art.”
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“What was once invention is now convention.”
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“My experiences are temporary, but Truth is eternal”.
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“Translation [and Releasing the Hidden Splendour] is a form of worship.”
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“The ear longs to hear what the heart already knows.”
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“Occupy Yourself!”
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“Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.”
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“Curb your God.”
–bumper sticker

“When I create art, it’s like holding hands with God.”
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“When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will truly know peace.”
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“In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.”
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–from the French film “Toi and Moi”.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
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“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
–Henry David Thoreau

“The mind loves truth and so does the body.”
–Christine

“I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.”
–Aldous Huxley

“There is a light that shines beyond all things on earth, beyond the highest, the very highest heavens. This is the light that shines in your heart.”
— Chandogya Upanishad

“Love believes all things and yet is never deceived.”
–Soren Kierkegaard

“My life is not mine.”
–Rumi

“Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.”
–William S. Burroughs

“Our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure.”
–Rainer Maria Rilke

“Everyone has got some preconceptions, but you have to readjust them in front of reality. Reality has the last word.”
–Henri Cartier-Bresson

“Love? What is it? Most natural pain killer what there is. LOVE.”
–William S. Burrough’s final journal entry

“We acquire the strength we have overcome.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I am all other men.”
–Schopenhauer

“Man is, that he might have joy.”
–Joseph Smith

“To the man who can perfectly practice inaction, all things are possible.”
–Ernest Holmes in Science of Mind

“People will forget what you say, but they will never forget how you make them feel.”
–Tom Asacker

“We have a right to know the truth; no right to ask anything else from God, but the right to know that.”
— J.M. Barrie in Tommy and Grizel

“If you don’t believe in something greater than yourself, you’ll never do anything greater than yourself.”
–nun on Oprah

“Boredom is the child of self-centeredness.”
–The Grand Lizard Andrews

“There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.”
–Robert Louis Stevenson

“Forgiveness is giving up the hope that your life could have been any different.”
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“When I was born I was so surprised I didn’t talk for a year and a half.”
–Gracie Allen

“Don’t look at me like I’ve gotten old or something like that.”
–Clint Eastwood

“Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.”
–Martin Luther King Jr.

“Peace is not something you wish for; it’s something you make, something you do, something you are, and something you give away”
–Robert Fulghum

“I REFUSE to participate in a recession.”
–bumper sticker

“We believe . . . different from Wall Street. We believe customer No. 1, employee No. 2, and shareholder No. 3. This is my religion.”
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“Fear is a choice.”
–Kurtis Matthews, San Francisco Comedy College

“Don’t Believe Everything You Think”
–bumper sticker

“One thing that comes out in myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.”
–Joseph Campbell

“When people asked [Jacques Cousteau], ‘Well, Captain, what do you expect to find?’ he always said, ‘If I knew, I wouldn’t go.’”
–Jean-Michel Cousteau, his son

“Let life happen to you. Life is in the right, always.”
–Rainer Maria Rilke

“And, as [Picasso] said, at the end of his life, he was in dialogue with the old masters, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Rubens. He thought he was talking to them and that they were talking back to him through his art.”
–Gary Tinterow, The Met, New York

“The world breaks everyone but afterwards many are strong at the broken places.”
–Ernest Hemingway

“Inside every head is a different world.”
–skateboarder in San Francisco

“Thank God our time is now, when wrong comes up to meet us everywhere, never to leave us till we take the longest stride of soul men ever took.”
–Christopher Fry

“If you’re neurotic and you think, I’m not where I deserve to be or my mother didn’t love me, or blah, blah, blah, that lie, that neurotic vision, takes over your life and you’re plagued by it ’til it’s cleansed. In a play, at the end of the play, the lie is revealed. [T]he better the play is, the more surprising and inevitable the lie is, as Aristotle told us. Plays are about lies.”
–David Mamet

“If you want to be a writer, you don’t want to live in a comfortable place.”
–Benjamin Alire Saenz

“And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
–Anais Nin

“Often people think that it’s a question of adrenaline, [that] it’s an adrenaline addiction. I think what they are addicted to essentially is brotherhood. It’s a very healthy impulse that is taking place in a very unhealthy place.”
–Sebastian Junger on troops in combat

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
–William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“Love well, be loved and do something of value.”
–Aristotle

“Tread softly upon the earth because the faces of the unborn look up at you.”
–James Cameron quoting Brazilian tribal saying

“You don’t attract what you want. You attract what you are.”
–Wayne Dyer

“We will go through the gate. If the gate is closed, we will go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we will pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, we will parachute in.”
–Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi

“Most stuff that is genuine is better left unsaid.”
–J.D. Salinger

“If things don’t seem out of control, you’re not going fast enough.”
— Mario Andretti

“We see things not as they are, but as we are.”
— Anais Nin

“A change in the weather is sufficient to re-create the world and ourselves.”
— Marcel Proust

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
— George Bernard Shaw

“. . . the only difference between you and God is that you have forgotten that you are divine.”
— Peter Solomon in The Lost Symbol

“Have an open-mind, but don’t let your brains fall out.”
— Jacob Needleman

“When thought races ahead of Being, a civilization is racing towards destruction.”
— Jacob Needleman in his new book What is God?

“A great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it.”
— G.K. Chesterton

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only at night.”
— Edgar Allan Poe

“Give thanks to unknown blessings already on their way.”
— Native American proverb at cafe in San Francisco

“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”
–e.e. cummings

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What it means to be intersex — and how the false sex binary harms us all

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Consciousness, sexuality, androgyny, futurism, space, the arts, science, astrology, democracy, humor, books, movies and more