Perhaps it is because I'm a writer trained in history that I've always assumed I would make mistakes in my drafts. Historians know how faulty human memory can be.
I don't have the panic I used to have, meeting people who are androgynous, but when you meet someone whose identity is unclear, that throws your own identity into flux because the way we treat each other is very gendered.
When I talk about intersex, people ask me, 'But what about the locker room?' Yes, what about the locker room? If so many people feel trepidation around it, why don't we fix the locker room? There are ways to signal to children that they are not the problem, and normalization technologies are not the way.
Conjoined twins simply may not need sex-romance partners as much as the rest of us do. Throughout time and space, they have described their condition as something like being attached to a soul mate.
We say, 'You may drink at the age of 21 but not at the age of 20.' Why? Because humans like to create terribly neat categories out of nature because it allows us a nice, tight social organization. The truth is, nature doesn't care that we like nice, neat social organizations. Nature likes variety.
Doctors are human animals. They want to be loved, they are tribal, they instinctually favor stories over scientific evidence, they make mistakes, and even small gifts make them susceptible to being biased. If we took doctors seriously as human animals, we might hurt them - and they might hurt us - a lot less.
