The scars have been there as long as Emory Hufbauer can remember.

When Hufbauer was a baby, doctors performed an operation that Hufbauer describes generally as one that took away their fertility and their ability to produce their own hormones; they also describe it emphatically as intersex genital mutilation.

It was the first of a series of medical interventions they received as a young person in order to organize their body more neatly into a gender binary. Because they couldn’t produce their own hormones after the procedure, they had to take medication. By age 7 or 8, they began expressing that they didn’t like the hormones that were selected for them. But they didn’t learn the word “intersex” until they were a teenager, online. And they didn’t start talking to their parents about it o

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