Intersex, in humans and other animals, describes variations in sex characteristics including chromosomes, gonads, sex hormones, or genitals that, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, "that do not fit typical definitions for male or female bodies."
Intersex people were historically termed hermaphrodites, "congenital eunuchs," among other terms.Mason, H.J., Favorinus’ Disorder: Reifenstein's Syndrome in Antiquity?, in Janus 66 (1978) 1–13.Nguyễn Khắc Thuần (1998), "Việt sử giai thoại (History of Vietnam's tales), vol. 8, Vietnam Education Publishing House, p. 55" Such terms have fallen out of favor, now considered to be misleading, discriminatory, and stigmatizing. Intersexphobia or interphobia is the historical and systemic discrimination, violence against, and negative perception of people with intersex traits.
Intersex people have been treated in different ways by different cultures. Whether or not they were socially tolerated or accepted by any particular culture, the existence of intersex people was known to many ancient and pre-modern cultures and legal systems, and numerous historical accounts exist.
Ancient history
Sumer A Sumerian creation myth from more than 4,000 years ago has Ninmah, a mother goddess, fashioning humanity out of clay. She boasts that she will determine the fate – good or bad – for all she fashions:
Ancient Judaism In traditional Jewish culture, intersex individuals could identify as androgynos, tumtum, ay'lonit, or saris. People who were androgynos were born with traditional physical traits of both men and women. People who were tumtum have unclear or "ambigous" gendered physical characteristics. People who identified as ay'lonit were assigned female at birth (AFAB) but developed male physical characteristics or underwent male puberty. People who identified as saris were assigned male at birth (AMAB) but developed female physical characteristics or underwent female puberty. Intersex individuals also took on different, more binary gender roles, sometimes conforming to men's, sometimes to women's.
Ancient Indian Subcontinent The Tirumantiram Tirumular recorded the relationship between intersex people and Shiva.
Ardhanarishvara, an androgynous composite form of male deity Shiva and female deity Parvati, originated in Kushan culture as far back as the first century CE. A statue depicting Ardhanarishvara is included in India's Meenakshi Temple; this statue clearly shows both male and female bodily elements.
Due to the presence of intersex traits, Ardhanarishvara is associated with the hijra, a third sex category that has been accepted in South Asia for centuries. After interviewing and studying the hijra for many years, Serena Nanda writes in her book Neither Man Nor Woman: The Hijras of India as follows: "There is a widespread belief in India that hijras are born hermaphrodites [intersex] and are taken away by the hijra community at birth or in childhood, but I found no evidence to support this belief among the hijras I met, all of whom joined the community voluntarily, often in their teens."Nanda, Serena. Neither Man Nor Woman: The hijras of India, p. xx. Canada: Wadworth Publishing Company, 1999
According to Gilbert Herdt, the hijra differentiate between "born" and "made" individuals, or those who have physical intersex traits by birth and those who become hijra through penectomy, respectively. According to Indian tradition, the hijra perform a traditional song and dance as part of a family's celebration of the birth of a male child; during the performance, they also inspect the newborn's genitals to verify its sex. Herdt states that it is widely accepted that if the child is intersex, the hijra have a right to claim it as part of their community. However, Warne and Raza argue that an association between intersex and hijra people is mostly unfounded but provokes parental fear. The hijra are mentioned in some versions of the Ramayana, a Hindu epic poem from around 300 BCE, in a myth about the hero Rama instructing his devotees to return to the city Ayodhya rather than follow him across the city's adjacent river into banishment. Since he gives this instruction specifically to "all you men and women," his hijra followers, being neither, remain on the banks of the river for fourteen years until Rama returns from exile.
In the Tantric sect of Hinduism, there is a belief that all individuals possess both male and female components. This belief can be seen explicitly in the Tantric concept of a Supreme Being with both male and female sex organs, which constitutes "one complete sex" and the ideal physical form.
Ancient Greece
According to Leah DeVun, a "traditional Hippocratic/Galenic model of sexual difference – popularized by the late antique physician Galen and the ascendant theory for much of the Middle Ages – viewed sex as a spectrum that encompassed masculine men, feminine women, and many shades in between, including hermaphrodites, a perfect balance of male and female." DeVun contrasts this with an Aristotelian view of intersex, which argued that "hermaphrodites were not an intermediate sex but a case of doubled or superfluous genitals," and this later influenced Aquinas.
In the mythological tradition, Hermaphroditus was a beautiful youth, the child of Hermes (Roman Mercury) and Aphrodite (Venus).Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.287–88. Ovid wrote the most influential narrativeTaylor, The Moral Mirror of Roman Art, p. 77; Clarke, Looking at Lovemaking, p. 49. of how Hermaphroditus became androgynous, emphasizing that, although the handsome youth was on the cusp of sexual adulthood, he rejected love as Narcissus had, at the site of a reflective pool.Taylor, The Moral Mirror of Roman Art, p. 78ff. There, the water nymph Salmacis saw and desired him. He spurned her, and she pretended to withdraw until, thinking himself alone, he undressed to bathe in her waters. She then flung herself upon him, and prayed that they might never be parted. The gods granted this request, and thereafter the body of Hermaphroditus contained both male and female. As a result, men who drank from the waters of the spring Salmacis supposedly "grew soft with the vice of impudicitia".Paulus ex Festo 439L; Richlin, "Not before Homosexuality," p. 549. The myth of Hylas, the young companion of Hercules who was abducted by water nymphs, shares with Hermaphroditus and Narcissus the theme of the dangers that face the beautiful adolescent male as he transitions to adult masculinity, with varying outcomes for each.Taylor, The Moral Mirror of Roman Art, p. 216, note 46. An older version of the myth, found in Halicarnassus and dated to around 250 BC had the nymph Salmacis taking in an infant Hermaphroditus and acting more as a mother figure.
Ancient Rome
Pliny notes that "there are even those who are born of both sexes, whom we call hermaphrodites, at one time androgyni" (andr-, "man," and gyn-, "woman", from the Greek).Pliny, Natural History 7.34: gignuntur et utriusque sexus quos hermaphroditos vocamus, olim androgynos vocatos; Veronique Dasen, "Multiple Births in Graeco-Roman Antiquity," Oxford Journal of Archaeology 16.1 (1997), p. 61. However, the era also saw a historical account of a congenital eunuch.
The Sicilian historian Diodorus wrote of "hermaphroditus" in the latter part of the first century BCE:
Diodorus also recalled the lives of Diophantus of Abae and Callon of Epidaurus, both of whom had characteristics which would correspond with intersex conditions.
Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636) described a hermaphrodite fancifully as those who "have the right breast of a man and the left of a woman, and after coitus in turn can both sire and bear children."Isidore of Seville, Eytmologiae 11.3. 11. Under Roman law, as many others, a hermaphrodite had to be classed as either male or female.Lynn E. Roller, "The Ideology of the Eunuch Priest," Gender & History 9.3 (1997), p. 558. Will Roscoe writes that the hermaphrodite represented a "violation of social boundaries, especially those as fundamental to daily life as male and female."Will Roscoe, "Priests of the Goddess: Gender Transgression in Ancient Religion," History of Religions 35, no. 3 (Feb., 1996): 195-230.
In traditional Roman religion, a hermaphroditic birth was a kind of prodigium, an occurrence that signalled a disturbance of the pax deorum, Rome's treaty with the gods.Veit Rosenberger, "Republican nobiles: Controlling the Res Publica," in A Companion to Roman Religion (Blackwell, 2007), p. 295. But Pliny observed that while hermaphrodites were once considered portents, in his day they had become objects of delight (deliciae) who were trafficked in an exclusive slave market.Plutarch, Moralia 520c; Dasen, "Multiple Births in Graeco-Roman Antiquity," p. 61. According to historian John R. Clarke, depictions of Hermaphroditus were very popular among the Romans:
In c.400, Augustine wrote in The Literal Meaning of Genesis that humans were created in two sexes, despite "as happens in some births, in the case of what we call androgynes".
Historical accounts of intersex people include the sophist and philosopher Favorinus, described as a eunuch (εὐνοῦχος) by birth.Philostratus, VS 489 Mason and others thus describe Favorinus as having an intersex trait.Horstmanshoff (2000) 103 n. 39Eugenio Amato (intr., ed., comm.) and Yvette Julien (trans.), Favorinos d'Arles, Oeuvres I. Introduction générale - Témoignages - Discours aux Corinthiens - Sur la Fortune, Paris: Les Belles Lettres (2005).
A broad sense of the term "eunuch" is reflected in the compendium of ancient Roman laws collected by Justinian I in the 6th century known as the Digest or Pandects. Those texts distinguish between the general category of eunuchs (spadones, denoting "one who has no generative power, an impotent person, whether by nature or by castration", D 50.16.128) and the more specific subset of castrati (castrated males, physically incapable of procreation). Eunuchs (spadones) sold in the slave markets were deemed by the jurist Ulpian to be "not defective or diseased, but healthy", because they were anatomically able to procreate just like monorchids (D 21.1.6.2). On the other hand, as Julius Paulus pointed out, "if someone is a eunuch in such a way that he is missing a necessary part of his body" (D 21.1.7), then he would be deemed diseased. In these Roman legal texts, spadones (eunuchs) are eligible to marry women (D 23.3.39.1), institute posthumous heirs (D 28.2.6), and adopt children (Institutions of Justinian 1.11.9), unless they are castrati.
Middle Ages Islam By the eighth century CE, records of Islamic legal rulings discuss individuals known in Arabic as khuntha. This term, which has been translated as "hermaphrodite," was used to apply to individuals with a range of intersex conditions, including mixed gonadal disgenesis, male hypospadias, partial androgen insensitivity syndrome, 5-alpha reductase deficiency, gonadal aplasia, and congenital adrenal hyperplasia.