Compulsory dandyism: A conversation on intersex joy and desire with Dr Christopher Breu

What forms can intersex joy take, and how might it show up in people's everyday lives or communities?

We’re enacting intersex joy right now – gathering in conversation, building a collective vision for a more joyful and affirming present and future for intersex folk. That's intersex joy.

My earlier academic work was critical – focused on masculinity and structural critique. Lately, especially in today's grim times, I’m invested in world building: imagining better futures that don’t erase our differences but allow connection through them. Intersex joy, like queer joy, involves collectivity and affirmation.

That joy exists [is] in dialectical tension with pain and shame. Many of us were introduced to our intersex identities through medical trauma. I had my first unnecessary surgery at age two and, in fact, am having my most recent surgery tomorrow – my 18th. That history shaped me, but I don’t feel wrecked by it. Instead, I realize that there's a kind of resilience that can come out of the pain. That's not to justify it, but it is to say that there's a power there.

Pain teaches endurance. Shame – like my own sense of sexual guilt or dissociation – can transform into pride. I’ve come to enjoy how my embodiment disrupts binaries. There's even joy in claiming a kind of ‘monstrosity’ in the face of normative expectations. The monstrous is only negative in the eyes of a normative culture. For those of us who have been labelled monstrous (and Michel Foucault argues that monstrosity was the way in which intersex was primarily understood before the 18th century) some of that conception still attaches to us today. But we can embrace our monster within. When not seen negatively, it is a source of power, strength and an affirmation of the nonnormative. Susan Stryker famously compared herself to Frankenstein's ‘monster’ at the beginning of the trans movement and I think we can invoke a similar kind of affirmative monstrosity for intersex (and indeed the two identities – or what I term identifications and embodiments in my book [In Defense of Sex: Nonbinary Embodiment and Desire] – often overlap). While monsters can be dark, and there is a pleasure in that, they can also be celebratory and joyful, like the monsters in Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, unsurprisingly one of my favourite books as a kid!

I also find great joy in music that challenges gender binaries. Contemporary nonbinary artists such as Fever Ray and Yves Tumor remix gender, sexuality and, in Tumor's case, race in rich and pleasurable ways. I found a similar pleasure, as a Gen X kid, in loving (and identifying with) the gender queerness present in the music and appearance of David Bowie, Prince and Annie Lennox.

Are there limits to intersex joy or access to it?

Absolutely. Pain, trauma and numbness are real barriers. Many intersex people suffer from chronic physical and mental health issues due to medicalization – physical disabilities, PTSD, OCD, anxiety and more. These limit access to joy.

I hope joy can interrupt that cycle, especially by ending unnecessary intersex surgeries. Numbness – both physical and psychological – is also a barrier. Many of us dissociate from our bodies due to repeated interventions. I’ve spent years in therapy trying to re-embody myself, and while it's hard, that journey is also a form of reclaiming joy.

In what ways can intersex embodiment be a source of strength and affirmation?

Intersex embodiment disrupts binaries – of sex, gender and identity – and that can be a deep source of strength. There's a natural overlap between intersex and queer/trans experiences, especially in resisting rigid binaries.

Our desires, appearances and sexualities become expansive. I love being able to mix and match styles – feminine and masculine. I find joy in the way my body defies expectations. My body has been through a lot, but it's strong, it's wilful and I love it for that.

Sex, too, becomes more complex and less genitally centred. That opens up a world of possibility. These experiences also fuel my writing and theorizing – especially my critique of how poststructuralism once de-materialized the body. Intersex embodiment demands we return to the material. And yet, as with Ela Przybylo's (2019) work on asexuality as well as the most radical versions of psychoanalysis, it can ask us to imagine the erotic differently than it is typically conceptualized. Sex, never binary, becomes radically nonbinary for many intersex subjects and eros becomes thoroughly decoupled from any normative conception of the genitals and their appearance.

What common misconceptions exist about intersex people and desire, and what might we do to disrupt them?

There are a number of misconceptions about intersex people and their relationship to desire. One of the basic misconceptions of intersex people is that our status as intersex will be visible when fully clothed. It might be, but more typically it is not. There is this assumption, based on the figure of the hermaphrodite, that the intersex person will appear as a perfect blend of the two presumed sexes (what used to be called in the medical literature ‘true hermaphroditism’, as opposed to so called ‘pseudo hermaphroditism’, which as a category would apply to most intersex people in the present). Many of us appear as typical men and women when clothed, and even unclothed, although many of us don’t. In the latter case it may be as much about how we choose to signify or enact our intersex embodiments, i.e. it may be more about our gender presentation, than any telltale signs associated with sex.

While hermaphroditism is a powerful historical figuration of intersex, as Foucault describes it, and one that can be used as a radical name for intersex people in the present (see Juliana Gleeson's [2025] newly published Hermaphrodite Logic), the fantasy perception of hermaphroditism is of the perfect blend of the sexes that reaches all the way back to Aristophanes’ story in Plato's The Symposium (Howatson and Sheffield, 2008) about the creation of the two sexes (although, if you read the story carefully, the figure Aristophanes names the hermaphrodite is a complicated spherical entity that is not merely a humanoid blend of the sexes).

Instead, our intersex embodiments are much better understood in relation to a conception of biological sex as a spectrum rather than a binary. Along with the challenge to binary sex by nonbinary and trans theory, this is the most radical epistemological challenge represented by intersex theory. As I argue in In Defense of Sex (Breu, 2024), intersex pushes us to rethink biological sex in relationship to a range of possible nonbinary embodiments. Within such a framework, sex stops appearing binary, but rather exists a continuum, in which certain embodiments may cluster in different parts of it, but there is a range of different embodiments throughout. We may not have to stop talking about men and women, although in some cases we will want to, but we will need to make space for all kinds of gender and sex variations and embodiments, including women with dicks, men with pussies and/or boobs, men who can menstruate and carry children, women who can’t, folks who combine or lack typical bodily markers associated with one sex or the other, folks whose surgically altered bodies produce complicated versions of nonbinary sexed embodiment, a whole range of gendered identifications and self-definitions and more. Here intersex joy becomes synonymous not only with various kinds of intersex embodiments and expressions but with the diversity of possible genders and sexes in general. Intersex joy becomes queer joy. While some trans theory and popular discourse has argued that the very idea of biological sex is transphobic, recommending it be replaced with gender as a catch-all category, biological sex only functions as transphobic if it is understood as ruthlessly binary. Intersex challenges such a binary, suggesting that sex is as complex and multiplicitous as gender, while also remaining distinct from gender (even as the two overlap and intertwine). A theory of embodiment that does not theorize sex as a spectrum distinct from gender runs the danger of effacing intersex entirely.

This capacious conception of sex and its relationship to intersex embodiment I propose also has consequences for desire. One of the assumptions about intersex folks in relationship to desire is that intersex embodiment, whether it has been surgically altered or not, makes sex more complicated, unwanted or difficult. It instead makes sex different as well as more experimental and fun. Rather than sex being tied to genitals and heteronormative conceptions of acts (missionary or otherwise), sex for intersex folks often involves different ways of taking pleasure in one's own body and those of others, different ways of using and desiring genitals and other body parts, which are no longer attached to a gestalt conception of a singular sexed embodiment, or radically rethinking eroticism and sex in general, in ways that have also been made available by asexual theory. Certainly, given the ways in which trauma and numbness are often an effect of unnecessary surgeries (and even necessary ones), intersex folks’ relationship to sex can be variable (again asexual theory is important here), but this variability itself pushes us to think about and enact sex in different ways. This is also a dimension of intersex joy.

What are some strategies or practices that can support the cultivation of intersex joy across generations?

This is an excellent question. Like the experiences of other queer folks, intersex experiences are generational. In her recent history, Juliana Gleeson (2025) theorizes that there have been three different approaches taken by intersex activism over the past 40 years. The first was the 1990s generation who first challenged routinized surgery and the effacement of intersex embodiments. This generation, often dealing with various forms of damage produced by the medical profession, embraced a kind of avant-garde queer and ironic stance captured by the phrase ‘Hermaphrodites with Attitude’ (see also Rubin 2021). This is my generation, although it took me a while longer to not only fully recognize my intersex history (rather than it just being the history of a persistent ‘birth defect’ and complications) and even longer to feel up to writing about it. The second generation of activism coalesced around what was called the Accord Alliance and redefining intersex embodiments as Disorders of Sex Development (or DSDs) in the late 2000s and early 2010s. This was an attempt to produce an accord between medical professionals and intersex rights activists, but it had the perhaps unintended effect of repathologizing and remedicalizing intersex, and was rejected by many intersex activists and advocates. Finally, most recently, intersex activism has emerged as much more international (led by the organization Intersex International) and centred around human rights discourse, which has proved a more effective way to frame intersex. It has led to crucial victories such as the 2020 agreement by the Lurie Children's Hospital (the institution where many of my initially unnecessary surgeries took place), after sustained pressure by intersex rights advocates, namely those affiliated with the Intersex Justice Project which was co-founded by Sean Saifa Wall, Pidgeon Pagonis and Lynnell Stephani Long (see Rubin et al., 2022). Similar tactics have been used elsewhere. Generations can learn from each other's different experiences around the definition of intersex and the struggles against interphobia and unnecessary surgeries. This shared knowledge can produce not only intersex joy but intersex solidarity.

We can learn from each generation and even from those who embraced the Alliance Accord and the DSD nomenclature. From the first generation of activists, we can learn the value of radicalism and the politics of ironic reappropriation of nomenclature, such as hermaphrodites. We can also learn from this generation to think through the radical challenge to ideas of binary sex that intersex proposes. We can learn from the Alliance Accord generation (which encompasses both those who affirmed the alliance and those who criticized it) to recognize that some intersex folk prefer a medical understanding of their embodiment as a ‘disorder’ and want (or may need) medical intervention. It is also important to note that surgical practices have become much less painful and somewhat more successful in the new century. Not all intersex people want to be gender warriors or queer activists and theorists and some may have specific sexed and gendered embodiments they prefer. They should have access to whatever medical support they need or desire. Finally, we need to keep learning from the ways in which the movement has been internationalized. As such, it connects not only to human rights activism but to postcolonial and decolonial theory as well (see Magubane, 2014; Monro et al., 2025; Swarr, 2023). Many unnecessary intersex surgeries take place in the global South these days, and function as an imposition of a Western conception of sex and gender onto non-Western cultures and spaces. We can also learn from all three of these approaches and begin to imagine a world in which intersex is not defined by violence but by flourishing. Perhaps there will be a future generation of intersex folks who are defined in terms of sexual diversity, affirmative queerness and bodies that have not been traumatized by nonconsensual surgeries. Such would indeed be intersex joy!

How can desire be understood as a form of intersex agency, resistance and creativity?

Desire is crucial to the constitution of intersex joy, whether it is the desire to be free from nonconsensual surgeries, sexual desire particularly as it is refracted through the prismatic differences of intersex itself, the desire to imagine other forms of eroticism and connection than those typically encompassed by sex, the desire to translate your experience into art and work (so much of my academic work, even though much of it is not directly about intersex, is informed by my intersex embodiment) and, finally, the desire for intersex and queer community.

Desire often functions differently for intersex people, in terms of how one imagines and desires both one's own body and the bodies of others. Because our bodies are unique and formed in distinctly nonnormative ways, we need to invent new pleasures and forms of sexuality and desire. I remember a very close cishet friend of mine who said to me that he found sex to be the most natural thing in the world. This is one of the places where I felt a profound intersex difference. While I often take great pleasure in sex (and perhaps even more in desire), I have never found it remotely natural. It was strange and filled with various queer possibilities.

Intersex desire can move beyond binaries both in what you desire and how you imagine yourself as desirable. Rather than adhering to gendered and sexual scripts that are relatively unvarying and unified, intersex desire is often polymorphous and perverse in the best sense (the original definition of perverse is ‘turning away’ – so it is a turning away from the normative and the scripted). If we can reclaim monstrousness, we can certainly reclaim perversity. For many intersex people desire emerges, as it does in the most radical versions of psychoanalysis, as radically nonbinary. Made up of desires for different part objects (the various ‘objects’ we desire in other bodies and people), and pleasures, which are often partially or fully diverse from gender, sex or genital and especially phallic (i.e. conventionally heteronormative and masculine centred) drives. Intersex desire thus contributes to queer desire more generally.

It can also involve embracing the kinky. Often desire for intersex folk is shaped by both trauma and a strange mix of the public and private. Your body was on display regularly to medical professionals even as you were often told not to talk about your experiences or your differences. All of this can filter into one's sex life in rich and kinky ways. Indeed, sex and sexual desire can function as one space in which you work through these histories. What was once traumatic can emerge as a heightened space of play.

What might a world look like that fully embraces intersex joy, desire, pleasure,and relational diversity?

In my book In Defense of Sex (Breu, 2024), I describe a vision of a sexual and embodied commons. This world would:

Such a world affirms intersex people not only by stopping harm but by supporting joy, desire and connection.