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First published online December 4, 2025

Temporal disobedience: Intersex timescapes, chronopolitics and intersex joy

Tori Dudys https://orcid.org/0009-0006-6641-1162, Celeste E Orr https://orcid.org/0009-0002-0735-8390 celeste.orr@unb.ca, and Casey Burkholder https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3979-7021View all authors and affiliations

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https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001251389818

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Abstract

This article theorizes inter time as a critical intervention into normative life courses governed by whiteness, cisheteronormativity, able-bodiedness and endonormativity. We explore how intersex people are positioned as temporal disruptions: outside, behind, or threatening to linear, coherent timelines of birth, reproduction, productivity, and death. Building on queer, crip, Indigenous, and Black temporalities, we develop the notion of inter time as a messy, non-linear, self-authored relationship to time – a joyous refusal of the timelines that mark intersex people as failed or tragic. We examine how endonormativity – the assumption that only ‘male’ and ‘female’ exist – underpins dominant temporalities and restricts intersex lives to scripts of disorder and deviance. In contrast, inter time foregrounds joy and resistance. We centre intersex joy alongside queer, crip, Indigenous and Black joy to imagine vibrant, liberatory intersex futures. This work aims to disrupt intersex deficit narratives and invites further integration of intersex studies into broader critiques of time. We ask: What does inter time offer to theorizing temporality? And what might it mean to live – and thrive – on intersex time?

Introduction

On Dani Coyle's (2022) podcast Inter_view, filmmaker, actor, model and intersex rights activist River Gallo explains that ‘we [intersex people] stand at the threshold of two things and aren’t either one’, to which Coyle replies, ‘[we are] the liminal spaces’. Occupying the liminal space between white Western understandings of ‘male’ and ‘female’ sex (see Magubane, 2014; Swarr, 2023), intersex folks are overwhelmingly framed as ‘tragic’ (Holmes, 2008: 73), disordered, diseased and disabled (Orr and Magnet, 2022). Intersex traits are framed as threatening to intersex people themselves (Carpenter, 2013). Intersex people also threaten society, as they disrupt dominant understandings of sex, gender and sexuality. Hence, they are routinely erased and denied. Indeed, according to one White House (2025) Executive Order, women must be ‘defended’ from ‘gender ideology extremism’ which suggests that intersex, trans, and non-binary people exist (see Butler, 2024). Beyond harmful Executive Orders that refuse the existence of intersex people, intersex people are routinely subjected to non-consensual medical procedures that are ‘seemingly about the future’ (Griffiths, 2021: 514). These procedures are imagined to save intersex children from a projected bleak, tragic future.

Disputing this deficit narrative, an intersex participant in Bonnie Hart and Jane Shakespeare-Finch's (2021: 912) study stated that intersex people can and do ‘[live] a life without expectation or program. [Live] a life of freedom, awareness and sensitivity’. Living a life without expectation or programme offers alternative, more fluid relationships with the normative, expected ‘life course’ (Monro and Berry, 2025: 26): sex and gender conformity, cisheteronormative monogamous marriage, reproduction and so on (Halberstam, 2011). Here we are reminded of Jack Halberstam's (2011: 1) notion of the potential of queers to fail at temporality because ‘Failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well’. Halberstam explains:

Fuck family, fuck marriage […] this is not my life, that will not be my time line. Queer time for me is the dark nightclub, the perverse turn away from the narrative coherence of adolescence–early adulthood–marriage–reproduction–child rearing–retirement–death, the embrace of late childhood in place of early adulthood or immaturity in place of responsibility. (Halberstam, cited in Dinshaw et al., 2007: 182)

Like Halberstam's rejection of normative timelines, Living a life without expectation or programme seems to be, in part, a joyful temporal project that resists normative timelines, timelines that often insist intersex people are innately temporally disobedient and dislocated; disobedient because they fail – purposely or otherwise – to live up to normative temporality and are dislocated from normative temporality. We seek to foreground the joy that exists in temporal disobedience and in these liminal spaces.

To illustrate some of the ways intersex people are or are presumed to be temporal disruptions, we consider white time, cisheteronornative time and able-bodied time through an intersex studies lens and develop the idea of endonormative¹ time. Underpinning white time, cisheteronormative time and able-bodied time is endonormativity, the idea that there is ‘male’ and there is ‘female’ and nothing else exists or is possible, or, if something else – intersex – does exist, it is inferior, pathological and ought to be erased from time.

Various intersex studies scholars and activists explore intersex futures and futurity (see Crouch 1999; Davis 2015; Griffiths, 2021; Holmes, 2008; Morland, 2005) and there is emerging scholarship exploring how intersex people navigate the ‘life course’ (Monro and Berry, 2025: 26; see also Cameron-Pimblett et al., 2017; Jones, 2020). Surya Monro and Adeline Berry (2025) outline the unique challenges and modes of discrimination that intersex people face from (pre)birth to elderhood. Importantly, Monro and Berry acknowledge that the life course is not neat and tidy. Intersex people can and do have complex relationships with time. Monro and Berry (2025: 27) write:

Whilst a life course approach addresses a sequence of events enacted over time (Elder, Johnson and Crosnoe, 2003), these events are socially contextualized and may not take place in any particular order […P]articular events may happen at different times to those normatively expected amongst endo populations, or not at all. For example, the realization of infertility that some intersex people face can happen in childhood, whilst for endo people, that usually happens when they try to conceive.

Limor Meoded Danon (2018) also draws attention to this temporal messiness, discussing the blurriness of intersex pasts, presents and futures, highlighting how medical violence in infancy or childhood can be revisited across the life course psychosomatically. Unexpected challenges, memories and side effects of surgery can reemerge, blurring the lines between past, present and future. Intersex pasts inform intersex presents and futures. Intersex presents inform pasts. Potential futures can inform presents, and so on.

We are interested in exploring this temporal messiness and asking questions like: How are intersex people understood to be caught between the past, present and future? How do violent forces seek to shoehorn intersex folks into normative temporality? How does intersex people's existence challenge normative temporality and endonormative timelines? As we explore these questions, we wonder if intersex folks are not simply ‘between’ the sexes – as the prefix ‘inter’ suggests – but also between time or understood to be outside of time, existing in the ‘liminal spaces’ (Coyle 2022). We echo Danon (2018: 91) here: ‘The current Western medical perception is that intersex bodies are “temporally disordered” and can be controlled and regulated in timeframes and over time’.

In response to dominant conceptions of time – such as white, cisheterosexual and able-bodied time – scholars examine and/or live out alternative temporalities, including Indigenous and Native time (Kidman et al., 2021), Black temporality (Wooden, 2025), queer time (Freeman, 2010) and crip time (McRuer, 2018). These alternative times contest normative temporality and underscore how marginalized peoples have different relationships with time. By engaging with these concepts, we advance the concept of ‘inter time’ to explore how intersex people, too, are ‘out of step with time’ (Goltz, 2022: 2) and resist normative timelines. Indeed, the advent of the Intersex Rights Movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Davis et al., 2017), the formation of trans/national intersex activist and advocacy groups around the globe and the development of intersex studies stem, in part, from the desire for intersex people to be destigmatized, to have self-determination, to receive reparations for past medical violence and to have timelines they control (see Davis, 2015; Gleeson, 2025; Holmes, 2009).

Inter time calls for the dismantling of the white, colonial, enabled, cisheteronormative, endonormative life course, creating a more fluid, tender understanding of time and how people navigate it. While more fluid and kinder, non-normative temporalities and relationships to time are complex. These temporalities can be joyful, playful, painful, creative and ambivalent. Holding all these threads together is vital to better appreciate the messiness of temporal relations and resist normative understandings of time.

We approach this project as three endosex people invested in intersex human rights, intersex justice from an intersectional perspective (www.intersexjusticeproject.org) and non-violent, vibrant and joyful timelines for intersex people, timelines that intersex people craft on their own terms. As endosex scholars with no lived experience of intersex embodiment, we acknowledge the diversity of intersex experiences, including, as a reviewer of this manuscript asked us to consider, those who find clarity, joy or community through diagnosis or consensual care, and we remain attentive to how narratives of future happiness have historically been used to justify non-consensual interventions. Tori Dudys is a white cis endo queer woman and student in Eastern Canada. Celeste E Orr is a white genderqueer endo disabled professor in Atlantic Canada. Casey Burkholder is a white cis endo bisexual femme and professor at a university in Eastern Canada.² Our work in this article is not rooted in lived or embodied intersex experience and we continue to work to recognize the constraints and limitations of our positionalities.

This article aims to disrupt the intersex joy deficit via theorizing. Yet, we do not envision this project to be merely theoretical. Theory can and should inform praxis. We hope that this work, in part, calls other scholars and intersectional thinkers – namely other endosex scholars and thinkers – who explore normative temporality and resistive relationships with time to actively integrate intersex studies and intersex existence into their work because endonormativity is one of the foundational stones holding up normative time. We also hope that this article contributes to the turn towards countering deficit narratives about intersex people (see hi, hello, hans, 2022; Jones, 2022; Wall and Laureano, 2023; Yusin, 2022). The white supremacist, cisheteronormative, able-bodied, endonormative life course dictates that intersex people do not have a future and that their pasts and presents are failures of time rooted solely in negative experiences and hardships. However, intersex people's lives – indeed all marginalized people's lives – are never this flat, reduced or deficit. At the same time, we think it is worth interrogating how narratives of future joy or wellbeing have historically been used to justify non-consensual interventions. Incorporating these complexities can help us avoid flattening intersex experiences and strengthen our engagement with queer joy as a framework attentive to both possibility and ethical responsibility.

We offer a theorizing of inter time to contribute to the radical articulation of temporality offered by Black, Indigenous, queer and crip theorists, because we see many overlaps. Inter time contributes to scholarship that exposes the normative life course as innately oppressive, one that purposefully prevents racialized, colonized, queer, disabled and intersex people from thriving in and through space-time. Namely, we wonder: what does inter time offer to the theorization of temporality? What does inter time offer to the disruption of normativity and assumptions about the life course?

In what follows, we intentionally organize the manuscript to reflect a non-normative temporality: queer joy is presented alongside intersex studies to enact, rather than only describe, the temporal disruptions we theorize. At the same time, we recognize that readers unfamiliar with these fields may benefit from encountering theorizing of time before queer joy. By making this structural choice explicit, we invite readers to consider how the order of engagement itself models intersex and queer time, emphasizing play, contingency and the possibilities of thriving beyond normative temporal frameworks.

Chronopolitics and politicizing time

Time seemingly carries with it ‘a certitude, a durability, and an assumed naturalness that appears fixed and correct’ (Goltz, 2022: 1). However, time is not apolitical or objective. Roger Saul and Casey Burkholder (2020: 8) highlight the ways that there is nothing neutral about clocktime:

What if time's neutrality is a ruse? What if its steady, unchanging beat, always constant, has, embedded within it, a political project that shapes and is shaped by the life of the modern institutions that prize its articulations (Saul, 2020)? What if what clock time is disposed to value most—regularity, linearity, order, efficiency, economy—silently supports a series of powerfully discreet institutional relations, discreet because its operations are as much perpetuated by self-monitoring as by impositions from above? How, as a consequence, might we negotiate the effects of the clock as a consolidating temporal force in our lives, and strategize to contest it, if we began to see it more clearly for what it was, a conduit for animating and legitimizing several more identifiable discourses and practices we may wish to challenge: capitalist excess, neoliberalism, consumerism, and the surveillance state (Hope, 2016; Martineau, 2015; 2016).

Time is so central to political life that it becomes almost invisible. Fernando Esposito and Tobias Becker (2023: 3) explain that ‘Time is so deeply interwoven with all aspects of politics that its centrality to the political is frequently overlooked’. There are many examples of this: voting ages; how long one can hold political office; the regulation of work hours. This is chronopolitics – the connection between time and politics – the ‘politics of time, the time of politics, and politicized time’ (Esposito and Becker, 2023: 4, emphasis in the original; see also Klinke, 2013; Taş, 2020).

Trauma studies scholars have long critiqued time's objective linearity. Trauma can bring a person ‘right back there’ to a moment of trauma; ‘trauma […] disorients linear conceptions of time’ (Moussawi, 2021: 78). Danon (2018: 94) echoes this sentiment, pointing to the ways in which intersex pasts, presents and futures can be temporally messy and nonlinear due to medical trauma. Like trauma, joy has the capacity to transport people through time; happy memories or excitement for the future can cause us to time travel. A queer temporality resists the demand for temporal coherence or resolution, instead inviting multiplicity, embodiment and messiness (Halberstam, 2005). We think this call for an interjection into normative understandings of time aligns with our desire to foreground queer joy – to resist the pathologization and risk discourses too often associated with intersex studies. In this sense, queer joy can affirm inter time, opening up more possibilities of self-authored timelines, of disorientation that is not pathologized but celebrated (see Wright et al., 2024). Having articulated time as a political construct, we now imagine inter time as a response to endonormative temporality. As we do this, we aim to represent intersex experiences without implying exceptionalism, while attending to how inter time intersects with broader non-normative temporalities. In doing so, we strive to balance the specificity of intersex experiences with the relational possibilities that emerge through connections with other forms of oppositional, disobedient and intersectional time.

What might queer joy studies offer to our thinking about inter time?

Queer joy emerges in spaces where identities, relationships, desires and forms of labour blend and blur – where body-minds, intimacies, friendships and kinships are not clearly delineated but are rather co-created (Burkholder et al., 2024; Wright and Burkholder, 2024). Queer joy thrives in the interstices, in the unruly convergence of lived experience and resistance (Burkholder and Keehn, 2024; Burkholder et al., 2024). Queer joy resonates with Indigenous joy (Ashcroft, 2022) when it disrupts and reimagines the colonial frameworks imposed on gender, sex, kinship, community and time. Here, queer joy emerges in the work of artists like Raven John's (2022) Beet Yeet & Eat, whose sculptures and performances draw from Two-Spirit traditions to challenge settler notions of identity, and in the storytelling of Joshua Whitehead (2018), whose novel Jonny Appleseed weaves queerness, Indigenous identity and desire into a narrative of unapologetic self-making. These are expressions of Indigiqueer joy grounded in resurgence, not assimilation – acts of affirmation that celebrate embodiment, ceremony and love.

Black queer joy (Combs, 2023) emerges through defiance and imaginative transformation. It pulses in the ballroom scenes documented in films like Kiki (2016), where queer and trans Black youth reclaim space-time through dance, fashion and chosen family. It lives in the poetry of Danez Smith (2020), whose work elevates Black queer vulnerability and eroticism as sites of power (see Lorde 2017 [1984]). Whether through performance, art, activism, language or literature, Black queer joy resists the script of survival alone and insists on pleasure, brilliance and futurity.

Femme joy (Dahl, 2016) intersects by celebrating femininities that defy rigid binaries, opening space for beauty in multiplicity. Fat joy (Evans et al., 2021) converges through its celebration of embodied resistance, challenging aesthetic norms and affirming the worth of all people's bodies. Trans joy (Shuster and Westbrook, 2022) is similarly woven in, grounded in the euphoria of living and being affirmed as one's gender. Crip joy (Sheppard, 2025) meets queer joy (Ingram and Jacobsen, 2024) in its push against ableist norms, envisioning spaces that centre access, care and interdependence. So here too do we understand and imagine intersex joy – a recentring and calling for the joy that exists from living beyond endonormative expectations (Wall, 2025).

As Michael Tristano Jr (2022: 279) describes, queer of colour joy is a radical force that ‘renegotiates what relationships can look, feel, sound, and smell like’, using desire to traverse and transform a social world saturated in colonial expectations. This framework challenges one to reimagine connection beyond the structures imposed by whiteness, cisheteronormativity and capitalism. In our thinking, we also draw on the theorizing of Sara Ahmed (2006), who reminds us that heterosexuality functions not only as a normative orientation but as a mechanism of cultural reproduction. Queer joy disrupts this reproduction; it disorientates. It questions what people have been taught to expect – about love, family, success, even death and time itself – and unsettles narratives that equate queerness with pain, loss or marginality.

To view queer joy as disorientating and disobedient is to recognize its capacity to unsettle the foundations of normative life: it threatens the dominant stories told in classrooms, in media, in family histories. It is not simply a counter to suffering or normative time but a way of living, a politic, that refuses the inevitability of normative futures. It is a way of offering another way to value and move through time.

In this context, what might queer joy offer to inter time? The fraught, often erased temporality that intersex people are pushed to inhabit – a time often defined by medical surveillance, social denial and belated or deferred recognition – persists even as visibility grows (see Davis, 2015; Monro et al., 2025). Increased visibility of intersex existence has not collapsed the structures that exclude or distort intersex life. Activists and scholars continue the work of insisting that intersex people are not anomalies of the past or problems for the future, but living, present realities, defying normative timescapes through their being – being angry, yes, but also being joyful, creative, complex.

Queer joy might offer a way of imagining inter time, not as linear or belated, but as expansive and affirming. It invites us to dwell in the now (whatever ‘now’ means), to honour nonlinear becoming and to imagine a world where joy is not conditional on conformity. In order to honour nonlinear becoming, we first theorize time in relation to intersex studies.

Theorizing time alongside intersex studies

Out of time

Many people assume that intersex people exist out of time – or do not exist at all. Intersex people, intersex activists and intersex studies scholars regularly confront the idea that ‘only two sexes are thought to exist’ (Preves, 2005: 19). While many cultures and communities acknowledge people who live (and have lived) outside of the sex and gender binaries (Robinson, 2019), there is a Western history of erasing and denying the existence of intersex, trans, non-binary and genderqueer people. English physician James Parsons ‘[argued] in his 1741 English treatise A Mechanical Enquiry into the Nature of Hermaphrodites that human hermaphrodites did not exist’ (Reis, 2009: 11). While Parsons later conceded that intersex people exist, for a while he, among others, believed that intersex people were a biological impossibility (Reis, 2009), highlighting the limits of white supremacist settler colonial imagination. And yet, of course, intersex people exist in the now.

Whiteness, colonialism and time

Time, timelines and how time is politically structured are strategically and ‘uncontroversially racialized “white”’ (Mills, 2020: 298). A prime example of the sneaky link between whiteness, colonialism and time is the ways in which racialized, Indigenous and colonized peoples have been constructed as ‘“primitives” existing outside of “modern” time(s) as objects of civilizing missions’ (Esposito and Becker, 2023: 4). Colonization, imperialism and white political goals are rendered ‘civilizing’ projects to disrupt racialized people who are ‘outside of time’ or to assimilate them into white ‘civil’ temporality. Mills (2020: 308) also draws readers’ attention to French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire who maintained that Black people were innately inferior to and deviant from white people and so ‘they must be the product of … a different timeline’. Hegel argued similarly, positing that Native peoples of sub-Saharan Africa and America were ‘prehistorical and ahistorical’ (Mills, 2020: 308).

In addition to Indigenous and racialized peoples themselves, the land has also been understood to be temporally dislocated – timeless or back in time – given that it is coded ‘of colour’ (Blackwell, 2023). Mills (2020: 309) offers a specific example, that of ‘Indian Territory’:

It is a ‘state of nature,’ a ‘howling wilderness,’ virgin land, untouched by human hand [… T]he land is in a sense timeless, history-less, not part of Euro-time. Conquest not merely brings this space into Euro-space, redeeming and civilizing its wilderness, but it also establishes a new temporal regime over the land.

Time was used as a tool to justify colonial violence (Malatino, 2009).

White settler colonial temporality affected the peoples on the land. And how those peoples were understood in sexed and gendered terms reveals a lot about the deep connection between white colonial temporality, endonormative time and interphobia. Above, we note that historical figures like Parsons denied the existence of intersex individuals, rendering them unthinkable in the now. However, what is disturbingly revealing about the illogic of white settler colonial forces is that while many white ‘experts’ denied the existence of intersex people, racialized people were overwhelmingly constructed as sexually ‘ambiguous’ or ‘hermaphroditic’. In other words, it was a near impossibility for a white person to be considered intersex, non-binary or genderqueer, but racialized people were innately so and, therefore, ‘back in time’.

Intersex, trans and critical race studies scholars have long pointed out that sex and gender are ‘racially coded’ and socially constructed (Markowitz, 2001: 391; see also Clune-Taylor, 2020; Gill-Peterson, 2018; Magubane, 2014; Snorton, 2017). Amanda Lock Swarr (2023: 17, 23) explains that the development of Bantu Gynaecology – ‘a field that claimed African women were physically different from and inferior to European women’ – was ‘built on hundreds of years of representations of Africans’ bodies as innately “hermaphroditic”’. María Lugones (2024: 43–44) documents that white colonizers ‘imagine[d] the [I]ndigenous people of the Americas as hermaphrodites or intersexed’. Evidently, supposed proper sex and ‘Gender […] arrives only with whiteness’ (Butler, 2024: 217).

Settler colonial forces mobilized interphobia to justify white supremacist conclusions that Black, Indigenous and racialized people were lower on the evolutionary scale. That is, they were, in some important sense, embodying the past; they were out of step with white time and human evolution. We see this clearly through the ways many Black, enslaved and colonized peoples were presented as the ‘missing link’ between animals and humans in freakshows and human zoos (Clare, 2009; Garland-Thomson, 1996; Taylor, 2011). A part of their embodiment that intrigued, titillated and scared white people was their imagined sexual differences or ‘ambiguities’ as well as their presumed disjointed relationship with time. They were supposed living relics of some past degenerate, ‘ungendered’ (Spillers, 1987: 68), not-quite-human animal condition. In addition to apparently embodying indeterminate sex, they were simultaneously understood as ‘a symbol of an “intermediate race” between human and animal’ (Boëtsch and Blanchard, 2014: 189). They were understood to be in the past, presently.

Problematically, ‘white chronopolitics, continues to structure our dominant understandings and normative judgments about the past and present’ (Mills, 2020: 312). For example, Black children are adultified by systems rooted in white supremacy (Hamad, 2020). They are presumed to be older than their age, not in need of ‘protection or nurturing’ and more knowledgeable about adult topics like sex (Epstein et al., 2017: 8). At the same time, Black children are disproportionately diagnosed with learning or intellectual disabilities and placed in ‘special education’ classes (see Ferri and Connor, 2005; Moody, 2016), suggesting that they are not developing fast enough – their ways of knowing and being and relating outside of white supremacist logics are deemed in need of correcting, corralling, changing (see Ladson-Billings, 2020). Black youth are routinely adultified, perceived to be ahead of their time in some regards to justify anti-Black racism, but are also perceived to be back in time or failing to develop on a proper timeline and in need of further ‘civilizing’ to justify anti-Black racism – this tells us a lot about the illogic of white time.

Additionally, as Callum Stewart (2024: 3) points out, ‘the coloniality of age figures Black childhood as an age with no future’. And yet, Black children can and do ‘refus[e] the terms of White futurity, and instead opt[] to grow otherwise … beyond the temporal limits of coloniality’ (Stewart, 2024: 4). Fikile Nxumalo and Stacia Cedillo (2017: 106) offer that:

Perspectives from Black feminist geographies bring new possibilities for relating to place, land, and space through ‘a decolonial poetics that reads black dispossession as a “question mark”’ (McKittrick, 2013: 5; emphasis added) and thereby imagines otherwise Black futurities that refuse Black life as ungeographic or placeless. These futures do not aim to erase the endurances and ever-shifting formations of the violences enacted by past–present plantation histories, yet inquire into affirmative anti-colonial Black futurities through geographies of persistence and inventiveness. (McKittrick, 2013)

Of course, there is resistance to white time and the violence that accompanies it. Black, Indigenous and people of colour reject and challenge white supremacist temporality in ways that are joyful, painful, creative and ambivalent (Blackwell, 2023; Goffe, 2022; Ibrahim and Ahad, 2022; Rifkin, 2017).

Isaiah Matthew Wooden (2025: 9) writes of ‘the wide array of strategies and tactics that Black people have perfected and carried out in their efforts to circumvent and invalidate “White time's” hegemony’. Drawing from Saidiya V Hartman (1997), Wooden (2025: 9) documents the ways in which enslaved Black people would steal time from their enslavers by engaging in the practice of ‘Stealing away – to have secret praise meetings, quilting parties, dances, and romantic encounters’. Wooden also analyses more contemporary examples of Black artists, poets, musicians, thinkers, writers and Afrofuturists who reclaim time and space and imagine and create alternative timelines and temporalities. Drawing attention to the ways that racist forces – state-sanctioned murders, incarceration, criminalization – literally cut down Black futures, Alisha B Wormsley's art project There Are Black People in the Future insists that ‘There are black people in the future’, contesting and rejecting white time and frameworks that do not wish Black people to be ‘in time’ at all (Wooden, 2025: 133). Wooden (2025: 141) writes of Wormsley's piece: ‘When Wormsley prominently displayed the declaration THERE ARE BLACK PEOPLE IN THE FUTURE on a rooftop billboard located in Pittsburgh's rapidly gentrifying East Liberty neighborhood in 2017, she was guided by an impulse […] to reclaim time’. We can also return to the film Kiki (2016), cited above, where queer and trans Black youth reclaim space and time through dance, fashion and chosen family.

Discussing ‘Black and Indigenous Futures on Turtle Island’, Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2020: 75) outline the ways in which settler colonialism, anti-Black racism and anti-Indigenous racism result in spatial, temporal, cultural, spiritual and embodied dislocation and dispossession. To combat this dislocation and dispossession, Maynard and Simpson (2020: 78) highlight resistance – Idle No More, Black Lives Matter, Indigenous joy – and Black and Indigenous futures that refuse ‘centring or bowing towards whiteness’: white people, white feelings, white nation states, white institutions, white time and so on. Challenging the linear nature of time, Simpson (cited in Maynard and Simpson, 2020: 77, 78) explains that liberatory Black and Indigenous futures are rooted in the present: ‘The kind of future I’m interested in is the kind of present I’m interested in: one that is based on Black and Indigenous freedom, self-determination, and one that continually generates Black and Indigenous life’ and ‘that categorically and unapologetically refuse white supremacy’.

Joanna Kidman and colleagues (2021) write of ‘Native time’ and how young Māori people resist white space-time in Aotearoa. One participant in their study resists by ‘recit[ing] her whakapapa’ (Kidman et al., 2021: 31) – her ‘complex networks of kinship relations that locates individuals within space, place and time’ (Kidman et al., 2021: 28). This participant ‘silently recites her whakapapa as she moves through these [white] neighbourhoods’, a ‘creative [way] of navigating unwelcoming spaces’ (Kidman et al., 2021: 31). That is, she places herself in connection to her past and present extended kinship networks to help her traverse settler colonial space-time and root her to her territory. In the context of Mexico, Maylei Blackwell (2023) foregrounds that ‘Indigenous temporalities are present in storytelling, fiestas, and ceremonies; plant, medicinal, and scientific knowledges; art and culture; the struggle to maintain Indigenous communal structures, foodways, dress, and textiles’ (93).

There is joyful, painful, defiant and creative resistance to white colonial time. Nevertheless, white time continues to be profoundly damaging to Black, Indigenous and other colonized peoples around the globe. And, as we hope we have underscored, those who defy white colonial time are also often understood as defying endonormative time; they are ‘sex-deviant’ relics of the past and ‘dangers’ to any present or future ‘civil’ temporality.

Cisheteronormative time

White colonial time is embedded in endonormative time and cisheteronormative (hereon cishet) time. To perpetuate white temporality, white people must biologically reproduce the ‘civil’ nuclear family structure, a structure that is predicated on naturalizing white, endosex, cisheterosexuality and monogamous marriage under patriarchal racial capitalism. The cishet timeline of monogamous marriage, biological reproduction, gendered labour and death is foundational to white time and the white life course.

Kim TallBear (2022) underscores that cisheteronormativity is settler colonial by nature. For TallBear (2022: 22), cisheteronormativity and all that comes with it – compulsory monogamy, compulsory motherhood, the nuclear family, private property – is ‘settler sexuality’. Indigenous nations and communities that did not and do not abide by this colonial mandate and timeline were/are deemed uncivil. White settler colonial forces sought and still seek to quash this ‘uncivil’ threat in many ways. For example, residential schools in Canada in part ‘functioned as homophobic machines to grind down [Indigenous] identities’ outside of settler sexuality (Depelteau and Giroux, 2022: 228); they enforced strict gendered dress codes; they forced Indigenous children to learn the skills that benefited ‘the [gendered] economic needs of […] Canadian capitalism’ (Depelteau and Giroux, 2022: 228); they ‘punished […] gender variance’ (Depelteau and Giroux, 2022: 229); and they ensured that ‘Alternative gender systems […] were associated with dirt, disease, and death’ (Depelteau and Giroux, 2022: 229).

Hence, queer people – particularly racialized and Indigenous queer folks, non-monogamous and non-reproductive queers, unmarried queers with chosen kinship networks, really anyone who does not abide by cisheteronormativity's sometimes acceptable sibling, ‘homonormativity’ (Duggan, 2002: 175) – are understood to be ‘out of step with time’ (Goltz, 2022: 2). We see the assumption that queer folks are temporally disjointed and disobedient in how we are talked about. We are childish and immature. We are in a phase. Our growth is stunted. We failed to launch. Those invested in cishet time and settler sexuality hope that queer people will grow out of it, grow up, redirect course and become ‘realigned’ because doing so is ‘a good way to be’ and ‘will make you happy’ (Ahmed, 2010: 580).

Queer children are a specific kind of threat. They are feared, surveilled and outlawed in many regards because they are ‘growing sideways’ (Stockton, 2009), away from the supposed proper, natural, white developmental path (see Butler, 2024; Edelman, 2004). Queer lives, especially during the HIV/AIDS crisis, have been marked as diseased, futureless, akin to death, so much so their deaths were/are rendered ungrieveable (see Gill-Peterson, 2013). Queer lives – particularly racialized queer people's lives – are understood as futureless.

So how does queer time relate to intersex issues? One of the main anxieties that prompts violent medical interventions on intersex infants and children is the fear that they cannot or will not have cishet, endonormative penis-in-vagina sex in the future (Orr, 2022). They will be unloveable in the cishet, endonormative sexual economy, a sexual economy that is presumed to be the only good, moral or pleasurable one. As articulated by Katrina Roen (2005: 266), ‘penis-vagina intercourse is considered to be the mark of successful surgery’. This is echoed in various intersex people's testimonies. Laura Inter (pseud.) (2015: 96) recounts: ‘One doctor explained that after the surgery […] I would be ready to “have sex normally, with your husband, when you get married”’. Pidgeon Pagonis (2015: 104) was told that surgery was needed so ‘you’ll be able to have sex with your husband when you’re older’. Daniela Truffer (2015: 112) explains, ‘My endocrinologist always told me I couldn’t have a boyfriend without a proper vagina […] After surgery, I was bleeding and in pain […] It was humiliating. The doctors said, I “best get a boyfriend soon’”. Surgery is apparently ‘vital so that [intersex people] can have “normal” heterosexual sex in the future’ (Orr, 2022: 236) and better abide by white, cishet and endonormative temporality that demands marriage, monogamy, cishet sex and so on. And in striving for this, the intersex child may be sterilized, robbing said child of a potential biological reproductive future (Orr, 2022).

Many endo medical professionals and parents fear for the intersex infant's future. They can be so invested in white colonial cishet timelines that they literally maim the intersex child. Endo doctors and parents can become so preoccupied with the future that they are unable to imagine an unaltered intersex child growing into a happy, joyful adult. Fears about the intersex child's imagined cishet future can prevent the parents and the child from living in the now. The child may be caught between the present (one that involves pathologization and medical violence) and the future (their presumed deficit future unless their body-minds are profoundly altered). The logic goes that the intersex child must be subjected to medical procedures so that their future is not ‘bleak’, meaning not intersex, not racialized, not crip, not queer. A ‘good’ future for an intersex child is the erasure of any intersex marker; that ‘good’ future is fetishized, and many parents and doctors strive for it.

It is vital to underscore that this imagined ‘good’ future for intersex children is not only queerphobic but also deeply colonial, racist and interphobic. The idealization of the white, cishet, endonormative, monogamous, reproductive marriage timeline is fundamentally rooted in colonial projects of, for example, Canada. This is clear through the ongoing sterilization of Indigenous women and the ongoing sterilization of intersex people in Canada (Orr and Magnet, 2022). Who the state even allows access to this timeline, or parts of this timeline – for example, biological reproduction – tells us a great deal about the co-constitutive nature of cishet, endonormative and white colonial time.

And yet, there is resistance. Queer theorists criticize expected timelines, explicitly naming them as cisheteronormative, racist, colonial, neoliberal and capitalist (Edelman, 2011; Freeman, 2010; Latour et al., 2015; Muñoz, 2009; TallBear, 2022). ‘From the outset’, Dustin Goltz (2022: 2) posits, ‘queer theory has been a temporal interrogation’. And queer lives themselves are temporal investigations and sites of creative, painful, joyful and ambivalent experimentation.

Halberstam (2005: 2) notes that queer people joyfully ‘produce alternative temporalities’ and ‘believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience – namely birth, marriage, reproduction, and death’. Given the restrictive nature of cishet time, Mary L Gray (cited in Latour et al., 2015) notes that queer individuals ‘imagine different futures’, futures ‘that do not claim moral imperatives’ and do ‘not look like the idealized middle-class, forty-hour work week’. Likewise, we see joyous intersex timelines as ones that are unquestionably self-determined and that foreground desire, pleasure, fun, intimacy and so on! Intersex people recount experiencing gender euphoria because of how their intersex embodiment has developed through time (Dale, 2021). Intersex individuals document what brings them joy: finding intersex community and ‘feeling loved and helped from my community’ (Wall, cited in Wall and Laureano, 2023: 190). Intersex people create joyful representations of themselves, disrupting the idea that living on inter time is always doom and gloom (Giménez Gatto, 2025).

White, cishet and endonormative timelines fail so many people; or, these people fail these timelines because the timelines were purposefully made to be failed (Halberstam, 2011). Additionally, TallBear (2022: 24) argues, from an Indigenous perspective, these timelines are not endurable: ‘Perhaps our [Indigenous, Dakota] kinship arrangements’ – including but not limited to intergenerational and extended kinship networks, kinship not rooted in biology, the option to be in non-monogamous relationships and functioning in a community that recognizes 2SLGBTQIA + people – ‘are actually culturally, emotionally, financially, and environmentally more sustainable than that nuclear family, two-parent model we are so good at failing at, and that's why we are “failing”’.

There are many celebratory, sustainable and joyful aspects to queer time, namely when it is rooted in anti-racist and anti-colonial logics. Yet, it is important to note that queer time was developed as a byproduct of the HIV/AIDs crisis (Goltz, 2022). The queer life course was turned upside down when gay, queer and trans communities were forced to face new ways of moving through time: sexual pasts were violently judged; presents consisted of navigating disabilities, impairments and illnesses; 2SLGBTQIA + folks mourned futures that were cut short (Goltz, 2022). One could argue that the original impetus for theorizing queer temporality – emerging out of the HIV/AIDS crisis – was also a way that queer people were thinking about queer people's relationships to disabilities.

Able-bodied time

So, let us turn our attention to able-bodied time. Able-bodied time is rooted in capitalism. Think, 9–5 workdays, shift work, the grindset, strict routines, the Kafkaesque onslaught of deadlines, appointments and paperwork – these things expect able-bodiedness and able-mindedness. There is little room for disability, madness or mental health crises, even though they are arguably the norm, ‘mainstream’ and ‘universal’ (Pieri, 2022: 105S). Disabled and mad people, under this ableist sanist capitalistic model, are framed as burdens. Our needs are deemed ‘special’ and ‘accommodations’ must be asked for by a system that demands we ‘prove’ we are disabled enough or disabled in the ‘right’ way.

Given that the world is structured around able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, many disabled people have different relationships with time – we have crip relationships with time. Though disabilities are different, some disabled and mad people are unable to enter the workforce due to mobility, pain or cognitive differences. For example, Sheppard (2020) speaks to the issues that people living with chronic pain face when it comes to daily life. To participate within the normative temporal plane, chronic pain sufferers must count ‘pace’ throughout their days, make calculations about how many spoons we have left (Miserandino, 2018) and take breaks to narrow the risk of experiencing extreme pain or fatigue.

Building on the concept of queer time, disability, mad and crip studies scholars have taken up the concept of ‘crip time’ as a means to expose the barriers that disabled people face when living lodged within able-bodied and able-minded time (Sheppard, 2020). Crip time explores the ways in which disabled, mad and crip people experience, understand and live through time differently from able-bodied and able-minded people (see Chazan, 2023; Katzman et al., 2019; Kuppers, 2014; McRuer, 2018). Crip time questions the ableist, sanist and capitalistic conventions of time to carve out space-time for folks who do not or cannot fit into these structures. In doing so, crip time offers a ‘more beautiful and forgiving’ understanding of time, timelines and expectations (Samuels, 2017).

Ellen Samuels (2017) explains that ‘When disabled folks talk about crip time, sometimes we just mean that we’re late all the time – maybe because we need more sleep than nondisabled people, maybe because the accessible gate in the train station was locked’. Samuels (2017) continues:

when we talk about crip time […] as my friend Margaret Price explains, we live our lives with a ‘flexible approach to normative time frames’ […] My friend Alison Kafer says that ‘rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds’.

Time is not as inflexible as often assumed when considered through a crip lens. There are ways to bend the clock to honour disabled and mad people as we navigate the intricacies and nuances of daily life with various challenges. Indeed, Samuels (2017) proposes that:

Crip time is time travel. Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings. (emphasis in the original)

We suspect that crip time – navigating able-bodied and able-minded time whilst experiencing grief, pain, disabilities, madness – might resonate with some intersex people and perhaps be quite indistinguishable from certain experiences of inter time. Samuels (2017) suggests that crip time is also grief time, pain time, perhaps living fabricated timelines when, for instance, disabled and mad people pretend we are not suffering when we are. This kind of experience is echoed in some intersex people's testimonies of having to keep secrets – do not tell people about your diagnosis, surgery or pain. Tiger Devore (cited in Me, My Sex and I, 2011) is one such intersex person who was told to lie to peers or teachers: do not tell them you were in the hospital getting surgery; tell them you were on vacation with the family. Devore (cited in Me, My Sex and I, 2011) recounts:

I would go back to school [from summer holiday], and I would have a tube running into my body with a sack on my leg underneath my pants that would collect my urine […] Of course, I could never tell anybody what was happening […] I always had to keep it a big secret […] I couldn’t tell anybody that I was having surgery ‘down there’, where I’m not supposed to talk about, where I’m not supposed to touch.

Intersex people like Devore are compelled to lie, to live fabricated timelines, to hide their active disablement in the name of ‘cure’ so that they can better align with cisheteronormative, endonormative, able-bodied and white understandings of sex, gender and time

Yes, ‘sometimes disability sucks’ (Sheppard, 2025: 3, emphasis in the original), but many disabled, mad and crip people find joy in refusing the normative, ‘joy in my crippness […] joy in being with other crips’ (Sheppard, 2025: 3). Indeed, at the heart of disability, crip and mad theorizing is the ‘anti-assimilationist position that disability’, and we can add madness, ‘is a desirable part of the world’, of time and of space (Hamraie and Fritsch, 2019: 2). It is a kind of joy in being and feeling and knowing differently. Likewise, the pathologization, pain, grief and violations that intersex people experience for transgressing normative time, settler sexuality, cisheteronormativity and the white Western sex binary are profoundly damaging and dehumanizing. At the same time, intersex people seek out, find, celebrate and feel joy in themselves, in community, in activism, in resistance, in creativity, in anti-assimilationist politics, in understanding that being intersex is ‘actually something desirable’ (Viloria, 2017: 328).

Harnessing inter time in practice: The thread

Recalling Coyle's (2022) quote that intersex people are ‘the liminal spaces’, we see inter time as a thread that is able to connect the many non-normative temporalities that inherently resist normative timelines and the un/intentional damage caused by chronopolitics. Seeing how white, endo, cishetero and able-bodied time all shape the way that intersex people are oppressed now and have been oppressed in the past, we believe that inter time can offer a fruitful intervention into better understanding of both the intersex experience and the ways that these non-normative times inter/act and overlap with each other. As endosex scholars, we recognize that we are inevitably limited in how we perceive inter time to be useful in praxis, but we would like to humbly offer ideas that we hope can spark new possibilities.

Importantly, we see value in inter time as an educational tool for endo parents of intersex children. If inter time is taken up by endo parents, it could help these parents to imagine a life for their kids as something other than inevitably bleak and wholly fraught with challenges. It could broaden endo parents’ own temporal landscapes and provide new vantage points through which to help them understand the unique needs of their kids and how they might show up from a place of empathy, support, love, joy and encouragement, rather than a place of fear.

For further ideas of where inter time may be used more practically within scholarship, we thought we might look to the other non-normative temporalities we have addressed and how they have been utilized within scholarship and practice thus far. As explained above, all of these non-normative temporalities present alternative paces to life and the life course for different people on the margins, which in turn can work to contextualize research within different critical spaces. In one example, Miller (2020) uses both queer and crip time to critically examine the harm that normative time can cause queer, disabled students within higher education spaces. Likewise, inter time can help expose normative harm within education for intersex students. According to research from Jones and colleagues (2016: 130), eighteen per cent of participants in an Australian intersex study had only completed primary school or lower. Causation could be related to experiences of educational disengagement that are tied to, for example, traumatic medical treatment and being erased from curricula. This can impact intersex people's health and ability to graduate (Jones et al., 2016: 133). In this case, inter time might be used as a lens through which to critically examine normative time and its restrictions for intersex students and their experiences navigating a normative educational system outside of normative timelines. Just as inter time might be used here to critically engage with the landscape of post-secondary education for intersex students, inter time as a theoretical lens can be used to critically analyze how a multitude of social systems specifically impact intersex people.

Utilizing Black feminist theory, decolonial theory and Saidiya Hartman's critical fabulation as methodology to reawaken stories of his ancestors, Sean Saifa M Wall (2025) critically examines what intersex joy means and who should be granted access to it. Wall (2025) suggests that intersex research often lacks intersectional frameworks and perspectives, with much scholarship and research in this field being white and centred within the Global North. As discussed earlier in this article, intersex erasure and oppression has roots in white supremacy and racism. When intersectionality is acknowledged and respected, inter time could be one thread that weaves racialized intersex peoples’ experiences more into intersex studies.

Wall (2025: 12–13) also writes about the importance of grief, justice, love and resistance when navigating the complexities of intersex joy – intersex joy cannot in itself exist without holding space for the grief, love, justice and resistance that accompany specifically Black intersex peoples’ experiences. Throughout this article, we have attempted to demonstrate the ways that living on inter time can act as a method of temporal disobedience, or resistance against normative constructions of time. Though inter time in itself is a form of resistance that may be integrated into a conversation about intersex joy (alongside grief, justice and love), simultaneously inter time may be one means used to help connect the grief, justice, love and resistance required to access or experience intersex joy. Wall's (2025) work brings ancestral stories (the past) to life through critical fabulation after their archival erasure. With its messiness of past, present and future, inter time helps to create space for a non-linear history to take form and for new shapes of resistance and justice to emerge.

Conclusion

From birth, intersex people face objectification, coercive medical procedures and imposed shame – signs of a world that does not welcome them. Intersex people, by the nature of their biologies, are marked as ‘between’ the sexes and, therefore, ‘between’ time – disobedient to white, cisheteronormative, endonormative time. And yet, inter time offers a way to highlight the joyful refusal of binaries.

The white, cisheteronormative, endonormative life course dictates that intersex people do not have a future and that their pasts and presents are failures of time rooted in negative experiences and hardships. By rejecting these rigid timelines and reimagining the constructs that confine intersex people, intersex studies scholars, intersex activists, thinkers, artists and communities are already crafting intersex timelines rooted not in lack but in liberation. These are futures filled with pride, community, love, intersex joy as well as queer joy – futures where intersex lives are not just possible but desired and radiant. By rejecting the normative, embracing temporal disobedience and reconceptualizing societal constructs, activists and thinkers can and do find ways to ground intersex timelines in joy rather than in its failure to meet normative expectations.

Like all resistant temporalities, inter time celebrates refusal, creativity and becoming. It holds grief and pain, yes – but also joy. Queer joy. Crip joy. Black joy. Indigenous joy. Intersex joy. The joy of living on one's own time. The joy of being uncontained. The joy of imagining, together, something more. The joy of ‘Living a life without expectation or program’ (participant in Hart and Shakespeare-Finch, 2021: 912).

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by Dr. Casey Burkholder's Canada Research Chair grant (grant number: CRC-2023-00275).

ORCID iDs

Tori Dudys https://orcid.org/0009-0006-6641-1162

Celeste E Orr https://orcid.org/0009-0002-0735-8390

Casey Burkholder https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3979-7021

Footnotes

1. Scholars like Shelby Astle et al. (2024), Ayla Fedorchenko (2024) and Amets Suess Schwend (2022) use the expression ‘endonormative’ to describe the ways in which the sex and gender binaries as well as endosex or endo (not intersex) body-minds are privileged and assumed to be natural, superior and default.

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2. At various points in this article the authors use ‘we’ pronouns when describing queer and disabled people or experiences to reflect one or more of the authors’ identities, embodiments and experiences.