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the mother cries, and the father gets drunk. If you let a child with ambiguous genitalia grow up without surgery, he went on, the kid will commit suicide at puberty. That’s just the way it is.
You can’t change society.
    The surgeon telling me this apparently thought that I, a lowly assistant professor not long out of grad school, would simply yield to his authority, as did his medical students and residents and the parents of his patients. But I knew these surgeons’ central argument—
you can’t change society
—to be simply counterfactual. Here I was, a woman, in pants, with a PhD; my identity had come into existence only because society had been changed—and quite recently, too. But if I tried to tell these surgeons that together we
could
change society, they would see me as wanting to sacrifice babies on the altar of a radical social agenda. So instead I just took to answering these docs with a joking paraphrase of another uppity historian, Winston Churchill : History will vindicate me, and I will write the history.
    I kept reminding myself, you can’t really blame these guys for their myopia. Surgeons are taught to think in terms of days and weeks. They are trained to focus intensely on the surgical field immediately before them. I had an advantage here, being trained in history. Temporal depth perception spanning millennia means you not only can see the potential to enact meaningful social change in terms of identity politics, but also you can see that, no matter what you do, you’ll eventually be forgotten. There’s something really liberating in knowing you don’t matter.
     • • • 
    H UMAN SEX COMES in two big themes—male and female—but nature seems to enjoy composing variations on those themes. Some sex variations occur at the level of sex chromosomes, some at the level of hormones, some at the level of hard-to-detect internal structures, and some at the level of anatomical parts you can see with the naked eye (assuming your eye isn’t the only thing that’s naked). If you call all of these variations intersex, you can then ask how common intersex is. That’s a question people love to ask. The problem is that to answer that question, one has to first decide how subtle a variation to count. How small should a penis be to count as intersex rather than male? How big a clitoris should count? How subtle a difference in hormone receptors? The truth is that human sex isn’t simple. Human sex is practically fractal.
    Nevertheless, wherever nature draws unclear boundaries, humans are happy to curate. And the specialist curators of sex tell us this: In America today, about one in two thousand babies is born with genitals so notably intersex that a specialist team is immediately called in. About one in three hundred babies has genitals unusual enough that the average pediatrician will give the parents a referral to a specialist. If you add up all of the dozens of kinds of sex anomalies—including incredibly subtle things you might never know you had without the benefit of a lot of fancy medical scans your insurance company probably doesn’t want to cover—the frequency of intersex in the human population comes to about one in a hundred .
    I was twenty-five and in graduate school before I ever learned that sex anomalies happen in humans. Years later, when I had become an assistant professor, I found out that a boy I’d grown up with had been born with ambiguous genitalia. My mother revealed this to me after reading some of my work, and when she revealed it, I asked her where that old friend was now. I told her I wanted to connect him with the support groups that had sprung up.
    “Oh no,” she answered, “we never told him.”
    This was exactly what I was then documenting in my work—how babies born with sex anomalies were “fixed” and then promptly swaddled in shame, secrecy, and lies.
    The topic of hermaphroditism had been suggested to me early in my graduate career by Fred Churchill, the