To get the ball rolling, I will say that there are PLENTY of terms that people call intersex people that tend to be received terribly. Some were so bad that some websites had to change up their tags.
CW: bad terms
Intersex people are often (with some exceptions made by people who are actually putting in the time to get things right) NOT what online art and literature sites use the tag “intersex” for, often in a sea of tags, some of which are ALSO profane (I’ve censored them for your sake), like
spoiler
c–t + boy
and
spoiler
d–k + girl
, and variations of these. 😬
They actually got removed by E6 (not going to finish THAT) because of popular demand. IF one tries searching those (I don’t recommend doing so), you will get a redirect.
Then there’s usage of deprecated (obsolete term that the scientific community eschewed) terms like
spoiler
hermaphrod!te
and its short form, which gets thrown around on art sites with monotonous regularity, and is definitely non-scientific. This didn’t get removed from E6… Oh, and then for some works, there’s male+(THAT term), which is both sets of binary anatomy but a flat chest, with the term without male in front of it being a non-flat chest with both sets of lower binary anatomy. Now THAT can get mixed up with the second anatomy+binary gender term by people.
Oh, and let’s not forget
spoiler
futanar!
and its short form… H terminology which on the relevant sites is seen as a synonym to either both sets and a non-flat chest, or a non-flat chest and anatomy that is capable of being tucked.
Evidently, some people on the internet love thinking that intersex means anatomy not of a nature that one could say society considers (in a sense) to be within the social construct that is the gender binary.
Some of the art in question that some of the more sus parts of the World Wide Web consider to be intersex opens really bad cans of worms. There’s some artists who draw cisgender male characters with flat chests (also non-scarred too) except that below, the anatomy there is not capable of being tucked. And vise versa. The can of worms this opens not only has non-insignificant accuracy issues with regards to the topic of intersex, but it also can be problematic for trans and nonbinary people too. Oh, and when there are both sets of lower anatomy having ALWAYS been on a character from birth, it also causes problems for people whose transition is in a direction disconnected from the binary, such if one is getting a penile-preserving vaginoplasty without orchiectomy, but the character had the results of that from birth. That’s when the can of worms opens, and the wheels fall off.
Oh, and while there is art out there that accurately depicts ambiguous anatomy, it is quite rare, so people get the wrong idea about intersex people because of the much larger amount of what I mentioned earlier.
As for people getting the wrong idea about intersex people, there ARE people online who I’ve ran into (unfortunately), who seem to equate being nonbinary and/or trans with being intersex, or who ONLY accept me as nonbinary BECAUSE I am also intersex. And then there are people who consider people who are nonbinary + intersex to be cisgender.
Firstly, there are binary trans people and binary cisgender people who are intersex, and one does not need to be intersex to be nonbinary or trans.
Then there are people who get stuff wrong. Not all intersex people have chromosomal intersex conditions. Not all intersex people have an inability for meiosis to be successful. Not all intersex people have anatomy that does not conform to what society seems to think people of either binary gender have.
Then there are people (typically on really sus/toxic websites) who think being intersex is the only reason to not misgender an intersex person who is non-cis.
Like, misgendering someone is just terrible as a whole, but doing THAT is…
Bad. Also, I’ve had people misgender me alone for being neurodiverse. Selective misgendering is honestly despicable, vile, and cruel.
And then in some rare cases online (at least in my experience, though not as rare as a Shiny 6x31IV Mew in Pokemon Emerald), there’s genuine confusion as well as a willingness to learn, which, if you run into that, educating them is the best idea.
I think the lesson we can all learn from this is that the internet features PLENTY of people who don’t know a thing about intersex people, who then often tend to go on to engage in online behavior of a nature that is not at all respectful to intersex people. This SubLemmy (AKA Community) was made out of sheer exasperation at someone who said some not-so-nice things about intersex people.
Oh, fun intersex fact: The original voice actress for Meowth in the Pokemon anime’s English dub was an intersex trans woman.
Now, I figured I should also mention the subject of symbols.
Some parts of the furry community are misusing a blue inverted-color version of the Unicode code point U+2B89 (your computer probably will not render it) to represent male characters with lower anatomy that isn’t able to be tucked. The symbol is basically a male symbol, but it points upwards inside the circle and isn’t angled. The analogy gets even worse if you look at the logo for the brand of water known as Pathwater, which only drives home the point. Also, this symbol on an American energy bar in California Costco stores uses a diamond rather than a circle. If the relevant companies had any idea what they had accidentally referenced, it would be an absolute Public Relations disaster for them.
Parts of the furry community also misuse the version of the transgender symbol that does not have the left upwards-pointing arrow with dash. ⚥(U+26A5) either to refer to flat-chested male characters with both sets of lower anatomy, or to refer to female characters with a set of downstairs anatomy capable of being tucked and a non-flat chest. This symbol of course, unlike the first one, was not invented by the furry community. In fact, the coiners of U+2B89’s symbol never defined U+2B89 as belonging to it. I’m just a Unicode geek who ended up accidentally finding out that a certain character (U+2B89) in the Unicode block “Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows” just happened to look like that particular symbol, but inverted in color and monochrome rather than blue. Not a fun discovery to make.
The lesson here is that U+2B89 should never be used as a gender symbol.
Oh, and I should mention that there are some people online who call themselves the terms mentioned in this post.
TL;DR: The Internet gets stuff about intersex wrong regularly.
Edited to fix some stuff.
Edit + Update:
Turns out that there is another bad term:
CW: bad term:
spoiler
newh@lf
Which refers to a character with a body closest to a pre-op trans woman who has done HRT. Such artworks sometimes get given an “intersex” tag, as well as slurs in their tags. It’s just ridiculous how quite a few art sectors handle intersex people and non-cis people. It gets old really fast.
Oh, and just as both gender identity and AGAB are not binary, computers are also not exclusively binary. In the olden days of computing, (most often happening in the country where Tetris was invented), there were computers that used ternary rather than binary, so there was on (1) and off (0) like a binary computer, and an in-between of sorts (2 or negative one or 0.5 depending on implementation) using a form of leakage current. In such a system, gender input forms aren’t like setting values to 0 or 1 corresponding to binary gender. The 3rd part of the trit (ternary equivalent to bit) would in those simplistic systems (Pokemon Crystal caught data OT gender, plus ALL Pokemon games since) would be outside male or female. Now, ternary computers went obsolete decades ago, but there are still companies out there making ternary architecture. Samsung decided to jump into it to improve computing technology, and people have been saying it will come back into play. And it looks like that WILL happen. A lot of the quantum computing being worked on is based around ternary, because there’s more states a value can be.
If ternary isn’t outside the binary enough, it’s important to note that the first computer (the Babbage Analytical Engine from the 1800s, which was all planned out but never built, yet Ada Lovelace decided to devise programs for it beyond Babbage’s original intent for the device) used decimal entirely rather than binary. Mind you, the device was mechanical, and was meant to deal in numbers. HOWEVER, its input system was in the form of punched cards, so not all of the machine was strictly decimal. But it mostly was.
If decimal isn’t outside the binary enough, there IS a number base that DEFINITELY is. Base32768, which is great at making binary data no longer binary. Base32768 is special in that 15 bits of data are stored per Unicode Plane 0 (Basic Multilingual Plane, whose characters in UTF-16 take up exactly 16 bits) code point. The resulting efficiency assuming no compression is involved is an efficiency of 93.75% (15/16ths), which is FAR more efficient than Base64 could ever do, which, when you combine it with heavy compression like my program BWTC32Key (http://b3k.sourceforge.io) does (it also uses AES256-CTR after the compression but before the Base32768), it can justifiably be an archive format when stored as UTF-16. BWTC32Key’s files use a .B3K file extension. These files are special in that their base is NOT binary. Their base is actually Base32768, not the Base 2 of binary. Also, some programs consider text documents already to be non-binary files. .B3K files are literally just UTF-16BE text documents that store data. BWTC32Key is something I wrote in 2019 after 4 years of effort and I spent 4 more years updating and adding features to it. So even modern computers that aren’t quantum can escape the binary.
So yes, computers aren’t only binary, even now. Database admins, web designers, and other developers should do well to remember not to have gender, or birth sex (something that should not be asked for willy-nilly), be a boolean value in their code. I mean, BWTC32Key is written in JavaScript and is quite literally a form, except there is no server involved, and everything in it is inline. But it’s still a form. I’ve seen my fair share of forms that are not inclusive to intersex and nonbinary people, among other issues, and as someone who has written code using form elements, I can say that those forms have significant problems in their design in addition to being exclusionary. If you are a developer, don’t replicate that code. Also, ask LGBTQ+ people what they feel is a good form design, and also include a write-in box so people can put what they want in. Oh, and by the way, please support Unicode passwords. BWTC32Key is really good at making them in all their secure glory, but nothing supports them yet, even as 4090s are cracking 8-character ASCII passwords in 48 minutes. Web designers and programmers in general need to be more inclusive of both security and diversity.
TL;DR: Computers aren’t binary either.