“All humans are male, female, or hermaphrodite”: That’s what many, many generations of students, future lawyers, administrators and notaries learned when they studied the first few pages of their compulsory readings at a medieval or early modern university.
Source: Rolandino de Passageri (ca. 1215-1300), “Summa artis notariae” (= Law text book), Bologna ca. 1255 (here: Reprint Lyon 1559). >>> More info
Hermaphrodites were recognized and protected by european civil and canon (=church) laws for more than 1000 years – STOP ERASING INTERSEX HISTORY!
“The idea that hermaphrodites in premodern Europe were persecuted on a regular base […] is still a common misconception. Indeed, it may be called a myth, and in several cases, this myth is quoted to support a dangerous narrative of progress: if hermaphrodites were killed as prodigies in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and adult hermaphrodites were persecuted in the later Middle Ages and in the 16th and 17th centuries, so the argument runs, then the Englightenment model that there were no ‚true‘ hermaphrodites was great progress; true, it re-defined double-sexed humans as ‚pseudo-hermaphrodites‘, but this pathologicalisation was still better than persecuting them, wasn’t it?” >>> Christof Rolker (2016): fulltext
See also:
– The Racist Roots of Intersex Genital Mutilations (IGM)
– Academic Complicity in IGM Practices
– Instrumentalizing intersex: “The fact that LGBTs in particular embrace intersex is due to an excess of projection” – Georg Klauda (2002)