Intersex as Acceptance and Emergence: Can Psychosocial Frameworks Disrupt Medical Embodiment?

This chapter explores how psychosocial care within healthcare is an essential element of reframing intersex embodiment and care for intersex people away from paradigmatic medical narratives ‘fixing’ a ‘disorder’ and towards supporting a person. Many biomedical accounts of intersex as a ‘disorder’ remain prominent in psychosocial provision with care often been offered as an ‘afterthought’ or an ‘emotional repository’. Such approaches fail to consider the transformative effect that psychosocial care can have on the intersex experience. Such care can offer support to ensure that intersex people and their families are equipped to deal with the structural challenges that they will face as a result of their intersex variations. These transformative approaches construct intersex as a contextual, situated and dependent individual in need of support in order to overcome the structural issues that they will be faced with. These insights are read alongside shifts in legal theory towards notions of ‘embodied integrity’ in order to outline a thicker conception of legal embodiment.