"Anyone who's like, 'Well, I've never met an intersex person,' I can guarantee that you have," says author and advocate Alicia Roth Weigel. "You just didn't know it." To all superficial appearances, Weigel seems like a cisgender woman. Yet when her mother was pregnant with her, the doctors told her to expect a son, because the amnio test showed the presence of XY chromosomes. But Weigel, like millions of other people around the world, was born intersex. And after undergoing surgery for what doctors at the time referred to as a "disorder of sex development," Weigel spent a childhood full of procedures and monitoring — and believing she had to be cautious in how she understood and explained her own body.
Now, however, she's one of the most visible intersex individuals in America, speaking out against invasive bathroom bills, working to keep the I in LGBTQIA+ from standing for "invisible" and sharing her own story in her cheekily named new memoir "Inverse Cowgirl."
