When we're trying to find accurate ways to describe ourselves we quickly find that there is a whole lot more to our experience of life, our experience of ourselves and others and their perceptions of us than can possibly fit in the silly notion that everyone is male/masculine/heterosexual/man OR female/feminine/heterosexual/woman. In Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate" he dissects one of the worst, pernicious errors of the 20th century - the idea that all children are born with totally blank brains and that we can program them like little computers to be anything and anyone we want. It was the basis of unspeakable abuse to intersex children during the 70's- today. I am one of those intersex people born with no more reason to be called male than female before the paradigm of surgery, lies, shame and secrecy started to spread due to spectacularly bad pseudo-science. So, I - like many other intersex children with ambiguous genitals was called a nick name that was gender neutral, dressed in gender neutral colors, handed a variety of toys and allowed to sort myself, which I did right on schedule - identifying myself as a boy by the age of 3, and with others seeing me as one by that age. I grew up a boy among boys and became a man among men and my sexual and romantic attraction being toward those most like me instead of least like me. and having typical gender fluid attributes found other gay boys/men like myself. I am not male. There are a host of physical, anatomical, hormonal things I don't share with males. I have attributes they don't share with me. I have no testicles for one thing, and I am sterile. I've met intersex people anatomically similar to me who instead of seeing themselves as boys saw themselves as girls and seeing as both of us needed artificial hormones to grow up and have healthy bodies they chose the female set of those where I was given the male set. The need for adult hormones to have healthy bodies also creates secondary sex characteristics to varying degree in people whether they are intersex or not and one's ability to utilize those hormones doesn't always align with our gender like it does with ordinary people. If you can't process testosterone well you may end up staying sick, or taking estrogens instead. That isn't something that happens to the garden variety male or female - they can easily thrive on either set of hormones. That's why transgender people can transfer sex attributes. So what would happen if intersex children were told they are intersex and that it's perfectly lovely for them to be intergender as well? What if we could just be both of those things without being forced to borrow a gender? What would have happened if we weren't erased, denied, and rationalized away? What if you could be a perfectly good intersex/intergender person from day one? No one alive knows except perhaps in some small groups of people isolated from "modern" civilization. However , there are historians like Elizabeth Reis who are looking for answers and maybe together with anthropologists we'll get a glimpse of the past and head toward a better future.
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