Intersex and aging: A (cautionary) research agenda

When we were first asked to write a chapter about intersex^∗and aging, we thought, "How hard can it be?" Surely, with all the social, political, psychological, and biomedical focus on intersex issues in recent decades, including national attention sparked by publication of Jeffrey Eugenides' novel Middlesex (2002) and John Colapinto's nonfiction As Nature Made Him, it would be relatively easy to pull together everything known about intersex and aging. We planned to conduct a literature review; interview activists, clinicians, and scientists; and analyze relevant policy documents. But we quickly discovered, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, that there is no there there. That is, very little published material exists on intersex and aging. Intersex activism focused on the beginnings of life has largely ignored aging, while researchers and policy makers in the field of aging and life course studies have generally excluded intersex as a category. The topic appears to be on nobody's scholarly radar, with the exception of a very few recent articles (e.g., Gedro, 2009; Witten, 2007).