Intersex: A Memoir

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Intersex explores gender as it forms in concrete and unavoidable patterns in the material world. What happens when a child is born with ambiguous genitalia? What happens when a body is normalized? Intersex provides tangled and shifting answers to both of these questions as it questions our ideas of what is natural and normal about gender and personhood. In this hybrid-genre memoir, intersexed author Aaron Apps adopts and upends historical descriptors of hermaphroditic bodies such as 'freak of nature,' 'hybrid,' 'imposter,' 'sexual pervert,' and 'unfortunate monstrosity' in order to trace his own monstrous sex as it perversely intertwines with gender expectations and medical discourse. Intersex leaves the reader wondering: what does it mean to be human? "Aaron Apps' Intersex is all feral prominence: a physical archive of the 'strange knot.' Thus: necessarily vulnerable, brave and excessive. Like the best kind of memoir, Apps brings a reader close to an experience of life that is both 'unattainable' and attentive to 'what will emerge from things.' In doing so, he has written a book that bursts from its very frame." (BHANU KAPIL)