What’s the difference between hermaphrodite and intersex?
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Intersex is the current, scientific and medical term to describe a person who was born with sexual characteristics of males and females. This is a wide umbrella that even covers some people who look at every level above the genetic to be on a given gender. For example, there is at least one woman with 46,XY chromosomes who has given birth to a child. She has complete androgen insensitivity, so her gonads developed into ovaries and uterus and vagina instead of into testes and prostate and penis.
Hermaphrodite is an older term that’s much more narrow. This was meant to describe a person who displayed “both” sets of characteristics, most typically by having both a penis and a vagina. Others that would be considered “intersex” today would be sometimes called pseudohermaphrodites.
The differences basically are that “intersex” is a modern, clinical term that is a much larger umbrella than “hermaphrodite” covers.
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