What is really damaging to the intersex community is when nonintersex people wishing to gender transition decide they are intersex, while knowing nothing about actual intersex bodies–and then run around telling eveyone they meet strange stories about what being intersex means.  I’ve encountered dozens of such people, and some of the stories they tell are frankly bizarre. […] intersex wannabes tell strange stories about their bodies, trying to gain support from others to secure binary gender transition services or to validate their genderqueer identity. […] Hopefully this phenomenon will fade away as transition services become easier to access, but today it’s still a big problem for the intersex community, because these wannabes spread disinformation, sometimes setting themselves up as “intersex authorities” to people around them.  Some of this disinformation can be actively dangerous, and none of it helps demythologize intersex reality in the general populace.  Unfortunately, the substantial frustration in the intersex community about wannabes plays a large part in making transphobic feminist rhetoric sound attractive to intersex people. If the trans community wants intersex people to ally with it, it is very important that trans people educate themselves on what intersexuality actually means, and call out other trans people they hear telling impossible stories of having had two sets of genitals in childhood, or having impregnated themselves. 

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Trans people are also going to continue to alienate intersex people if they continue to assert the more abstract claim that the entire trans community has the right to call itself intersex, because trans people have an intersex brain, or the brain of one binary sex in the body of the other. This claim deeply alienates intersex people for two reasons.  First, the impulse to appropriate the term intersex is based on the presumption that it is better to be deemed an intersex person than a trans person.  This indicates a profound ignorance of all the the pain and marginalization intersex people face–in other words, it illustrates nonintersex privilege. And secondly, the people who make this “intersex brain” case generally go on to assert that they deserve free gender transition services, because intersex people get those services for free as children, as society understands in their case that this is medically necessary.  This claim presents the central problem against which intersex advocates struggle–forced genital surgery performed on unconsenting children–as both necessary and good.   Arguments in favor of forced sex assignment surgery on intersex infants (or adult intersex athletes, or any other group of intersex people) are so maddening to intersex advocates that they can drive people into the arms of TERFs.