I've been seeing a lot of intersex people on tumblr making the claim that you cannot be born with both a penis and a vagina, and I think that what they are trying to do is fight against the Hermaphrodite stereotype - which involves being born with a "fully formed and fully functional" (under perisex ideas of genital normality - our genitals may be fully formed and fully functional to us even if others do not consider them so) penis and vagina.
The thing is, it's been slowly evolving from correcting misinformation to actively spreading it and erasing the lived experiences of those of us with ambiguous genitals.
I think that part of the reason for this is that most folks in the intersex community trend more towards either side of the genital spectrum, and those of us born with more ambiguous genitals are less common, and those of us who were allowed to remain ambiguous beyond childhood and into adulthood are even less common, much less speaking about it regularly on tumblr. As such, you get a lot of generally well-meaning intersex people just sort of making guesses as to what that experience is like and playing a sort of game of telephone about it.
You can be born with both a penis and a vagina, it just may not look or function the way perisex people would expect a penis or vagina to look or function.
A hypospadic micropenis is still a penis. A shallow vagina that doesn't go anywhere is still a vagina. There are plenty of combinations out there, they just don't fit perisex ideas of normality or what might immediately come to mind when we talk about someone having "both sets of genitals".
This isn't even getting into our own perceptions of ourselves and how we label our genitals, as well. Just like how a transmasc individual may refer to his bottom growth as a dick, intersex folk label their genitals a variety of different ways regardless of what others think a penis, vulva, vagina etc "should" look like or what they're "medically" considered to have.
Anyway, just something I've noticed and wanted to talk about a bit. We can combat stereotypes without throwing each other under the bus.
