by Sarah Mirk
Sometimes, a baby has a different configuration of its internal and external anatomy. For example, a baby with testes and a penis may have XX chromosomes or a baby with XY chromosomes and a uterus may not have a vagina. Variations like these that do not fit into the binary definition of male or female bodies are intersex. The Intersex Society of North America estimates that about 1 in 1,500 or 1 in 2,000 babies are born with sexual anatomy variations. In the past, most doctors performed surgery on the genitalia of intersex babies to make the anatomy match the doctor’s determination of a baby’s sex. These surgeries often took place under a cloud of stigma and secrecy. Many intersex children did not even know they had had surgery at birth. These days, the Intersex Society of North America recommends that these surgeries not be performed on intersex children. They should be able to choose what they want when they are older and to give informed consent about their treatment. They should also have expert advice and peer support to make decisions.
Vulvas, Uteruses, Vaginas—Oh My!
Many people have misconceptions about what the word vagina refers to. Here’s what is accurate: The vagina is a muscular and flexible internal canal that has a small external opening. The vaginal canal connects to the cervix and uterus. The outside part of this genitalia—the part you can see—is the vulva.
Vulva Myths
Sometimes people joke that vulvas smell like fish. Vulvas do have a slight smell, but it’s a normal, healthy smell. Vulvas are actually self-cleaning. Isn’t that cool? But if you do notice that your vulva has a rotten or musky smell, you may have an infection. Make an appointment right away to see a doctor.
If you haven’t ever looked at your genitalia, go for it! Get a handheld mirror and put it between your legs, angling it upward so you can see what’s there. If you have a vulva, the first thing you’ll probably see is hair. Pubic hair begins to grow on the labia majora (Latin for “big lips”) during puberty. If you want to, you can carefully trim this hair with scissors to get a better look at your vulva. (Some people shave and wax pubic hair. But be careful if you decide to do this. You can end up with painful razor burn or ingrown hairs.) Inside the labia majora are smaller folds of skin called the labia minora, or “small lips.” Both sets of lips help protect the vulva’s supersensitive areas. The inner and outer lips of the vulva come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. They may be brown, pink, red, or purplish. Sex educator Heather Corinna describes the labia minora this way: “They tend to look a lot like flower petals or two little tongues.”
Toward the backside of the vulva is the vaginal opening. This is the hole that people insert fingers, toys, or penises into when they want to have vaginal sex. The vaginal opening also is where to insert tampons if you menstruate. It’s also where babies pass through during vaginal childbirth.
Inside is the vagina canal, a muscular tube 3 to 6 inches (7 to 15 cm) long that connects to the cervix and uterus. The uterus is where eggs, made in the ovaries, wait to be fertilized. If an egg is fertilized, that person becomes pregnant. If the egg is not fertilized, the egg and a layer of the uterus’s internal lining flow out of the vagina for a few days once a month. That’s menstruation, or a period.
A thin membrane called the hymen covers the entrance to the vaginal canal. Hymens are often naturally full of holes. Everyday activities such as bike riding, horseback riding, or gymnastics can rip the hymen. So if you decide to have vaginal sex someday, you may or may not have a hymen.
Above the vaginal opening is a much smaller hole that leads to the urethra—the hole that pee comes out of. This connects to your bladder. Inserting anything into the urethra is typically extremely painful, so steer clear if you’re poking around.
At the top end of the vulva is the clitoris, a round and very sensitive organ. The clitoris is the vulva’s pleasure center. It is home to eight thousand nerve endings. It doesn’t have any reproductive function, so scientists think the whole point of the clitoris is to feel good. The visible part of the clitoris is often pea-size or even smaller and is part of a much larger internal organ.
Dick-tionary
Penises are just as unique and varied as vulvas. The head of the penis is more sensitive than the shaft. Inside the shaft are long cylinders of tissue that are usually soft and spongy. When you’re sexually stimulated, blood rushes to the penis and fills up the spongy tissue, making it hard. This is an erection. Erections are sometimes called boners, even though the penis actually has no bones. It’s only tissue, and it softens again when the blood leaves.
Boner Science
Erections aren’t controllable, and they don’t happen just from sexual stimulation. Erections can happen if you see something that turns you on. But they also happen as a reflex reaction in situations where you get nervous, scared, angry, or stressed. A lot of people get erections when they least want them, like right before a class presentation. Many people get “morning wood,” waking up with an erect penis. Erections can happen naturally during the night, especially during the deepest parts of sleep. Erections go away on their own or after ejaculation. As hormones even out after puberty, the number of random reflex erections decreases.
The shaft and head of the penis are covered by the foreskin, a piece of stretchy skin. When the penis becomes erect, the foreskin naturally retracts, revealing the head. About 80 percent of Americans with penises have surgery to remove the foreskin, usually when they’re babies. This circumcision is done for cultural or religious reasons or because parents believe foreskins contribute to health risks. The science on whether it’s healthier to be circumcised or uncircumcised is hotly debated. Many critics say the surgery is unnecessary.
Penises are all shaped a little differently. Some are long, some are short, some are thick around, and some are skinny. Some penises are very straight when erect, and other penises curve up or down. People talk a lot about penis size—having a large penis is seen as better than a smaller penis. The truth is that sexual pleasure has nothing to do with penis size. Smaller penises are just as sensitive and full of nerves as bigger penises.
The penis has one hole: the urethra, which is at the very tip of the head. All the fluids that come out of a penis—pre-ejaculate (the clear liquid emitted when you’re aroused), semen (the white, sticky liquid that’s full of sperm), and urine—come out of the body through this hole. Ejaculation of sperm, or cumming, happens when a penis is erect. Scientists estimate that thirty-nine million sperm are in the average glob of ejaculate.
Behind the penis is the scrotum, a sack of loose skin and muscle. The scrotum and penis are sensitive to temperature and will shrink when the air is colder. Inside the sack are two testes, or balls, that vary in size from about olive-sized to about apricot-sized. Testes are where sperm is made. The testes are constantly making a tremendous amount of sperm—an average of 290 million sperm cells a day. Sperm moves out of the testes and into the penis in a little tube called the vas deferens. If sperm isn’t ejaculated, it dissolves back into the body and is recycled into new sperm.
Butts and Breasts
Compared to penises and vulvas, butts are simple. Everyone has one! Butts are full of nerve endings, so they’re supersensitive. The visible ring-shaped opening between your cheeks is the anus. Inside is a canal called the rectum, which some people use for anal sex. If you’re ever going to insert something into your rectum, do so with extreme caution. It’s easy to tear the sensitive skin around the anus. Proceed very slowly and use a water-based lubricant, which is sold at drugstores.
Everyone has nipples and breasts too. Breasts come in all shapes and sizes. Many people’s breasts include glands to produce milk. Biologically, small breasts can be just as sensitive and good at producing milk as big breasts. Genetics and weight determine breast size. Typically, breasts are a slightly different size and grow at different rates. If one of your breasts is a little bigger than the other, that’s normal.
Studies show that regardless of a person’s gender, nipple stimulation lights up the same part of the brain
as genital stimulation. But nipple sizes and sensitivities vary. Some people have supersensitive nipples, while others feel hardly anything on their nipples. Nipples get softer and harder throughout the day. They get bigger and harder when they’re cold and smaller and soft when they’re warm.
Gender Expression
People present their gender in a million different ways through their clothing, hairstyles, and body posture. Psychologists usually talk about gender expression on a range between masculine and feminine. Since there are an infinite number of ways to dress and act, people are coming up with creative new ways to describe gender expression. Here are several examples:
Androgynous. Someone who presents as a mix of masculine and feminine or neither, often blurring the lines between masculine and feminine. Celebrities Ruby Rose and Bex Taylor-Klaus often present androgynously.
Butch. Someone who presents as masculine, usually a masculine lesbian. The term can also refer to masculine gay men or to masculine nonbinary people. Two butch celebrities are Lena Waithe and Lea DeLaria.
Femme. Someone who presents as feminine. Many men who perform in drag—such as RuPaul or Trixie Mattel—aim for a femme look. The term can also refer to heterosexual women such as Beyoncé, Madonna, and Rihanna, who present femininely, or to feminine nonbinary people, such as Alok Vaid-Menan.
Who Are You Anyway?
Biological sex is a category that includes external genitalia and internal biology, such as chromosomes and hormones. When babies are born, doctors usually label them male or female based on external anatomy. But gender identity is defined by how you think about yourself. Do you think of yourself as a boy? As a girl? As neither? Or does it change day to day?
People use many terms to describe their gender identity, and they are constantly inventing new terms. In the “Gender Nation Glossary,” the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and the lifestyle website Refinery29 define three main gender identities that fall outside the binary:
agender: a person who does not identify with any gender
gender fluid: someone for whom gender identity and presentation is on a spectrum. A gender-fluid person may fluctuate between presenting as feminine, masculine, neither, or both.
nonbinary: a person who experiences their gender identity, gender expression, or both outside the categories of man or woman
Instead of using the pronouns she/her or he/him to describe themselves, people who identify outside the binary may choose to describe themselves with gender neutral pronouns, such as they/them. For example, “I saw Em at the store today, and they were buying my favorite cheese!” The pronouns you use to define yourself are a personal decision. If people don’t ask you which pronouns you prefer, let them know. And if you don’t ask someone which pronouns they prefer, you may be misgendering them, which is rude and hurtful.
How Do You Know If You’re Transgender?
Most people have moments where they don’t feel entirely like the gender they were assigned at birth. But for trans people, that feeling endures over many years. Every person’s experience with gender is different—there’s no one story of what it’s like to be transgender. On the website Reddit, hundreds of people responded to a post asking people to recall their earliest memories of realizing they were trans, and every story was different. One trans man wrote,
I remember as a preteen being very distressed as my chest started to grow. I hated it. Every bit of it. I was so embarrassed and disgusted by the little bumps starting to protrude under my shirts. As a teenager, I overcompensated in femininity because I felt that’s what would garner me attention from people, what would make me liked. I wore push-up bras and just tried really hard to be something I wasn’t. At 18 and 19, I started really getting into cosplay, but instead of choosing female characters, I was always gravitating towards male. It’s where I felt comfortable, where I felt . . . REAL.
Many transgender people know they are trans when they are as young as four or five. For other people, it can take a long time to figure out what feels right. Some transgender or nonbinary people don’t start experimenting with clothing, makeup, fashions, and haircuts to find what feels “real” until they are adults. Then some people may talk to a doctor about using hormones, surgery, or both to transition medically. This long process involves counseling and meetings with doctors.
When a person is sure about the decision to transition and has the okay from doctors, they may choose to start taking hormones. People who are transitioning to male will take testosterone, and people who are transitioning to female will take estrogen. The effects of hormones are profound, impacting everything from where hair grows on your body to the shape of your face. Some people decide to have gender-confirmation surgery such as top surgery (breast augmentation or removal) or bottom surgery (genital reconstruction surgery or removal of the ovaries, uterus, or testes).
These options require careful consideration, discussion with medical professionals, and personal research. Not everyone who is trans decides to start taking hormones or get surgery. Some trans people feel right in their bodies after changing things like their name, hair, pronouns, and clothing.
Defining Your Desires
It would be nice if we could decide exactly to whom we would be attracted, right? It would be convenient to not get a crush on the emotionally unavailable person who’s totally wrong for you. But the heart works in mysterious ways. The term sexual orientation describes your inherent, enduring emotional, romantic, or sexual attraction to other people.
“Am I gay? Am I bisexual? Am I straight?” Sexual attraction is complicated! People’s identities often become more complex and shift throughout their lives as they gain more experience. In the 1940s, researcher and biologist Alfred Kinsey interviewed thousands of Americans about their sex lives. His groundbreaking research showed that many people aren’t entirely straight or entirely gay. Instead, human sexuality is on a spectrum. “The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats,” he wrote. “The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects.” Based on this idea, he developed the Kinsey Scale, which ranges from one (100 percent heterosexual) to six (100 percent homosexual). An x stands for people who don’t feel much sexual attraction at all. That’s called asexuality. Asexual people might want to partner with someone and be emotionally romantic and intimate but without the drive to be physically intimate.
Asexuality: The Invisible Orientation
Some people don’t feel sexual at all and don’t enjoy sex. That’s normal. The website What Is Asexuality? lists these questions to help evaluate whether you might be asexual:
Are you generally disinterested in the idea of sex?
Is your interest in sex more scientific than emotional?
Have you ever had to pretend to be interested in sex to fit in?
Have you ever felt “broken” because you don’t experience sexual feelings as do those around you?
Have you ever felt that you were straight “by default” or that you were bisexual because you were equally disinterested in all genders?
Have you ever gone out with someone or had sex because you felt “that’s what you’re supposed to do?”
Many people identify somewhere in the range between 100 percent heterosexual and 100 percent homosexual. How many people in the United States identify as not entirely straight? A 2016 survey of 1.6 million Americans found that 4.1 percent of people identified as either lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. That would mean roughly ten million adults in the United States identify as LGBT. Age makes a big difference in how people identify. People born after 1980 are more than twice as likely as older folks to identify as LGBT. According to a 2016 survey by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, about 12 to 16 percent of young people in the United States identify as somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum. Young adult author Juno Dawson says, “Just because LGBT people are in a minority, it doesn’t mean they are not NORMAL. People with blue eyes are in the minority, but we don’t think of them as a
bnormal, do we? We don’t look at Jake Gyllenhaal and say, LOOK AT THAT MASSIVE, BLUE-EYED FREAK!”
SEXUAL ORIENTATION BY AGE (in percent)
18–34
35–51
54–71
72+
Heterosexual
84
91
94
98
Bisexual
6
4
2
1
Asexual
4
1
2
>.5
Gay or lesbian
3
3
2
>.5
Pansexual
2
1
1
1
GENDER IDENTITY BY AGE (in percent)
18–34
35–51
54–71
72+
Cisgender
88
94
97
97
Agender
3
>.5
>.5
1
Gender fluid
3
1
—
—
Transgender
