One of the most frustrating things about getting more involved in intersex debates is that I keep learning that words I've been using for a while are actually slurs against my kin.

I recently posted about Hermaphroditius, for instance. I'm willing to bet a lot of you have reacted to this post with "wait, hermaphrodite is a slur? I thought it was a biology term for snails?" And that's perfectly understandable, because I did too! I've only ever used that term being used for biology- which, mind you, would still make it very innappropriate to use for humans, but not necessarily a slur. Then I learned that it has been used primarily to refer to intersex people across history (For instance, John Money, the guy infamously credited for the whole "we need to mutilate infant at birth trust me it'll be better in the long run", referred to his subjects as "hermaphrodites.") I initially thought this was a slur in english and nowhere else- but recently while listening to a 50s podcast in my own language, I heard a guy refer to another as an "hermaphrodite" in a clearly derogatory way.

Obviously this is the main one, but I had a similar moment with shi/hir recently. I only ever knew of this pronoun set from queer wikis and such. Turns out they are also largely considered as slurs since they originated from furry porn for a "herms" specie (well, I know some intersex folks use them and good for them, but usually not a good sign if a perisex person uses these.)

I've heard people argue that "futanari" is also an intersex slur. Is it? The term originates from the Scroll of Illness, which is as far as I can tell a comedy work making fun of doctors and/or made-up diseases- the "futanari" coming up when the subject of ridicule is someone with both a penis and a vagina. Certainly, futas don't exist in real life, but people with ambiguous genitalia (namely here clitoromegalie which might look close enough to the drawing in question) do exist, so. Not a promising start!

I don't speak japanese myself, so I can't know if "futanari" is considered a slur by japanese people. You've heard me complain about "futa" being used interchangeably with "intersex" enough to know that it is real fucking rude to call an intersex person a "futanari." But should teh word futa be banned alltogether? I've seen people propose alternative words (bigenital, bisexed, altersex, or salmacian to name a few), should we go with these?

In an ideal world, it'd be great. Sadly we live in this one, and frankly I don't think there is any force on earth that could make people drop the word futa. I mean, "trap" is still widely used in porn spaces, and there's a MUCH stronger ground imo on arguing that it's a slur that shouldn't be used anymore. Additionally, fact is that when people don't use the word "futanari" for their porn they use "intersex" instead, and personally I find that worse. I'd much rather people keep "futanari" to refer to the fetishized body type that does not exist rather than use "intersex" and muddling intersex search results even further. Of course, that implies you should never ever use the word "futanari" to refer to an intersex person- that would be a slur.