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Conjoined twins who refused to be 'fixed'

George and Lori Schappell didn’t seem to care whether others understood them. But America is still struggling to accommodate bodies like theirs.

Lin and Win Htut shared a single pair of genitals; in 1984 doctors designated the more “aggressive” of the 2-year-old boys to retain their penis, while the other was given a surgically constructed vagina and reassigned as a girl. The Virginia Quarterly Review once published a poem written in Lori’s voice, in which the poet took it upon herself to warn an imagined observer: “You don’t know the forest / of two minds bound by weeds / grown from one to the other, / the synapses like bees / cross-pollinating / our honeyed brain.” Although children who identify as trans aren’t eligible for medical interventions before the onset of puberty and only some choose hormones or surgery in their late teens, the idea of little kids receiving those treatments has helped inflamepanic over whether they should be allowed at all, even for adults.

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