The word "intersex" really needs to be binned, as it's entirely inaccurate and promotes the false idea that the various conditions it supposedly covers generally cause people to have sex organs and other characteristics of both sexes, and therefore to be mixed sex or of neither/no sex. Which is precisely the sort of harmful hogwash that the gender ideologues are trying to spread.

And IMO, even the term that's preferred today - "DSDs" - seems to be way too broad and undifferentiated to be fit for (the) purpose(s) for which it is employed, whether by the gender ideologues who've appropriated it to sow confusion, or by persons who have DSDs themselves and their advocates and HCPs.

Under the DSD umbrella are a wide variety of medical conditions, some of which are female only, some of which are male only, and some of which affect both sexes - but most of which do not result in any ambiguity about which sex category the affected individuals sex belong to. I think lumping them all together has ended up doing a disservice to people with these disorders - as it would be to speak of COPD, asthma, cystic fibrosis, lung cancer, pneumonia, panic-related breathing distress, etc and now COVID-19 all as "respiratory conditions."

MRKH-1, for example, is a female-only condition in which the uterus is missing, but the ovaries are usually present and function normally; women with MRKH-1 are otherwise healthy. MRKH-2 is also a female-only condition, but it often has effects that go well beyond the reproductive tract; the kidneys and skeleton/spine are often affected, and some girls/women with the condition will develop hearing impairments and heart defects. However, my understanding is that girls/women with MRKH-2 have normally functioning ovaries, as those with MRKH-1 do, so in neither case is there a need to take exogenous hormones.

By contrast, in Turner's syndrome, also a female-only DSD, the ovaries deteriorate in utero, so girls & women with the condition never go through puberty and the treatment protocol involves taking exogenous hormones. Turner's often affects the development of many parts of the body outside the reproductive tract too; most of the time, it leads to short stature; half the time, it leads to heart defects, and sometimes to learning issues too.

XY 5-ARD, the male-only DSD that Caster Semenya has, is an enzyme deficiency that makes it impossible to convert T into DHT. DHT is needed for the external male genitalia to develop properly in utero; without DHT, males with the condition tend to be born with genitals that look atypical for their sex, and their testes are often undescended or fully internal. Females can have 5-ARD, too but since DHT plays no role in female sex development, in girls 5-ARD is not a DSD.

In 5-ARD, the testes always function normally, as do androgen receptors. As a result, males with 5-ARD are healthy and go through normal male development, including male mini-puberty in the first six months after birth and regular puberty in adolescence. They do not need to take exogenous hormones as with some other DSDs.

With some other "DSD" conditions where there might be internal or "streak" testes, there's a high risk of testicular cancer - so the testes often have to be removed. But that's not the case with 5-ARD; they have low rates of testicular cancer, and so the testes can be left as is without a cancer risk.

Although I've described only a handful of the conditions now all lumped together under the DSD umbrella, I think I've given evidence that including all these diverse conditions in one catch-all category does not serve the people with these diverse conditions. A male with 5-ARD will have very different medical and psychological issues due to his DSD than a female with MRKH will, and I can't imagine a support group including both groups would meet the needs of either.

Using the vague, overarching label "DSD" for all these diverse conditions affecting both sexes also works against the goal of greater understanding of these diverse conditions amongst the general public. Plus it seems like a way of "othering" - putting all the "normies" over here, and all the "DSDs" over there on the sex equivalent of the island of misfit toys. This is much like the racial/ethnic categorization that puts all "whites" of different ethnicities in one group, and lumps everyone else of non-European ethnic heritage and all other shades of skin together under headings like "POC" and "BAME."