Pidgeon Pagonis

Pidgeon Pagonis
Born	1986 (age 30–31) Chicago, Illinois
Residence	Chicago, Illinois
Nationality	American
Alma mater	DePaul University
Occupation	Activist Writer Artist
Known for	Intersex activism
Website	pidgeonismy.name

Pidgeon Pagonis is an intersex American activist, writer, artist, and consultant. They advocate for intersex human rights and against nonconsensual intersex medical interventions.

Pagonis was born in 1986 in Chicago, Illinois, and has Mexican and Greek ancestry. As a child, Pagonis, who is queer and nonbinary-identified and uses singular they pronouns, was diagnosed with androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS). They were not told of this condition, but were raised as a girl, told that they had ovarian cancer (when they in fact had no ovaries, but internal testes), and subjected to a series of surgeries to alter their genitalia.

Pagonis learned about intersex traits during their freshman year in college, while attending a lecture at DePaul University. They subsequently accessed their own medical records, and learned the truth about their condition.

Pagonis graduated from DePaul with bachelor's and master's degrees in women and gender studies.

Pagonis joined the advocacy organization interACT a few years after discovering they were intersex. They became the leadership coordinator of the youth program at interACT. In 2013, Pagonis testified with Mauro Cabral, Natasha Jiménez and Paula Sandrine Machado before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights about the medical interventions they were subjected to as an intersex child. They were also featured in the 2012 documentary Intersexion.

In 2014, Pagonis created a documentary of their own, The Son They Never Had: Growing Up Intersex, which they tour around the country, advocating against nonconsensual "corrective surgeries". This work was published in a bioethics journal, Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics.The Son They Never Had was also shown at the Leeds Queer Film Festival in the UK in March 2017.

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