AcknowledgementsI would like to express my deepest gratitude to the 23 interviewees who shared with me their stories about their lives. I would also like to thank the doctors, bloggers and patient organizations that helped me recruit the interviewees.
KeywordsNormality, negotiation, diagnosis, sexed embodiment, atypical sex development, qualitative analysis, young women, Sweden
Research highlights There is limited knowledge about facing atypical sex development as a young woman. The article explores how such women negotiate sexed embodiment. It shows how they use a "differently normal" and a "normally different" strategy. Doing so, they focus on bodily features that they do have to construe normalcy. Through a thematic and interpretative analysis, I outline two negotiation strategies: the "differently normal" and the "normally different" strategy. In the former, the women present themselves as just slightly different from 'normal' women. In the latter, they stress that everyone is different in some manner and thereby claim normalcy. The analysis reveals that access to diagnosis corresponds to the ways in which the women present themselves as "differently normal" and "normally different", thus shedding light on the complex role of diagnosis in their negotiations of sexed embodiment. It also reveals that the women make use of what they do have and how alignments with and work on norms interplay as normality is construed.