Intersex

Excellent summary in the wake of the UK Supreme Court interpretation of the Equality Act:

If you have strong feelings about what a woman is, that’s fine – whatever they are, this judgement isn’t asking you to change them. The court has stressed that it is not its role “to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex.” Instead, its job was to try to figure out what politicians and the lawyers they worked with meant by the term when they drew up the Equality Act (2010).

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Part of the difficulty with this area of law is that when the Equality Act was written, there was very little public awareness of trans people, and that ignorance extended to the people working on the bill. Although cases of trans men getting pregnant already existed, they dismissed these as anomalous and unlikely to become relevant. Although LGBT groups such as the Equality Network advised them of the existence of non-binary people, they felt that this was a tiny minority not worth worrying about. They were similarly quick to ignore concerns raised by intersex people, and they adopted a binary definition of sex. This would inevitably lead to difficulties as public attitudes and behaviours changed, and as gaps between the law and lived reality emerged.

In the judgement released today, the judges defined ‘biological sex’ as “the sex of a person at birth.” This is, in fact, far from a watertight definition, but, helpfully, they also referenced For Women Scotland’s rather clearer “biological sex as recorded on their birth certificate.” The judges, however, are experts in law, not in medicine or biology, and they did not take evidence from anyone in that category. They therefore make statements such as “as a matter of biology, only biological women can become pregnant,” which might seem reasonable to the average person but which overlook the fact that intersex people sometimes find themselves with inaccurate birth certificates.

Intersex advocates say that they have been shut out of the conversations about gender and health in the United States and that the January 28 executive order has far-reaching consequences for intersex kids, not just because it allows dangerous surgeries to continue.

“None of the EOs mention intersex people specifically — they are systematically scrubbing mentions of intersex people from government websites,” the intersex rights group interACT wrote  in an email to community members.

Several hospitals and doctors have complied with Trump’s order, announcing in recent weeks that they have halted gender-affirming care, though some have resumed care based on ongoing litigation. In some cases, those same health centers that have stopped gender-affirming care have also largely continued to perform controversial sex-altering operations in the form of intersex pediatric surgeries, according to interACT.

Intersex advocates say that juxtaposition lays bare the hypocrisy of the order and those following it. It’s been “striking” to see those same health providers continue non-consensual intersex surgeries, said Sylvan Fraser Anthony, legal and policy director for interACT.

“Hospitals have been so reluctant — flat out refusing or taking years before issuing some partial policy about whether they’re going to be changing practices related to these non-consensual surgeries on intersex children,” Anthony said. “They’ve taken years, if not decades, to review those [policies] and most have not been responsive at all to calls to review and update their standards and their practices for intersex children to respect their bodily autonomy. Whereas they’re responding within a matter of days and weeks to this executive order when no one is making them — rushing to make policy moves that harm trans patients.”

Twenty-five years ago, trans women (those transitioning from male to female) outnumbered trans men (transitioning from female to male) two to one. Today, those seeking hormonal treatment for gender dysphoria are trending younger and are primarily trans men.

Yet, Trump’s first executive order was titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” The text of the order repeatedly states its intent is to protect women from “men (who) self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women … (which) attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety and well-being.”

If the majority of those seeking treatment for gender dysphoria today are primarily trans men (females transitioning to males), then why do women’s spaces need protecting? Nowhere in the executive order or in any of the various state legislative efforts claiming to protect women has there been any concern expressed for protecting men’s spaces from the trans men who will be entering them.

That’s because the language around protecting women is really about asserting dominance over the bodies of individuals classified as female at birth — whether they are cisgender or transgender. It’s about keeping the female body pure, normalizing bodily oppression and perpetuating rape culture.

The language used is also rooted in racism.

There is a reason those who study the rise of Christian nationalism in America emphasize its connection with white supremacy. The language around protecting women from predatory men has an unsavory history in the United States. It isn’t that long ago that Black men in America were lynched regularly, and far too often the reason given was to protect some white woman’s body.

Wanted to share something very important and personal to raise awareness and hopefully help someone who’s struggling with similar feelings I felt back when I was diagnosed as intersex.

Although some people may think that intersex people are rare, they actually make up around 1.7% of the population, which is comparable to the number of people with red hair in the world. Many children are born with ambiguous genitalia, meaning that doctors are unable to identify their sex as either male or female. However, let’s get one thing clear: Sex is NOT binary.

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However, the ambiguity of intersex people’s sex leads to healthcare professionals operating on infants to adjust their sex in order for it to conform to either male or female sexual characteristics. Doctors are legally allowed – with the consent of the infant’s parents – to perform surgeries on children, stripping them of any kind of agency over their own bodies. These procedures can also cause serious problems such as infertility, pain, incontinence, and mental health issues.