Intersex

The single most important sentence about the word is that intersex is not a gender identity. It reports how a body developed. An intersex person may be a woman, a man, non-binary, or something else, and most are not transgender. The term appears in this catalogue because it appears on almost every list of gender identities, which is the error worth correcting rather than repeating.

Why the word keeps appearing on gender lists

Two categories are being run together. Sex characteristics are chromosomes, gonads, hormones and anatomy; gender identity is a person's own sense of their gender. The categories interact but they are not the same axis, and someone can be unusual on one and entirely ordinary on the other.

The confusion is old and partly the fault of the medical record. For most of the twentieth century intersex variations were treated as conditions to be resolved, often surgically and in infancy, so the literature is full of language about assignment and correction that reads like a claim about identity. It is not one. Cisgender and Transgender describe the relation between an identity and a birth assignment; intersex describes the body that assignment was made about.

What the figures actually say

interACT gives about 1.7 per cent of births showing some intersex trait, and about 0.05 per cent involving genital differences apparent at birth. The gap between those two numbers is the whole argument about the word. The wider figure counts every variation of sex development, including late-onset conditions that are common and rarely thought of as intersex; the narrower one counts the cases that historically triggered surgery. Both are cited as the prevalence of intersex, which is how the same fact ends up quoted at a thirtyfold difference.

Sources that give one figure without saying which definition it uses are not usable for this claim.

What to call it

The word itself is roughly a century old. Richard Goldschmidt's work on intersexuality in 1917 carried it into English biology from the German, and Merriam-Webster dates the English term to that period. It replaced hermaphrodite, which had been the medical word since antiquity and which survives now only as an insult.

Intersex is the term most intersex-led organisations use. The clinical literature often prefers differences of sex development, abbreviated DSD, and many intersex people reject that phrase because disorders was the original expansion and the framing that produced the surgeries. Hermaphrodite is obsolete in human contexts and offensive.

The intersex flag, yellow with a hollow purple circle, was designed in 2013 by Morgan Carpenter of Intersex Human Rights Australia. The colours were chosen for having no gendered associations at all, which is a fair summary of what the community has asked for.

Where an identity does attach

Some intersex people do use gender terms built around the variation. Ipsogender names an intersex person who identifies with the sex they were assigned; intergender is used by some intersex people for a gender shaped by being intersex. Those are identities and belong on a list of them. The bare word intersex is not, and putting it there implies that having an intersex body is a way of being a gender.

What changed in the record

The shift from a medical category to a rights category is recent and datable. Malta became the first country to prohibit non-consensual surgical modification of intersex minors in 2015, and the United Nations and several national human rights bodies have since treated early surgery as a rights question rather than a clinical one. Before that the literature is almost entirely surgical, which is why older sources describe intersex people in language most would now reject.

That history is the reason the terminology argument is sharp. A word choice here is a position on whether a body needed fixing.