Australian governments, their rules and regulations, and state and federal legislation all have yet to come to terms with the existence and facts of intersex, despite intersex people numbering between 1:60 and 1:100 of the Australian population.
We are pleased to note when they make an effort to begin to understand though, and hope that our comments will stimulate them to think further, and try harder, to get it 100% right in every instance.
Who knows? One day intersex Australians may be treated as full and equal citizens with full human rights and that would be a very fine thing indeed.
In that spirit, we are pleased to report that the Australian Passport Office, in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, has made first steps in reforming its practices in relation to what it calls ‘sex and gender diverse’ people. We thank them for this change of attitude towards those who fall under that banner.
Screenshot, Sex and Gender Diverse Passport Applicants page, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
It should be noted, though that DFAT’s new position is essentially a return to the more humane and realistic policy that existed before former Howard federal government Foreign Minister Alexander Downer instituted a homophobic, transphobic and intersexphobic policy through a ministerial directive denying passports to those whom he labelled ‘transgender.’
At last two intersex people were denied passports under Downer’s ministerial directive after they were falsely labelled as ‘transgender.’ Bad enough that any Australian is denied a passport due to ministerial phobia against them. Worse that an intersex person is effectively punished simply for being born intersex.
Both intersex Australians eventually received their passports, after a great deal of anguish, pain, frustration and sheer expense.
Indirect Outcomes
In one instance, the byzantine difficulties of the experience indirectly led to the Inner City Legal Centre (ICLC) in Sydney setting up its world’s first intersex legal service.
It also almost resulted in the individual and the ICLC being forced to fight all over again exactly the same kind of case against DFAT that Grace Abrams had already fought and won in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
It had come to that partly due to Downer’s ministerial directive and partly because of the British Records Office’s tendency to misplace divorce records. The individual concerned was long divorced at the time she was refused a passport, but could not furnish proof of divorce due to her records being misplaced in the UK. Proof was eventually provided by the British Records Office some time afterwards.
The conclusion to be drawn from all this is that there is one rule for transgender people, and another for intersex people, even when they are mislabelled as ‘transgender.’
One-size-fits-all does not work, especially for intersex people where every single one of us is unique and living in unique circumstances. One-size-fits-all is bad law and even worse medicine. One-size-fits-all medicine is the product of belief, not science, and belief has no place there.
We have learned that intersex people can assume nothing when it comes to Australian law, and must be prepared to re-fight court cases already won by fellow non-intersex citizens.
Thanks & Suggestions for DFAT
We thank DFAT for adopting the blanket term proposed by the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) to cover LGBTI people – ‘sex and gender diverse.’ We have made separate commentary about terminology in our On Terminology page in this website.
We are grateful that DFAT has made its policy on ‘sex and gender diverse’ people public now. It has not always been so. Enquiries to various passport offices in the past about passports for intersex people yielded widely varying answers from a number of different DFAT officers, and it was impossible to gauge the actual policy until now.
However there is room for improvement.
The page’s first answer includes this phrase…
… the ICAO standard that the sex data field on the travel document must be completed with the letter M for male, F for female or X for unspecified.
The ICAO is the International Civil Aviation Authority, and the regulation permitting a choice of M, F or X has stood for some decades now. X has been interpreted to refer to intersex people, or at least those intersex people who choose not to be identified as male or female.
Previous enquiries at the APO about Australian intersex people’s right to an X yielded the reply that it is only permitted when one has been classified as being of unspecified or indeterminate sex by the doctor who attended one’s birth. Given Australian doctors’ extreme reluctance to do so, preferring instead to assign the baby as male or female regardless of whether non-consensual surgery was performed or not, we only know of two Australians whose birth certificates record either non-specific designation.
We believe that intersex people who choose to be identified with an X on their passport should be permitted to do so, regardless of their attending birth physician’s beliefs and practices at the time, and that a policy and application procedure should be formulated and publicised.
However, DFAT’s page does not go into details or specifics on X. We ask that DFAT now clarifies this oversight.
We also ask that DFAT consults with intersex people on the matter of concepts and terminology.
Words and understandings that apply to some ‘sex and gender diverse’ people will not apply to all of them. Intersex is a very different phenomenon to others under that banner. Beliefs that apply to us, or some of us, may be inappropriate when applied to non-intersex people. And the reverse very much applies too.
We have even identified phrases in the current version of the DFAT page that non-intersex and intersex people may regard as anachronistic, discredited or simply the product of misunderstanding. We can suggest improvements.
We are glad to help DFAT in any way that we can.
