WE are currently building a network of websites for Organisation Intersex International and its national affiliates and the content of this website will be migrating there as well. OII’s The Intersex Network is located at oiiinternational.com.
In the meantime this site will be operating under service as usual.
IN what amounts to something of an understatement, an officer of the Government Equalities Office – GEO – has replied to an intersex activist in the United Kingdom about the many examples of discrimination that he has shared with them in letters and emails.
Letter from the UK GEO recognizing “the difficulties intersex people can face” and committing to “tackling discrimination wherever it occurs, regardless of people’s background”.
Thank you for your e-mail of 03/01/2012 2:50:17 PM about intersex people.
Please be assured that the Government is fully aware of the difficulties intersex people can face and is committed to tackling discrimination wherever it occurs, regardless of people’s background. Government Equalities Office officials are engaging with relevant Government departments to consider how these issues can be addressed, and will keep stakeholders informed as matters develop.
We look forward to being informed about matters as they develop and continue to point out that the only stakeholders in intersex genitals, bodies and lives are intersex people ourselves. There are no other stakeholders and we question whether anyone else who is not intersex is qualified to consult upon our bodies and lives.
WE at Organisation Intersex International – OII – wish to express our gratitude to Trans Media Watch – TMW – and Helen Belcher in particular for including intersex in their written submission and Helen’s presentation to the Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practice and ethics of the press in the United Kingdom. Putting oneself into the public eye and in the firing line of the British press is no small thing and demands a very great deal of courage.
The Leveson Inquiry: Wednesday 8 February 2012, Afternoon session - click to go to this web page.
We also wish to thank Helen Belcher for the unprecedented act of mentioning the word intersex eight – eight! – times during her testimony on Wednesday February 8 2012.
The British press is unwittingly collaborating in the silencing, exclusion and erasure - SEE – of intersex people. SEE is a major part of the mechanism of medicine’s and society’s power and control over intersex bodies and lives. We hope that members of the press take notice of Ms Belcher’s repeated use of the word intersex and pick up on the very real possibility of a story there.
The Guardian’s commentary quotes Helen Belcher thus:
Intersex is where the physical biology of a person has aspects of both genders, Belcher says.
In reality Helen said this:
Intersex is where the physical biology is in between or has aspects of both genders.
Intersex is indeed to do biology which is by definition physical, but it is not “in between or has aspects of both genders”. Gender is the social roles commonly associated with a given sex. Gender is social, behavioural, and sex is biological, physical.
The press and government in the UK seem perennially confused about the difference between behaviour and biology, though. The starkest example of such confusion in the media is when they declare that someone was “born a man”. Nobody is “born a man” or “born a woman” – in reality we are born male, female, both or neither, as infants and not fully-grown men or women. We may eventually come to take on the social role of man or woman but which one is by no means guaranteed.
The best illustration of the UK government’s confusion between sex and gender lies in the Equality Act 2010 and its description of sex:
11 Sex
In relation to the protected characteristic of sex—
(a) a reference to a person who has a particular protected characteristic is a reference to a man or to a woman;
(b) a reference to persons who share a protected characteristic is a reference to persons of the same sex.
Item (a) should refer to “a male or to a female” given that “a man or to a woman” refers to genders.
We strongly recommend that the UK government corrects this definition from a mash-up of sex with gender to sex alone, and that they add intersex here, defining being intersex as an aspect of sex and thus of biology. The government would be wise to add gender as a separate protected attribute so that they can protect the great many transgender people and others who are of non-binary genders and gender expressions who are not protected under the attribute of “gender reassignment” which appears intended only to apply to transsexual people as indeed is implied by the attribute itself.
We also wish to remind the government that intersex people, in common with the rest of LGBTI, are first and foremost discriminated against by virtue of homophobia. In the case of intersex, that discrimination often starts before or at birth and continues for all of life. Intersex fetuses are now being tested for biological variations such as CAH, XXY and AIS and aborted. The genitals of intersex newborns are being cut up to make them cosmetically resemble those of non-intersex newborns.
In other twist, sex has been “replaced” by gender in the Press Complaints Commission’s Editor’s Code of Practice:
12 Discrimination
i) The press must avoid prejudicial or pejorative reference to an individual’s race, colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or to any physical or mental illness or disability.
ii) Details of an individual’s race, colour, religion, sexual orientation, physical or mental illness or disability must be avoided unless genuinely relevant to the story.
Bizarre indeed. According to the following statement of the 8th February, it seems that gender replaced sex under the erroneous belief that gender is somehow a replacement for or superset of sex or somehow “widens” the meaning of sex:
“It has decided that the word ‘gender’ will replace ’sex’ in subclause 12(1), thus widening its scope to include transgender individuals.”
Believing that something is so does not make it so. It may be appropriate for the word gender to be used in order to “include transgender individuals” but by removing the word sex the PCC has also removed the possibility of inclusion under its code for intersex people unless they are somehow mistakenly believed to be transgender. That may be useful in a small number of cases but not for intersex people in general.
The Press Complaints Commission’s decision appears to be aligned with attitudes towards intersex at the Government Equalities Office – GEO.
In mid-2010 UK Greens MEP Keith Taylor wrote to Rt Hon Theresa May MP, expressing his concern at the exclusion of intersex people from the Equalities Act 2010. Minister for Equalities Lynne Featherstone MP finally replied at the beginning of November 2010. We have commented on this exchange of letters elsewhere and note that despite the statement that “the Transgender Action Plan will be an ideal opportunity for intersex people and interested parties to let us know their views” that did not actually occur as intersex people needed due to the nature of the GEO consultation process and surveys directed at the transgender and not the intersex community.
Further, the assertion in Minister Featherstone’s letter that “discrimination is [not] taking place against this group of people [intersex]” is questionable given what intersex people themselves tell us occurs in the UK. The implication is that the consultation process was flawed in its intersex inclusion or lack of it as has occurred subsequently.
There is no mention of intersex in the Transgender Action Plan.
INFORMANTS of OII Australia’s recalled a Family Court of Australia case several decades ago where the marriage of an intersex was annulled on the basis that an intersex person cannot be legally married under the common belief that marriage can only be between someone who is seen to be 100% man and someone who is seen to be 100% woman. Our informants could not provide specific details, but we have finally tracked the case down and have obtained the judgement document.
Family Court of Australia at Brisbane: In the marriage of C and D (falsely called C), Judgment handed down 20 April 1979.
We have sent this judgement document to one of our legal teams for analysis and commentary, but it appears that the judgement still holds in the case of other marriages involving one or more people born intersex regardless of amendments to the Marriage Act 1961 and other such Family Court of Australia cases such as Re: Kevin which involved the marriage of a man of transsexual background to a non-intersex, non-transsexual woman.
Amongst the reasons for the annulment being made and the principle still holding is this:
(iv) further, the definition of “marriage”as understood in Christendom is the voluntary union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others for life and a marriage in the true sense of the word within that definition could not have taken place and did not exist.
It should be noted that case law created in one country can be and is referred to and influences legal cases in other countries, as indeed has occurred in this one where reference was made to cases in England and Canada. The reverse can also occur, with Australian judgements affecting cases in the US, the UK and other nations with similar legal systems.
OII members wishing to obtain a copy of this judgement document should contact OII Australia via the Contact page in the footer below.
JOY 94.9’s Word for Word interviews intersex Hobsons Bay Mayor Tony Briffa in My Intersex Life - click to download this MP3 file.
BOTH the Kaleidoscope Trust’s website and that of the now renamed – note the plus symbol – LGBT+ Liberal Democrats are still heavy with the intersex-excluding acronym LGBT, but there are signs that intersex inclusion is slowly occurring in both online locations, and one hopes within both organizations. We wrote an article here when we first noticed the +.
It should be noted that intersex people continue to have no rights in the so-called “developed world” as well as throughout the rest of the so-called “developing world”.
LGBT+ Liberal Democrats: Lib Dem MEP Sir Graham Watson urges EU to stand up for LGBT rights in developing world - click to read this article.
South West Liberal Democrat MEP Sir Graham Watson has contributed an item to the LGBT+ Lib Dems website that alternates LGBTI with LGBT, paragraph to paragraph. Does he mean to fully and equally include intersex in the initiative about which he writes? It is hard to tell, but we certainly hope so. Thank you, Sir Graham!
The Kaleidoscope Trust appears equally uncertain as to the inclusion of intersex people in its work. One page only uses the intersex-inclusive acronym – LGBTI – and the word intersex – the About us page. So far all other pages in the Kaleidoscope site and the activities reported upon are LGBT-only.
That omission aside, it is good to see Kaleidoscope appears to be listening to OII’s constant, global plea for the rights attributes formula of “sexual orientation and gender identity” to be expanded to “sex, sexual orientation and gender identity”. Only thus will intersex people be included in the law reform efforts of human rights defenders and organizations everywhere.
The Kaleidoscope Trust works around the world to promote diversity and respect for all regardless of sex, sexual orientation or gender identity.
As noted here, “Slowly, slowly catchee monkey” comes from the days of British colonialism when many far eastern countries were under British rule. Soldiers posted there used to try to catch monkeys to keep as pets and despite all their efforts were not very successful. Many natives spoke a pidgin English which was a simplified form of English. They showed the soldiers how to catch monkeys by demonstrating a simple but effective method.
British rule also spread discrimination against LGBTI people around the world. The United Kingdom lags behind much of the “developing world” in its overt intersex inclusion. LGBTI human rights organizations are common throughout that “developing” world.
Poster, After Homosexual: The Legacies of Gay Liberation.
MORGAN, OII Australia board member, wrote and presented this paper at the After ‘Homosexual’ conference in Melbourne on 4 February 2012. The conference marked the fortieth anniversary of Dennis Altman’s book Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation. The 10-minute presentation was delivered as part of a curated panel on intersectionalities.
I’d like to pay my respects to the indigenous owners of the land, and their elders past and present.
I’m speaking today as a member of OII Australia, a local intersex activist organisation that’s aligned with the LGBTI movement because of our common experience of homophobia, and misogyny. It’s clear at the conference that there’s no settled view on the inclusion of the ‘I’, so I’m going to present a few stories, mostly public ones, and a little history – to illuminate some of the intersections between intersex and the rest of the LGBTI communities.
Firstly, though, what is intersex?
Intersex is where a person’s biological sex is not clearly male or female; a person might have characteristics of both or neither. It’s always congenital. Someone can find out or be discovered to be intersex at birth, puberty, when trying to conceive a child, or serendipitously.
It’s not an identity: it’s not in our heads, although some of us will opt out of the gender binary. It’s typically carved into our bodies.
Hanne Blank, a fat activist and writer of a new history of heterosexuality called Straight was recently interviewed in Salon magazine. It reports:
While Blank looks like a feminine woman, her partner is extremely androgynous, with little to no facial hair and a fine smooth complexion. Hanne’s partner is neither fully male, nor fully female; he was born with an unconventional set of chromosomes, XXY, that provide him with both male genitalia and feminine characteristics. As a result, Blank’s partner has been mistaken for a gay woman, a straight man, a transman — and their relationship has been classified as gay, straight and everything in between.
Phoebe Hart is a young, married, Australian woman with male chromosomes and Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, which means that her body doesn’t respond to testosterone in a typical way. Her autobiographical movie, Orchids: My Intersex Adventure, screened on ABC1 last weekend and is still available on iView for another week. It has also screened during queer film festivals around the country and overseas.
About half an hour into the movie, she asks her husband, James, how he felt when she told him she was intersex. He says:
…once I found out what AIS was, I was confronted with the fact that I thought I might be gay myself. Genetically you’re a male! But I think you can fall in love with the person. Whether that person is male or female doesn’t really matter.
As a side note, I had a similar discussion with my then long-term male lover just after diagnosis, with a very different outcome.
Phoebe had internal testicles that produced testosterone. These were removed in adolescence due to a slight risk of cancer. What Phoebe doesn’t say in her movie is that risk is less than the cancer risk associated with having breasts. So why aren’t breasts routinely removed? The reason has to be that women are not supposed to have testicles. It’s a matter of shame, a secret.
But bodies need sex hormones, to mature, to maintain a libido, prevent osteoporosis and a host of other reasons. Removing her functional gonads means that she now needs lifelong hormone replacement treatment, with all the risks associated with that.
Medicalisation goes back centuries, and for much of that time there was no clear differentiation between LGB, T and I.
Michel Foucault presented the case of Herculine Barbin, in nineteenth century France.
Mogul, Ritchie and Whitlock state:
Siobhan Somerville in Queering the Color Line reports “as late as 1921, medical journals contained articles declaring that a physical examination of [female homosexuals] will in practically every instance disclose an abnormally prominent clitoris” and that this is “particularly so in colored women”.
A key change happened in the 1950s, when New Zealand doctor John Money declared that sex equals nurture, not nature, and that the “brain is an object for behavioural engineering“.
His (now discredited) work led to standard medical protocols that still result in cosmetic genital surgery on infants and children with intersex variations. Even now, in Australia, these are performed to prevent social and familial discomfort, despite medical research that shows poor satisfaction with surgery.
The trauma associated with these surgeries led to the establishment of an intersex movement, initially through a magazine advert and later online. The immediate priority of the movement, led by the Intersex Society of North America, was to engage with the medical profession, and this led in 2006 to a “consensus statement” that changed the terminology associated with intersex. It introduced the term “Disorders of Sex Development” or DSD.
The aim was to create a non-pejorative, value-neutral term to replace “intersex” and “hermaphrodite”. In a very literal sense it was homophobic: it aimed to eliminate a parental and social fear of homosexuality and queerness in an attempt to improve patient outcomes.
It failed.
Dr Dix Poppas, working at Cornell University, describes his current “rationale for early reconstruction” on infant genitals as including,
… minimizing family concern and distress, and mitigating the risks of stigmatization and gender-identity confusion…
CAH, Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, is a manageable salt wasting condition that requires lifelong treatment. In women, it’s also associated with higher levels of prenatal testosterone, and a degree of physical and mental “masculinisation”.
In 1999, Columbia University psychologist Heino Meyer-Bahlburg published a paper entitled What Causes Low Rates of Child Bearing in CAH?:
CAH women as a group have a lower interest than controls in getting married and performing the traditional child-care/house-wife role. As children, they show an unusually low interest in engaging in… maternal play, motherhood…
Meyer-Bahlburg proposes that “treatment with prenatal dexamethasone might cause these girls’ behaviour to be closer to heterosexual norms”.
In an analysis that clearly shows the homophobic nature of these concerns, Alice Dreger tells how Meyer-Bahlburg and Dr Maria New of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in NY published research in 2008 stating:
Most women were heterosexual, but the rates of bisexual and homosexual orientation were increased above controls… and correlated with the degree of prenatal androgenization.
Dreger describes, in 2010, New and fellow pediatric endocrinologist Saroj Nimkarn (Weill Cornell Medical College) to be “constructing low interest in babies and men – and even interest in what they consider to be men’s occupations and games – as “abnormal,” and potentially preventable with prenatal dex”.
Dexamethasone is a class C steroid that, in tests on sheep, has been shown to result in reduced mental capacity. It’s also linked to low birth weight, a greater incidence of cleft palate and other issues.
Dr Maria New began clinical trials on pregnant human mothers in 2010 to reduce masculinisation effects on CAH girls.
Dexamethasone has no impact on the salt wasting associated with CAH.
Genetic screening is now available for CAH and XXY, via amniocentesis. OII Australia is currently examining the effects of this in Australia, and preliminary research shows a drop in number of live births with these intersex variations.
The shift to DSD failed to change the system. It’s failed to change medical protocols.
It has also come close to destroying the intersex movement. We’ve had to start almost from scratch.
It is almost impossible for us to engage with the medical profession directly.
In many ways, the experience of intersex people shows what happens when a group of “disordered” people are found to be “born this way”.
Being trans remains a disorder, while no treatable biological cause has been established. Being gay or lesbian is no longer a disorder to doctors in most countries, even though this remains contentious in some major political and religious institutions.
The big weakness in the early intersex movement was a failure to organise around the causes of this medical treatment – homophobia, misogyny. We have to focus on the human rights and ethical case for liberation.
Intersex people are aligned with the “LGBTI” movement because of the nature of our oppression.
We seek the right to be ourselves as we are, in the context of infant and adolescent surgery, adult relationship and medical issues. Even “straight” intersex people and their partners have to question and address issues with their sexual orientation and gender identity.
We’ve been here all along, and we need to be included – especially in campaigns around health and social services practices and policies, employment protection, and other frameworks for our LGBTI communities.
1. OII Australia does not support the establishment of a third gender category, but does seek the ability for all adults to opt out of the gender binary and use neutral sex or gender markers on legal documents. For more on the 2003 and 2011 ‘X’ passport reforms see here.
2. Intersex is about an experience of the body, not identity. Nor is intersex synonymous with androgyny. Any person, intersex or otherwise, may feel more comfortable with a non-binary identity such as intergender, or genderqueer.
3. There are many more intersex variations than those mentioned in this presentation.
4. We reject pathologising language, such as “disorders”. Intersex variations are a natural part of the human condition.
5. Mention of Poppas was omitted from the panel talk at time of delivery due to time constraints.
6. With thanks to Gina Wilson, chairperson of OII Australia, Hida Viloria, chair of OII, and Gavriel Ansara for help during the researching of this paper. The article includes some minor changes post-delivery at the conference.
7. Republishing this presentation is subject to written consent on terms available by request. (Sharing the link is, of course, ok).
UGANDAN LGBTI human rights activist David Kato was brutally murdered just over a year ago and fellow African LGBTI activist Sokari Ekine writes a letter to the man who was so beloved and continues to be remembered by many.
New Internationalist blog: A year without David - click to read this article.
In the face of the widespread exclusion of intersex people from human rights reforms in the so-called global north, it is truly inspiring to see how intersex-inclusive human rights activists in the so-called global south continue to be. Let us hope that the north’s intersex exclusion will not be exported to the south.
Surely David you would have loved to see all these splendid outbreaks of revolutionary love. We still have a long way to go before LGBTIQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex and Queer) people are wholly included in these uprisings, but there is more hope today than yesterday.
Dear David Kato Kisule – we miss you, we miss you but your spirit is strong enough for us not to forget.
* David Kato was bludgeoned to death on January 26th 2011 in his home in Kampala Uganda. He was an out gay Ugandan LGBTI activist and human rights defender and founding member of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG).
A number of erstwhile allies of intersex people have supposed – apparently without bothering to actually ask – that intersex people want the legislative creation of a third gender or a third sex.
Sex – male and female under the sex binary belief system, and gender – man and woman under the gender binary belief system, are two very different though related things.
The reality is that intersex people do not want a third sex or gender category and the reality is that third genders or sexes lead to a whole new set of problems and oppressions of difference. Note the comment by OII’s Gina Wilson under the article.
World Policy Blog: Dividing by Three: Nepal Recognizes a Third Gender - click to read this article.
Observers of Nepal’s LGBTI rights movement sometimes claim the category was created in line with contemporary Nepali politics. Listing the third gender as a comprehensive LGBTI category, they claim, means the movement can swell its numbers and gain clout—and eventually form a political party. Nepali language media have referred intermittently to Pant as a third gender, despite his open identity as a gay man. Others place the identity category into gender-ambiguous cultural tropes such as hijras (who often categorize themselves as a third gender in other South Asian countries). With 102 ethnic groups officially registered in the country and less than half of its citizens identifying Nepali as their mother tongue, dozens of words linked with sexual and gender identities are associated with the third gender category.
THE Scottish people and media continue to impress us with their ability to say the word intersex and to pronounce intersex-including acronym LGBTI. That the people of Scotland and its media are not too frightened to say intersex and LGBTI and to cast them in print or pixels is an object lesson to the people and media of the rest of the United Kingdom as well as its government and lawmakers, especially those located in England.
The Journal: Lord Provost asked to end gay discrimination - click to read this article.
Scottish Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender & Intersex (LGBTI) organisations have launched an appeal to Edinburgh’s Lord Provost, the Rt Hon George Grubb, to oppose discrimination against homosexuality.
They hope the Lord Provost can use the city’s ‘twinning arrangement’ with St. Petersburg to urge that city not to pass a bill that would threaten the LGBTI community’s freedom of expression and right to protest.
Refusing to say intersex or LGBTI actively contributes to the common, widespread silencing, exclusion and erasure of intersex people and actively supports the work of the medical eugenicists striving to disappear intersex from the face of the planet.
Refusing to write intersex and LGBTI contributes to intersex genital mutilation – IGM – and the denial of human rights to intersex people everywhere.
GENDER DynamiX (GDX) and the Support Initiative for People with atypical sexual Development (SIPD) have taken their collaboration in the Exchange Programmes in 2010 and 2011 a step further and, together with Transgender and Intersex Africa (TIA), will concentrate its efforts mainly on advocacy in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Forming the tripartite will further solidify and strengthen their work in Africa and a specific mission and vision for the new partnership has been formulated.
The main focus of this new entity is to support a growing transgender and intersex movement and to engage regionally in advocacy for the human rights of transgender and intersex people.
While forming a platform for all regional work of the three organisations, Transitioning Africa is not a new NGO but will remain a formal partnership of the three organisations and thus retain autonomy locally and regionally and the capacity for its activities will be provided by the three organisations in the implementation of its activities, such as capacity building workshops, advocacy support to other organisations, exchange programmes and mentorships.
The vision of Transitioning Africa is to see a strong transgender and intersex movement in Sub-Saharan Africa, based on human rights principles, while the mission is to strive for gender recognition within social movements in Africa.
It aims to build transgender and intersex leadership and capacity, by supporting both individual transgender and intersex activists, as well as transgender and intersex organisations on the continent.
The mission further states that Transitioning Africa will advocate for transgender and intersex issues within regional and international platforms, directly, and support local advocacy efforts when invited.
It will also aim to document the history of the transgender and intersex movement in Africa.
An Advisory Committee will advise Transitioning Africa on its work.
This Committee will consist of 6 members, including the Directors of the 3 partner organisations.
Three members will be recruited strategically to bring in knowledge and/or skills for the benefit of Transitioning Africa.
