A wave of anti-trans bills and regulation in the United States are not only constructing sex as rigidly binary and immutable, they are constructing exemptions that explicitly permit surgical interventions to change the sex characteristics of children whose bodies don’t fit strict norms for female or male.
The bodies of intersex people – born with sex characteristics that challenge ideas of how female and male bodies should look and function – are profoundly stigmatised in our societies. Medicine takes for granted the idea that people with intersex traits must be shaped to fit social expectations. But this is often a medical solution to a social problem, not a problem in the person. The intersex movement calls for acceptance of bodily diversity and, like the trans movement and the pro-choice movement, respect for bodily autonomy and freedom from coercive practices.
Intersex variations, or innate variations of sex characteristics, include a wide range of traits affecting chromosomes, sexual anatomy or hormones. They’re also referred to as “differences of sex development” in sporting regulations, or “disorders of sex development” in medicine.
