Intersex rights in the UK

I wanted to do this last year on Intersex Awareness Day, but forgot about it. Since there was a big generalized thread about trans issues yesterday, though, this felt like a good time to make a “short” post raising awareness of the state of intersex rights in the UK.

Since this is an obscure topic, it’s first important to clarify what “Intersex” means for anyone who might not know. Intersexuality is an umbrella term for several developmental abnormalities, some genetic and some not, where the traits that make up physical sex are to some extent ambiguous at birth. Different medical and support organizations use varyingly strict definitions for the term; some only consider a very strict range of obviously serious conditions to be intersex, while others at the extreme opposite include hormonal disorders like PCOS under the umbrella. Regardless, even under the conservative definition, intersexuality is extremely varied, ranging from people with completely ambiguous genitalia and internal reproductive anatomy, or even ambiguous genotypical sex, to people who are basically physically normal and only have a condition visible under a microscope. You might be familiar with the term “Disorders (or differences) of Sexual Development” instead, which has recently become popular as a less identity-driven alternative label to “intersex” within some social and medical circles – the NHS started using it a few years ago, but it hasn’t caught on in the US – but this is controversial for a whole bunch of complicated reasons.

It’s worth taking a moment to note that intersexuality has nothing inherently to do with trans issues, though a much larger than average amount of intersex people are trans than the general population for reasons which are probably self-evident. Intersex people are also often caught up in legislation surrounding trans stuff, such as a lot of the “bathrooms are separated by chromosomes” legislation popping up in the US recently, but that’s not important here.

With all this said, I can now get to what I meant to the point of this post, which is that the UK has some of the [worst protections for intersex people in the western world.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex_human_rights) And nobody talks about it!

Let’s break it down. Probably the most well-known medical controversy surrounding intersex people is the issue of surgical sexual assignment after birth. If you’re not familiar, from the 1960s onward, it became medically fashionable to surgically alter children born with ambiguous genitalia into one phenotypical sex or the other, often based entirely on the discretion of the doctor as to what would produce a “better result” cosmetically. Putting aside the fact that this irreversibly takes agency away from the child on a critical part of their life, often these radical procedures are done by surgeons inexperienced with genital surgery out of a desire to get it done as soon as possible to minimize interference in the child’s development and “normalize” the situation for the parents. The result is that nerve damage and long term cosmetic and functional problems with the area are extremely common. Because of my reassignment surgery, I’ve experienced numbness in parts of my junk for my whole life, and since my teens, routine chronic pain. It sucks.

Since the late 90s, there has been an increasing backlash to the practice, and it’s been banned in a bunch of places. But not here. Though less common, [the NHS continues to recommend and perform reassignment surgery.](https://www.buzzfeed.com/patrickstrudwick/how-many-intersex-children-being-operated-on) There was [talk](https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/surgery-on-intersex-children-may-stop-p2p8qq5dc) of it being banned a couple years ago, but it seemingly fizzled out and went nowhere.

Hilariously, the government cares so little about this that they claimed the practice was dead back in 2016, only to be instantly countered by the data showing it’s still ongoing. To quote wikipedia’s article on UK intersex rights:

> A footnote to a House of Commons report on transgender equality in 2016 suggested that intersex medical interventions were matters of the past,[33] and the country denied such practices in statements to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child later the same year.[34] However, this was belied by data presented to the UN Committee by intersex civil society organizations later in 2016, including National Health Service Hospital Episode Statistics and clinical publications.[35]

As far as I’m aware, it’s never even come up in the commons since.

Related to this, another unusual thing about the UK compared to many other countries is that there is no special process for changing your legal sex as an intersex person. If you are assigned based on a doctors discretion at birth – which is often a completely subjective judgement, and is not rooted in any strict criteria, genetic or physical or whatever – then that sex they chose for you is, legally speaking, treated identically to if the assignment had been done by mother nature. Your only choice from that point forward if you don’t like it is to go through the exact same psychological analysis and two-year test of commitment that all trans people go through to get a Gender Recognition Certificate. To reiterate, you have to be _psychologically analyzed_ to be allowed to disagree with a choice made _for_ you by another human being.

Granted, there are professionals in the country who are aware of how patently absurd the law is and will basically just wave you through, but it’s still garbage and entails a huge amount of bureaucracy and waiting.

Finally, and most egregiously, intersex people have no formal legal protection in the law anywhere in the UK except Jersey. If you are discriminated against, either for being visibly intersex or for something to do with your body, then you have no special rights in the way that women, disabled, gay, or trans people might. Which makes it far harder to fight legally. This is especially a problem in schools, where intersex people are sometimes locked out of PE completely because the staff don’t want to deal with the issue, with parents having no real way to fight back beyond just personally advocating for their kids.

Oh, and obviously intersex people don’t have the option of choosing to reflect their physical reality legally with a 3rd gender marker, but that almost feels like a _quaint_ complaint in comparison.

Obviously intersex people are a very small group of people and slip under the radar for that reason, but these are devastating issues for real people’s lives which could be easily fixed with legislature with no controversial consequences whatsoever. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say “consider writing to your MP to raise awareness of the issue” in this sub, but, uh, yeah.