Legal recognition of intersex people
Intersex people are born with sex characteristics, such as chromosomes, gonads, or genitals that, according to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, "do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies".
The Asia Pacific Forum states that the legal recognition of intersex people is firstly about access to the same rights as other men and women, when assigned male or female; secondly it is about access to administrative corrections to legal documents when an original sex assignment is not appropriate; and thirdly it is not about the creation of a third sex or gender classification for intersex people as a population but it is, instead, about self determination.
[2] Sociological research in Australia, a country with a non-binary gender marker, has shown that 19% of people born with atypical sex characteristics may prefer that option.
Intersex scholar Morgan Holmes states that much early anthropological material on non-European cultures described gender systems with more than two categories as "primitive", but also that subsequent analysis of third sexes and genders is simplistic or romanticized:[12] much of the existing work on cultural systems that incorporate a 'third sex' portray simplistic visions in which societies with more than two sex/gender categories are cast as superior to those that divide the world into just two.
I argue that to understand whether a system is more or less oppressive than another we have to understand how it treats its various members, not only its 'thirds'... recognition of third sexes and third genders is not equal to valuing the presence of those who were neither male nor female, and often hinges on the explicit devaluation of women[12]In recent years, civil society organization and human rights institutions have raised issues relating to legal recognition.
[2] On January 20, 2025, US president Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14168, entitled "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government".
[28] A 2017 submission by Justicia Intersex and Zwischengeschlecht to the United Nations Committee Against Torture identified two Argentinian cases of children denied birth certificates without parental consent to irreversible medical interventions.
Reports have shown how elite women athletes with intersex conditions have been humiliated, excluded, and suffered human rights violations as a result of sex verification testing.
[3][2] Some countries have the gender self-determination legal model such as Argentina, Belgium, Malta, Denmark, Greece, France, Portugal, Norway, Chile, Uruguay, Luxembourg, Colombia, Ecuador, Iceland, and Ireland permit changes to sex classifications via simple administrative methods.
[2] Other countries do not permit intersex people to change sex assignment at all or, such as the United Kingdom, only by declaring that they are transgender and obtaining a diagnosis of gender dysphoria.
[37] In 2013, Germany became the first European nation to register babies with characteristics of both sexes as indeterminate gender on birth certificates, amidst opposition and skepticism from intersex organisations who point out that the law mandates exclusion from male or female categories.
On September 26, 2016, intersex California resident Sara Kelly Keenan became the second person in the United States to legally change her gender to non-binary.
"[3] The Issue Paper argues that "further reflection on non-binary legal identification is necessary": Mauro Cabral, Global Action for Trans Equality (GATE) Co-Director, indicated that any recognition outside the "F"/"M" dichotomy needs to be adequately planned and executed with a human rights point of view, noting that: "People tend to identify a third sex with freedom from the gender binary, but that is not necessarily the case.
[25] Laura Inter of Mexican intersex organization Brújula Intersexual, imagines a society where sex or gender classifications are removed from birth certificates and other official identification documents,[50] and Morgan Carpenter of OII Australia states that, "the removal of sex and gender, like race and religion, from official documentation" is "a more universal, long-term policy goal".
[52] The Malta declaration by the Third International Intersex Forum, in 2013, called for infants and children to be assigned male or female, on the understanding that later identification may differ:
