By Prashant Singh, Research and Advocacy Officer, Intersex Asia
When Intersex Asia co-organised the landmark side event “Getting ‘Intersex’ in the Picture: Ensuring Intersex Inclusion in CRVS Mechanisms” at the Third Ministerial Conference on Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) in June 2025, it was a moment that many of us had worked towards for a long time. That event was the first-ever dedicated discussion on intersex inclusion in CRVS frameworks at such a high-level forum. It reinforced something we at Intersex Asia have always known: securing inclusive intersex birth registration and establishing an accurate intersex legal identity has a profound impact on every aspect of an intersex person’s life, from accessing healthcare and education to securing legal recognition and protection from harm.
Less than a year later, I had the opportunity to attend the 2026 CRVS Research Forum, organised by UNESCAP, held from 30 March to 1 April 2026 in Bangkok. This was not a standalone moment. Rather, it was a continuation of momentum, building directly on the advocacy groundwork we have been laying since 2025 for intersex human rights in Asia. We are regularly highlighting the importance of integrating intersex civil registration and vital statistics policies on the agenda in Asia, and the Research Forum was an opportunity to deepen that engagement at the level of evidence and policy research.
What the Research Forum Revealed
The 2026 Forum was a follow-up to the 2024 Forum. Over three days, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers from across the world presented work spanning birth registration, death registration, cause-of-death data, digitisation and many other CRVS-related issues.
Day 3’s Session E3 on “Registration and Legal Identity” was particularly significant. A presentation titled “When death tears you apart: the omission of transgender identities in Colombian death certificates” by Dr Sebastián León-Giraldo of Universidad de los Andes illustrated how binary and rigid sex/gender categorisation in CRVS systems renders gender-diverse people systematically invisible even in death. This finding resonates directly with what we have been documenting and arguing regarding innate variations of sex characteristics: that the failure to establish proper legal recognition of sex characteristics at birth creates cascading invisibility across a person’s entire life course, including in intersex mortality data and vital statistics.
A second presentation, “Liberté, Égalité, Interoperabilité: Gender identity and CR, VS, and ID” by Ms Madeline Cameron Wardleworth of the Global Health Advocacy Incubator, examined how civil registration, vital statistics, and identity systems interact in ways that either enable or obstruct intersex legal gender recognition. This lens is one that Intersex Asia has consistently applied to our own advocacy. It highlights how CRVS systems that classify without nuance – or fail to accommodate affirming intersex sex markers – create structural barriers not just for individuals seeking to change their records, but for the state’s ability to generate meaningful data about intersex populations at all. Additionally, research on systemic barriers to legal gender recognition in Bulgaria, Ecuador, and Peru by Dr Clare Conry-Murray from Johns Hopkins provided a comparative framework that underscored the global nature of these challenges.
Beyond the gender-specific sessions, the Forum’s overarching equity theme offered important lessons. Research on who gets “left behind” in birth registration from Indonesia, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and Nepal consistently pointed to marginalised groups whose specific needs remain poorly captured in national data systems. The evidence from Nepal was particularly close to home: we know from our own work, including through partners like Campaign for Change Nepal, that intersex people are categorised under a catch-all “Other” marker that denies true intersex statistical visibility, rendering our community statistically invisible and making targeted policy impossible.
Building on Momentum — And What Comes Next
Attending the 2026 Research Forum reinforced for me that the CRVS space is not static. The Forum’s expansion to a global platform means that the conversations it generates now have broader reach and influence. That is both an opportunity and a responsibility for civil society organisations like ours. For Intersex Asia, engagement with this forum is part of a longer continuum—one that stretches from our side event at the Third Ministerial Conference, through our consistent participation at the UN ESCAP CSO Forum, and towards the comprehensive thematic report on intersex CRVS inclusion that we are preparing.
The research presented at the Forum also confirmed what we have been advocating: that the push for universal, inclusive CRVS systems requires not only political will at the ministerial level, but a research ecosystem that generates disaggregated, community-specific evidence. As an organisation, we are committed to contributing to that evidence base to advance intersex policy reform. Our forthcoming CRVS thematic report will provide the in-depth analysis and actionable recommendations for policymakers that this space requires.
The journey is long. But as we said after the 2025 Ministerial Conference, for the first time, we are truly getting ‘intersex’ in the picture. The 2026 Research Forum showed us that the picture is getting larger, and that we must make sure intersex people—and their rights to legal identity—are fully in it.
