Here’s a number many human rights professionals have never heard: up to 1.7% of people are born with variations in their sex characteristics, chromosomes, hormones, or anatomy that don’t fit typical medical definitions of male or female. That estimate, from biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling’s widely cited research, is used by the United Nations’ own Free & Equal campaign. It makes being intersex roughly as common as having red hair.
Now here’s the uncomfortable question: when did your organisation last mention intersex people in a strategy document, a funding proposal, or a policy ask? If the answer is “rarely” or “never,” you’re not alone, and that’s exactly what we want to address in this read. Hopefully, by the end of this article, your answer can shift from “never” to “about to.”
The Blindspot in The Human Rights Framework
Modern human rights work is built on a quiet assumption: that every body falls into one of two clean categories, and that law, medicine, and policy can be written accordingly. Intersex people are living proof that this assumption was never true.
Across the world, many intersex infants and children are subjected to medical interventions that are non-consensual, irreversible, and not medically necessary, performed only to conform to social expectations of what a boy or a girl “should” look like. Intersex-led organisations call these practices Intersex Genital Mutilation (IGM), and document their consequences such as “severe and irreversible physical harm and emotional distress.” The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights is unequivocal: intersex people face “stigmatization, violence and harmful practices based on their sex characteristics,” including forced and coercive medical interventions, and these violations are rarely investigated, let alone remedied.
Why Intersex Is a Human Rights Issue, Not A Medical Niche
Strip away clinical jargon and pathologizing labels, and what remains is a set of core questions every human rights worker already knows how to ask:
- Bodily integrity: Who consented? (In the case of non-consensual childhood interventions, nobody really matters since the child never consented.)
- Freedom from violence and torture: UN treaty bodies have repeatedly flagged non-consensual intersex surgeries as cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.
- The right to health: Intersex adults routinely avoid healthcare settings altogether after childhoods spent being examined, photographed, and operated on without informed consent.
- Equality before the law: In most countries, intersex individuals still lack explicit legal protection against discrimination based on sex characteristics.
If your organisation’s agenda covers any of those four fundamental pillars – as almost every human rights agenda does – then intersex rights already reside squarely inside your mandate. They simply have not been counted in.
Why Now?
Three historic developments have moved intersex rights from the margins directly onto the official international human rights record:
- April 2024 — The UN counted intersex people in: The UN Human Rights Council adopted Resolution 55/14, “Combating discrimination, violence and harmful practices against intersex persons” – the landmark first resolution in UN history exclusively dedicated to intersex rights.
- 2025 — The global evidence is officially on record: The UN High Commissioner’s follow-up report (A/HRC/60/50) comprehensively maps discriminatory laws, acts of violence, and harmful practices against intersex persons worldwide, spelling out state obligations.
- The legal frontier is actively advancing: In 2015, Malta became the first country in the world to protect intersex people’s bodily integrity by law through the Gender Identity, Gender Expression and Sex Characteristics (GIGESC) Act, prohibiting non-consensual modifications. In 2017, intersex organisations from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand issued the Darlington Statement, demanding “the immediate prohibition as a criminal act of deferrable medical interventions… without personal consent.”
The global momentum is clear. The question is whether the wider human rights sector will adopt this proactive approach, or keep treating intersex communities as an afterthought in someone else’s acronym.
What “Counted In” Actually Looks Like
True inclusion is far more than adding a letter to an organizational statement. It requires concrete, deliberate policy decisions:
- Explicitly name sex characteristics: Protect “sex characteristics” as an independent protected ground in your non-discrimination policies, alongside sexual orientation and gender identity.
- Directly resource intersex-led organisations: The movement is three decades old and remains chronically underfunded, particularly across Asia, the Global South, and grassroots regions.
- Stop outsourcing intersex realities to clinical framing: The true experts on intersex human rights are intersex advocates—not the clinicians or surgeons who operate without consent.
- Audit institutional terminology: Outdated medical labels like “Disorders of Sex Development” (DSD) pathologize natural variations. “Intersex” and “variations in sex characteristics” are affirming, community-endorsed terms. Explore community-approved language through Intersex Asia’s depathologized terminology resource, The Purple Key Glossary.
How to “Count Us In” This Intersex Awareness Day
This October 26 – marking Intersex Awareness Day and thirty years since the first public intersex demonstration in Boston in 1996 – commit to one concrete action: count intersex people in. Include sex characteristics in your next policy brief. Invite an intersex-led organisation to your next coalition roundtable. Deepen your understanding of bodily integrity and learn about bodily variations through Intersex 101.
The global human rights framework was always going to be unfinished without the intersex movement. It still is—but your organization has the power to change that today.
