Understand what it is to be an intersex person

Intersex people are born with sexual characteristics – including genitalia, chromosome patterns, and glands, such as testicles and ovaries, that do not fit the typical binary notions of male or female bodies.

The Intersex Human Rights, from Australia, adds to the definition that intersex creates risks to experiences of stigma, discrimination and harm. The concept is based on definitions shared by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (Acnudh).

Influencer Karen Bachini confirmed, in a video posted on her channel on YouTube, that she is intersex. Specialists estimate that at 1.7% of the population is born with intersex characteristics.

Internationally, the definitions of intersex have been altered in recent years, converging towards a model based on the law of two human rights, instead of medical definitions.

A wide spectrum of human rights norms and their application to issues of sexual orientation and gender identity is treated by the Yogyakarta Principles.

Created in 2006, the document was updated in 2017, when it received 10 new indications for international human rights legislation, which applies to the issues of sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sexual characteristics.

The document affirms that the sexual characteristics are the physical characteristics of each person in relation to their sex, including their genital organs and other sexual and reproductive anatomy, the chromosomes, the hormones and the secondary physical characteristics that manifest themselves at puberty.

Intersex Human Rights clarifies that intersex people do not share an identity, being a diversified population. Intersex people can be heterosexual or not and cisgender, which consists in identifying themselves as the attributed sex when they were born, or not.

Intersex traits include a wide range of different underlying variations. These can be determined not before birth, not at birth, during puberty and at other times, such as trying to conceive a child. Each stroke has its own characteristics and different degrees of expression.

The intersex term can be described as a “guarda-chuva” with ghosts. In this context, people with intersex variations may use a variety of different terms, including being intersex, having an intersex variation or condition, having an innate variation of sex characteristics, or naming specific traits.

complexity

In the technical guide Orientações sobre Identidade de Gênero: conceitos e termos, the psychologist and professor Jaqueline Gomes de Jesus affirms that the intersex person is the one whose body varies from the pattern of masculine or feminine, culturally established, not that it refers to configurations of two chromosomes, à location of two genital organs – such as testicles that do not deceram, penis too small or clitoris too large, end of the urethra dislocated from the tip of the penis or vagina absent – ​​and the coexistence of testicular and ovarian tissues.

In the article, the psychiatrist and biomedical engineer Vernon Rosario affirms that the vision of sex has been modified over time with the advances of two studies related to molecular biology, affecting the conception of intersex people.

The discovery of two chromosomes, for example, especially two sex chromosomes, will initiate the genetic and molecular understanding of sex determination. In the current context, it is argued that the process of determination and sexual differentiation is more complex than the idea that the XX chromosome defines women and XY, men – as it has become established for a long time.

“The molecular biology of sex determination has become much more complex in the following years. For intersex people, this molecular complexity is a question of health and also of sex. Such biological and genetic complexity requires an increasingly microscopic level – not really molecular – of understanding of sex in intersex people and, probably, for an increasing number of people with undiagnosed intersex conditions”, says the psychiatrist in the article.

combat against abuse

The intersex community seeks to combat stigma, discrimination and harm, in addition to promoting awareness and respect for diversity of bodies.

In recent years, awareness of intersex people and recognition of two specific human rights abuses that they face have increased, thanks to the work of two intersex human rights defenders, second to the United Nations (UN).

Human rights abuses against intersex people include infanticide, forced and coercive medical interventions, discrimination in education, sports, employment and other services, as well as lack of access to justice and remedies.

UN Agencies articulate awareness campaigns on intersex awareness, with the objective of alerting for the specific care that must be guaranteed to this part of the population.