There is a category of person that the loudest parts of the contemporary gender debate consistently collapse into a broader argument where they do not belong: the intersex person, born with naturally ambiguous biological characteristics, chromosomal, hormonal, anatomical, that do not fit the standard binary definitions of male or female.
Their situation is genuinely different. Not a matter of identity claim or gender expression or the feeling of being in the wrong body. A matter of biology that arrived ambiguous from the beginning. For some intersex people, medical intervention addresses a real physiological reality, not a desire to become something other than what they are, but a need to clarify what they already are, on their own terms, in their own time.
The conflation of intersex experience with the broader trans debate does a disservice to intersex people, whose specific medical and social needs get lost in a conversation that was not primarily designed around them. And it does a disservice to the broader debate, by making it appear that every discussion of biological sex is an attack on people whose biology genuinely does not conform to binary categories. These are different conversations. They deserve to be held separately, with the honesty and precision that each requires.
By Kenneth Eze
Kenneth Eze is a secular humanist, community paralegal, and advocate for those whose identities make them targets in Nigeria. He is a regular contributor to the African Humanist Journal.