Intersex : stories and statistics from Australia

T. Jones, B. Hart, M. Carpenter, G. Ansara, W. Leonard, J. Lucke

Humans are simultaneously more similar in their sex development, and more diverse, than is commonly appreciated or understood. Females and males are not made of wildly different ingredients. The potential to have intersex variations?to be born with atypical sex characteristics?exists for all humans in the first few weeks of their prenatal development. 1.7% of people actually go on to be born intersex. However, most of us know little about intersex variations. This is only partly due to their occasional invisibility. Intersex people have historically faced deep social stigma?the assumption that they were simply bizarre aberrations from the human norm. Furthermore, intersex infants have been widely subjected to systematic institutional mistreatment, particularly within medical settings. Finally, some people with intersex variations have simply tried to integrate themselves unnoticed into the socially accepted categories of male and female.