Over the past little while, I have seen an increase in the use of the phrase “sex characteristics” in material about human rights. The phrase piqued my interest because it is clearly an attempt to deconstruct the concept of sex itself. While activists will tell you that the push to include this language in human rights legislation is for the sake of people with disorders of sex development (DSD) (or, intersex people, as queer activists always call them), I don’t buy this. I think DSDs are being used as cover to further queer theory and its neverending fight against the “normative,” right down to the idea of whole and indivisible sexed bodies.
“Sex characteristics” first appeared in legislative language in 2015 in Malta, when it passed the Gender Identity, Gender Expression and Sex Characteristics Act, which also introduced sex self-identification to the country. This was a significant step because not even the original 2007 Yogyakarta Principles included the phrase anywhere in the document. The Yogyakarta Principles, it is important to note, were a global driving force behind the push to include sex self-identification into human rights law under the concept of “gender identity.”
After Malta, many (so-called) human rights organizations began to lobby for the attribute of “sex characteristics” to be included in the Yogyakarta Principles as well. This included the International Service for Human Rights, ARC International, the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association, and the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute. In 2016, the United Nations also released a report, titled Living Free & Equal, that had adopted the phrase.
And so, in 2017, the Yogyakarta Principles plus 10 were adopted, this time featuring the phrase “sex characteristics” over 100 times throughout the 27-page document.
Now, as for why this is a problem. Obviously, I do not have an issue with legal protections for people with DSDs. These protections generally revolve around the right to bodily autonomy and freedom from discrimination. For example, advocates would say that medically unnecessary cosmetic procedures shouldn’t be carried out on children before they can consent to them. I think it is important to note, however, that some DSDs require medical identification and intervention for the healthy functioning of the individual’s body.
The problem comes with subsuming what are medical conditions under the broader “queer” cause—and by queer I mean that horrible philosophy that frames everything normal as oppressive. I don’t believe this does people with DSDs any favors at all. In fact, I think that connecting it with sexuality and the nonsensical concept of “gender identity” only serves to confuse society about their unique issues.
To illustrate this, let’s take a look at some definitions of “intersex” proposed by some of the organizations that are pushing for the addition of “sex characteristics” in human rights legislation.
From Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Expression, and Sex Characteristics at the Universal Periodic Review by ARC International, the International Bar Association, and the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association:
‘Intersex people are born with physical sex characteristics that do not fit medical norms for female or male bodies’ or as earlier defined ‘intersex people are born with physical, hormonal or genetic features that are neither wholly female nor wholly male; or a combination of female and male; or neither female nor male.
From Born Free and Equal: Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, and Sex Characteristics in International Human Rights Law, Second Edition, by the United Nations Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights:
Intersex people are born with physical sex characteristics that do not fit the normative definitions for male or female bodies.
(Note that the first edition of this document in 2012 did not include “sex characteristics” in the title.)
I want to draw particular attention here to the use of the words “norm” and “normative.” These definitions do not concern themselves with what actually constitutes male and female, but only with rebelling against whatever they say others deem to be normative. The first definition even makes it seem possible to not be wholly male or female or, ultimately, to be neither.
Again, I am not sure how any of this is supposed to help people with developmental disorders. Framing them as not being “normative” only serves to alienate them from their sex, which is obviously the goal here.
We see this again in the 2018 publication Sexual and gender diversity in SRHR: Towards inclusive sexual and reproductive health & rights through mainstreaming by Rutgers International, which states:
Not everyone is born with bodily sex characteristics that are wholly female or male, according to the norms in society.
The way of framing this issue as one of social “norms” is done completely in the service of ideology, and it ends up providing people with a very skewed perception of reality.
DSDs are sex specific, and the vast majority of people who have them are easily identified as either male or female. People are as wholly male or female as they are human, and developmental disorders don't change that. We would not say that someone with a developmental heart condition has a different type of circulatory system or is an entirely different type of human. We would not (I hope) frame properly functioning hearts as merely representing a social norm. We would see such a person as wholly human despite their medical condition. But what these NGOs and supposed “human rights” organizations have done is position “intersex” people as something “other”—definitely as some “other” sex, in many instances.
It should not be surprising that such muddled, ideologically driven, and inhuman thinking has already led to some shockingly confused legislation. For example, in Australia. From April 29, 2024, the Queensland Anti-Discrimination Act 1991 made it “unlawful to discriminate against a person because of their sex characteristics.”
Again, on the government website, we see that infernal term “norms” creep in:
Some people have innate variations of sex characteristics and their bodies don’t conform with medical and social norms for female or male bodies.
But it gets worse. Here is one of the examples given of possible discrimination faced by someone with “variations of sex characteristics”:
For example, a man with intersex traits being disadvantaged when seeking treatment for ovarian cancer because a health service’s medical records system fails to recognise that a man may have some typically female sex characteristics.
So, to be clear, in this hypothetical scenario, a man is seeking treatment for ovarian cancer. This is patently ridiculous. A person who has ovaries is female because ovaries are part of the female reproductive system. Ovaries are not merely “typically female sex characteristics”; a body that has them is a wholly female body.
And here lies the crux of the issue. Supposedly serious human rights organizations have adopted a view of the person as something akin to a machine composed of parts rather than as a living, breathing, and fundamentally whole human being. Even worse, these disparate parts can be mixed and matched to such an extent that you somehow end up with a man who has ovaries. And keep in mind that this example person was not presented to us as a trans-identified woman.
This way of viewing human beings is—and I don’t say this lightly—inhuman. We are fundamentally not machines built of interchangeable parts that can be swapped out on a whim, and sex characteristics don’t just pop up in random combinations on different people. This view that has been drip-fed to the public over the last decade has resulted in no small number of people convinced that it is possible for humans to have two functional sets of genitals or to produce both types of gametes. This is not possible because the male and female developmental pathways are mutually antagonistic, yet such a very simple and basic fact of our species has been deliberately obfuscated. But to what end?
Again, because I feel this cannot be overstated, my argument here has nothing to do with believing that people with DSDs should not be protected from discrimination. They should, and I believe they easily can be with protections for “sex,” but that would require us having a proper view of sex. Introducing the language of “sex characteristics” and muddying our understanding of sex is not the answer and does nothing to help such people, and I don’t believe that was ever the goal in the first place.
While no doubt many advocates for these changes are people with DSDs themselves, I believe this was largely done in the service of gender ideology more specifically and queer theory more broadly. Disrupting our understanding of sex and making it seem as more of a mixed bag of various “characteristics” rather than the way the entire body is organized makes it easier for trans-identified people to claim to be the opposite or some “other” sex. It also helps to further the “queer” fight against “norms,” which at this point has become a battle against the norm of reality itself.
None of this leads humanity anywhere good. It isn’t furthering our understanding of minorities like people with DSDs, people who struggle with gender dysphoria due to many different possible reasons, from discomfort with puberty to autogynephilia, or people who are same-sex attracted. Queer theorists have taken our experiences and used them to create a distorted representation of what it is to be human built from an assortment of identity labels and sliced up (sometimes literally) physical characteristics that have no spark of life when stitched haphazardly together.
You are not just a bundle of identity labels and physical characteristics. Religious ideas about the soul aside, the fact remains that you are an indivisible human being developed as a whole from the moment of your creation, not bit by bit, part by part. The sex of your body is no more able to be carved away than your heart could beat or lungs draw air independently. We can’t lose sight of this fundamental reality, and I fear what could happen if we do.
Beautiful, powerful essay.
EK: “... deconstruct the concept of sex itself ... right down to the idea of whole and indivisible sexed bodies ....”
You certainly do cover a lot of ground. And it’s certainly useful to know the history, uses and misuses, and ramifications of the term “sex characteristics”. However, while you do have some valid criticisms of those “deconstructionists”, methinks that both you and they have some profound -- and quite unscientific if not risibly wooish -- “misunderstandings” about what it means to be male and female in the first place.
For starters, you might note that, while “deconstruction” has, reasonably, acquired some pejorative connotations, its original meaning – “a taking to pieces” (circa 1865; https://www.etymonline.com/word/deconstruct) – is largely what biology has done with the sexes. It has examined the phenomenon of reproduction across literally millions of species, “taken to pieces” the process in each of those species, and found the common elements in all of them, thus rendering them all down into some bare bone “essences” of what it takes to qualify as “male” and as “female”. Which are “produces small gametes”, and “produces large gametes”, respectively. Something which even Trump’s EO on “restoring biological truth in government” has more or less championed:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/defending-women-from-gender-ideology-extremism-and-restoring-biological-truth-to-the-federal-government/
So you may wish to try rectifying those “deficiencies” by reading a couple of articles by a philosopher of science, Paul Griffiths, in Aeon magazine – for something of a popularization – and in a PhilPapers Archive article for a deeper analysis:
https://aeon.co/essays/the-existence-of-biological-sex-is-no-constraint-on-human-diversity
https://philarchive.org/rec/GRIWAB-2
And if you wanted get down a bit deeper into the biological bedrock, you might take a gander at this article in the Journal of Molecular Human Reproduction, the Glossary definitions in particular, on “Gamete competition, gamete limitation, and the evolution of the two sexes”:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221214064356/https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990?login=false
From that Glossary:
"Female: Biologically, the female sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the larger gametes in anisogamous systems.
Male: Biologically, the male sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the smaller gametes in anisogamous systems."
To any biologist worth their salt – few and far between these days, particularly among the woke and even among the gender-critical crowd – that is ALL that “male” and “female” MEAN. The criteria of “produces large or small gametes” qualify as the necessary and sufficient conditions for sex category membership. Which means, no gametes, no sex.
On the other hand, you clearly have a rather wooish conception about what are the defining criteria to qualify as male and female with your, “The sex of your body is no more able to be carved away than your heart could beat or lungs draw air independently”. Kind of a “precious bodily fluids” sort of argument.
But it seems you either have to accept that, biologically speaking, there are clear, specific, readily quantifiable, and quite objective requirements to qualify for a sex category membership card – which many people don’t meet -- or you peddle some subjective, unquantifiable, and mythic “essence” – as you’re basically doing with that claptrap -- that has absolutely no justification or corroboration in any reputable biological journal, encyclopedia, or dictionary.
Which brings me to the “theme” of your essay, your discussion of “sex characteristics” where you go off the rails in a rather spectacular fashion. Although your “deconstructionist” targets do likewise, even if to the other side of the road. But for some examples, from your quotes, they say:
• ... born with physical, hormonal or genetic features that are neither wholly female nor wholly male; or a combination of female and male; or neither female nor male;
• ... born with physical sex characteristics that do not fit the normative definitions for male or female bodies;
• Not everyone is born with bodily sex characteristics that are wholly female or male, according to the norms in society;
• Some people have innate variations of sex characteristics and their bodies don’t conform with medical and social norms for female or male bodies;
Where they go off the rails is in suggesting if not endorsing the view that various “sex characteristics” – presumably or putatively those relevant to the process of sexual reproduction – such as various “physical, hormonal, or genetic” features are, in themselves, either male or female. But “male” and “female” denote “ONLY” “produces large or small gametes”. All, or many, of those “sex characteristics” are simply “secondary sexual traits” that are generally typical of one sex or the other, but not unique to either.
But where you too go off the rails on that same score is in rather cluelessly failing to differentiate between various traits – i.e., various “sex characteristics” – that are, likewise, typical of one sex or the other while not being unique to either. For examples, likewise relevant to those “deconstructionists” above, consider that breasts are typical of human females, but not unique to them – for example, consider gynecomastia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gynecomastia]. “breasts” aren’t thereby “female” in themselves since they're not producing any ova, they’re only physical traits typical of females.
And there are probably dozens if not hundreds of similar types of “sex characteristics”. For example, “adult human females” typically have XX chromosomes, and “adult human males” typically have XY chromosomes. And there are probably another dozen karyotypes that are possible, though most are infertile and thereby sexless. But some human females have XY chromosomes while being fertile, able to produce ova – ergo, females but with an atypical chromosome “sex characteristic”:
“Report of Fertility in a Woman with a Predominantly 46,XY Karyotype in a Family with Multiple Disorders of Sexual Development”; https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article-abstract/93/1/182/2598461
Similarly, there are many “men” with XX chromosomes – another atypical chromosome “sex characteristic” – although they’re likewise infertile and technically sexless, neither male nor female:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome
Griffiths’ PhilPapers article goes into some additional detail on that phenomenon, but this bit seems a useful point of reference that you might want to try paying close attention to:
PG: “Like chromosomes, the phenotypic characteristics of an organism [e.g., genitalia, chromosomes, hormones] can only be labelled as ‘male’ or ‘female’ if there is ALREADY a definition of sex. There is nothing particularly ‘male’ about being blue as opposed to brown, but colour is a good way to judge sex in Blue Groper [fish]. Incubating the egg is a reliable criterion for identifying biologically female primates. But in pipefish and seahorse species the male incubates the eggs in his brood pouch (Vincent et al 1992).”
As he emphasizes, you can’t possibly say which traits are typical of males and which ones are typical of females if you haven’t FIRST specified what it takes to qualify as either. Try keeping in mind the difference between traits that define a category – being 13 to 19 for “teenager”, producing large gametes for “female” – and those traits that are merely typical of, but not unique to, those categories, i.e., those “sex characteristics” in the latter case.
You may also wish to take a gander at my post on the analogous difference between accidental and essential properties:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/accidental-and-essential-properties