Beware the Phrase "Sex Characteristics"

Inhumanity Hiding Behind Human Rights

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Pablo Picasso (1907)

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.