The new guidance from HHS, complying with Trump’s Executive Order redefining sex, attempts to push an unscientific agenda rather than reflect any biological reality. It aims instead to erase the existence of transgender and intersex people.
The Trump administration has up until now ignored the nearly 2% of the population with intersex variations, because their existence undermines the idea of sex as a clear-cut binary. Instead of offering “objective biology,” HHS’ guidance tries and fails to incorporate the existence of intersex people while using the stigmatizing term “disorders of sexual development”.
The guidance claims intersex people do not constitute a third sex because they don’t produce a third type of gamete. But the scientific consensus has long been that no single factor determines a person’s sex, and many intersex people’s bodies are impossible to sort in HHS’ narrow definitions of sex. People who were born without gonads or have a mix of gonadal tissue that could produce both sperm and ova are unaccounted for under these definitions. And the definitions redefine women with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS) as men, despite the fact that they are assigned female at birth and live their whole lives as girls and women.
If sex was a strict binary, surely HHS could offer a binary definition of sex that all people could fit neatly into. Any attempt to define biological sex as a clear-cut binary will fail, because sex is a spectrum, and not all bodies fall neatly into boxes. Intersex people exist, and will always exist, regardless of unscientific and political attempts at erasure.
