Intersex-inclusive pride flag by Nikki, CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

Contrary to the opinion of the Trump regime, which recently proclaimed there are only two sexes, the gender binary is false. Nearly two in every hundred people have intersex traits, according to figures often cited by advocates, and by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Intersex people have biological variations in their sex characteristics—whether of genitals or internal sex organs, chromosomes or hormones. These traits are sometimes called “ambiguous”—only because we’re taught to perceive sex as two opposites, rather than the varied, rich, resilient tapestry it is.

Additionally, among LGBTQI people aged 18-60 in the United States, 1,219,000 are reportedly nonbinary—that is, with a sense of self that can’t be confined to either category, male or female.

New studies might revise or fine-tune the statistics; yet the point remains. Gender diversity is our collective experience.

But to the capitalist patriarchy, sex is an inflexible binary. The norm, which must be preserved, is a reliably sex-stratified society, from board leadership to sports to military conscription. Promoting resentment of nonstandard sex and gender identities is a handy way to divide people who could be allies.

Transgender rights, migrant rights, and the rights of the unhoused are linked, Olivia Wood observes, as “the same mechanisms of the state are used to oppress all of them and deepen capitalist exploitation for the entire working class.”

That’s worth considering when anyone wonders why Trump felt compelled, on Inauguration Day 2025, to make “two sexes” into federal policy. In short, the gender binary serves as a mechanism for social control. It’s high time we refused to be divided, ranked, and conquered.

Taking on the System

In early 2006, the parents of an adopted child went to court. Their mission? To take on a medical system that problematizes intersex kids.

A few years earlier, South Carolina’s social services department, together with doctors at the Medical University of South Carolina, noted that one-year-old M.C. had a physically evident intersex condition. They concluded that the child could be raised on either side of the social binary.

Rather than resist the urge to impose a gender on another human being, they took it upon themselves to assign M.C. to the female category. They cut M.C.’s healthy genital tissue just before he was adopted.

By age seven, M.C. had grown into a male sense of self. M.C.’s adoptive parents sued in the name of their child for medical malpractice. Imposing an identity on an intersex kid causes serious, long-term medical problems. Yet many intersex people avoid medical help on account of deep mistrust.

“They disfigured him because they could not accept him for who he was,” said M.C.’s adoptive mother.

Ultimately, in July 2017, the defendants settled with M.C., offering an annuity policy to cover medical debt.

The Act of Assigning

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment has urged countries to stop “genital-normalizing” surgeries on intersex persons. Human Rights Watch has also urged U.S. doctors to stop. So has the American Bar Association.

In 2024, Rep. Sylvia Garcia of Texas introduced the Protect Intersex Children Act to bar these surgeries on children in the U.S. foster care system. Alas, it did not receive a vote.

Re-Thinking Genital Surgeries on Intersex Infants, a report from three former surgeons general, recommends waiting for children to become ready to decide whether or not to undergo surgery. The week before Trump took office, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services called for an end to a surgical paradigm that enforces sex........

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