Intersexuality - Dealing with Intersexuality

Socio-cultural Attitudes - Legal Traditions

Sexual Rights

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In the Western legal tradition, intersexual persons, like members of other sexual minorities, never had any specific rights. An early attempt in the 1930s to formulate sexual rights was simply ignored. Even the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) did not include sexual rights. More than a half-century later, in 1999, the World Association for Sexology (now World Association for Sexual Health) passed its declaration of sexual rights in Hong Kong. It summarized the demands made by various groups since the beginning of the “sexual revolution” in the 1960s. In the meantime, several other organizations have issued their own sexual rights declarations, for example the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2002.
However, none of these documents addresses the specific concerns of intersexual persons. They do mention a right to “sexual integrity” or “bodily integrity”, but there is no explicit reference to routine surgical sex “normalization” in infancy. Neither is there a hint at the problem of sex reassignment in adulthood, or the right to stay married once personal identification papers have been changed from one sex to another. And, of course, with regard to sexual self-identification, there is no mention of a third option “X = neither female nor male”. On the other hand, there is no general agreement, even among the intersexes themselves, that these omissions need to be corrected and that respective new rights should be demanded. It may very well be enough to develop a wider or more precise interpretation of the following texts: