Medieval law asked which sex 'prevails' before letting some people witness a will
A twelfth-century collection of church law ruled that whether a hermaphrodite could witness a testament depended on which sex prevailed. Five centuries later the English jurist Edward Coke listed three kinds of heir: male, female, or both. Today the term is intersex, and even that word divides the people it describes.
Intersex people are born with chromosome patterns, gonads or genitals that, in the United Nations human rights office's phrasing, fall outside typical binary notions of male or female bodies. The counterpart term for typical sex characteristics is endosex. Visibly ambiguous genitals occur in roughly one birth in 2,000 to 4,500, but estimates of the overall intersex population swing from 0.018 percent to 1.7 percent depending on which conditions are included. Medical classification systems generally group such traits under disorders of sex development.
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century physicians tried to build the first taxonomy, sorting people by the microscopic appearance of their gonads into true hermaphrodites and male or female pseudohermaphrodites. Those labels are now rarely used, and advocates regard hermaphrodite as stigmatising and misleading. The geneticist Richard Goldschmidt coined intersexuality in 1917, but the word only caught on after the biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling's 1993 essay arguing that two sexes are not enough.
Preferred language is still contested. An Australian study of 272 people published in 2016 found 60 percent used intersex to describe themselves. A 2017 Chicago survey found 80 percent of support group respondents liked the term or felt neutral about it, while caregivers were less keen, and the hospital reported that the phrase disorders of sex development may harm care. Yet another US study found 53 percent of 133 parents and adolescents disliked intersex, and a 2020 European study split roughly 43 percent against, 37 percent for and 20 percent neutral.
Some intersex infants undergo surgery or hormone treatment to produce more conventional sex characteristics. The practice is controversial, lacks firm evidence of good outcomes, and can involve sterilisation. Adults, including elite female athletes, have also been subjected to such treatment.
Source: Intersex
