Biology is Not Destiny

Are all human beings born with a clearly recognisable sexual identity – as either male or female? Clearly not. There is enough medical evidence to establish that at birth infants often do not display a clear sexual identity. This biological confusion is sometimes evident and can be corrected. Sometimes it reveals itself only at puberty but there are also instances of people living their entire lives without knowing about their condition.

A person’s gender is determined not just by physiological attributes but also by how a person is socialised. Hence, for instance, you find people who are brought up as females, or as males, even if physiologically they do not fall clearly into one or the other sexual category. Tragically, despite medical knowledge about intersex, defined by the Intersex Society of North America as “a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that does not seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male”, people with such a condition continue to suffer discrimination.