My Lords, I rise to move Amendment 33A in the name of my noble friend Lord Stevenson of Balmacara, which is a probing amendment. Our interest in this issue is to draw attention to people born with an intersex condition; individuals whose anatomy or physiology differs from contemporary cultural stereotypes of what constitutes male and female.
Being intersex is not a disease, it is not a disorder, it is a perfectly normal—and quite common—variation within human development. The need to use the term is made necessary by society’s insistence on maintaining a rigid classification of all human beings as male or female. In many ways, those with an intersex condition can be termed non-gendered. Sometimes a person is not found to have an intersex anatomy until she or he reaches the age of puberty or she or he finds himself an infertile adult, or dies of old age and is autopsied. Some people live and die with intersex anatomy without anyone, including themselves, ever knowing.
If we take the classic stereotypes of what constitutes male and female and consider the biological, social, gender or sexual orientation in the round, there are very few human beings who completely conform in all aspects to the rigid stereotypes. Most people vary from the standard stereotypes in some ways, sometimes in small details, sometimes significantly. Some commentators would now consider sexuality as a continuum with the standard stereotypes as the extremes of this continuum.
One major difficulty with the use of bipolar stereotypes is that there is no precise way of determining into which of the two boxes someone should be placed at birth. All the available yardsticks are flawed: karyotype,
gonads, secondary sexual characteristics, appearance—none of these, or even any combination of them, can determine sex with absolute certainty. It is only by ignoring the vast amount of biological evidence to the contrary that this fiction of a strict bipolar sexuality can be maintained. Those who clearly do not fit these classifications—a substantial minority—are dismissed as being disordered or biological errors which require fixing.
It is understandable to discover that, when an infant is born, there is often great pressure on parents and clinicians alike to come up with a clear definition of sex for the newborn. Such people are often subjected by the medical professions to surgical and chemical interventions, usually without their explicit permission, to normalise them and thereby eradicate the evidence of difference.
Your Lordships will understand that, with this amendment, we are talking about a largely hidden and often overlooked minority of people. Estimates of this population run to as many as 1% of live births exhibiting some degree of sexual ambiguity and between 0.1% and 0.2% of live births being ambiguous enough to become the subject of specialist medical attention, regretfully including involuntary surgery to address their sexual ambiguity.
If we lived in a legal jurisdiction where marriages were defined without reference to the sexual identity of the couples concerned, these complications would not occur. However, the approach underlying the Bill is based on an assumption that the sex of the participants is settled. The UK of course recognises the legal and official change of gender, which would allow a transsexual person to be legally married in accordance with their adopted gender identity. However, those intersex people who identify as non-gendered do not always, if they are allowed to, attempt to transition and are therefore excluded at all levels. Our amendment would specifically include in legislation, for the first time, those who identify as non-gendered.
Unless there is some consideration given to this largely hidden and often overlooked minority, they will be isolated yet again from the rights accorded to other, higher-profile groups. I beg to move.