Alicia Roth Weigel, Time - For most Americans, the past few days have felt like a whirlwind; for intersex Americans like myself, the past week has been one of unimaginable whiplash. On Jan. 16, then President Biden’s department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a groundbreaking report on the health inequities our community suffers—believed to be the first ever federal policy acknowledging the existence of, let alone challenges faced by, intersex individuals in the United States. Flash forward to Jan. 20, and President Trump signed an executive order that attempts to negate our very existence.
Trump’s executive order on “Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” intended as an attack on transgender Americans and disingenuously disguised as “defending women,” erases the biological reality of intersex people like me.
I was born with physical traits—external sex anatomy, internal reproductive organs, hormones, and chromosomes—that don’t fit neatly into the binary “male” or “female” options on a birth certificate, and I’m not alone. As the extensively data-driven HHS report references, more than 5 million intersex Americans were born with differences or variations in their sex characteristics or reproductive anatomy, roughly the same number as those born with naturally red hair. Trump’s executive order, however, states that it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes—male and female—and dictates that sexes are not changeable, rather “grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”
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