Things you can do, big and small, to make the world better for trans and nonbinary people.
On the issuing of an intersex birth certificate in the USA
I’ve seen a few articles hailing it a success for nonbinary people, and I’d like to address that.
~
An intersex birth certificate has been issued in the US. This is good news, because of the circumstances around it. It was issued to an intersex adult who wanted to get their original birth certificate corrected, and who finds that the term intersex carries a lot of personal significance.
However, I’ve seen a few articles hailing it a success for nonbinary people, and I’d like to address that.
Most intersex people have binary genders, and most nonbinary people are not intersex.
Intersex is a term that describes people born with sex characteristics that don’t fit the typically male or typically female binary. It specifically applies to a condition (not a disorder) present from birth. Most intersex people grow up to claim a gender that is binary, which means most will identify as either men or women.
My understanding is that intersex people have a lot of problems because their birth certificates cannot easily be changed. For example, in March 2016 the OII-UK stated that one of their activism goals was “to ensure that sex or gender classifications are amendable through a simple administrative procedure at the request of the individuals concerned.” They go on to say that sex or gender should ultimately not be included on birth certificates at all.
I also understand that many intersex people are against having an intersex marker option being available for birth certificates from birth, because it will be issued to babies who are visibly intersex at birth, with all the social restrictions and stigma that come with it later in life. It also fails to acknowledge intersex people whose genders are binary, and intersex people who are assumed to be dyadic and binary at birth but find out later in life that they are not. It highlights that gendering babies can cause problems, and this is compounded by the difficulty in changing the gender marker on a birth certificate even in adulthood.
Specifically on whether this case will help nonbinary people, there is no indication that this is true. Sara Kelly Keenan, the person issued with an intersex birth certificate, is nonbinary and originally asked the court for a certificate that said nonbinary, “because that’s an umbrella term that would also include gender variant people.“ The court instead issued an intersex birth certificate, which Keenan is still very happy with. To put it another way, the case is an example of the courts refusing to issue a nonbinary birth certificate.
It’s possible that it may abstractly help by pushing record-holders to make records easier to change, and it may help by opening up the question of whether more gender or sex marker options can be added to birth certificates, but it will take some time, probably many years, to know for sure. It could even be used to uphold anatomy as the best metric for dictating gender markers on the official records of nonbinary people.
This case is a success in the direction of allowing intersex people to change the gender marker on their birth certificates and providing intersex people with more options when they do so, but I would argue that it does not affect non-intersex nonbinary people currently; most would in Keenan’s situation still be limited to an M or F gender marker.



I'm dyadic but this is what intersex activists in Germany are saying as well (we recently got a third gender marker, X, on our IDs, that's only available for intersex babies born after the legislation change).
I heard about that. I'm sad for intersex people in Germany, who've been shunted from one no-choice to another no-choice. I'm also curious to see how such a big change affects things in the long term for intersex people.