Obioma Chukwuike went to an all-girls boarding school in Nigeria, but was not sure if she was a girl or a boy. “Everybody seemed so worried about my body all the time. People kept asking me if I was a girl or a boy and I would answer: ‘I don’t know. I am just me’.”

Kaisli Syrjänen recalls the secrecy and the silence during adolescence in Finland. “It was a feeling of not being fully included, of not having a space simply because you didn’t fit into a binary worldview.”

Crystal Hendriks grew up in South Africa thinking she was “a normal girl” until she never got her menstruation like all the girls around her. “I thought I was the only person in the world like this. I felt alone at school and inadequate as a human. I sometimes don’t know how I survived.”

Mauro Cabral Grinspan still painfully remembers how a visit to a small pediatric clinic in Argentina at age 13 led to a long series of traumatic medical procedures, psychotherapy and surgeries throughout the years. “They couldn't accept that my body was fine the way it was. It was a brutal form of medical violence.”

Across the world, intersex people often suffer from discrimination, stigma and prejudice, and are subjected to multiple rights violations during all their lives. Intersex people are born with sex characteristics that do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies. This week, Chukwuike, Syrjänen, Hendriks and Cabral Grinspan joined many human rights defenders and intersex organizations in celebrating a milestone that culminates years of tireless advocacy and grassroots campaigning.

“Universality of human rights”

In a landmark vote, the Human Rights Council on April 4 adopted a resolution calling on Member States to enhance efforts to combat discrimination, violence and harmful practices against intersex people, the first of its kind for the United Nations. The resolution also calls on Member States to address the root causes, such as stereotypes, spread of misconceptions and inaccurate information, stigma and taboo, and to work to fulfil the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health for persons with innate variations in sex characteristics.

“This is a great moment for the intersex community, but we still have a long way to go,” said Dr. Morgan Carpenter, Executive Director of Intersex Human Rights Australia (IHRA) and a bioethicist at the University of Sydney School of Public Health.

“Because of the way our bodies are perceived as different, we can experience stigmatisation, discrimination and harmful practices, including medical interventions to make our bodies appear or function in ways that are more typically female or male. We are calling for the same rights as everybody else. It’s about the universality of human rights, including the rights to bodily integrity and bodily autonomy, and freedom from harmful practices.”

Intersex persons are born with a wide range of natural variations in their sex characteristics that don’t fit the typical definition of male or female, including sexual anatomy, reproductive organs or chromosome patterns. It’s estimated that up to 1.7 per cent of the population is born with intersex traits, according to UN data. Working with civil society and intersex rights defenders, UN Human Rights has led several initiatives to promote the visibility and rights of intersex people and issued a Technical Note in 2023 for States and other stakeholders on UN recommendations on the rights of intersex people and good practices in their implementation.

Most of the activists share stories of pain, shame and suffering in solitude, including feeling misunderstood by their own families, particularly when reaching puberty.