Intersex Conditions Are Not Nearly as Common as Red Hair

I subscribe to evolutionary biologist Colin Wright’s new Substack Newsletter, Reality’s Last Stand. In his most recent article, “Intersex Is Not as Common as Red Hair,” Wright deals with a claim commonly heard from LGBTQ+ activists, the claim that 1.7% of people have intersex conditions, supposedly making it as common as having red hair. Most activists make this claim without any ill-intent. They want to show that intersex conditions are common and the people with these conditions should not be seen as abnormal. The “facts” touted by the activists, however, don’t add up.

Many LGBTQ+ activists get their information from a book titled Sexing the Body, by Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000), who got her number from a study asking people to physically describe “idea” males and “ideal” females.  For example,

Their “ideal female” has two X chromosomes, functional ovaries that result in normal feminizing puberty, intact oviducts attached to a functional uterus, cervix, and vaginal canal. This ideal female must also have labia minora and majora present, and a clitoris that ranges between 0.20 and 0.85 cm in length at birth.

These “ideal” definitions fails because they include “many conditions that cannot be considered intersex in any clinically relevant sense.” The central error was to equate “differences of sexual development” (DSDs) with “intersex.”  To illustrate Wright referred to a chart of Fausto-Sterling’s data (that was created by Twitter user @zeno001):

Screen Shot 2020 12 07 at 8.41.19 PM

Using this data, Wright points out how misleading the 1.7% claim is.

. . . 88% of Fausto-Sterling’s 1.7% figure is taken up by one condition: late-onset adrenal hyperplasia (LOCAH). These individuals have completely normal male or female genitalia at birth that align with their sex chromosomes. The sex of these individuals is not ambiguous, so to label LOCAH as an intersex condition is a far cry from what most people and clinicians conceptually envision the term to capture.

The next most prevalent DSD on Fausto-Sterling’s list iclude any chromosomal deviations from classical XX and XY (e.g. Klinefelter syndrome, Turner syndrome, etc.). However, these conditions do not result in ambiguous genitalia and therefore cannot be considered intersex in any clinically relevant sense. . . . .

Lastly, vaginal agenesis, the next most common DSD on the list, is not generally considered an intersex condition, as girls with this condition are genotypically XX, possess perfectly normal ovaries, and can even become pregnant and birth their own children following vaginoplasty. They are unambiguously female.

When these common DSDs are removed, and intersex conditions are more precisely defined as “conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female,” Fausto-Sterling’s 1.7% figure drops dramatically. According to Sax, “Applying this more precise definition, the true prevalence of intersex is seen to be about 0.018%, almost 100 times lower than Fausto-Sterling’s estimate of 1.7%.”

With Wright’s facts-first approach, the 1.7% claim commonly touted by activists bears no resemblance to reality.  As Wright reassures readers, this overstated statistic has no bearing on our duty to treat all intersex people as fully human. They are due the same kindness and respect as any other person. That should never be an issue for anyone, of course.

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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

This Post Has 2 Comments

  1. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth

    Colin Wright adds this from his Substack website:

    So, why do I use a much narrower definition than those used by Fausto-Sterling and many intersex organizations? Am I just trying to make intersex seem as rare as possible (<0.02%), whereas activists and scientists like Fausto-Sterling are trying to do the exact opposite by quoting the much broader 1-2% statistic? Are we all then equally guilty of letting our biases pull us in opposite directions? No, and here’s why.

    My view—that intersex is a subset of DSDs—comes from a paper by Leonard Sax, a psychologist and physician, where he defined intersex as “those conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female.” Sax favored this definition because of its clinical relevance; that is, it simply made no clinical (or logical) sense to place individuals with Klinefelter syndrome or Turner syndrome (whose sex is unambiguous) within the same umbrella category as individuals with conditions resulting in some degree of sexual ambiguity. Thus, Sax’s definition provides more nuance and greater conceptual clarity regarding the actual phenomena one may wish to consider.

    Many activists, on the other hand, rely on there being a disparity between what the 1-2% statistic they frequently quote actually refers to and what they’re hoping people interpret “intersex” to mean.

  2. Avatar of Bill Heath
    Bill Heath

    Redefining terms in order to control the narrative is the signal characteristic of today’s anarcho-authoritarian movement in the U.S. It begins in public schools controlled by unions and is completed in universities controlled by leftists who have deluded themselves into believing they’re liberals. It’s then maintained by three groups of self-identified elites: Big Tech, an overwhelming majority of mass media, and the Democratic Party.

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