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My discussion of intersexuality's changing exemplificatory position within feminist studies of science explains how its medical management has emerged as an exemplary injustice of recognition. Specifically, the surgical protocol that aims to make unusual genitalia invisible, and the medical obfuscation of intersexuality's ramifications for the cultural construction of gender, have been written as a wrong by Anne Fausto-Sterling and Suzanne Kessler. By mapping intersex treatment as a discursively produced injustice, I argue that it is accordingly within discourse that the wrongs of intersex treatment may be redressed – not by undoing past surgeries, or by punishing clinicians as personally “guilty.”

Purpose – Intersexuality is examined from a sociology of diagnosis frame to show how the diagnostic process is connected to other social constructions, offer new support that medical professionals define illness in ways that sometimes carries negative consequences, and illustrate how the medical profession holds on to authority in the face of patient activism.

Methodology/approach – Data collection occurred over a two-year period (October 2008 to August 2010). Sixty-two in-depth interviews were conducted with individuals connected to the intersex community including adults with intersexuality, parents, medical professionals, and intersex activists.

Findings – Medical professionals rely on essentialist understandings of gender to justify the medicalization of intersexuality, which they currently are doing through a nomenclature shift away from intersex terminology in favor of disorders of sex development (DSD) language. This shift allows medical professionals to reassert their authority and reclaim jurisdiction over intersexuality in light of intersex activism that was successfully framing intersexuality as a social rather than biological problem.

Practical implications – This chapter encourages critical thought and action from activists and medical professionals about shifts in intersex medical management.

Social implications – Intersexuality might be experienced in less stigmatizing ways by those personally impacted.

Originality/value – The value of this research is that it connects the sociology of diagnosis literature with gender scholarship. Additional value comes from the data, which were collected after the 2006 nomenclature shift.

Historically, it has been common practice for doctors and parents to withhold the diagnosis from their minor intersex patients. This study seeks to integrate intersex youth experiences into the growing body of literature on diagnosis disclosure for intersex patients.

Using gender structure theory as a model, 16 intersex youth were given in-depth surveys regarding their experiences with their intersex identity in individual, interactional, and institutional contexts.

Participants more positively experience intersex than the earlier generations of intersex people. They were not deeply troubled by their diagnosis as doctors have historically feared, and they are open about their diagnosis with their non-intersex peers and teachers. They also find peer support valuable.

Data was collected from a single event and cannot represent all intersex youth. Future research must continue to engage with intersex youth experiences both inside of and beyond activist and support group networks.

These findings are strong exploratory evidence for the importance of diagnosis disclosure for intersex youth. Policies of withholding intersex diagnoses in clinical and familial contexts should be reevaluated in light of the experiences of intersex youth.

Diagnosis disclosure for intersex youth creates the potential for increased medical decision-making participation and increased capacity for activism and community building around intersex issues.

Our results encourage future studies that center the experiences of intersex youth, for we conclude that theorizing the lived experiences of intersex people is incomplete without their perspectives.

This paper aims to challenge the cisnormative and binary assumptions that underpin the management and gender scholarship. Introducing and contextualising the contributions that comprise this special issue, this paper critically reflects on some of the principal developments in management research on trans* and intersex people in the workplace and anticipates what future scholarship in this area might entail.

A critical approach is adopted to interrogate the prevailing cisnormative and binary approach adopted by management and gender scholars.

The key finding is the persistence of cisnormativity and normative gender and sex binarism in academic knowledge production and in society more widely, which appear to have hindered how management and gender scholars have routinely failed to conceptualise and foreground the array of diverse genders and sexes.

This paper foregrounds the workplace experiences of trans* and intersex people, which have been neglected by management researchers. By positioning intersexuality as an important topic of management research, this paper breaks the silence that has enwrapped intersex issues in gender and management scholarship. There are still unanswered questions and issues that demand future research from academics who are interested in addressing cisnormativity in the workplace and problematising the sex and gender binaries that sustain it.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the harms suffered by intersex children who are subjected to medically unnecessary genital-normalizing surgery (GNS) and the possible applicability of statutes prohibiting female genital mutilation (FGM) to certain cases of GNS to redress this harm in the USA.

Consulting publications by medical researchers and intersex activists alike, this comment reviews the procedures undertaken as part of GNS (most commonly including clitoral reduction) and the reasons behind these procedures. It also parses the language of federal and state statutes prohibiting FGM in the USA.

Surgical practices that include clitoral cutting when the procedure is not necessary to the health of the person on whom it is performed constitute FGM and are punishable under federal and certain state laws in the USA. GNS with clitoral reduction fits the definition of FGM because it is performed for cosmetic and social reasons, not medical necessity.

Acknowledging GNS with clitoral reduction as FGM is a crucial strategy to ensure that female-assigned intersex children’s rights to bodily autonomy are protected to the same extent as non-intersex children’s rights. Intersex legal activists in the USA should press for enforcement of FGM statutes as to female-assigned intersex children until the medical practitioners who continue to defend and perform GNS see the procedures as illegal genital mutilation.

Purpose: To consider the extent to which the legal recognition of non-binary gender has the potential to disrupt the gender binary.

Methodology/Approach: This chapter will employ case study as method, focusing on recent changes to Australian law and policy, which introduce a third gender category. I rely on the work of queer theorists on normativity and recognition as a theoretical framework and on the work of social scientists on transgender people as evidence.

Findings: This chapter finds that while there is much to be celebrated about increasing alternatives to the dominant categories of male and female, the legal recognition of non-binary gender may in fact serve to conceptually purge the dominant gender categories of non-conforming elements while simultaneously masking the ways in which institutions of regulatory power continue to demand conformity with normative standards of gender.

Research Limitations: Since few non-binary individuals in Australia have adopted the X marker the implications laid out in this paper are speculative. The experiences of non-binary individuals present an important avenue for further research.

Practical Implications: I recommend, as an alternative to further gender classifications, that we should seek to minimize the degree to which membership of a particular gender category is used to distribute rights and privileges.

Originality/Value of Paper: This chapter advances the literature on non-binary gender, contributes to existing queer and feminist analyses of the gender binary and extends work on normativity to legal recognition of alternative genders.

The chapters in this book focus on how higher education can cultivate and promote a more inclusive and equitable environment in higher education, especially with regard to gender diversity as well as those non-conforming, non-heteronormative groups. The chapters in this volume cover the broad picture/context of diversity in various countries as well as a specific focus on gender. The chapters discuss the factors relating to inclusion and equity, what is driving campuses to be more inclusive, and practical steps and case studies that higher education institutions can implement to create more inclusive and equitable learning environments. Finally, this volume discusses the need for inclusive leadership which involves building institutional capacity for inclusion and creating the right conditions under which inclusion and equity can grow and thrive and crafting policies and practices whose end result is to create a culture of inclusion.

“Disparity” implies the existence of a “markedly distinct in quality or character,” difference between one group and another. Some groups, due to elevated stigma associated with group membership, are invisible as a disparate minority and therefore, while there may be a great inequity in healthcare between that group and the normative population, the invisible minority is ignored. This chapter addresses the issue of healthcare for the transgender-identified population. We address how the normative viewpoint of mental illness and unacceptable religious status, along with lifelong perceived and actual abuse and violence, creates a socially sanctioned inequality in healthcare for this population.

This brief paper aims to examine the extent to which lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ+) older adults in Australia used the internet for social, informational and instrumental needs, including how internet use changed during COVID-19.

The authors used a survey advertised to LGBTIQ+ older adults (N = 394), recruited as a sample of convenience, on social networking sites and via LGBTIQ+ and aged care organizations.

Self-reported internet use decreased during COVID-19, with various significant between-group differences in purposes of internet use and sexuality, gender, living arrangements and time.

The internet can be a critical form of social contact for LGBTIQ+ older adults, and this is among the first studies in Australia about their internet use during COVID-19. Findings from the study suggest patterns of internet use may be decreasing among LGBTIQ+ older adults during the pandemic.

This chapter focuses on what we know about the intersections of gender, doping and sport and addresses the history, complexities and nuances of how gender impacts perceptions of and research on doping in sport. After establishing briefly what the physiology, psychology, media studies and sociology literature demonstrates with respect to the intersection of doping and gender, this chapter addresses how and why gender was neglected in the creation of anti-doping policies. The lack of thought toward gender in the creation of the current anti-doping system, combined with the conflation of drug testing and sex testing issues by the International Olympic Committee's medical commission in the 1960s, has led to persistent gender stereotypes associated with anti-doping rule violations. As a result, unintended overlap between sex testing and drug testing continues, with implications for the eligibility of intersex and transgender athletes.