Let's talk about inclusion!  

One of the more common enquiries we get is 'how can community services better include intersex people in service delivery?'

What makes a group, an organisation or acronym inclusive? An exclusive focus on language, and even mention of specific terms like the word intersex, does not itself make an organisation inclusive. Unfortunately, this kind of focus provides no way for people with intersex variations to know that they, and their needs, will be understood or responded to.

Even more concerningly, people with innate variations in sex characteristics – the intersex population – are frequently misrepresented as a gender or sexuality diverse minority, as necessarily queer or trans, or as a mythologised third sex category. These popular misrepresentations provide no tools to clearly understand the needs of a population that is far more diverse, nor to fully consider implications for inclusion within service delivery. Genuine inclusion gets definitions right, but goes beyond these to consider health and wellbeing needs, and respond to the diversity of people with intersex variations.

The Inclusive Practice and Raising the Bar guides provide toolkits to move beyond terminology and tokenism and take meaningful action. These guides are intended to help make your service, project or program intersex friendly.

This suite of resources includes:

• Inclusion guide to respecting people with intersex variations: Information about who are intersex people, helpful terminology, defining inclusion, measuring inclusion, intake forms and research, and a checklist on using appropriate terminology – download PDF version
• Raising the bar: How to be an intersex ally, respecting the diversity of the intersex population, doing your research, using appropriate language, acknowledging leadership and prioritising consent – download PDF version

These resources are free to use and share. For more information click here.

Intake forms and surveys

In order to respect the diversity of the intersex population and avoid misrepresentation that affects data quality, we advise against including the word intersex in questions on sex or gender in intake forms or surveys. We recommend a separate question on innate variations of sex characteristics. 

We provide guidance in our resource on forms and data collection.

For researchers, we can help develop and review proposed studies. More detailed information on this and inclusive practice in research can be found here.
 

New webinar: Raising awareness and visibility of the ‘I’ in educational settings