I previously spoke to Kellan Baker, PhD, MPH, MA, over one of Donald Trump’s anti-trans executive orders. He’s the Executive Director of the Institute for Health Research & Policy at Whitman-Walker and was part of a committee that informed the National Institutes of Health’s definition of sex and gender. “There is no easy, simple, straightforward, binary, immutable definition of sex. It simply doesn’t exist from a biological standpoint,” he told me. “There are any number of elements that go into what we think of as sex. For example, chromosomes, gonads, external genitalia, and hormones.”
He added, “All of these elements of sex can align. All of these elements of sex can not align with each other. There are many people for whom they would be very surprised if they were to take a chromosome test and learn that perhaps they had an intersex variation, or perhaps there were some element of their bodies that was different from what is typically expected of males and females.”
