This book engages with intersex people to understand the choices they have and the impositions they face in predominantly Western societies. As part of this, the main question the book asks is ‘What is intersex?’ To answer this question, we rely heavily on the accounts of intersex people gathered from our own empirical research while also paying close attention to the ways in which differing forms of regulation construct, shape and stifle the possibilities and experiences of being intersex. As a result, this book investigates the conditions that frame our understanding of the body and that create the institutional conditions under which intersex bodies can emerge or are denied. In doing so, it is attentive to the ways in which institutions create norms that give value to certain types of body and devalue others. This interrogation leads to three further questions: How has the idea of intersex been mobilized? Who has utilized the idea of being intersex? And for what purposes?

The examples that we focus on highlight the ways in which intersex is often interpreted through narrow institutional frameworks. In this book, each chapter focuses on a different regulatory framework. Chapter 2 considers medical guidelines and the pathologization of intersex; Chapter 3 explores the use of third markers on official documentation to recognizing intersex embodiment as non-binary; Chapter 4 critically examines the way in which intersex is constructed as LGBT, particularly through the institutional inclusion of intersex within equality laws; Chapter 5 considers legal rights-based frameworks which have prohibited non-therapeutic medical interventions; and, finally, Chapter 6 examines intersex within the context of psychosocial care. Each of these frameworks have been selected as they are important examples of regulative and institutional control over intersex people which offer an attempt to help intersex people but in doing so create the terms and conditions that frame what intersex is and what it can be. Moreover, the book demonstrates the power of medicine in determining how intersex has been understood and the difficulties that other conceptualizations have had in challenging narratives of disorder Some of the alternative narratives have faced difficulties because of the lack of ontological resonance with intersex people, but others – that have been informed by the experiences of intersex people – have also faced resistance because they clash with medical understandings of the intersex body.