Tuesday, March 13, 2012
How Common is Intersex Status?
Posted by Dr. Cary Gabriel Costello at 12:31 AM
http://intersexroadshow.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/how-common-is-intersex-status.htmlIf you poke around the internet trying to find out how common it is for a person to be intersex, you may well wind up frustrated that nobody seems to have a precise figure to give you. You'll probably encounter some commonly-cited odds: 1 in 2000, or 1 in 2500. People have passed these figures around for a number of years, until, by repetition, they've come to seem generally accepted. I used to repeat these figures myself, before I learned more about how they were generated. Being born intersex is presented as rare; less common, say, than being born with Down's syndrome.
These estimates are off by more than a factor of 10.
A true, conservative estimate is that more than 1 in 150 people are born with intersex bodies. In this post, I'm going to explain why the true commonplace of intersexuality is so widely underestimated. And yes, I'll justify my 1 in 150 estimate by the end.
