Not everyone is male or female – the growing controversy over sex designation

When a human is born, it’s a health practitioner’s job to assign a ‘male’ or ‘female’ label based on a look at the baby’s genitalia.
But sex designation is not as simple as a glance and then a check of one box or another on a birth certificate. Instead, the overwhelming evidence shows that sex is not binary.
To put it another way, the terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ don’t fully capture the complex biological, anatomical and chromosomal variations that occur in the human body.
That’s why calls are growing to remove sex designation from birth certificates, including a recent recommendation from the American Medical Association.