Inclusive practice

These resources have been developed in collaboration between the Darlington Consortium members (Intersex Human Rights Australia and Intersex Peer Support Australia) and LGBTIQ+ Health Australia (formerly the National LGBTI Health Alliance). They are aimed at making services intersex friendly.

What makes a group, an organisation or acronym inclusive? An exclusive focus on language and mention of particular terms offers no guide to inclusive practices, and no way for people with intersex variations to know that they, and their needs, will be understood. For more than a decade, groups and organisations in Australia have talked about ‘LGBTI’ populations, but people born with variations in sex characteristics – the intersex population – are frequently misrepresented as a gender or sexuality diverse minority. Many organisations have struggled to move beyond mentioning of a definition of intersex to fully consider the implications for including intersex people within their service delivery.

Genuine inclusion goes beyond terminology and definition and considers the health and wellbeing needs, and diversity of people with intersex variations. The Raising the Bar and Inclusive Practice guides provide toolkits to move beyond terms 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.

Inclusive practice in healthcare and medicine

Health and wellbeing, including inclusive practice

If you work in healthcare or medicine, we provide details of a more extensive set of healthcare and wellbeing resources on a specific page that will be of interest to you.

Data collection and research

We provide specific resources on including people with innate variations of sex characteristics in forms, including intake forms, and on researching intersex populations.

Watch the ILGA World session on how to be a good intersex ally, held on 20 October 2020. The session was chaired by Tony Briffa, co-executive director of IHRA.

More information

Read the joint press release

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. https://ihra.org.au/wp-content/uploads/key/Intersex-inclusion.pdf

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. https://ihra.org.au/wp-content/uploads/key/Raising-the-bar.pdf