THE SALINITY OF SEX

Following the 2024 UK Supreme Court ruling which ruled that single gendered spaces must be based on ‘biological sex,’ there have been questions about where trans people should go when needing to use public gendered facilities. The EHRC issued interim guidance, withdrawn 15 October, that stated that trans people were to use the bathrooms of their ‘biological’ sex, but also that ‘in some circumstances the law also allows trans women (biological men) not to be permitted to use the men’s facilities, and trans men (biological women) not to be permitted to use the women’s facilities’.

 

While the focus of these rulings has been on trans women and, to a lesser extent, trans men, it raises questions for intersex individuals who are either mentioned only as an extremely rare occurrence or are erased from the conversation all together. For those in favour of bathroom bans, biology is held up as something simple and obvious—there are males and females, and any sensible person knows which is which. The reality of sex is far more complicated. Intersex conditions, rather than being rare exceptions, are relatively common (about 1.7% of the population), almost as common as the occurrence of twins (2%) and nearly six times as common as identical twins (0.3%).

 

The Salinity of Sex uses the intersex condition of classic congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) to visually demonstrate the between-space of sex. Salt piles, representing the salt-wasting conditions which affect a majority of those with classic CAH,  sit before sculptural representations of The Prader Scale of female virilization in order to represent the ways in which sex expression and other bodily functions are intertwined, further challenging the claim of the simplicity and obviousness of sex.