An interdisciplinary scholar and human rights activist, Dr Rogena Sterling was the first open, intersex person to receive a PhD in Aotearoa New Zealand. Their research focuses on human rights, indigenous data sovereignty, identity and wellbeing, intersex issues, and the decolonising of sex/gender. Rogena frequently speaks on these topics at conferences and in the media, and their writing has been published in numerous books and journals.

Rogena is currently a kairangahau (research officer) at Te Kotahi Research Institute, University of Waikato. They are also Co-Chairperson of Intersex Trust Aotearoa New Zealand, a Board member of Winston Churchill Memorial Trust and have previously served on various government human rights and intersex advisory panels and bodies.

The word gender is complex and loaded. For intersectional feminists, gender sits at the core of the fight for equality. It can enable us to take agency over our identity and our gender and sexual self-expression. But Rogena’s words caution us. Forgetting the historical establishment of gender and universalising it on all communities and people becomes a tool of oppression, especially for intersex people who are reminded painfully, for whom the concept was established, as it is written physically and psychologically on their bodies and identities.  

The establishment of gender, enabled the stabilisation of the binary, a belief that only male and female sexes exist historically. Intersex people have been made invisible through sex assignment, assigning a ‘gender identity’ at birth, and traumatising ‘sex normalising’ surgery and/or medical treatment of intersex children. It denies diversity of sex identity, especially the existence of intersexuality and intersex people. 

“Sex is a diverse continuum, from male to female, with no clear lines between them.”  Rogena says. “It is time we left behind this fiction of two sexes, to allow freedom for us all. Intersex variations are normal, they demonstrate the diversity of sex. These variations should not be made invisible but celebrated.”