According to the Yogyakarta Principles, gender identity “refers to each person’s deeply felt internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex assigned at birth.
This includes the personal sense of the body (which may involve, if freely chosen, modification of bodily appearance or function by medical, surgical or other means) and other expressions of gender, including dress, speech and mannerisms. Human Rights violations based on gender identity can also affect intersex people –those people whose sexed body (chromosomes, gonads and/or genitals) varies from culturally normative female or male standard bodies. Intersex people are usually forced to undergo medically unnecessary procedures –surgical and hormonal- in early childhood, aimed to “normalize” their bodily appearance and prospectively fix their gender identity.