Promoting and Protecting Human Rights in relation to Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Sex Characteristics A Manual for National Human Rights Institutions 1.7.2. ‘Being stealth’ about transgender status Many transgender women identify as female and many transgender men identify as male. They may want to be able to live as women and men respectively, without disclosing their past. This is called ‘being stealth’.70 Sometimes it is assumed that ‘being stealth’ is the same as when a lesbian, gay or bisexual person is ‘closeted’ and that transgender people should be more open about their gender identity. However, the two concepts are very different. A transgender person who is stealth is living in their appropriate gender identity – and choosing not to disclose a previous identity because it does not reflect who they really are. Being stealth may be the only way that a transgender person’s gender identity is respected. 1.7.3. Disclosure of intersex status The term ‘coming out’ is problematic for many intersex people too. Their intersex status describes their body and is often not linked to their sense of identity. Typically, a person is told the facts about their intersex variation by a doctor or a parent. This is very different from the process of self-definition linked to discovering sexual orientation or gender identity. Disclosing intersex status to others can undermine, rather than affirm, intersex people’s identities as women or as men or as cisgender.71 This is particularly an issue when other people mistakenly assume that all intersex people are a third sex or are transgender. Photo by Rebecca Swan. 24 70 When other people are not aware that a person is transgender, the transgender person is sometimes described as ‘passing’. This means that they ‘pass’ as no different from another woman or another man. Many transgender people are not comfortable with the term ‘passing’ as it can imply that they are pretending to be women or men and that their gender identity is not genuine. 71 M. Carpenter and D. Hough, Employers’ Guide to Intersex Inclusion, 2014, Pride in Diversity and Organisation Intersex International Australia.