Codified Sex: The ISO and Transnational Sex Standards

This paper explains the emergence of international visual and digital codes for sex. It focuses on the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), an international body that creates proprietary, highly influential recommended standards for virtually every industry. The ISO was formed as a post-war project of national development, economic efficiency, and peaceable international relations. The ISO has formulated specific codes for rendering sex in visual signs and digital codes. In 1977, the ISO developed the first digital standard for coding gender known as ISO 5218, which was revised in 2004. In the words of ISO, this 5218 standard “specifies a uniform representation of human sexes for the interchange of information” in order to “minimize the amount of human intervention required for communicating the representation of sexes.” The ISO also offers visual schema for representing sex, such as the figures used on bathroom signs. This paper describes the emergence of this international codification through transnational technocratic committees and its uptake in different contexts. In light of science and technology studies (STS), standards for sex offer a textbook case of the ways that networks stabilizing an object, in this case, the standard itself. These standards offer a concrete instance of a global infrastructure of gender norms and a case study in the transnational production and circulation of codes for sex.