SLIM's Theory of Change

The intersex movement offers a consistent vision, built over several decades. We want to live free from medical violence, forced genital surgeries, and stigma against our unique sex anatomy. In SLIM's words, we want:

societies that value and affirm the agency of intersex children and adults

Over the years, many different organizations have used many different strategies to approach this big goal. Do we get there by using the law to create civil rights protections? Do we get there by building mass education campaigns for parents? Do we get there by confronting medical violence with direct action?

Social change efforts are notoriously tricky to evaluate. A Theory of Change helps groups narrow down big ideas in order to focus their time and energy. It's a self-contained physics model that suggests: if we do X, we create some amount of movement toward Y.

The amount of movement toward Y may not be something we can ever measure exactly. But if we put forward a specific idea about how the world works, we can run and refine better experiments over time.

A Path from a Problem to a Vision

We know the vision, and we know the problem:

people with unique sex traits face medical violence and sociocultural erasure

But how do we connect those dots?

SLIM's Theory of Change has four sequential parts:

1. The problem (people with unique sex traits face medical violence and sociocultural erasure)
2. The actions within our control
3. The outcomes of those actions that move toward the vision
4. The vision (societies that value and affirm the agency of intersex children and adults)

Actions within our control are like gears that turn slowly. These interlocking pieces all move in the same direction. Sometimes these actions are also called interventions, because they move toward interrupting the big problem. Because SLIM focuses on cultural work, our actions relate to people, information, media, and the spread of ideas. Our actions or interventions fall into three categories:

Narrative: expanding ideas about human sex anatomy

Research: grounding in our own histories of resistance

Organizing: connecting people and ideas to build power

As our actions continue, they create outcomes toward the vision. These outcomes are also interlocking, progressing in order. 

Greater movement capacity to change education, policy, healthcare

Lower social anxiety
around genital and hormonal diversity

Shift in medical practice 
toward agency and consent

While we can't know how long it will take to create large-scale cultural change, we can zoom out to evaluate the relationship between our actions and vision. Put together, SLIM's Theory of Change looks like this:

Download SLIM's Theory of Change as a PDF →

Theory of Change is what we do, while the Intersex Justice Framework is how we do it. These theoretical tools focus our time and energy while defining the ways we win cultural change.