1.7% is huge, a much larger number than most people realize, and as you say, that's only for people with externally visible intersex conditions. Many more people with more subtle intersex characteristics exist.

Some people with intersex conditions identify as transgender. Some theorists suggest that subtle intersex conditions "cause" people to be trans, though that's a notion other theorists hotly contest or hold to be either irrelevant or unhelpful.

But however we look at gender theory, we have to acknowledge that biological sex is far more complicated than the simplistic XX/XY genetic scheme most of us learn in school. We can truthfully say that sex itself is on a spectrum, a point driven home by the occasional elite woman athlete made to endure indignities because her serum testosterone levels are higher than those of most women and some men.

Given gender is even more complex and varied than sex, it's astonishing anyone would try to shoehorn everyone into a simplistic binary. Though (and here's an interesting thought) even in societies where varied gender has been taken for granted for at least centuries, as in South Asia, trans people can still suffer horrible oppression.

Prism & Pen editor Artemis Shishir lives in India, and his family don't doubt for a second that transgender people are a genuine, natural phenomenon. Trans people are part of their culture and have been forever. But they are, tragically, a despised part of the culture for most people. Having a trans person in the family, no matter how natural a phenomenon, is shameful and to be hidden.

Kind of like with Intersex babies. Humans can be very cruel.