Abstract AIDS remains amongst the leading causes of death globally. Identity is the primary mode of understanding HIV and organizing in response to the HIV epidemic. In this Article, I examine how epidemiology and human rights activism co-produce ideas of identity and risk. I call this the narrative: the commonsense understanding about an identity group's HIV risk. For example, epidemiology offers the biological narrative of risk: anal sex and the weak rectal lining make men who have sex with men more vulnerable to HIV; while the fragility of a woman's vaginal wall provides a biological foundation for women's vulnerability. These biological narratives underpin rights-claiming in international human rights institutions: many women's rights activists and gay rights activists rely on these biological ideas of risk to define their groups and demand legal and policy change. The corresponding legal projects emanate from identity driven projects. While acknowledging identity's potential as an organizational force, this Article argues that we must critically interrogate our reliance on identity politics in building movements to respond to the HIV epidemic. Through telling the history of gender organizing in the context of the international HIV epidemic and international human rights law, this Article encourages HIV-movement lawyers and activists to remain vigilant about the downsides of identity politics so that we can remain responsive to the most marginalized communities. In other words, we must be attuned to the downsides of identity politics, even as it may feel like a necessary mode of activist engagement, in order to protect people and issues that are left out of identity-based movements and strengthen the response to HIV and AIDS. I conclude this Article by offering strategies to minimize the downsides of identity-based legal advocacy through shifting the mode of legal advocacy around HIE By remaining vigilant about destabilizing identity, taking a consequentialist approach, and remaining focused on the background rules, advocacy can remain agile and responsive to the impact of HIV. According to the latest (2008) WHO and UNAIDS global estimates, women comprise 50% of people living with HIE In sub-Saharan Africa, women constitute 60% of people living with HIE In other regions, men having sex with men (MSM), injecting drug users (IDU), sex workers and their clients are among those most-at-risk for HIE but the proportion of women living with HIV has been increasing in the last 10 years. (1) --World Health Organization, 2012 INTRODUCTION AIDS remains amongst the leading causes of death globally. (2) The quotation above, set into circulation by the World Health Organization, reproduces the grammar of the HIV epidemic: risk, vulnerability, and population. Quotations like this one manage our understanding of HIV, describing who will contract HIV and who is most deserving of our attention. Consequences follow: funding is allocated and resources are divvied. In a world with purportedly finite resources for human survival, we resort to cost-benefit analysis--some people have to die for others to survive. Or perhaps more accurately, some types of people have to die for other types of people to survive. (3) As groups must compete for resources, identity becomes the primary mode of understanding, managing, and responding to the HIV epidemic. I define identity as a series of core representations that become commonsense knowledge about a given group. These representations collectively shift and recompose. (4) Existing identity narratives, epidemiology, and through international human rights activism co-produce (5) ideas of identity and risk. (6) I refer to this phenomenon as the identity/risk narrative. For example, epidemiology offers the biological narrative of risk: anal sex and the weak rectal lining make men who have sex with men more vulnerable to HIV; while the fragility of women's vaginal wall provides a biological foundation for women's vulnerability. …