AHRC’s Paper ‘Surgery on intersex infants and human rights’
The Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has released a paper titled Surgery on intersex infants and human rights.
We deeply regret the report’s equivocation on surgery to modify the appearance of intersex infants and children. The report acknowledges such interventions without commenting on their necessity or lifelong consequences.
It is available for download here.
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The “REPORT OF A PUBLIC HEARING BY THE HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION OF THE CITY & COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO” from 2005 already had quite clear findings and recommendations about intersex human rights – shortly before the DSD-backlash.
You find the PDF here: http://www.sfgov.org/site/uploadedfiles/sfhumanrights/Committee_Meetings/Lesbian_Gay_Bisexual_Transgender/SFHRC%20Intersex%20Report(1).pdf
The australian human rights commission fails to see that their question of what the ” benefits and risks of surgery on intersex infants” are, is a wrong one – life saving surgery on infants, intersex OR NOT, is beneficial and necessary – but (COSMETIC) surgery for “reducing the risk that the infant will be rejected by parents, discriminated against or ostracised by peers and broader society” is outrageous and crazy, similar to pathologize homosexuality or assimilate skin color due to racism.
And the famous majority of satisfied intersex people who accept their treatments and sex/gender assignments are yet to be seen – and especially those studies that claim that there is such a majority ( I never met one such satisfied person yet).
Frustrating indeed, since the arguments are not new…
Hello Ins!
‘Fails’ is the word. Can’t they grasp the essence of what is at stake here? We intersex people live in our own bodies. Our parents and our doctors do not. However much they pretend to be stakeholders, and however much AHRC goes along with that pretence, they are not and never will be.
Like you, I have never met that alleged ‘satisfied majority’ either. What I have met are innocent people very badly used, abused and brutalised with bodies that, even if they have been made to cosmetically resemble those of one sex or the other, and it just happens by chance that sex is the same as the sex of their brains, the functioning and appearance of their cosmetically created genitals has been very badly compromised, for no useful reason other than to make parents and doctors happy at the child’s lifelong expense.
It needs to be said again and again: The child is the patient. The parents are not the patient. They are not to be made happy at their child’s expense.
AHRC has no excuses.