OII Australia president Morgan Carpenter participated in a capacity-crowd media talk organised by The Walkley Foundation on Thursday 27 February at the State Library of New South Wales. Fellow panelists were Churchill Fellow and writer Senthorun Raj, journalists Monique Schafter (ABC’s 7.30 Report, formerly Hungry Beast) and Elias Jahshan (Star Observer, formerly Parramatta Advertiser), chaired…
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Alice Dreger, professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at the Northwestern University, USA, writes on hypospadias in Pacific Standard, The Science of Society: the simple idea that a real man has to pee standing up “has put a surprising number of babies under the knife”. Hypospadias is likely more common than widely understood: In…
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The Victoria Department of Health is holding a community consultation forum for intersex people/people with intersex variations, on Wednesday 19 February. The event will be held at Drummond Street Services, 195 Drummond Street, Carlton, between 6pm and 8pm. All intersex people are welcome to attend and participate. The event will consider priority health issues, service…
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Update: We welcome the High Court judgement to recognise Norrie as having “non-specific” gender. We take no pleasure in having to comment on this case, currently before the High Court, Australia’s highest court, which has a hearing likely to be heard on 4 March 2014. However, the case raises the stakes for intersex people in…
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We welcome the publication of guidelines for general practitioners by the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission. With our input, it includes a good statement about what constitutes discrimination by family doctors towards intersex people. The statement reads: Intersex people are a distinct group from transgender people and may experience different forms of discrimination….
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Important note: this paper should not be regarded as a guide to our current policy on identification documents. Our approaches have been informed by community-building and evidence-building, and are defined (as of March 2017) in the Darlington Statement.
In November 2013, Dr Dan Christian Ghattas of OII Germany, together with the Heinrich Böll Foundation, published a preliminary study on the human rights of intersex people in 12 countries around the world, including Australia, along with Belgium, France, Germany, New Zealand, Serbia, South Africa, Taiwan, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, and Uruguay. While a preliminary study,…
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In the second half of 2013, OII Australia participated in a ground-breaking study by GATE and American Jewish World Service (AJWS) on funding for trans* and intersex community and human rights work. The study, The State of Trans* and Intersex Organizing, was published in December 2013 and the results are somewhat challenging, particularly for intersex…
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Historically and currently, Births, Deaths and Marriages (BDM) legislation is used to make trans people undergo medical treatment in order to change the sex marker on their documentation. Despite this, the link between birth registrations and medical treatment on intersex people is not clearly understood. Indeed, this area of legislation is often seen as an…
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Morgan Carpenter and Tony Briffa (OII Australia) and Bonnie Hart (AISSGA) spoke on intersex healthcare in Geelong in October. The event also discussed healthcare pathways for transgender and gender diverse youth. Morgan gave a presentation: Tony and Bonnie participated in a panel discussion with Dr Nate Reid and Tracy Whitmore:
The third international intersex forum included a self-organising working group on identification documents. Given recent and proposed developments in Germany, Australia and Argentina, this seemed to be useful. 11 people from 8 organisations participated, and most of the text was included in the final forum statement. Our understanding is that the statement was shortened due…
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Between 29 November and 1 December 2013, the Third International Intersex Forum, supported by ILGA and ILGA-Europe, took place in Valletta, Malta. The event brought together 34 activists representing 30 intersex organisations from all continents, and produced a common declaration.
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