International Intersex Awareness Day

October 26, 2021

Every year, Intersex Awareness Day strives to inform and educate people about intersex people, their human rights issues, and the discriminations they face in daily life, including the decision for many to “normalise” their own sex in their own time and if they want to. Many find the decision to determine their own sex is taken away from them at birth when parents and doctors make the determination upon the discovery that they are intersex. These surgeries can often lead to infertility, pain, and mental suffering.

What is Intersex?

According to Intersexday.org, intersex people are “born with sex characteristics that don’t meet medical and social norms for female or male bodies”.In countries around the world, intersex infants, children, and adolescents are subjected to medically unnecessary surgeries, hormonal treatments, and other procedures in an attempt to forcibly change their appearance to be in line with societal expectations about female and male bodies. When, as is frequently the case, these procedures are performed without the full, free, and informed consent of the person concerned, they amount to violations of fundamental human rights.

Active allyship

In marking Intersex Awareness Day, it is important to note and celebrate the diversity of intersex people and to affirm their human rights to bodily integrity, physical autonomy, and self-determination. These are issues of critical importance, as intersex people were and are subjected to medical interventions as infants and children to alter their sex characteristics without personal consent and for social rather than medical reasons. This is a human rights violation, and Australia has come under criticism in recent months by UN treaty bodies for such forced and coercive medical interventions on intersex children.

Positive Outcomes

In September 2021, the Public Health Association of Australia approved and published an important new Policy Position Statement on the Health of People with Diverse Genders, Sexualities, and Sex Characteristics. It calls on Australian governments to end human rights abuses in medical settings, noting that these occur in infants, children, and adolescents with intersex variations in Australia. We congratulate the Public Health Association of Australia and the members of its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Special Interest Group for this important work.