A core imperative of intersex advocacy is the securing for everyone born intersex their fundamental human rights of personal autonomy in all decisions made about, and for them – primarily in the medical environment, but equally so throughout an intersex person’s life.   Allied to that fundamental human right is a person’s right to bodily integrity, to live with a body of their choice, not one imposed by the wholly artificial values integral to the current intersex medical orthodoxies.

So much of what is perpetrated by intersex clinicians is enacted on infants and young children.  The consent for their interventions is sought from parents, as the child’s proxy.  Aside from the question of whether parents do have the right to accede to medically unnecessary surgeries, and other interventions, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) recognises that parental rights are not absolute.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child explicitly states a child has the right to having their privacy protected.

Parents and their intersex children should have a right of access to psychological support in learning about the challenges of growing up intersex.  Sadly that provision is woefully underfunded in UK Multi-Disciplinary Teams.  That needs to be rectified. The adult services that are available face a huge demand, reflecting the implicit need for such services to be fully integrated into all aspects of medical provision.   The lack of support for intersex children and their parents was something that was acknowledged in a recent BMJ editorial.

Problematising an intersex child via the medium of talk show tv  abuses a child’s human right to privacy, especially so if discussing gender presentation and identity is utilised to replace actually addressing the medically unnecessary abuses perpetrated as a consequence of the current intersex medical orthodoxies.   

OII-UK cannot condone revealing  the identity of intersex children in articles and other media when it is clear they have no say in what is said about them, or how their future lives will be affected by such actions.