The Bodily Autonomy of Intersex Children and Families are Under Attack
Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, the personal agency we have over the medical decisions we make for bodies and lives has been under constant threat by the government. However, abortion bans aren’t the only modern threat to bodily autonomy that desperately needs discussing.
Many are unfamiliar with the realities intersex children face when it comes to nonconsensual surgeries and sterilization, but it is a very real issue. Both parents and children are being denied the ability to determine what procedures doctors choose to perform on them to the detriment of their health and wellbeing. This is something we should all be invested in putting a stop to.
Forced sterilization has a long history of being weaponized against populations deemed “undesirable.” The US has been doing so since the early 20th century, when followers of the eugenics movement began implementing sterilization laws as a means of “protecting society” from the disabled, mentally ill, poor, criminals, and people of color. However, these practices have never been forbidden or even condemned by the American government.
Between 2006 and 2010, California prisons are said to have authorized sterilizations of nearly 150 female inmates. The Center for Investigative Reporting reveals the state paid doctors $147,460 for permanent sterilizations that former inmates say were done under coercion. In 2020, a whistleblower complaint on behalf of immigrants detained at the Irwin County Detention Center raised concerns regarding “the rate at which hysterectomies are performed on immigrant women under ICE [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] custody.”
There is yet another even more common practice of sterilization affecting the general population that has managed to avoid garnering widespread public or media attention.
Intersex individuals are born with a combination of male and female sex characteristics. This can include chromosome patterns, genitals, and reproductive organs. They represent 1.7 percent of the population, which makes them about as common globally as redheads. Despite this, their existence is somewhat of a well-kept secret amongst the general population. This is in part due to the fact that a vast majority of intersex infants have medically unnecessary surgeries performed to remove or alter the appearance of their genitals or reproductive organs.
These surgeries can be performed without their parent’s knowledge or consent, despite the fact that they amount to sterilization and can inflict permanent harm, not to mention that lifelong hormone replacement therapy is required as follow-up treatment.
Even with parental consent, surgeries carried out on children too young to determine their own gender identity run the risk of medically assigning the wrong sex. These procedures are completely irreversible, and run a high risk of causing incontinence, scarring, lack of sensation, and even psychological trauma. Future surgical options are typically severely limited by severed nerves and scar tissue. As gender affirming care and transgender services become less accessible, intersex individuals are at risk of losing medically necessary resources for a condition they never consented to.
This issue creates a precedent that permits doctors to perform medically unnecessary surgeries on non-consenting individuals without fear of punishment or accountability. Bodily autonomy is something we all deserve irrevocable access to. When we align ourselves and our communities across familiar issues, we strengthen our collective ability to fight for our causes as well as our support networks.
