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Amid transgender care bans, exceptions made for surgery on intersex children

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Northern Star Girl:
  Amid transgender care bans, exceptions made for surgery on intersex children

                                   ABC News
 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/intersex-surgeries-ignite-controversy-bans-gender-affirming-care/story?id=100452871

ByKiara Alfonseca and Mary Kekatos
July 18, 2023, 3:11 AM

EXCERPTS Below: (Click News Link above to view entire story)
Intersex people don't fit into the traditional male and female binary.
When Sean Saifa Wall was 13, a doctor recommended to his mother that Wall's male-typical genitals be removed and that he begin feminizing hormone therapy.

He says his late mother agreed to the surgery and treatment, but Wall adds that his mother picked the wrong gender for him.

"Receiving my medical records and really learning about what happened to me without my thorough informed consent, I think, made me really angry," Wall, who is now 44, told ABC News.

Wall was born intersex, which encompasses a group of people with genitals, chromosomes, hormones or reproductive organs that are neither clearly male nor female at birth.

Born with partial androgen insensitivity syndrome, or AIS, he had atypical reproductive organs and, like many intersex people, had surgery performed to assign him to one gender over the other without, he says, his consent.

Since the mid-1900s, genital reconstructive surgery has often been seen as a "fix" for intersex conditions to be more cosmetically pleasing and to fit into one gender, experts told ABC News.

This can include removing internal testes and gonad tissue, reducing the clitoris or creating a vaginal canal.

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