Stop Doctors From Mutilating the Genitals of Intersex Children
By Melissa Lynn on January 26, 2012 2:11 pm
http://forcechange.com/12268/stop-doctors-from-mutilating-the-genitals-of-intersex-children/Target: Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Goal: To stop doctors from performing unnecessarily and traumatic gender reassignment surgeries on infants and children who are born intersex.
About 1 in every 1,500 children are born with intersex. This means that their genitalia does not easily fall into what is typically viewed as male and female. Many doctors and surgeons will insist that the parents of infants approve of invasive, elective "corrective" surgery in order for the children to be able to grow up as traditional men or women.
Since the 1950s the procedure for intersex births was to assign a gender to the infant and perform surgery to make the genitals match that gender. The parents were informed never to talk about the fact that their child was born with intersex and to raise the child as a "normal" boy or girl.
However, these surgeries were rarely successes. Many children spent years of their childhood getting more and more surgeries in order to "correct" their bodies when nothing was medically wrong with them from the start. The children are constantly being told that there is something wrong with their bodies, leading to feeling intense shame, guilt and depression. More so, the surgeries often end up reducing the person's sensation in order to make the genitals look more standard.
