New HHS Report Condemns Nonconsensual Surgeries on Intersex Youth

[Jessica_Rose]

New HHS Report Condemns Nonconsensual Surgeries on Intersex Youth

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/new-hhs-report-condemns-nonconsensual-surgeries-on-intersex-youth/ar-AA1xoiAs?ocid=windirect&cvid=a56fa0da59fa4508b8ffbc402190ee5f&ei=56

Story by Samantha Riedel (17 Jan 2025)

HHS officials published the 31-page report, Advancing Health Equity for Intersex Individuals, on January 17 along with a memo providing guidance on the report's findings to other government agencies. Citing interviews with intersex people and previous research studies, the report's authors highlighted the trauma and inequity that intersex people currently face within the U.S. healthcare system and identified necessary policy changes. Most notably, the report calls for an end to nonconsensual surgeries on intersex youth — a practice that is still legal in most countries including the U.S., even though such surgeries are often not medically necessary and instead performed to "normalize" bodies with divergent traits.

"Historic and current medical protocols often focused on immediate surgical interventions to conform a child's sex characteristics to a single sex, not because such surgical interventions were medically necessary, but because of social and cultural expectations about how bodies should appear," the report's authors wrote. Because those procedures have been found to lead to "lasting and complex harms" to intersex people throughout their lives, doctors and parents of should "delay any non-emergent medical interventions until an intersex child is old enough to be involved in decision making about their sexual and reproductive health," the report recommends.

[Lori Dee]

I wonder if this will only apply to intersex youth, or if it is part of the new Administration's policy to ban "genital mutilation".

I gave no consent to be circumcised and there was no medical reason, nor religious reason to do it. It is not routinely performed today the way it was in the past. It would not surprise me if this policy will be used as a "foot in the door" to further other medical bans that are none of the government's business.