The Forgotten Minority, Intersex

Most people think a gender and sex as a binary but we know it is really a continuum, a spectrum.

Many times doctors think they know best, they tell the parents you must “correct” the problem in order for them to have a happy life but in reality they are creating a lifelong nightmare.

Intersex People Deserve Proper Healthcare — So We Created a Hospital Policy Guide
The Intersex-Affirming Hospital Policies guide lists ways the medical community can improve healthcare for intersex people.
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By Hans Lindahl
September 14, 2018

I have never had a medical experience that was not traumatizing. And I am not alone. Intersex people like me often have nowhere to go to receive proper medical attention.

In late 2015, I moved to San Francisco with the naively optimistic belief that I could find an intersex-competent doctor in a city renowned for its LGBTQ+ population. If not here, then where? My search began by reaching out to trans clinics in hopes that they’d have seen intersex patients like me before. I found a doctor, herself a trans woman, who claimed to have experience treating intersex patients. She arrived to my routine checkup with a chilling bedside manner. The first words out of her mouth, before even seeing my records, were to ask why I hadn’t considered having an invasive surgery. She then told me to return in one week for a consultation on a hysterectomy. I don’t have a uterus.

Luckily, I know how to call these types of bluffs by now. Most people may not realize just how little most doctors know about intersex bodies. To this day, many medical professionals push damaging cosmetic surgeries — such as clitoral reductions — on intersex newborns. Panicked families have no reason not to believe that doctors would only advocate for their child’s best interests, but in reality, these surgeries are unnecessary, and are proven to compromise sexual function.

I’ve long since given up on trans clinics, and have settled for a queer women’s clinic in the city. My doctor, a trans man, is warm and welcoming despite having no prior experience with intersex patients. Together we used a pen to cross out “transgender woman” and write in “intersex” on the clinic’s hormone replacement therapy (HRT) forms. There were no options on the forms for intersex people to begin with.
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In 2016, Lambda Legal released a widely successful transgender-affirming hospital policy guide, listing concrete policy instructions for the respectful treatment of transgender patients. This year, interACT, a national intersex advocacy organization, for whom I serve as Communications Director, teamed up with Lambda Legal and Proskauer Rose LLP to produce an intersex edition: Intersex-Affirming Hospital Policies. For the first time, I can see a path toward non-traumatizing care.

The guide, a free download for any institution interested in improving its practices, centers intersex voices and includes quotes from our actual experiences with medical professionals. Top medical, legal, and ethics experts weighed in on how the medical community can do right by intersex people.

The conservatives attack trans youth because they are “too young” to know that they are trans and complain about medical treatment that are giving to trans youth; but do you ever hear them criticize “corrective surgery” on intersex babies?

Last month, the state of California passed the first legislation in the U.S. that acknowledges the harms of non-consensual intersex medical interventions. Several prominent medical policy organizations have issued statements in support of sensitive and affirming intersex care, including Physicians for Human Rights, GLMA: Health Professionals Advancing LGBT Equality, and the American Association of Family Physicians. Despite this, not one U.S. hospital has issued a firm written statement or policy condemning the practice of performing cosmetic “normalizing” surgeries such as clitoral reductions, orchiectomies, and vaginoplasties on intersex infants.

No surgery should be done on anyone until they are old enough to understand what is being done to them.

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This morning I am doing training for Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing Course at a local college with a friend, who is a retired psychologist.