HRW report finds respect for medical rights of intersex individuals lacking in US News
HRW report finds respect for medical rights of intersex individuals lacking in US

Human Rights Watch [advocacy website] on Thursday released a report [press release] detailing the lack of respect for the rights of intersex individuals in the United States. The report, entitled “A Changing Paradigm: US Medical Provider Discomfort with Intersex Care Practices” [text], found that despite progressive changes, many medical professionals still prescribe harmful medications and dangerous surgeries to assign a gender to intersex individuals. HRW claims that the practices are harmful, and often lead to long term physical and psychological issues.

[D]espite … promising developments in care for intersex people, the field remains fraught with uneven, inadequate, and piecemeal standards of care—and broad disagreements among practitioners that implicate the human rights of their intersex patients. While there are certain surgical interventions on intersex children that are undisputedly medically necessary, such as operations to repair bladder exstrophy, some surgeons in the US continue to perform medically unnecessary, cosmetic surgeries on children, often before they are one year of age

HRW is urging the medical field to adopt newer standards to give parents information about the long term impact of implementing surgical or hormonal treatments necessary to provide informed consent for procedures performed on their intersex children.