Basic Human Rights for the Intersexed

Curtis E. Hinkle

2001

Imagine the following scenario: a young woman finally delivers a healthy baby in a large urban hospital. The doctor in attendance looks immediately between the child's legs and hesitates to announce the first news most new mother's hear upon the birth of their baby. Instead, he turns to the others in the room and looks inquisitively. No one is sure of the sex of the infant.

Why is no one sure of the sex of this child? It's obvious to everyone present that the baby is intersex but no one will dare say it out loud with the mother present. There are only two choices - boy or girl. Even though Nature does not agree with this arbitrary division into just two sexes, our medical practitioners and society must at all costs keep alive the myth that we are all males or females.

In order to keep this myth alive, the baby’s “enlarged clitoris” is surgically “normalized”. His ability to enjoy one of the most basic aspects of human life - sex - has been severely reduced, if not totally eliminated.

He will be raised as a girl even though he may never feel like one. The surgery has forever altered many aspects of his potential to integrate into society as male or female. He feels isolated and knows how different he is but no one will tell him the truth.

As he grows up as a female, he is often sexually abused but is too ashamed to report it because he understands how different and unacceptable he is. He tolerates the abuse in silence and shame.

Later in life he faces discrimination in the workplace for being so different. When he files a discrimination charge with the EEOC, he finds out that only males and females are covered under the sexual discrimination laws. His discrimination was not because he was a man or a woman but because he was neither, which was not covered under sex discrimination laws according to the legal experts at the EEOC.

S-I-L-E-N-C-E! Deafening. Silenced at birth and mutilated to fit into what the doctor feels is his best choice of the two acceptable sexes. Silenced by predatory sexual abusers because he is too ashamed to report the molestations. Silenced by the ones who are supposed to love him because the medical personnel have recommended they never discuss the topic of intersexuality with him. Silenced by his colleagues at work who have no room for someone in between. Silenced by the law which denies his very existence.

Such is the plight of millions of intersex persons throughout the world. Should intersex persons not have the basic human rights granted others?

What are the human rights most people have and that all countries which have signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are supposed to guarantee its citizens?

Below are some of those rights enumerated in the Declaration:

• Article 1: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
  

• Article 2: Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.
  

• Article 5: No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
  

• Article 6: Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
  

• Article 7: All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.
  

• Article 16: Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
  

Are intersex persons treated with dignity? Are we treated equally before the law? Are we treated as fully human? No! Let's break the silence and dare to speak the truth.

"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights." Intersex infants are not treated with dignity. Their rights are violated by performing purely cosmetic surgery on them to make others feel comfortable while mutilating them and taking away their ability to enjoy a sex life. Their sensitivity is not what counts. The ability to accommodate a man's penis in the future is more important than their dignity or consent or ability to have an orgasm. Vaginoplasties are performed routinely on intersex children assigned female so that they will be able to let a man insert his penis in them. No one ever asks him if he even feels like a woman. His parents have to dilate his little artificial vagina making him feel sexually abused by those who love him most. The type of vaginoplasties performed use a piece from the colon with very frightening results.

Instead of recognizing our sex as intersex, we are treated in a very inhumane way. We are crushed into silence and if we dare speak we are told that we have a medical condition which must be treated. How would men feel if they were told that being a man was an illness and they would have to let surgeons operate on them, removing very sensitive parts of their bodies and forcing them into hormone therapy, while all those in charge of the treatment were writing how effective this treatment was? The medical experts would point out that you could not even tell this man had ever had a penis. How would women feel if the only pictures we ever saw of them were in medical textbooks with their faces blackened out, held up as pathological freaks? We are humiliated, marginalized, pathologized and told everyone else knows best. We are to listen, never to speak. We do not have basic human rights. We are voiceless. We are treated in a subhuman manner. We have no place to live openly in our cultures. We are not treated with dignity.

"Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status." This is true unless your sex is intersex. We do not have the right to marry a person we may feel is our opposite sex. We do not have the right to certain medical care that we need because we are assigned to the other sex. Try getting an HMO doctor to treat a man with a uterus. We do not have basic protections against sexual discrimination because we are in a legal no man's land. We do not have the right to say no to unwanted mutilating surgeries and wrong sex assignments.

"No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment." Wouldn't unwanted mastectomies of women be considered inhuman and degrading treatment? Would surgical castration of men be considered cruel? Wouldn't mutilating women's clitorises or forcefully cutting of the head of a man's penis be considered cruel, inhuman and degrading? Why is this not so with intersex children?

"All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination." I was told by the investigator from the EEOC that my discrimination which was very, very serious and had resulted in a mental collapse which was medically documented was not covered under the law because I was not being discriminated against because I was a man or a woman but because I wasn't either. The laws only protect men and women. I find this in total violation of the Declaration of Universal Human Rights as well as the Fourteenth Amendment of the U. S. Constitution.

"Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution." Intersex people are routinely deprived of this right because some surgeon decided at birth which sex he was. He grows up only to discover he must marry a man or no one at all.

For a list of articles by Curtis E. Hinkle: Click here