U.S. Includes Intersex People in Bans on Sex Discrimination in Federal Health Care!

On May 13th, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a 362-page rule on the Obamacare/Affordable Care Act’s Section 1557, the provision of the law which bans sex discrimination in health care, which included the statement: “… the prohibition on sex discrimination extends to discrimination on the basis of intersex traits or atypical sex characteristics.” This…

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Chilean officials oppose “normalization” surgery for intersex children!

The Chilean government is urging doctors to stop performing “normalizing” genital surgeries, a.k.a. Intersex Genital Mutilation (IGM)! In a “document the Chilean Ministry of Health released last week expressed its opposition to “unnecessary ‘normalization’ treatments of intersex children” that include “irreversible genital surgeries until they are of a sufficient age to make decisions about their…

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Viloria presenting at the APPPAH 19th Congress

ICE E.D. Hida Viloria will be speaking about the right to genital integrity, as it relates to intersex people, this Friday, December 4th, at the Association For Prenatal And Perinatal Psychology And Health (APPPAH)’s 19th International Congress (December 3-6, 2015). The Congress theme is Birth and Society: How Birth Impacts Society and how Society Impacts Birth. Viloria will…

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Intersex People and The Quest For Justice in The Jurist

   In this excellent article, “The Right Not To Be Mutilated: Intersex People and The Quest For Justice,” Arvind Narrain of ARC International outlines the medically unnecessary cosmetic genital surgeries and other medical treatments that intersex infants and minors are subjected to–which we also refer to as Intersex Genital Mutilation (IGM), due to its similarities…

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Viloria published in Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics

OII-USA E.D. Hida Viloria’s essay, “Promoting Health and Social Progress by Accepting and Depathologizing Benign Intersex Traits”, has been published in the Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics fall issue, which features a Narrative Symposium on Intersex. From the NIB website’s description of the symposium: What are the joys and heartaches faced by people diagnosed intersex? These symposium authors…

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Tell Oxford to stop calling intersex people abnormal!

The Oxford Dictionary has been making strides accepting people that fall outside  statistical “norms”, such as Trans and Genderqueer people, and we have celebrated this progress. However, it still defines being intersex as an “abnormal condition”. How can we expect society to accept intersex people when we are defined as innately flawed?  Please take a…

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Buzzfeed article questions nonconsensual surgeries

This article provides in depth coverage of the groundbreaking South Carolina lawsuit by the Crawfords, parents of M.C., an intersex boy, against the doctors who operated on him. Great quotes by the Crawfords and OII-USA’s Hida Viloria. Some of the doctors interviewed expound deep prejudice against intersex traits, specifically ambiguous genitalia, and there are some…

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