Aileen Kennedy, from the UNE School of Law became interested in issues relating to intersex, when she undertook research about sculpting the body and the neuroscience of gender. Aileen was appalled how intersex issues have been treated and ignored by our society. She decided to learn more about this area and her expertise was acknowledged when she was asked to join the Human Rights Commission Panel on Intersex issues.

Aileen Kennedy

Aileen kindly agreed to give us a heads up on this important issue:

‘One thing which is rarely talked about in our society is intersex issues. Intersex relates to people whose biology is a combination of male and female anatomy. This situation is more common than you would think. Approximately 1 in 2,000 babies are born intersex, which makes it about as common as red hair.

Since the 1950s, intersex is   dealt with as follows. Before a child turns 2 years old, the treating doctor will make a decision to reconstruct the genital area and administer hormones to ’normalise the child’s body to look more male or more female, in line with the sex of assignment. In most cases, if the genitals of the child are ambiguous, in the sense of not being clearly male or female, doctors will make the decision to  assign them as female and reconstruct their bodies to match, using hormone treatment, genital cosmetic surgeries and sterilisation procedures. This means that a lot of young children have early invasive surgeries. In addition, they need to continue having surgeries throughout their life, as well as being on a life-long hormone program.

As you can imagine, this has extremely negative consequences for intersex people Early and invasive ‘normalising’ treatment is increasingly seen as a breach of human rights. In fact, most intersex activists argue that medical practitioners should wait until the child reaches the age of competence before undertaking medical intervention. Then the individual can decide what medical interventions they would like to pursue.

There has been a long time tradition of secrecy in terms of intersex people. In fact, 30 years ago people were not told they were intersex. For example, doctors would say they were undertaking appendectomies instead of gender operations. Parents were instructed not to tell anyone, including the child, if their child was born intersex.

Given this background, it is clear all the community needs to become aware of these issues. This awareness will hopefully allow intersex people to be more fully supported into the future!