Intersex Kiwis need unique protections under law, activist says

Friday, 18 February 2022

The intersex community needs protection from traumatic infant surgeries, advocate Eli Rubashkyn says.

While they were not addressed in the Conversion Practices Prohibition Bill, passed by a vote of 112 MPs to eight this week, Rubashkyn is optimistic that change is coming.

During the third reading of the bill on February 15, Green Party MP Dr Elizabeth Kerekere acknowledged that intersex issues were missing from the bill.

“The Government realises that intersex issues are very singular, particularly in the case of gender normalising surgery on intersex infants, and that it needs to be considered elsewhere,” she said. “I certainly feel a new members' bill coming on to cover this.”

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Rubashkyn, who is the Auckland-based intersex programme officer for the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association, agrees this population needs new legislation.

The United Nations Human Rights Office estimates 1.7 per cent of the global population are intersex.

In their submission to the select committee on the conversion practices ban, Rubashkyn urged legislators to also protect sex characteristics – genitals, reproductive organs and chromosome patterns – from conversion therapy alongside sexuality and gender identity.

Intersex refers to people born with sex characteristics that don't match the binary of male and female.

For many, infants’ families and medical professionals work to “normalise” their bodies with multiple surgeries to give them typically male or female bodies.

According to the Ministry of Health, there were 206 surgical operations performed on children under 15 with intersex characteristics in 2017 and 2018. Of those, 85 per cent were on children under five.

Researchers from the University of Waikato, professors Claire Breen and Katrina Roen said these surgeries were not urgent.

“These surgeries could be delayed until the children are older and able to give or refuse consent. There is no clear biomedical basis for such surgery, it is not lifesaving, and it puts the child at risk (as surgery inevitably does).”

Intersex activists don't typically refer to these surgeries as conversion practices, instead calling them ‘normalisation,’ ‘mutilation’ or 'sex assigning surgeries'.

But Rubashkyn said next to the practices outlawed this week, and those of days gone by, they are comparable.

“These surgeries that happen to us, which are the most horrendous human rights violations I am talking about here, they are conversion practices, but in a very medical sense,” they said.

The range of long-term consequences of these surgeries was immense, Rubashkyn said. Loss of sensation, problems with urination, pain, infertility, scarring, the need for lifelong hormonal replacement therapy, psychological trauma and lifelong mental suffering.

“Intersex children are victims of unnecessary, unproven and unscientific medical treatments.”

Rubashkyn says the goal is not a total ban on surgeries, because some might be needed in some circumstances.

“We want standards of care that are based on affirming intersex identities and at the same time provide tools to assist parents, because they suffer in this complicated world,” they said.

“All surgeries done with cosmetic reasons, when they are non-vital surgeries and can wait for the person to give their consent, we want those to stop.”

In her speech to Parliament on Tuesday, Kerekere said she suggests the government is taken at its word when it says it wants to stop viewing intersex health care as soley medical.

She quoted from the bill's select committee report, which says the governments wants to “take a rights-based approach that focuses on ensuring that intersex people and their whānau have all the relevant information and support to make informed decisions about their healthcare [and to] support health practitioners to provide best practice health care for intersex people.”

“This is the basis now of our advocacy,” Kerekere said. “This is the place where we can hold them to account.”