teenvogue:

These Young Intersex People Want You to Know That They Exist

On Saturday, October 27, intersex people and their allies gathered outside New York-Presbyterian Hospital’s Weill Cornell Medical College to call for an end to surgeries performed on intersex babies — also known as intersex genital mutilation.

Intersex people are those born with sex characteristics that fall outside the binary of what we traditionally understand as male or female. At birth, when doctors assess a baby’s genitals to assign it a sex, intersex babies are often put through medically unnecessary surgeries to make their genitals conform to the binary. These surgeries can not only be traumatic but also perpetuate shame and stigma. So, on the day after Intersex Awareness Day, at least 100 intersex people and allies stood in the rain outside the New York hospital where some of these surgeries reportedly take place to demand they stop, as part of an action lead by activist group Voices4 and the Intersex Justice Project, the intersex people of color-led group behind the #EndIntersexSurgery campaign.

“Intersex surgeries are still happening all over the world,” Hanne Gaby Odiele, a model and intersex advocate, told Teen Vogue. Hanne didn’t find out she was intersex until she was 17. “We are targeting a hospital that is known for still doing non-consensual surgeries on children.”

In addition to asking medical professionals to end these surgeries, intersex advocate Emily Quinn told Teen Vogue there needs to be a societal shift in how we think about bodies.

“Our bodies do not need to be fixed, there’s not a problem that needs to be fixed,” Emily said. “It’s just that society needs to be enlightened and understand that biology isn’t black and white, specifically sexual differentiation in humans isn’t black and white.”

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📸: Brittney McNamara