Outside the Law: Intersex, Medicine and the Discourse Rights
![handle is hein.journals/cardw12 and id is 75 raw text is: OUTSIDE THE LAW:
INTERSEX, MEDICINE AND THE DISCOURSE OF
RIGHTS
Jo BIRD*
Texts and research dealing with intersexuality make no provision for
intersexuality to exist except as a.pathological condition. Instead of using the
knowledge to designate a space in which intersexuality constitutes a sex or set of
sexes which is co;isistent with the forms that the human body may take... the
knowledge is used in order to make diagnoses which... lead to the erasure of
physical states that challenge this vision of human existence. I
'Intersexuality is not a disease... I'm not even gonna say it's an
abnormality. I simply say it's a variation. 2
To be lied to as a child about your own body, to have your life as a sexual
being so ignored that you are not even given the decency of an answer to your
questions, is to have your heart and soul relentlessly undermined.,3
INTRODUCTION
It is only very recently that the treatment of intersex has been recognised as a
human rights issue.4 The main purpose of this paper is to look at the hurdles that
exist to legal visibility of the medical treatment of intersex as an international
human rights abuse, and to outline some of the possible strategies that might be
used in this process of recognition.
An article written in 2003 in the Journal of Pediatrics and Children's Health,
stated that [n]ext to perinatal death, genital ambiguity is likely to be the most
devastating condition to face any parent of a newborn.5 Why is intersex
Jo Bird is a PhD candidate in Law at the University of Melbourne, Australia. This article is based on a
chapter of her thesis.
I Morgan Holmes, Re-Membering a Queer Body, UNDERCURRENTS, May 1994, at 13.
2 Interview by Sharon Preves with Jana, an intersex man, SHARON PREVES, INTERSEX AND
IDENTITY: THE CONTESTED SELF 117 (2003).
3 Martha Coventry, Finding the Words, CHRYSALIS, 1997, at 27.
4 See, e.g., A Report of a Public Hearing by the Human Rights Commission of the City and County
of San Francisco, A Human Rights Investigation into the 'Normalization' of Intersex People [hereinafter
Intersex Report]; Tony Briffa, Letter to Nature: Intersex Surgery Disregards Children 's Human Rights,
428 NATURE 695 (2004); Jo Bird, When Sex Means 'Condition'or 'Impairment': Evaluating the Human
Rights of Transgender and Intersex Peoples, 5 S. CROSS U. L. REV. passim (2001).
5 Y. Low, J. Hutson et al., Rules for Clinical Diagnosis in Babies with Ambiguous Genitalia 39 J.
PEDIATRICS & CHILDREN'S HEALTH 406 (2003).](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/cardw12&div=10&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Outside the Law: Intersex, Medicine and the Discourse Rights
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