Surgically Shaping Sex: A Gender Structure Analysis of the Violation of Intersex People’s Human Rights

Conservative AI and social inequality: conceptualizing alternatives to bias through social theory

“…Human physiology does not neatly differentiate people into male and female -this is work carried out within sociotechnical systems such as medical institutions, where doctors have to confront the fact that many human bodies are not easily classified in a binary framework. Historically, this has led to surgical interventions that harmfully and irreversibly attempted to eliminate ambiguities from human bodies (Davis and Evans 2018). AI systems make similar sex and gender-based classifications (often conflating the two), based on the idea that the human population can be divided into discrete, natural groups that can be 'read' by others on the basis of appearance.…”

Towards Categorical Visibility? The Political Making of a Third Sex in Germany and the Netherlands

“…Intersex is not a sexual orientation or a singular gender identity, but refers to many different biological possibilities (Dreger and Herndon, 2009). Most scholarship on intersex rights has addressed the experiences of people with intersex characteristics in relation to medicine (Horowicz, 2017; Carpenter, 2018; Davis and Evans, 2018), where intersex characteristics have long been seen as ‘disorders’ or ‘diseases’. Although almost all intersex conditions pose no physical risk and require no medical intervention, infants with intersex traits have been subject to surgeries so that their bodies conform to a binary sex norm.…”

Intersex Stigma and Discrimination: Effects on Patient-Centred Care and Medical Communication

“…There is often no proof of the beneficence (i.e., net benefit or all things considered improvement to wellbeing) of medically unnecessary (e.g., cosmetic) surgery during infancy; in fact, evidence currently suggests these practices cause more harm than good (20,21). Therefore, we contend that the continuation of medically unnecessary surgery on intersex infants and children is deeply ingrained in the maintenance of a normative sex and gender binary (5,12,(21)(22)(23)(24). This leads to worse clinical outcomes for intersex individuals due to their social discrimination (5,12,(21)(22)(23)(24).…”

“…One of the behaviours that intersex advocates condemn is the practice of early so-called "cosmetic" -or otherwise medically unnecessary 5 and/or unproven as to their functional beneficence -surgical interventions on intersex infants. They argue that such interventions strip these infants of their (future) bodily autonomy (i.e., their ability, once sufficiently mature, to decide whether to undergo such interventions) and human rights (e.g., to bodily integrity), because they are not yet capable of consenting and most such surgeries are not medically urgent (11,12). Moreover, in Canada, as in a majority of countries, intersex individuals do not benefit from explicit legal protection against such surgeries (13).…”