In the wake of the abundant bills introduced around the country this year surrounding legislation and control on trans bodies, one segment of the population that remains left out but still affected is our intersex community.
A report by them. explores Alicia Roth Weigel’s story. Earlier this year, she showed up to the Texas Capitol to testify against a bill that would ban gender-affirming medical care for trans youth, on behalf of intersex advocacy organization interACT and an overlooked provision of the bill that allows doctors to continue performing medically unnecessary surgeries on intersex youth as it bans gender-affirming care. Weigel says these holes in legislation are common but rarely noticed due to their careful wording, that the text of these bills often doesn’t even mention the word “intersex,” though the vast majority of the bills surely affect intersex people.
The Texas bill in question allows doctors to perform surgeries on children “born with a medically verifiable genetic disorder of sex development” and those that do “not have the normal sex chromosome structure for male or female as determined by a physician through genetic testing.” These procedures are often used to police the bodies of intersex youth but are virtually never performed on trans minors, according to Weigel.
This is not an isolated incident: 33 bills put forward this year in 17 different states have similar language that allows for medical procedures on intersex children, according to Freedom for All Americans’ testimony to them. Nearly half of the bills come from Texas. The state is preparing for a third, special session on September 30 to address these bills. Scheduling delays derailed the first attempt, and the second session focused on voter suppression laws and abortion restrictions.
As of now, the intersex carveout is not written into Texas state law, though that doesn’t mean the clauses are not a cause for concern. Advocates say the language is the result of model bills created by anti-LGBTQ organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom, which has reportedly authored bills in dozens of states limiting trans access to athletics and public restrooms. Activists also worry that the amount of these exemptions being passed without notice in the larger fight for trans rights and that language leaving intersex children vulnerable could become the norm in similar bills.
“These rights should be so basic,” Weigel tells them. “It should be such a basic fundamental understanding that a trans kid should be able to ask for something that will improve their health and an intersex kid should not have something forced upon them that will be detrimental to their health. Unfortunately, our legislators here are a lot more focused on discriminating than they are on science and providing adequate healthcare to their constituents.”
Doctors around the world have performed corrective surgeries on infants with intersex bodies since the 1930s with the goal of forcing them to align with the gender binary, including castrations, vasectomies, and hysterectomies. The procedures often leave children with long-lasting effects they never consented to, like sterilization, scarring, and severed nerves. The United Nations have since condemned intersex surgeries on infants.
Despite this, and estimates that suggest 1.7 percent of the world’s population have traits that do not align with standard sex definitions of male and female, nonconsensual surgeries on intersex infants are still legal in all 50 states.
Activists hope that they can continue to raise visibility around these bills and how they also affect intersex people, which is often ignored by the mainstream LGBTQ movement.
It’s unclear how this third legislative session in Texas will go, and if the state will pursue another anti-trans medical care bill, but activists expect, regardless of the outcome, this issue will likely return next year as the country gears up for midterm elections.
