Intersex people in the United States are subjected to medical practices that can inflict irreversible physical and psychological harm on them starting in infancy, harms that can last throughout their lives.

Many of these procedures are done with the stated aim of making it easier for children to grow up “normal” and integrate more easily into society by helping them conform to a particular sex assignment.

The results are often catastrophic, the supposed benefits are largely unproven, and there are generally no urgent health considerations at stake. Procedures that could be delayed until intersex children are old enough to decide whether they want them are instead performed on infants who then have to live with the consequences for a lifetime.

Intersex people are not rare, but they are widely misunderstood. Biology classes often oversimplify a fundamental reality. We are taught that sex is dimorphic: simply male or female. But sex, in reality, is a spectrum—with the majority of humans appearing to exist at one end or the other. In fact, as many as 1.7 percent of babies are different from what is typically called a boy or a girl. The chromosomes, gonads, internal or external genitalia in these children—intersex children—differ from social expectations. Around 1 in 2,000 babies is different enough that doctors may recommend surgical intervention to make the body appear more in line with those expectations.

Until the 1960s, when intersex children were born, the people around them—parents and doctors—made their best guess and assigned the child a sex. Parents then reared them per social gender norms. Sometimes the intersex people experienced harassment and discrimination as a result of their atypical traits but many lived well-adjusted lives as adults. During the 1960s, however, and based largely on the unproven recommendations of a single prominent psychologist, medical norms in the US changed dramatically. Doctors began recommending surgical solutions to the supposed “problem” of intersex traits.

In this report, based on interviews with intersex adults, parents of intersex children, and medical practitioners working with intersex people, interACT and Human Rights Watch document the fall-out from that medical paradigm, and the failure of the medical community to regulate itself effectively. As detailed below, there have been changes in practice in recent years, with many doctors now advising against surgery on infants and young children. But even so, surgery continues to be practiced on children with atypical sex characteristics too young to participate in the decision, when those procedures both carry a meaningful risk of harm and can be safely deferred.

Report by the Human Rights Watch