Betsy
06-10-04, 10:23 PM
http://www.ilga.org/news_results.asp?LanguageID=1&FileID=61&ZoneID=7&FileCategory=1
UN 2004 - NGO statement: intersexuality
For intersex persons, mutilation creates a permanent status of human rights violation and inhumanity
27/05/2004
Latin America and Caribbean
Speech given by Mauro Cabral / Argentina.
Intersexuality and Human Rights (Item 10, Economic,
Social and Cultural Rights).
This Commission will hear a great deal about discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. I want to tell you a story of how prejudices about how bodies should be sexed or gendered can lead to the surgical mutilation of children.
The purpose of my speech is to introduce the issue of intersexuality in the context of the right to health. Intersexuality is an umbrella term, describing a wide variety of situations in which a person’s genitals do not correspond with current social, cultural and political stereotypes. For Western medicine, we are
persons with ambiguous, indefinite, deformed or pathological genitalia. For the international intersex people’s movement and its allies in the fields of theory and human rights, intersex people are those whose genitals differ from masculine or feminine stereotypes, without such variance in genital appearance meaning an inherit deformation or pathology.
Different studies carried by experts around the world establish that at least one every 2,000 or 2,500 people is born with genitalia that differs from the stereotypes either by their appearance or functionality. Many of those people will be subjected to surgery aimed at cosmetically normalizing and correcting their genitalia, very soon after they are born, during childhood and even during adolescence. It is needed to say, from the very beginning, that those surgical interventions are medically superfluous and bodily mutilating.
According to current medical standards for treatment, girls born with clitoris that are larger than the feminine genital stereotype are subjected to normalizing clithoridectomies. Boys whose penis are smaller than the masculine genital stereotype are subjected to surgery, too often to turn them into girls, because their bodies contradict stereotypes
about masculine genitalia.
In general, intersex people are not told about the surgeries performed on us during our early childhood, or we receive misleading information about it. We do not often have access to our medical records: they are hidden or destroyed. These mutilating surgeries, aimed at transforming intersex bodies into culturally acceptable ones, violate our autonomy of decision as well as our bodily integrity. Intersex people have no access to informed consent before interventions that
decide not only about our legal gender but also about the shape of our bodies and the sensitivity of our flesh. Medical secrecy also violates our right to identity, to our personal history and to our status as subjects entitled to all human rights, protagonists and not victims of our own history. Genital mutilation
of intersex children damages genital sensitivity in irreversible ways; it causes post-surgical trauma, and the internalization of brutal prejudices denying or stigmatizing the diversity that in reality human bodies show.
In the current medical “treatment” for intersexuality, discrimination based on gender identity and expression meets discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Sexism meets homophobia.
The difference in genitalia cannot justify, under any pretext whatsoever, ethical and political hierarchies: cannot justify mutilation, because it never normalizes but does the opposite. For us, mutilation creates a permanent status of human rights violation and inhumanity.
In the light of what the right to health means, we advocate a review of medical practices around intersexuality and the adoption of concrete measures to eliminate genital mutilation of intersex children.
Mauro Cabral / Argentina
And his actual testimony:
TESTIMONY I was born in Cordoba, Argentina -the City where I have
lived all my life. That happened in 1971. I grew up as a solitary and
quiet girl. My mother died when I was 13 years old, leaving my younger
siblings and me with my father.
Shortly after my mother's death, some of my relatives started to worry
about me and my health: I had not menstruated yet. After I underwent
several revisions and physical exams, my doctors finally found the
cause: I just had no vagina, fallopian tubes nor uterus. My father
decided then to turn to the surgeon who had performed two different
surgeries on me before (pylorus and double inguinal hernias, according
to my medical records). He knew my body, my father said, and knew me.
I started visiting this surgeon when I was 14; his response was
heterosexist from the beginning. As he told me, I should not be
worried, because they would turn me into a "real", a "true" woman -a
woman with a vagina, a woman capable of having the love of a man:
penetrative love. But I was not.
Instead of that I found myself, for the first time in my life,
speaking of the (until then) unspeakable: I did not want to become any
kind of woman, because I felt myself, at that point of my life, as a
boy with a different body, a wonderful, strong, beautiful and "closed"
body, a body that was in fact loved as it was by my boyfriend -another
teenager who could treat me just as his own boyfriend. I did not want
my body to be changed, in any way. I told him this story again and
again. I told it to everybody.
My surgeon, his medical team, my father and the rest of my family
reacted with horror and fear; for them it was clear that I had a
serious mental disorder caused by, precisely, what was lacking.
Vaginoplasty was then mandatory, to "correct" my gender
self-perception and guarantee, for me and my partner, a "normal"
sexual life. Trapped between the threat of being confined in a
psychiatric hospital or consenting surgery, I agreed. A piece of my
colon was cut off, and placed where the vagina should have been. I was
16.
Seven months later something happened. My peritoneal muscles closed
the neovaginal channel by the middle, giving it a sandglass shape. The
intestinal liquid that it had not stopped producing was collected in
the superior segment of the sandglass, and the pressure broke the
flesh, exploding inwards. The liquid invaded my body, causing a
massive infection. I had to be operated again, and remained ten days
in the intensive care unit dealing with peritonitis and pneumonia.
When I started feeling better, still in the hospital, my surgeon and
his team talked with me and my father. There was a problem: the
neovagina must be used. It must be opened all the time, to prevent
possible new closings and possible -and fatal- infections. You will
not survive two like this one, my surgeon said. His advice was simple:
I must have therapeutic sex. After all, that was the original purpose
of the whole thing: penetrability. I refused. I was barely 17.
During the following six years I had to go periodically to the
hospital. I had to go and get nude, lying on a delivery table, with my
legs tied up. I had to be put asleep, under general anaesthesia, to
have the neovaginal channel opened by my surgeon with a steel tube.
His surgical theory was simple, again: as I refused to think of myself
as a woman, I was just stubbornly closening my body. Even with the
dilatations, I faced five episodes of partial-closenings, all of them
extremely painful and dangerous. Very soon, the first surgical
intervention showed an unexpected complication: a big scar in the
sigmoid, where the piece of colon had been cut off. I have had a
chronic pain and other colonic troubles since then.
During the last two years of dilatations, some things started
changing. The sufferings caused by the treatment began to be taken
seriously by other members of the medical team. For the first time, my
surgeon started considering the possibility that the vaginoplasty had
been a mistake. But the neovagina could not be removed; a new surgery
could damage the muscles that regulate sphincters control. Even with
them accepting the fact of my persistent male identification,
dilatations should go on. Due to the repeated traumatism provoked by
dilatations, the neovaginal channel finally closed. I was 24.
After two years, I decided to visit another doctor, a gynaecologist.
His approach was completely different. For the first time in my life I
heard a different story, that made me feel both anger and relief: I
had never "closed" my body. Vaginoplasty had been a bad choice from
the beginning; moreover, it had been badly performed. For the first
time since the whole storm began, I was supported exactly as the
individual I felt I was: a young male person repeatedly violated.
His will, his identity, his corporeal integrity, violated. His body
violated. Recognizing the damage caused, this second doctor gave me
back something lost, a certain sense of wholeness. I could start
grieving, because I became a human being with a history instead of an
ill mind living in a malformed body. My surgeon has repeatedly
expressed in public regrets for his decision regarding my case.. But
he never apologized Neither has my father, who still considers that
surgery was the best choice for me.
I am 32 now. I live as always: as someone who inhabits some place in
the masculine spectrum, who dates men, and who stills considers his
body so beautiful, strong and wonderful as always -even when it can be
sometimes socially problematic, exactly as other "different" bodies
are. I identify myself as a transgender man with an intersex
background, a persistent damage placed firmly in the core of my life
experience under the aim of "normalization". I am sure that the people
involved in my history had the best intentions; they were homophobic
and clearly ignorant - but I am sure they positively cared about me.
They only have outdated and compulsory theories to justify their acts.
They just could not hear what I tried to say. And that is exactly why
I am writing this: to encourage all of you to face the evidence of
our lives and testimonies, to pay attention to all of us.
END
UN 2004 - NGO statement: intersexuality
For intersex persons, mutilation creates a permanent status of human rights violation and inhumanity
27/05/2004
Latin America and Caribbean
Speech given by Mauro Cabral / Argentina.
Intersexuality and Human Rights (Item 10, Economic,
Social and Cultural Rights).
This Commission will hear a great deal about discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. I want to tell you a story of how prejudices about how bodies should be sexed or gendered can lead to the surgical mutilation of children.
The purpose of my speech is to introduce the issue of intersexuality in the context of the right to health. Intersexuality is an umbrella term, describing a wide variety of situations in which a person’s genitals do not correspond with current social, cultural and political stereotypes. For Western medicine, we are
persons with ambiguous, indefinite, deformed or pathological genitalia. For the international intersex people’s movement and its allies in the fields of theory and human rights, intersex people are those whose genitals differ from masculine or feminine stereotypes, without such variance in genital appearance meaning an inherit deformation or pathology.
Different studies carried by experts around the world establish that at least one every 2,000 or 2,500 people is born with genitalia that differs from the stereotypes either by their appearance or functionality. Many of those people will be subjected to surgery aimed at cosmetically normalizing and correcting their genitalia, very soon after they are born, during childhood and even during adolescence. It is needed to say, from the very beginning, that those surgical interventions are medically superfluous and bodily mutilating.
According to current medical standards for treatment, girls born with clitoris that are larger than the feminine genital stereotype are subjected to normalizing clithoridectomies. Boys whose penis are smaller than the masculine genital stereotype are subjected to surgery, too often to turn them into girls, because their bodies contradict stereotypes
about masculine genitalia.
In general, intersex people are not told about the surgeries performed on us during our early childhood, or we receive misleading information about it. We do not often have access to our medical records: they are hidden or destroyed. These mutilating surgeries, aimed at transforming intersex bodies into culturally acceptable ones, violate our autonomy of decision as well as our bodily integrity. Intersex people have no access to informed consent before interventions that
decide not only about our legal gender but also about the shape of our bodies and the sensitivity of our flesh. Medical secrecy also violates our right to identity, to our personal history and to our status as subjects entitled to all human rights, protagonists and not victims of our own history. Genital mutilation
of intersex children damages genital sensitivity in irreversible ways; it causes post-surgical trauma, and the internalization of brutal prejudices denying or stigmatizing the diversity that in reality human bodies show.
In the current medical “treatment” for intersexuality, discrimination based on gender identity and expression meets discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Sexism meets homophobia.
The difference in genitalia cannot justify, under any pretext whatsoever, ethical and political hierarchies: cannot justify mutilation, because it never normalizes but does the opposite. For us, mutilation creates a permanent status of human rights violation and inhumanity.
In the light of what the right to health means, we advocate a review of medical practices around intersexuality and the adoption of concrete measures to eliminate genital mutilation of intersex children.
Mauro Cabral / Argentina
And his actual testimony:
TESTIMONY I was born in Cordoba, Argentina -the City where I have
lived all my life. That happened in 1971. I grew up as a solitary and
quiet girl. My mother died when I was 13 years old, leaving my younger
siblings and me with my father.
Shortly after my mother's death, some of my relatives started to worry
about me and my health: I had not menstruated yet. After I underwent
several revisions and physical exams, my doctors finally found the
cause: I just had no vagina, fallopian tubes nor uterus. My father
decided then to turn to the surgeon who had performed two different
surgeries on me before (pylorus and double inguinal hernias, according
to my medical records). He knew my body, my father said, and knew me.
I started visiting this surgeon when I was 14; his response was
heterosexist from the beginning. As he told me, I should not be
worried, because they would turn me into a "real", a "true" woman -a
woman with a vagina, a woman capable of having the love of a man:
penetrative love. But I was not.
Instead of that I found myself, for the first time in my life,
speaking of the (until then) unspeakable: I did not want to become any
kind of woman, because I felt myself, at that point of my life, as a
boy with a different body, a wonderful, strong, beautiful and "closed"
body, a body that was in fact loved as it was by my boyfriend -another
teenager who could treat me just as his own boyfriend. I did not want
my body to be changed, in any way. I told him this story again and
again. I told it to everybody.
My surgeon, his medical team, my father and the rest of my family
reacted with horror and fear; for them it was clear that I had a
serious mental disorder caused by, precisely, what was lacking.
Vaginoplasty was then mandatory, to "correct" my gender
self-perception and guarantee, for me and my partner, a "normal"
sexual life. Trapped between the threat of being confined in a
psychiatric hospital or consenting surgery, I agreed. A piece of my
colon was cut off, and placed where the vagina should have been. I was
16.
Seven months later something happened. My peritoneal muscles closed
the neovaginal channel by the middle, giving it a sandglass shape. The
intestinal liquid that it had not stopped producing was collected in
the superior segment of the sandglass, and the pressure broke the
flesh, exploding inwards. The liquid invaded my body, causing a
massive infection. I had to be operated again, and remained ten days
in the intensive care unit dealing with peritonitis and pneumonia.
When I started feeling better, still in the hospital, my surgeon and
his team talked with me and my father. There was a problem: the
neovagina must be used. It must be opened all the time, to prevent
possible new closings and possible -and fatal- infections. You will
not survive two like this one, my surgeon said. His advice was simple:
I must have therapeutic sex. After all, that was the original purpose
of the whole thing: penetrability. I refused. I was barely 17.
During the following six years I had to go periodically to the
hospital. I had to go and get nude, lying on a delivery table, with my
legs tied up. I had to be put asleep, under general anaesthesia, to
have the neovaginal channel opened by my surgeon with a steel tube.
His surgical theory was simple, again: as I refused to think of myself
as a woman, I was just stubbornly closening my body. Even with the
dilatations, I faced five episodes of partial-closenings, all of them
extremely painful and dangerous. Very soon, the first surgical
intervention showed an unexpected complication: a big scar in the
sigmoid, where the piece of colon had been cut off. I have had a
chronic pain and other colonic troubles since then.
During the last two years of dilatations, some things started
changing. The sufferings caused by the treatment began to be taken
seriously by other members of the medical team. For the first time, my
surgeon started considering the possibility that the vaginoplasty had
been a mistake. But the neovagina could not be removed; a new surgery
could damage the muscles that regulate sphincters control. Even with
them accepting the fact of my persistent male identification,
dilatations should go on. Due to the repeated traumatism provoked by
dilatations, the neovaginal channel finally closed. I was 24.
After two years, I decided to visit another doctor, a gynaecologist.
His approach was completely different. For the first time in my life I
heard a different story, that made me feel both anger and relief: I
had never "closed" my body. Vaginoplasty had been a bad choice from
the beginning; moreover, it had been badly performed. For the first
time since the whole storm began, I was supported exactly as the
individual I felt I was: a young male person repeatedly violated.
His will, his identity, his corporeal integrity, violated. His body
violated. Recognizing the damage caused, this second doctor gave me
back something lost, a certain sense of wholeness. I could start
grieving, because I became a human being with a history instead of an
ill mind living in a malformed body. My surgeon has repeatedly
expressed in public regrets for his decision regarding my case.. But
he never apologized Neither has my father, who still considers that
surgery was the best choice for me.
I am 32 now. I live as always: as someone who inhabits some place in
the masculine spectrum, who dates men, and who stills considers his
body so beautiful, strong and wonderful as always -even when it can be
sometimes socially problematic, exactly as other "different" bodies
are. I identify myself as a transgender man with an intersex
background, a persistent damage placed firmly in the core of my life
experience under the aim of "normalization". I am sure that the people
involved in my history had the best intentions; they were homophobic
and clearly ignorant - but I am sure they positively cared about me.
They only have outdated and compulsory theories to justify their acts.
They just could not hear what I tried to say. And that is exactly why
I am writing this: to encourage all of you to face the evidence of
our lives and testimonies, to pay attention to all of us.
END