Ban ‘sex surgery’ for kids
GENITAL surgery should be banned on children whose sex characteristics are ambiguous because the procedures can scar young patients for life and be considered human rights violations, a leading rights group said yesterday.
Several hundred so-called intersex children in the United States have undergone sex reassignment surgery in recent years, and worldwide, doctors recommend surgery for an estimated one in every 2,000 intersex babies, US-based Human Rights Watch and interACT, an advocacy group, said.
Surgeries to make them resemble more typical boys or girls include removal of testes or ovaries, deepening shallow vaginas and enlarging small penises, they said in a report.
They called for a US moratorium on all surgical procedures on intersex children too young to decide.
The surgeries amount to “human rights abuse taking place in a medical setting,” said Kyle Knight, a HRW researcher.
“These surgeries are medically unnecessary, they are harmful and they haven’t delivered on the outcomes that were originally theorized,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview.
The report said the benefits of sex reassignment surgery remain unproven but the resulting harm can be catastrophic.
Surgery can cause life-long pain, sterilization, loss of sexual sensation and health complications, it said.
Some 1.7 percent of the world’s population, or 127.5 million people, is thought to be born intersex.
But detailed data on the US intersex population is largely lacking.
The surgeries’ popularity dates to 1960s’ research which concluded intersex people could be assigned typical male or female genitals.
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