Europe goes purple!
Every October 26, Intersex Awareness Day is celebrated around the world, and every year brings with it our opportunity to make visible our existence, our past, and our present. This year was not the exception, but quite the opposite: In 2025, IAD brought excellent news for intersex people in Europe -and everywhere. On Monday November 27, the Council of Europe met at the launch of the Recommendation of the Committee of Ministers to member States on equal rights for intersex persons (from now on, the Recommendation).
The Recommendation had been adopted by the Concil of Europe almost two months before. On October 7 2025, the Committee of Ministers had unanimously approved it, creating a new gold standard for intersex people and our enjoyment of human rights. Its adoption marked the conclusion of a long process of ellaboration, discussion and negotiation that started back in 2023; it also marked a new threshold for hope, as 46 member States came to agree on intersex issues in a global context where disagreements are far more usual than agreements.
The launch of the Recommendation was an impressive event; the circular room was packed with people wearing purple, yellow or a combination of both. They were intersex activists, but also experts from different fields, representatives from allied organizations and networks, governmental staff, and diplomats -all of them unified under the wave of purple and yellow, visibly signaling their commitment with the celebration. I had the privilege of attending this event by invitation of OII Europe and with the support of InterAction for Health and Human Rights.
The Recommendation addresses multiple issues affecting people with innate variations of sex characteristics: our right to life and respect for our human dignity, including the prohibition of non-consensual interventions or treatments; access to justice, redress and reparations, as well as individual and social access to truth; right to security (including our protection against hate crime and hate speech, and extending protection to intersex persons deprived of their liberty); the right to seek asylum; our access to substantive equality, as well as the prohibition of discrimination on ground of sex characteristics in areas such as education, work and sport; our right to access healthcare and social care (including access to medical records and to provision of healthcare, as well as our right to depathologising treatment); respect for private life (including birth registration, legal recognition, protection of family life, and inclusion in public instruments, such as censi); and a series of “transversal concerns”, (including data collection and evaluation, training and awareness raising, empowerment of intersex communties, and international cooperation).
One of the key issues addressed by the Recommendation is that of pathologisation as a root cause of human rights violations against intersex people. The document adopts depathologising language to define intersex people as “persons who have innate variations of sex characteristic(s), including chromosomal, gonadal, anatomical or hormonal, that vary from the societal and/or medical understanding of typical female and male bodies”, and sex characteristics as “each person’s physical and biological features relating to sex, including internal and external genitalia, sexual and reproductive anatomy, gonads, chromosomes, hormones and distribution of body hair, fat and muscle mass”. Furthermore, the Explanatory Memorandum that accompanies the Recommendation explicits that “the use of human rights-based terminology is paramount for the effective protection of intersex persons, as it ensures that they are not patologised and prevents the perpetuation of stigma”. The same document correctly affirms that “the vast majority of innate variations of sex characteristics do not pose risks to the life, health and/or physical wellbeing of intersex people”, but prevalent misconceptions keep identifying those variations as pathologies calling for medical intervention. Such a “normative pathologisation… often results in interex persons being subjected to normalising medical interventions or treatments from infancy…”.
Centering its attention on pathologising mechanisms, the Recommendation includes clear-cut language on medical classifications of guidelines, establishing that
Member States should ensure that medical classifications, clinical coding systems, protocols and guidelines concerning persons with variations of sex characteristics respect their human rights and are non-discriminatory and non-stigmatising. These should be developed and regularly reviewed with the active participation of civil society organisations working on intersex matters with a human rights-based approach, in particular intersex-led organisations. Member States should also ensure that this is reflected in the training curricula of healthcare professionals. This approach should extend to how information regarding care for intersex persons, as well as general information about intersex persons, is provided to the persons concerned, their legal representatives, all prospective parents and the general public.
Extending depathologisation to reproductive health and rights, the Recommendation also establishes that
Member States should ensure that variations of sex characteristics are not the sole basis for encouraging selective abortion, where abortion is legal under national law; that prospective parents are provided with clear, comprehensive, comprehensible and evidence-based information about intersex variations and their associated health outcomes; and that they receive psychological and social support services.
The Explanatory Memorandum extends the call for depathologisation even further, stating that “medical professionals must also be trained to balance the need for clinical experience and healthcare training with ethical alternatives to invasive procedures, such as prioritising medical photography over repeated physical examinations, while actively avoiding stigmatisation and pathologisation”, and calling Member States to engage critically with international and regional professional associations and institutions to ensure human rights protections.
For all of us working around the world to advance intersex depathologisation, the Recommendation contains a double message. On one hand, it provides a bold support to the goal of depathologising intersex in our lifetime; on the other hand, it confirms that despite all the past and present challenges faced by our movement worldwide, change it is not only possible, but real: change is here. That was exactly the climate at the Council of Europe when the Recommendation was launched -from the moved (and moving) speeches to the photo exhibition, the chorus performance and the reception, to the entire building shining in purple to mark the beginning of the regional campaign Europe Goes Purple.
The Recommendation is a groundbreaking achievement for the European intersex movement, and a living testimony of its capacity and tenacity. It is also a key instrument in the process of protecting and promoting our human rights around the world, and of depathologising intersex people, our bodies, our experiences and our lives. Moreover, by addressing intersex pathologisation as a human rights issue and calling for access to truth, reparations, justice and memorialisation, the Recommendation brings a new opportunity for intersex visibility in the IADs yet to come: the visible horizon of intersex futures.
Mauro Cabral Grinspan
On a personal note, as an intersex person from Argentina currently living in Belgium, I want to express my deep admiration and gratitude to all people involved in the Recommendation and, in particular, to Dan Ghattas (Executive Director of OII Europe) and to Cianán B. Russell (Senior Policy Officer at ILGA Europe, and my own husband) for their relentless, unquenchable work over this process.
You must be logged in to post a comment.