Books and selected journal articles on intersex issues, including fiction, peer-reviewed papers, and biographies.
OII Australia and ACON announce three new resources to explain intersex to the LGBT* and broader communities, service providers and parents. The resources have been produced by OII Australia, a national intersex-led Public Benevolent Institution that promotes human rights and health issues, and ACON, a leading LGBTI* health promotion organisation in NSW. OII and ACON…
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OII Australia is delighted to announce “Making your service intersex-friendly“, a short guide to making services intersex-inclusive. We hope that it will help organisations and businesses across Australia to better understand intersex and people with intersex variations, and better respond to community needs…
The World Health Organization, together with OHCHR, UN Women, UNAIDS, UNDP, UNFPA and UNICEF, have issued an interagency statement on Eliminating forced, coercive and otherwise involuntary sterilization. The statement covers intersex people, trans people, women, women with HIV, indigenous and ethnic minority women, and people with disabilities. This is an important development, that recognises the…
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OII Australia has made a submission to the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) on the deselection of intersex traits using Assisted Reproductive Technologies.
The Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at the Washington College of Law has just published an important new book, Torture in Healthcare Settings: Reflections on the Special Rapporteur on Torture’s 2013 Thematic Report. The book contains a chapter on intersex issues, beginning on page 91, authored by Anne Tamar-Mattis of Advocates for Informed…
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A study published in the peer reviewed medical press this month describes the birth of an intersex child as a “challenging clinical emergency”, and finds that the incidence of post traumatic stress symptoms in parents is comparable to that amongst parents of children diagnosed with cancer. OII Australia believes that the framing of the birth…
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Alice Dreger, professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at the Northwestern University, USA, writes on hypospadias in Pacific Standard, The Science of Society: the simple idea that a real man has to pee standing up “has put a surprising number of babies under the knife”. Hypospadias is likely more common than widely understood: In…
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Update: We welcome the High Court judgement to recognise Norrie as having “non-specific” gender. We take no pleasure in having to comment on this case, currently before the High Court, Australia’s highest court, which has a hearing likely to be heard on 4 March 2014. However, the case raises the stakes for intersex people in…
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We welcome the publication of guidelines for general practitioners by the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission. With our input, it includes a good statement about what constitutes discrimination by family doctors towards intersex people. The statement reads: Intersex people are a distinct group from transgender people and may experience different forms of discrimination….
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In November 2013, Dr Dan Christian Ghattas of OII Germany, together with the Heinrich Böll Foundation, published a preliminary study on the human rights of intersex people in 12 countries around the world, including Australia, along with Belgium, France, Germany, New Zealand, Serbia, South Africa, Taiwan, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, and Uruguay. While a preliminary study,…
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In the second half of 2013, OII Australia participated in a ground-breaking study by GATE and American Jewish World Service (AJWS) on funding for trans* and intersex community and human rights work. The study, The State of Trans* and Intersex Organizing, was published in December 2013 and the results are somewhat challenging, particularly for intersex…
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We’ve recently seen a book by Alyssa Brugman, entitled “Alex as Well”. We believe that the author has confused intersex with non-binary identities, like genderqueer or bigender. This is often a sign of poor research, or the use of intersex as a mere plot device. Additionally, the depiction of cultural and linguistic minorities is a…
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