Pathologisation and Human Rights: our Submission to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights

After the Intersex Resolution was passed last year, the Office of the High Commissioner of the United Nations for Human Rights asked for submissions addressing the root causes for stigma, discrimination and violence against intersex people. We focused our response in one of the oldest, more pervasive and more dangerous of those root causes: pathologization. Here you can find our full submission to OHCHR.

On the 4^th of April 2024, the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted the Resolution “Combating discrimination, violence and harmful practices against intersex persons”. Accordingly, the Office of the UN Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) should prepare a report  “examining in detail discriminatory laws and policies, acts of violence and harmful practices against persons with innate variations in sex characteristics (also known as intersex persons), in all regions of the world, and their root causes, and also examining best practices…” For this reason, the OHCHR requested submissions addressing these issues. From the Intersex Depathologization Project, we submitted a contribution focused on identifying pathologisation as one of these root causes.

In our submission, pathologisation was defined as "the systematic practice of identifying certain traits as intrinsically “abnormal”, “disordered” or “pathological”, and placing those traits, and the very people who embody them, under medical jurisdiction -in a context where medicine has an extraordinary capacity for instituting ontological, epistemological and normative classifications".

Our submission offered a comprehensive analysis on the different ways in which intersex pathologisation has decisively contributed to the promotion and justification of practices incompatible with the human rights of intersex people, including our right to bodily integrity, and our right to health.  We also argued that, as a political strategy, anti-gender movements around the world are contributing to increase intersex pathologisation and, therefore, promoting “discriminatory laws and policies, acts of violence and harmful practices against persons with innate variations in sex characteristics”.

In September this year, the OHCHR Report will be presented to the Human Rights Council in Geneva. InterAction for Health and Human Rights will attend to advocate once again for a world free from stigma, discrimination and violence against intersex people.

Download our submission

Do you want to know more about our work depathologising intersex?  Contact us here: depath@interaction.org.au