“Humiliated and Ashamed, Again and Again”: Regulating Genital Examinations of Children with Innate Variations of Sex Characteristics

Australian researcher and InterAction board director, Dr Aileen Kennedy has published an article titled “Humiliated and Ashamed, Again and Again”: Regulating Genital Examinations of Children with Innate Variations of Sex Characteristics in the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics. Dr Aileen Kennedy is a leading scholar on Australian law relating to sex and gender, with particular focus on intersex human rights. Aileen chaired Intersex Human Rights Australia between 2022 and 2024 and remains a board director of InterAction for Health and Human Rights. She is a member of Australian Lawyers for Human Rights LGBTIQ Sub-committee and is a national director of Pride in Law. Aileen is a Chancellor’s Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the UTS Faculty of Law in the Law Health Justice Research Centre.

Abstract

"Past and current medical practices of early invasive medical interventions on people with innate variations of sex characteristics (IVSC or intersex variations) include repeated genital examinations. Research on people with IVSC has long shown high levels of anxiety, depression, and suicidality. Increasingly, researchers are looking to medicalization processes themselves, including genital examinations, to explain poor mental health outcomes. The emerging evidence confirms what intersex people have been saying for decades—that these experiences provoke deep, lifelong trauma, shame, and humiliation—often linked to anxiety and depression. This article offers a set of recommendations for effective regulation."

You can read the full article here: https://doi.org/10.3138/ijfab-2024-0014