A new bill introduced this week is looking to make California the first state in the U.S. to restrict doctors from performing non-consensual surgeries on intersex infants.
On Thursday evening, openly gay state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) introduced Senate Bill 225, a proposal that would delay irreversible operations intended to “correct” the genitalia of people born intersex until they are six years old. That age requirement is based on research showing that children develop their gender identity as early as five, per a 2013 study published in the journal Psychological Science.
Supporters of the legislation hope that delaying these surgeries will give young patients time to be able to develop greater understanding regarding what they entail, rather than immediately operating on newborn children with genital differences.
In a statement, Wiener said SB 225 is intended to ensure these critical decisions about intersex people’s bodies are not “made for them and without their input.”
“This legislation gives children and their families more time to research and opt in or out of non-emergency surgeries to irreversibly change a child’s sex characteristics,” Wiener said. “We must provide people the ability to make important healthcare decisions for themselves — especially when healthcare decisions are associated with a person’s gender assignment, and can result in long-term pain, PTSD, depression, and a loss of sexual sensation.”
SB 225 is being backed by the advocacy groups interACT: Advocates for Intersex Youth, Equality California, and the American Civil Liberties Union of California, all of which have signed on as co-sponsors of the legislation.
In a press release timed to the introduction of Wiener’s bill, interACT noted in a statement that the majority of operations on intersex youth are “performed on children under two years old.” These procedures, which include clitoroplasty and clitoral reduction, often result in “extreme scarring, chronic pain, chronic incontinence, loss of sexual sensation, post-traumatic stress disorder, incorrect gender assignment, and the need for additional surgeries to treat complications from the original surgery,” according to the organization.
“Many adults who underwent these surgeries as infants have expressed deep concern and anguish about the procedures,” interACT said in an email. “The intersex community is leading the movement to ensure that no matter what gender identity a person grows up to have, everyone born with unique sex anatomy should be able to play a role in major healthcare choices.”
Although no state legislature has ever passed a law like SB 225, advocacy groups are hopeful that California will break that trend after two hospitals announced last year that they would cease performing some forms of surgery on intersex children: Chicago’s Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago and the Boston Children’s Hospital. (It must be noted, however, that neither of these medical institutions committed to halting the surgeries in all cases.)
“Building on 15 years of advocacy work by interACT, we saw two premier children’s hospitals finally commit to stopping infant clitoral and vaginal surgeries in 2020,” said Kimberly Zieselman, executive director of interACT, in a statement. “Now it’s California’s time to shine.”
While legislation restricting nonconsensual intersex surgeries had been put forward in the California State Legislature in recent years, the bills were killed after meeting with resistance from the California Medical Association and Societies for Pediatric Urology. Wiener was able to successfully lobby for the passage of a resolution in 2018 calling on doctors to wait “until the child is able to participate in decision making” before operating, but that statement was nonbinding.
But after Wiener narrowed the scope of this year’s bill to weaken opposition from past critics of the effort, LGBTQ+ advocates hope 2021 will be different.
“The LGBTQ+ community — and transgender, nonbinary and intersex folks in particular — have been fighting for decades to secure our rights to make decisions about our own bodies,” Equality California Executive Director Rick Chavez Zbur said in a statement released Thursday. “That fight continues today. Children born with diverse physical sex traits and their parents should be able to participate in the critically important decision-making process regarding medically unnecessary and often irreversible surgical interventions.”
Although the passage of California’s bill would be unprecedented, it’s not the only U.S. municipality that is seeking to prevent intersex young people from irreparable harm. New York City is weighing an ordinance that would mandate an education and outreach campaign intended to teach doctors, parents, and young people about the estimated 1.7% of children born intersex and the impact these operations can have on their bodies.
According to the news publication Bay Area Reporter, federal legislation regarding the medical treatment that can be provided to intersex youth “is likely to be introduced in Congress this year” with Democrats now in control of both houses.
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