Thread by @interACT_adv

“So you’re saying that trans kids are too young to consent, but intersex kids aren’t?” asked Bria Brown-King, director of engagement for the intersex rights group InterAct. “How does that make sense?”
#TransIntersexSolidarity @19thnews
19thnews.org/2023/03/bills-…

More than two-thirds of the bills introduced this year that would ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth have specific intersex exemptions.

Those carve-outs have consequences, advocates say: Some of the first explicit anti-intersex language is being written into law.

The controversial exemptions allow doctors to assign minors who are born with secondary sex characteristics as “male” or “female” through surgeries, hormones or other interventions.

While doctors have operated on intersex minors to assign them “male” or “female” sexes for decades, human rights organizations have long condemned the surgeries on kids as cosmetic, unnecessary and inhumane.

"The bills are really authorizing in the law the practice of performing these unnecessary surgeries,” Moran said. @uliveinasociety

@SeanSaifaWall thinks the bills are not about protecting children at all and said they are really about reinforcing rigid gender ideals and heterosexuality.

“I see the attack on trans people, and I see the mandates to continue doing surgeries on intersex infants and children as a way of crushing bodily autonomy as a way of upholding ‘male’ and ‘female’ as sacred,” he said.

“This harm has been really endemic and it’s been long-standing. The scary part about it, though, is when there’s a codifying it into law.”