Blog: Perspectives

In a major victory for intersex rights, the Chilean Ministry of Health has ordered the suspension of "normalizing" treatments for intersex children, including irreversible surgery, until they reach an age when they can make decisions on their own.

This year, we've had a lot of changes. For one, we changed our name to OutRight Action International after 25 years of advocacy as IGLHRC.

We hosted 39 LGBTI rights advocates from every region of the world for meetings with more than 25 governments and four UN agencies in and around the United Nations. The human rights defenders also attended OutSummit.

OutSummit – Pushing the Boundaries for Global LGBTIQ Activism one day conference is assembling a line up of speakers to represent all the letters of our community. Keep checking back regularly additions to the list.

On November 20, Transgender Day of Remembrance, the Permanent UN Missions of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador and Uruguay, joined by OutRight Action International and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, discussed the progress of human rights for LGBTIQ people in Latin America at a special event at UN Headquarters in New York.

At the main plenary panel of the 2015 conference of ILGA-Europe, OutRight Executive Director Jessica Stern joined fellow activists from around the world in addressing the benefits and challenges of cultivating alliances and other partnerships in the work of the LGBTIQ movement. The four-person panel, held on October 30 in Athens, shared its title with the overall event: “Many voices, one movement—Together, mobilised for a just society.”

“Today on Intersex Awareness Day, we look back nearly 20 years since two courageous individuals, Morgan Holmes and the late Max Beck, with their allies from Transexual Menace and Middlesex, stood outside a meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics in Boston to put doctors on notice that intersex people demanded an end to dehumanizing and stereotypical treatment and care.