“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.
Since then, intersex activists have taken pains to ensure the community is not mis-categorized, misunderstood or subjected to bodily mutilation. Intersex Awareness Day has played a key role in providing a platform for public education for a community that has often been denied the basic right to self-determination.
On this day, we stand in solidarity with their efforts to oppose medical and sociological norms that insist on narrow definitions of bodies as simply “male” or “female.” We stand in solidarity with their efforts to end unwanted surgeries on children that may traumatize individuals for life. And we stand in solidarity with their efforts to build a global intersex movement whose time has come."
To read a powerful essay by Morgan Homes, please visit: http://intersexday.org/en/max-beck-morgan-holmes-boston-1996/
Published on October 26, 2015 | OutRight Action International an LGBT human rights organization