The FELGTBI+ fights so that intersexuality stops being treated as a disease

The State Federation of Lesbians, Gays, Trans, Bisexuals, Intersex and More (FELGTBI+) has urged this Thursday to eliminate the stigma associated with intersexuality and to stop considering it and treating it as a disease by the medical sector..

Intersexuality “does not represent any disease or disorder, but rather diversity,” said the president of FELGTBI+, Uge Sangil, according to a statement from the organization on the occasion of Intersexual Visibility Day.. This term refers to people who have genital characteristics of both sexes..

Eradicate invasive genital examinations

Sangil has urged that the bodies of these people “stop being seen as something strange, ugly and pathological, always shrouded in a high degree of secrecy, and that invasive and traumatic genital revisions” as well as “cosmetic” surgeries be eradicated. and indiscriminate against intersex minors”.

Therefore, the FELGTBI+ requires that any invasive genital and hormonal surgery or procedure, which does not aim to treat a real physical problem of the minor, be first approved by an ethical committee in which experts in affective-corporal diversity, gender, and gender participate. and with knowledge in the development of trauma.

Intersexuality, a taboo topic

For Iolanda Melero, co-founder of the intersex organization Kaleidos, intersexuality is a taboo subject. So much so that many intersex people, such as yours, have discovered that they are intersex as adults because neither medical professionals nor their families had ever informed them..

“My parents discovered that I was intersex when I was two years old because a teacher told them that my genitals were swollen.”. I had surgery when I was two and four years old.. Neither my family nor my doctor ever told me anything, only that they had to operate on me 'down there', without specifying why,” says Melero..

It was already at the age of twenty, at the doctor's office, when he heard the doctor tell another person that he had Morris syndrome and, upon investigating, he discovered what it was about: a feminine appearance and identity, but with hidden testicles and the Y chromosome.

Myths about intersexuality

To this day, “a multitude of myths about intersexuality that generate stigma and fear of visibility” continue to circulate, such as that they are the “third sex”, “hermaphrodites” or that they are “neither completely male nor female”, he reproaches. Melero.

And it requests more visibility for intersex people “from a non-pathologizing, non-stigmatizing point of view”, as well as that intersexualities be “included within the variability of the body in textbooks”.