The Council of Europe wants to better protect intersex people against unnecessary medical interventions
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Interseex people are still insufficiently protected against unnecessary medical interventions in Europe. That is what the European Commission says to racism and intolerance (ECRI), an independent supervisory body for human rights within the Council of Europe, on Wednesday in its annual report.
Source: Belga
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Interseex people are people born with a body that does not meet the stereotypical image of the gender ‘man’ or ‘woman’. On Wednesday, Ecri states in her annual report that some of those people at the age of a minor are still subject to medically unnecessary intervention. This concerns, for example, radical operations where sexual characteristics are adjusted.
Those interventions « are still not prohibited by law in most European countries, » said the report. There is still no law in Belgium that explicitly prohibits unnecessary medical interventions among intersex minors. The federal government has included in its coalition agreement that it wants to « protect the physical and psychological integrity and the physical autonomy of people with variations in sexual characteristics ».
Parents of Interseex children often receive insufficient information when they have to agree to a ‘gender -normalizing’ operation. Ecri also signales that medical records about those operations are often lost or destroyed in some European countries.
Gender ideology
The Council of Europe – not an establishment of the European Union and therefore not to be confused with the European Council or the Council of the European Union – also encourages that there is still a lot of ignorance among the population about the situation of intersex persons. However, it is not an exceptional phenomenon. According to the Institute for Equality of Women and Men, five children are born every day in Belgium with a variation of sexual characteristics.
In addition, in its annual report, Ecri focuses on transphobia in Europe, among other things. Hate messages against transers remain widespread in many European countries, the organization states. A clear increase is being observed in particular during election campaigns. The transphobic groceries are then spread under the pretext that children must be protected against the so -called « gender ideology ».
