2016-12-08
The Greens say that the 5-year-old Australian child known as Carla should have been allowed to choose their own gender at an appropriate time, rather than the Family Court approving gender assignment surgery.
“Liking the colour pink is no justification for enforcing gender assignment surgery on a 5-year-old,” said the Australian Greens LGBTIQ spokesperson Senator Janet Rice.
“Being intersex is not about sexual orientation or gender identity and expression. It is a question of biological variation.”
A 2013 Senate Inquiry into the issue of ‘Involuntary or coerced sterilisation of intersex people’ concluded that “irreversible medical treatment, particularly surgery, should only be performed on people who are unable to give consent if there is a health-related need to undertake that surgery, and that need cannot be as effectively met later, when that person can consent to surgery”.
The committee recommended that ‘a protocol covering ‘normalising’ surgery should be developed, and then adhered to in all cases of intersex children’.
“The protocol recommended by the Senate is yet to be developed,” said Senator Rice.
“From what is publicly known, we believe that if the protocol had been developed, it would be unlikely to have supported surgery in this case.”
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