Every 26th October it’s Intersex Awareness Day.
Every year, Intersex Awareness Day strives to inform and educate people about intersex people, their human rights issues and the discriminations they face in daily life, including the decision for many to “normalise” their own sex in their own time and if they want to.
Many find the decision to determine their own sex is taken away from them at birth when parents and doctors make the determination upon the discovery that they are intersex. These surgeries can often lead to infertility, pain and mental suffering.
What is Intersex?
According to Intersexday.org, intersex people are “born with sex characteristics that don’t meet medical and social norms for female or male bodies”.
It is thought that up to 1.7 percent of babies are intersex. Some are born with an obvious intersex traits, whilst in others, it is not apparent until they reach puberty. Some may never exhibit the variations in their chromosomes.
What’s it like to be Intersex?
The first Intersex Awareness Day
The very first Intersex Awareness Day took part in 1996 when a public demo took place in North America. They marched to highlight their right to choose which sex they should be and not doctors. They also wanted to highlight the fact that intersex people do not need to be “fixed” or “normalised”.
