Intersex adult seeks justice over irreversible childhood surgery

Health-e News Intersex adult seeks justice over irreversible childhood surgery More than 10 intersex adults have approached a South African support organisation since 2020 saying they underwent surgery or other irreversible medical interventions as children without their or their parents’ informed consent.

One of them is 33-year old Lerato Sikhosana from Orange Farm, south of Johannesburg.

She says medical procedures performed when she was a child have left her struggling with physical and psychological consequences decades later.

Intersex is an umbrella term for people born with sex characteristics that do not fit typical definitions of male or female bodies.

These variations can involve reproductive organs, hormones, chromosomes or genitalia, and may be apparent at birth or become visible only later in life.

Peaceworth Maquba, intersex activist and founder of the support group Intersexions, says medically unnecessary and irreversible interventions that were done on intersex children who are now adults, are more common than many people realise.

Maquba says since 2020, more than 10 intersex adults have approached the organisation reporting that they had undergone surgery or other irreversible medical interventions during infancy or childhood without their or their parents’ informed consent.

Maquba says the long-term effects can include chronic pain, scarring, infertility, reduced sexual sensation and lifelong hormone treatment.

According to Maquba, psychological trauma, anxiety and loss of trust in healthcare can also follow.

“Where a child is healthy and there is no immediate threat to their health, surgery primarily intended to alter the appearance of their genitals should not have been presented as a medical necessity,” says Maquba.

What Lerato Sikhosana’s medical records show Sikhosana was born at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in 1993 with ambiguous genitalia, or atypical genitalia — a rare condition where a newborn’s external sex organs do not look clearly male or female.

Sikhosana’s mother says at birth, doctors initially told her that her baby was a boy.

But she says there was a medical condition that needed to be corrected.

Sikhosana says her mother understood that doctors were going to remove two protrusions she could see on the baby’s abdomen.