I have mixed views on this article.
Firstly I really dislike the structure of these sorts of articles, and they’re particularly common with the ABC: start with an emotional anecdote, outline some facts, then finish with the same emotional anecdote presumably to tie the article up in a bow and hammer it home. It’s a manipulative way of making the emotion of individual cases more important than the facts to sway opinion and it’s a blight on modern journalism.
Second, the opening story, for Noah. I would reserve judgement on it until I know - not that it’s likely to be disclosed - what the actual diagnosis is. I know from experience that surgeries in Australia are done for genuine reasons, not for cosmetic “assignment of sex” reasons. For example there could have been a severe cloacal abnormality which can cause all sorts of problems including significant infection, obstruction leading renal failure if left so I would have some skepticism about that case. Similarly for the case of Peter Gassner, who had an operation on his penis and urethra aged 3. What condition did he have that has been placed under the intersex umbrella? Doesn’t make sense. And the case of Tony Briffa. The article states “When she was seven years old, her gonads were removed” but what isn’t made clear but can be clearly inferred is this will be internal testes. Given Tony’s age, it was likely considered at the time that the risk of cancer was high. This has subsequently been shown to be not as high as previously thought and MRI has made surveillance easier negating the need for removal now. But the lack of accuracy in this part again appeals to emotion rather than fact.
I also take issue with the statistic of 1.7%. This is not the frequency of ambiguous genitalia where “sex-normalisation” procedures would be considered. The incidence of this is much rarer.
However I do agree with the right of children to reach an age of consent to certain procedures in this area, if there is no significant functional issue or risk of long term health problems. I am particularly interested in this paragraph:
A landmark Human Rights Commission report, to be released tomorrow, recommends all Australian states and territories prohibit unnecessary medical treatments that modify a child's physical, hormonal or genetic sex characteristics, until they are old enough to consent.
I want to read the details of this. But I see two other areas that this could potentially impact. The first is children in gender clinics of course. And the debate would be when is “old enough to consent”.
The other area is newborn male circumcision, which is still far too common in Australia and is an unnecessary medical treatment that modifies a child’s physical sex characteristics without consent. I’ll be interested to see if that is included.
Overall I think this is positive but I would share concerns about overlap of diagnoses that may actually genuinely need intervention for good medical reasons, and I am not sold on the presentation of the positive move in the article because of potential misrepresentation of the cases described, with emotional language in place of factual journalism.