NEWS FLASH

Today Is Intersex Awareness Day | Today marks Intersex Awareness Day, which first started in 1996 when activists protested the American Academy of Pediatrics for advocating infant genital surgery on intersex babies to make them “normal.” For those unfamiliar, intersex — the “I” often now included, especially internationally, in LGBTI or LGBTQI — is when people are born with intermediate or atypical physical features that would normally distinguish male from female. Traditional medical practice used to be for doctors to “correct” infants born with ambiguous genitalia by surgically mutilating that genitalia and encouraging the parents to raise the child in the arbitrarily assigned gender role. Intersex people and awareness about their identities are an important reminder that humanity exists on a complex spectrum of sex and gender that does not fit into the social binaries reinforced by society. Learn more at the Intersex Society of North America.