The Growing Visibility of Intersex Demands at the United Nations: A Review of the Treaty Bodies’ Concluding Observations

Ernesto Zelayandia-Gonzalez ()
Additional contact information
Ernesto Zelayandia-Gonzalez: Andalusian School of Public Health, 18011 Granada, Spain

Social Sciences, 2023, vol. 12, issue 2, 1-22

Abstract: In recent years, there has been an increasing visibility of intersex people’s issues and experiences of human rights violations amongst international human rights institutions and monitoring bodies. At the United Nations, to date, there are more than 500 treaty bodies’ concluding observations taking notice of human rights abuses against intersex persons and calling member states to fulfil their human rights obligations. This paper follows the inclusion and visibility of intersex issues in the text of the United Nations treaty bodies’ concluding observations. I looked for explicit mentions of the word “intersex” in treaty bodies’ report documents and reviewed how the concluding observations and recommendations of these bodies resonate with demands coming from intersex activist groups. I found that the main issues included in the treaty bodies’ reports concern intersex genital surgeries (IGS), autonomy claims, and demands for redress and support mechanisms, and while these issues have gained visibility, there are also a number of demands by intersex activists that remain less visible, if not invisible altogether. This paper aims at providing evidence of the increasing visibility and awareness of human rights monitoring bodies have over intersex people’s rights.

Keywords: intersex; activism; human rights; social movements; United Nations; treaty bodies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/12/2/73/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/12/2/73/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jscscx:v:12:y:2023:i:2:p:73-:d:1051410

Access Statistics for this article

Social Sciences is currently edited by Ms. Yvonne Chu

More articles in Social Sciences from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().