Between one and two percent of all babies are born with ambiguous or nonconforming genitalia, and traditionally, parents and doctors have assumed the most appropriate course of action is to perform a (sometimes irreversible) surgery to make the child present as entirely male or female.
That decision elicits a lot of problems, not the least of which is that the child has no say in the procedure. Intersex children should be able to grow and decide their identity - be that male, female, or outside of the binary.
Human Rights Watch makes a strong case for why these surgeries should be stopped (except in the minority of cases when they are medically necessary), and California just became the first state to pass a resolution condemning the surgeries.
This should become the policy nationwide, which is why we are signing this petition to call on the U.S. Congress to ban non-necessary "corrective" surgeries from occurring until the intersex individual can have a say about their identity and body.
