Torture in Medical Healthcare Settings: An Intersex Approach

Abstract

This paper will address the issue of torture in healthcare settings focusing its attention a particular population: intersex people. The normative framework for this presentation will be provided by the reports launched by Juan Mendez (former Special Rapporteur on Torture) and the WHO report on Sexual Health, Human Rights and the Law. During the last two decades healthcare settings have increasingly become a contested place in terms of human rights and, particularly, in terms of torture and ill treatment. The intersex movement has been key in highlighting psycho-medical abuses taken care in those settings, and getting attention from international, regional and national human rights institutions to their occurrence, as well as to their lifelong consequences in terms of sexual and reproductive health and rights. In this context, different psycho-medical publications have recently started to analyze the current professional approach to intersex care by introducing and articulating human rights questions into arguments in favor or against specific interventions -including, decisively, normalizing surgeries. Those publications will provide an adequate entry point to identify and analyze current trends in (1) bioethical issues in intersex healthcare; (2) psycho-medical concerns on human rights in medical settings; (3) the role of patients' testimony in framing conflicting politics of evidence.