According to recent reports, new guidelines for the medical care of intersex infants born in Ireland are being developed by Children’s Health Ireland (CHI), which oversees children’s hospitals in the country.

As reported by the Irish Independent, the news emerged after former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar posed a parliamentary question about the issue. Children’s Health Ireland replied that they are in the process of developing safe and well-accepted national guidelines to standardise medical care for intersex infants.

Children’s Health Ireland has, in recent years, joined the Disorders of Sex Development International (DSD) registry, through which they are taking part in a surveillance study of gonadectomy, a term referring to the surgical removal of gonads (testes or ovaries). According to their parliamentary response, there are “three to four multidisciplinary DSD clinics per year where cases from across the country can be discussed”.

Expanding on recent changes in ­clinical recommendations as well as active ethical issues, they said that “the decision to proceed with any surgical intervention involves detailed robust multi-disciplinary discussion on an individual basis to fully inform and involve the patient or family in the decision-making process”.

According to research published by Dublin City University (DCU), being intersex does not ordinarily impair a person’s life or physical health. “At its core, being intersex is about being human,” the researchers concluded. “Being intersex and having a variation of one’s sex characteristics is a highly diverse experience”.

Despite this, medical interventions to modify intersex children’s sex characteristics are routinely performed in Irish hospitals, as highlighted by Intersex Ireland. Intersex activists refer to these procedures as Intersex Genital Mutilation (IGCM), which was officially declared to be torture by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture in 2013.

This is because such procedures often cause irreparable damage to the sexual, reproductive and urinary capabilities of intersex people and have negative impacts on their quality of life and mental and physical health.

According to the United Nations, between 0.5% and 1.7% of the global population are intersex. Despite this, the HSE currently doesn’t provide information about medical interventions performed on intersex children on its website, and public awareness of the topic is very limited.

In response to a past parliamentary question posed by Intersex Ireland, the HSE claimed that the standard of intersex healthcare is of a very high quality. Intersex Ireland commented, “A health organisation that continues to perform IGM while ignoring the protests and concerns of intersex people affected by it cannot be taken at its word when it claims that it provides those same people an excellent standard of care.”