Dear University of Louisville and Norton Children's Hospital Louisville,

End non-consensual and unnecessary surgeries on intersex children at your facilities.

I am an intersex and non-binary person. When I was a child, I was a patient in your hospital, under the care of your faculty. During that time, I was operated on, twice, without my consent and without medical need. These operations caused me to suffer unnecessarily, and ten years later their consequences still weigh on my life. I was told that the purpose of these operations was to make me more normal, healthy, and complete, but they served only as a terrible punishment for the harmless intersex physiological differences I was born with. These treatments did not heal me, but instead did me harm. I do not believe that this was motivated by malice, but it was a terrible mistake caused by a profound misunderstanding of my humanity as an intersex person.

As organizations which claim to support LGBTQIA+ rights in 2020, I call on you both to ban all* intersex-related surgeries from being performed in your facilities on children too young to consent, except in the cases of immediate danger to the patient or chronic pain, and issue a statement officially apologizing to me and to all intersex people who have survived such experiences at your facilities, as other children's hospitals in Chicago and Boston have already done. And I call on you to take a further step forward: to be the first hospital in the country to develop a set of standards for the safe and ethical use of hormone therapy in intersex children, centering their own input and consent.

I hope that you will accept my offer of forgiveness, and move forward with us all into a more decent and inclusive future.

Sincerely,

Emory Hufbauer (they/them)

*The recent ban by Boston Children's Hospital is a great step forward for intersex rights, but it does not go far enough in protecting the full diversity of intersex people. I call on UofL and Norton to issue an inclusive ban on and apology for all non-consensual and unnecessary childhood surgeries relating to any variations in genitals, gonads, hormones, or sex chromosomes.