"In this moment, we don’t have the numbers. I think we have still been able to do such amazing work, but it seems like the suffering has to be immense and overwhelm the system before people are willing to get involved. We need a mass of people who feel this issue as their own, who have been affected, who have been harmed . . . it has to be such a large number of people to physically demand that it stops because it won’t happen before then. Pediatric urologists have literally gone on record saying that they won’t stop performing surgeries on intersex children unless there is a legal obligation to do so. They are financially incentivized to do surgery.
When we think about justice movements, they take decades, even centuries. It’s a slow unfolding process. The intersex movement is so nascent—just a little over thirty years old in the United States. It is going to require numbers and for people in the medical field to become brave enough to admit what their colleagues are doing is wrong and not stand by it. We need people within the medical fraternity to take a stand against their colleagues. I see a relationship between the order of police and the medical fraternity. Things will not shift until people are brave enough to do something. It’s going to take a multipronged approach. There needs to be a broader level of awareness of intersex issues. Because when people hear about it, they’re like, “This is bullshit what you are doing to these children!" People don't even know what intersex is, and I think that speaks to the level of erasure we experience."
-Sean Saifa Wall, interviewed by David A Rubin, Michelle Wolff, and Amanda Lock Swarr in Creating Intersex Justice, 2021.
