Intersexuality: What Parents, Guardians and Communities Should Know and Do to Care and Protect Infants and Children Born with Intersex Variations’ Rights in Tanzania

Abstract

ABSTRACT Tanzania lags behind in the course of ending stigma and discrimination against persons born with intersex variations. To date, the Tanzania Government has not enacted any law outlawing cosmetic surgeries, stigma and discrimination against persons born with intersex variations as per demands and calls from, among others, The First African Intersex Meeting, 2017 and The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, 2023. Undoubtedly, this legal/policy silence is not at all unprejudiced. It facilitates harmful practices to take place unnoticed and uncontrolled. Primary and specialized healthcare providers, parents, traditional and religious leaders, therefore, continue performing harmful normalization surgeries and treatment, tradition-led mutilations and killings of infants and children born with intersex variations. In this context, I use scanty evidence available in the country and experience from other parts of the globe to highlight on what parents, guardians and communities should know and do to care and protect infants and children born with intersex variations’ human and citizenship rights in Tanzania. I recommend parents, guardians and community members to better understand who infants and children born with intersex variations are and their (health) needs. Intersex variations are not disorders requiring immediate or emergency (medical) interventions.‘Normalization’surgeries should wait until the children are mature enough to make informed consent to alter their physical appearances. Whenever possible, parents and guardians should seek, share support and correct intersex information from parents/guardians with similar experiences and adult persons born with intersex variations, media, internet and intersex-led groups and organizations and institutions within and outside Tanzania. Importantly, parents, guardians, persons born with intersex variations, intersex movements, activists and persons born with intersex variations-led organizations should lobby, openly criticize and pressurize the government to enact persons born with intersex variations-friendly policies, laws, and (treatment) guidelines aiming at ending harmful practices that persistently violate their human and citizenship rights. In turn, this commitment would enable infants and children born with intersex variations to grow up and live free from body shaming, stigma, harm and pain in a country/world where their human and citizenship rights are cherished.