Intersex Genital Mutilation (IGM) is an intervention on a healthy intersex body. It is performed when, according to societal and medical notions, a person’s external genitals do not look “normal” enough to pass as “male” or “female” genitals.
Performing IGM was not always the default practice. Before the middle of the twentieth century, as a 2016 article of three Surgeons General of the United States points out, “most children born with genitalia that did not fit the male-female binary norm were not subjected to surgery”. Beginning with the 1950s, however, in “an era when pressure to conform to social norms was often unyielding”, the standard treatment protocol changed. Infants born with atypical genitalia were “increasingly subjected to surgical procedures such as clitoral reduction, vaginoplasty, gonadectomy, and hypospadias repair, primarily to ‘normalize’ gendered appearance, not to improve function”.
The term IGM encompasses all harmful medical practices, including surgical, hormonal and other medical treatments to irreversibly modify sex characteristics of intersex persons for non-vital, cosmetic reasons.
