In April, the European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), a monitoring body of the Council of Europe, criticized Serbia’s complete lack of official data on “sex normalization” operations on intersex children.
Numbers are difficult to find. Serbia’s umbrella facility in preventive medicine, the Institute of Public Health-Dr. Milan Jovanovic Batut in Belgrade, which publishes national health data, did not respond to RFE/RL’s request for intersex figures for Serbia.
‘Are You A Boy Or A Girl?’
Vladimir Kojovic is a specialist in pediatric surgery and urology at Serbia’s state-run facility for intersex children and maternal and children’s health care who has been dealing with intersex issues for 25 years. He says that neither his institute nor any other facility in the country performs the controversial surgery on children — and haven’t for about a decade.
But his team at the Dr. Vukan Cupic Institute in Belgrade sees around 10 cases a year of newborns whose sex cannot be conclusively determined through visual, hormonal, or chromosomal clues.
“At birth, we [usually] have a baby with signs of both genitals — so genitals of both sexes,” Kojovic says. Intersex comes in many forms, though, and he acknowledges that “you can’t guess which sex that person will develop into.”
Infants who underwent “sex normalization” operations in Serbia were monitored later in life, Kojovic says, and “we saw that mistakes were made.”
Their only publicly acknowledged victim, Randjelovic, concedes that the prevailing view at the time might have been that such an operation in the first years of life “was the easiest [thing] to do in that period and was least traumatic for the child.”
But, he says, that “didn’t turn out to be correct.”
Instead, he recalls elementary school classmates bullying him and asking, “Are you a boy or a girl?” or, “You have a female name, [but] you don’t look like a girl.”
He says there was a lack of information in the media growing up and remembers first seeing medical experts talking about sexual minorities in magazines and on television in the 1990s. Ranjelovic says he sought, and got, some answers through psychotherapy. He first knowingly met another intersex person at the age of around 30, he says, at a conference outside the country.
Now, Ranjelovic heads a nonprofit organization called XY Spectrum that promotes the rights of intersex people and provides support for the parents of Serbia’s intersex children, including through cooperation with the Dr. Vukan Cupic Institute where “sex normalization” operations used to be performed.
“You first have to become clear to yourself,” he says, “to know who you are, and then at some point you have to become clear to someone else and then enter into some category of relationship with others.”
Written by Andy Heil based on reporting by RFE/RL Balkan Service correspondent Sonja Gocanin. Illustrations by Juan Carlos Herrera Martinez.
Source link : https://www.rferl.org/a/intersex-children-serbia-health-sex-normalization/33171933.html
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Publish date : 2024-10-29 06:28:00
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