Unnecessary surgeries are no longer performed, right?
More and more health professionals believe that surgeries on intersex children should be delayed until the child can decide for him- or herself. Unfortunately, this does not apply to all forms of sex diversity. In babies with CAIS, the testes are not removed these days, but in children with CAH, they usually don’t wait until the child can decide for himself. It is believed that children with CAH “benefit” from early non-autonomous, uninformed surgical treatment. Doctors who say that intersex children are no longer operated on usually redefine intersex as ‘children whose sex we have been totally unable to determine’. In this way, they can operate on children whose sex they say could be determined.
Based on those surgeries, many countries have received strong recommendations from the UN Committee for the Convention Against Torture to end these medical treatments. So yes, unnecessary surgeries without the consent of the child itself are still performed.