Arguments for a Ban on Intersex Surgery: Future Autonomy and Jehovah Witness Blood Transfusion Refusal

The last few years have seen significant shifts in public, jurisdictional, and clinical positions on the ethics of pediatric intersex surgery in both United States and Internationally. Since 2020, multiple hospitals have issued moratoriums on the practice domestically, while the High Court of the state of Kerala in India recently gave the government three months to come up with an order to regulate the practice. It seems as though an increasing number of health care professionals in intersex medicine are personally compelled by arguments against surgery on the basis of autonomy, yet find it difficult to move from there to restricting parents’ right to choose. In this lecture, Professor Klune-Taylor outlines a new argument for banning pediatric intersex surgery on the basis of autonomy via a dis/analogy with the inability of Jehovah Witness parents to refuse life-saving blood transfusions for their children.

Catherine Clune-Taylor (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University. She teaches, researches, and speaks at the intersection of feminist theory, philosophy of science, and bioethics. She has published articles in Hypatia, and The American Journal of Public Health, and is the author of the chapter “Is Sex Socially Constructed?” in the Routledge Handbook on Feminist Philosophy of Science published in 2020. She recently completed a book manuscript titled Securing Cisgendered Futures: A Feminist Critique of the Pathologization of Intersex and Trans Kids.