Rachel spoke in contribution to the government’s Health Safeguards for People Born with Variations in Sex Characteristics Bill 2025. This bill ensures that intersex infants and children are not subjected to unnecessary or irreversible medical procedures until they are capable of providing informed consent. Motivators for these highly invasive procedures include parental confusion, stigma, cosmetic considerations and the reinforcement of binary gender.
Thursday the 19th of February 2026,
Victorian Legislative Council
Rachel Payne (South-Eastern Metropolitan):
I rise to speak on the Health Safeguards for People Born with Variations in Sex Characteristics Bill 2025 on behalf of Legalise Cannabis Victoria. Firstly, I would like to acknowledge all the lived experience advocates and stakeholders who are here today and thank them for their engagement and sharing their experiences with me and my colleague David Ettershank. I particularly want to thank Tony Briffa, M, Dr Sean Mulcahy and Anna Brown from Equality Australia, as well as LGBTIQA commissioner Joe Ball. Thank you so much for your engagement and sharing your stories.
Biological variations as common as red hair
More people are intersex than many people realise. Roughly 1.7 per cent of babies are born with some form of variation in sex characteristics, about the same percentage of people born with red hair, so not as uncommon as many in society think. Variations in sex characteristics may include variations to reproductive organs, chromosomes or hormones – basically, variations that do not fit the typical definitions of male and female. People born with intersex variations have experienced harm and trauma through inappropriate and unnecessary medical interventions for far too long. Many think that invasive and unnecessary medical procedures for intersex kids are a thing of the past, but this is unfortunately not the case.
Drivers, risks and consequences
In December last year Equality Australia published The Missing Voice, a report on ongoing medical interventions on intersex children. This report identified that intersex children remain at risk of medical interventions that could be deferred until they were old enough to consent for themselves. This risk arises for many reasons, often unbalanced and non-medical, without proper consideration of the potential harm decisions to medically intervene may cause. This can be driven by stigma and cosmetic considerations to justify intervention, which are highly invasive procedures and can require multiple follow-up surgeries, can cause loss of sensation and may not align with the child’s future identity. Another driver for these kinds of interventions is to reinforce gender, forcing alignment of the development of a child’s body, along with what they believe will be their gender identity based on chromosomes, hormones or a genital appearance. These decisions also present harms, creating situations where a person’s physical characteristics can become discordant with their gender identity, leading to gender dysphoria.
Equality Australia’s report found that another factor was an unbalanced assessment of medical risks, whereby risks presented to parents can be overstated. Contexts can be missing, as can an appropriate weighting of risks alongside the potential long-term harm of invasive surgeries. This leads to more interventions than medically necessary. For instance, some procedures may be recommended to lower cancer risk, but it could also result in a loss of natural hormone production and result in a person requiring lifelong hormonal replacement therapy. Alongside this, they face increased risks of osteoporosis or cardiovascular disease and other long-term health complications. Most significantly, intersex people can permanently be sterilised before they can understand what fertility means or express any preference about their reproductive future.
Finally, this report discusses parental distress and confusion as an influencing factor. Often these children are so young that the best interests of the child become the best interests of the parent who is making a decision for them. At times this decision can also be counter to the advice of doctors. The existing system fails to deal with these drivers of poor outcomes for intersex kids, and it also fails to have a robust, independent framework for resolving complex cases and proper documentation practices. This is particularly vital where there may be clinical disagreements, issues of weighing harm and the absence of diverse lived and professional experience to guide decision-making.
Legal framework of protection
The bill before us today establishes new health safeguards and oversight and reporting processes to protect people born with intersex variations in sex characteristics, particularly infants and young children. It includes informed consent safeguards, an oversight panel, treatment plans and prohibitions with consequences for noncompliance. The legislation will not affect urgent interventions needed to save a life or prevent serious harm, but under the changes all other procedures and treatments would be reviewed by a new independent oversight panel. If the panel recommends treatment, parents must consent on behalf of a child who cannot, while children judged capable of making their own medical decisions can consent themselves.
The bill also creates a legal framework to protect people born with intersex variations from harm by establishing informed consent safeguards to ensure that people with intersex variations are told of treatment options and have access to peer support and counselling to make informed decisions. Where they have capacity to give consent to treatments, they will be able to do so. Where a person cannot give consent, an oversight panel would need to approve treatments before parents or guardians can give consent to treatment. The independent legislated oversight panel will ensure that irreversible decisions are properly considered.
There are consequences for noncompliance – for example, a clinician who does not meet informed consent obligations can be referred to the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency for unprofessional conduct. The maximum penalty for the most serious, intentional or repeated breaches is set to be two years imprisonment or 240 penalty units.
The proposed reform will be supported by improvements to the model of care; enhanced data collection to provide better statistics on variations and procedures; and resources, guidance and education. These changes bring Victoria in line with the ACT, which banned non-consensual medical procedures on intersex people. Internationally, Malta, Germany, Greece, Spain and Portugal also have laws prohibiting these procedures.
Informed by lived experience and stakeholders
The bill gives effect to the commitments outlined in the 2021 strategy report (i) Am Equal: Future Directions for Victoria’s Intersex Community. Importantly, this report, released in 2021, was informed through consultation with lived experience stakeholders, including the Victorian Intersex Expert Advisory Group and intersex support groups, as well as medical, legal and surgical stakeholders like the Royal Children’s Hospital, Monash hospital, the Human Rights Law Centre and the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, as well as others. These are important and overdue reforms and Legalise Cannabis Victoria is proud to support this bill.
Related:
- LGBTIQA+ rights and Anti-vilification laws – Rachel Payne
- LGBTIQA+ legal service launched in the south-east – Rachel Payne
- Protecting Bodily Autonomy for People with Intersex Variations – Rachel Payne
