Intersex Awareness Week is marked annually to recall a small group of protesters who picketed the American Academy of Pediatrics in 1996 for ignoring the rights of children born with sex variations. While the academy has not budged, medical institutions and governments around the world are increasingly recognizing that people born with intersex variations deserve bodily autonomy.

Intersex children are born with chromosomes, gonads, hormone function or internal or external sex organs that don’t match typical social expectations. For over half a century, doctors around the world have routinely performed surgery on newborns to standardize bodies so that they align with social gender norms. These nonconsensual surgeries are medically unnecessary to perform at such a young age. They also carry significant risk of trauma and other forms of lifelong harm, including a loss of sexual pleasure and/or function, incontinence, chronic pain, scarring, and early-onset osteoporosis.

Over 50 evaluations by United Nations human rights treaty bodies on the conduct of various countries have concluded that nonconsensual surgeries to alter the sex characteristics of children born with intersex traits are human rights violations. Countries including Malta, Greece, and Spain, as well as parts of Australia and India, have banned nonconsensual surgeries, while the UN Human Rights Council passed its first resolution on the issue last year and issued a comprehensive report this year.

In January, the US Department of Health and Human Services published a landmark report on intersex health equity that called for ending nonconsensual surgeries. In August, delegates of the Australian Medical Association unanimously supported a resolution to recognize the harm that medical professionals had inflicted on intersex people. “Recognising this harm is the first step,” a physician said in support of the resolution. “Next we must call for legislated protections, guidelines founded in lived experience and evidence.”

The Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers in October urged that “Member States should enact legislation that explicitly and specifically prohibits any medical intervention on a person’s sex characteristics…without their prior, free, informed, express and documented consent.”

Intersex Awareness Week is a good reminder of how far things have come and how much further they need to go. The evidence of harm inflicted on intersex people is plentiful. Undoing it requires respecting the principle of bodily autonomy and integrity, a core human rights obligation.