Mobilising for Intersex Rights in Iceland

Daniela Alaattinoğlu is the fourth lecturer of the RIKK – Institute for Gender, Equality and Difference and GRÓ-GEST lecture series Queer Iceland in an International Context in spring 2022. Daniela’s lecture is titled “Mobilising for Intersex Rights in Iceland”. The lecture is held Thursday 24 February at the Lecture Hall of the National Museum and is streamed live. Since the mid-20th century until today, a predominant medical approach in industrialised countries to intersex people – people born with variations in sex characteristics that cannot easily be classified as ‘male’ or ‘female’ – has been that of pathologization. Considered a pathology, the medical response has been ‘correction’, often through invasive medical interventions on infants. Iceland is here no exception. During the last decades, intersex human rights defenders have questioned the medical view that being born with variations in sex characteristics is, as such, an illness. During the latter half of the 2010s, Icelandic inte