Legal Recognition of Intersex Persons; From Negative Recognition to Positive Recognition

Incontrovertibly each person’s body has an undeniable role in shaping personality and in self- definition of ego. Nowadays and based on scientific efforts, we know sex and accordingly, gender, as a spectrum in inter bodily experience. Over the long years intersex status was considered a "disorder", but recently and in the light of modern medical, psychiatric and cognitive science, "different" experience of the two feminine and masculine sexual templates replaced the prevailing perception of intersex status. Concurrently with these scientific efforts, the process of legal recognition of intersex persons as conscious, dignified and autonomous persons has started. Legal recognition as one of the widespread types of recognition, influenced by the dynamism of the two concepts of sex and gender, is an action that during the years, encapsulates the debate on the agent of recognition on the one hand and subject of legal recognition, intersex persons, on the other hand. Birth of positive and negative legal recognition is the result of this action and reaction. In negative legal recognition, only the two feminine and masculine sexual patterns are recognized and intersex persons have to undertake the burden of irreparable and dangerous surgical shaping to join one of the two, without informed consent and necessity of treatment. But in positive legal recognition, existence of component elements such as right to self-determination, right to bodily integrity and right to have infant genitalia, creates a right-based model of legal recognition of intersex persons. In fact, this research is a descriptive-analytical research with a comparative approach in study of the legal acknowledgement or enforcement mechanisms of judicial precedent that guarantee such rights. This also actualizes the fundamental idea of positive legal recognition, i.e. the equity between intersex and male or female humane.