Comrades, friends, siblings – whose bodies are seen as worthy of care?
That’s how I opened my solo session at the ILGA Europe Conference, and the question still hangs in the air. Because in Ireland, and across Europe, the truth is brutal: not all bodies are treated as worthy.
My workshop, Resisting Anti-Rights Attacks: Inclusive Healthcare in Europe with a Focus on Intersex Justice, was packed to the walls. Every seat filled, people standing, and still questions spilled over twenty minutes past the scheduled end. That energy told its own story – this movement is ready to fight back.
For intersex people, healthcare has often meant surgical violence – bodies cut and stitched to look normal.
For trans people, it means endless waiting, suspicion, and denial.
The same hormones denied to trans adults are forced upon intersex infants.
The same puberty blockers condemned as “dangerous” for trans youth are routinely prescribed to intersex children without consent.
The double standard is political, not scientific. It’s not about who gets what.
It’s about autonomy.
Just as women were excluded from medical trials for decades, intersex and trans people remain invisible in research.
If you’re not counted, you don’t count.
Without data, we vanish from treatment guidelines, from prevention campaigns, from care itself.
That invisibility isn’t an accident – it’s design.
My work through EIWH and Intersex Ireland confronts that design head-on.
Projects like HPV-FASTER-Implement, SPIOMET4HEALTH, and CBIG-SCREEN prove inclusive research is possible when we demand it.
We spoke about the weaponisation of biology – how sport has become a new frontier for controlling women’s bodies.
The obsession with “fairness” is rooted in colonial pseudoscience and racism.
When trans and intersex women are excluded, all women risk being policed for their gender.
Every accusation of being “too strong” or “too masculine” echoes the same old misogyny in a new uniform.
Solidarity or Defeat….Some activists say, “Don’t mix intersex and trans issues.”
I reject that.
Division is a trap. The far-right thrives on it.
They use intersex pain to justify trans exclusion and pretend compassion while erasing both.
Our struggles are not identical – but they are shared.
And when we are divided, we lose.
This session wasn’t just theory. It was solidarity in action.
Academics, activists, health workers – all questioning how Europe can move beyond control, toward care built on consent.
We ended with a challenge:
Expose medical hypocrisy. Build alliances. Demand inclusion in research and policy. Because every body counts , but only when we fight for it.
And judging by the hands raised and the conversations that followed, the fight is very much alive.
Download our excellent PowerPoint – Resisting Anti-Rights Attacks Below: