"Rosie is now in the process of figuring out her gender identity on her own terms. While she says she still likes to use female pronouns for now and wants to keep her name, Rosie says that sometimes she feels like a boy and other times, nonbinary. "Because I am both!" she said.
"Rosie's mother, Stephani Lohman, said she felt extremely pressured by the surgeons to consent to surgery even after she voiced her concerns about the procedure, including the evidence that these surgeries can have devastating side effects including a loss of sexual function, psychological trauma and life-long pain.
Pending legislation in California and New York would effectively ban these surgeries in those places by requiring informed consent from the patient before a cosmetic genital surgery.
As of 2013, the United Nations has condemned the practice on the grounds that an infant cannot consent.
Three former US surgeons general agreed, writing in July 2017, "these surgeries violate an individual's right to personal autonomy over their own future."
In 2017, Human Rights Watch concluded the surgeries violate a patient's human rights. Their research found that these surgeries can cause life-long pain, scarring, loss of sexual function, the need for life-long hormone replacement and maintenance surgeries, and psychological harm similar to that of child sexual abuse victims.
Dr. Ilene Wong Gregorio is a practicing urologist and intersex rights advocate who supports the legislation.
"Doctors have been imposing their assumptions on heteronormativity and what a child should look like, and intersex bodies, for decades," she said. "There are still people who practice outdated medicine and the only way to protect children from these people, who through culture or ignorance or hubris, are doing these things, is to actually put something in writing in the court of law."
