9 March 2017: We announce OII-ITALIA
Intersex is an umbrella term to describe those people whose congenital sexual characteristics differ from what the medical establishment generally addresses as “male” or “female”.
Alessandro Comeni and Sabina Zagari are very happy to announce the creation of OII Italia, the first Italian organization founded and composed only by intersex people.
Our advocacy work aims at stopping the violation of intersex people’s human rights, especially the un-necessary and non-consensual medical treatments inflicted upon intersex people in order to conform our bodies.
OII Italia is an independent affiliate of OII (Organisation Intersex International), a decentralized global network of intersex organizations, which was founded in 2003, and has operated since then through its national groups in every region of the world.
“We consider not only useful but necessary that intersex activism, from a human rights perspective, has in our country a full representation.” said Alessandro Comeni and Sabina Zagari, co-founders of OII Italia.
“By creating this new organization we want to share our experiences with other intersex people giving them the opportunity to join our voices in the fight for the interruption of normalizing cosmetic surgeries. Our aim is to fight for intersex people’s self-determination and their basic human rights, which have been for too long denied.
For more than a decade, there have been in Italy, patients organizations and patients’ parents peer support groups, that have achieved good results through dialogue and negotiations with the medical professionals; as well as allies groups and associations that work on and advocate for intersex rights.
We hope that OII Italia, gathering new and old activists and human rights defenders, will give new strengths to this joint fight.”
Alessandro Comeni is an intersex activist since 2009; he has been elected honorary President of the Italian LGBTI association Certi Diritti in 2015, 2016 and 2017. Co-founder and board member of OII Europe, in 2013 he also co founded and has been part of the group intersexioni, which he left in 2016.
Sabina Zagari is an intersex activist since 2016. Sabina seats in the board of Arcigay Varese, and is a member of Circolo TBGL Harvey Milk in Milan.