BODIES BEFORE WORDS

Critiques of Normalization, Binary Order and Normative Attempts / Protection, Care, and Normative Reconstruction

Medical interventions involving children with variations of sex characteristics raise fundamental questions about bodily integrity, autonomy and the limits of parental, medical and legal decision-making. Its title points both to a temporal dilemma—what may be decided about a child’s body before they can speak for themselves?—and to a normative claim: that the body, its integrity and its future possibilities must remain primary when others seek to describe, classify or alter it through diagnoses proxy consent, legal arrangements or judicial decisions.