Hida Viloria
Hida Viloria is a Latinx American writer, author of Born Both: An Intersex Life, and intersex and non-binary rights activist of Colombian and Venezuelan descent. Viloria is Founding Director of the Intersex Campaign for Equality.
Early life and education
Viloria was born in Jamaica, Queens, New York, to recently immigrated Colombian and Venezuelan parents. Her father, a physician, and mother, an ex-school teacher, chose to register and raise her as female without subjecting her to medically unnecessary cosmetic genital surgeries, also known as intersex genital mutilation, that were routinely recommended at the time for intersex children with genital variance like hers.Viloria attended Wesleyan University in Connecticut from 1986-1988, and graduated with high honors and high distinction from the University of California, Berkeley in 1998, with an Interdisciplinary Studies B.A. in Gender and Sexuality.
Career
Viloria is the author of the acclaimed, Born Both: An Intersex Life, and has been published extensively on intersectional intersex issues such Intersex Genital Mutilation, its harms, heteronormative imperatives and similarities to FGM, discrimination against intersex women in sports, sexuality, legal gender recognition, and gender identity, in venues such as The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, Huffington Post, The Advocate, Ms., The New York Times, The American Journal of Bioethics, the Global Herald, CNN.com, and more.Viloria is recognized as a human rights activist who advocates for equality and human rights for intersex and non-binary people, as President elect of the Organisation Intersex International from 2011-2017, and as Founding Director of the Intersex Campaign for Equality.
Viloria educates extensively about intersex and non-binary gender issues as a frequent speaker, consultant,
television and radio guest
and in film (Gendernauts, One in 2000, Intersexion, The General Was Female?"".
Opposing nonconsensual medically-unnecessary surgeries
In 1996, Viloria participated in the first international intersex retreat. She reports that, eager to meet people like herself, instead she "met people who'd been traumatized and physically damaged by cosmetic genital surgeries and hormone treatments they'd been subjected to in infancy and childhood, and it moved me to become an intersex activist."Viloria has been advocating publicly against the use of medically unnecessary cosmetic surgeries and hormone therapy on intersex infants and minors, aka Intersex Genital Mutilation, since 1997, reaching audiences of over one hundred million, via appearances in various documentaries about intersex people, including the first,Hermaphrodites Speak!, and most notably on ABC's 20/20, The Oprah Winfrey Show, in Spanish on the Emmy nominated Spanish language show Caso Cerrado, and at the UN Headquarters in New York City for Human Rights Day 2013.
In 2004, Viloria testified before the San Francisco Human Rights Commission in 2004, on the need to ban medically unnecessary cosmetic genital surgeries on intersex infants and children.
Between 2010 and 2017 Viloria published numerous essays speaking out against nonconsensual medically-unnecessary surgeries, also known as Intersex Genital Mutilation, in publications including CNN.com, The Advocate, The Huffingtion Post, and the Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics. Her memoir Born Both: An Intersex Life, published March 14, 2017 by Hachette Books, examines and critiques Intersex Genital Mutilation extensively.
Opposing "disorders of sex development"
In 2006, the international medical establishment replaced the terms "hermaphrodite" and "intersex" with the term "disorders of sex development". Viloria is among a handful of American intersex activists who opposed the use of the term "Disorders of Sex Development" since its introduction. In 2007, she publicly critiqued the label and the homophobic and transphobic reasoning behind the replacement of 'intersex' with DSD. S/he also argued that being raised to define oneself as disordered is psychologically harmful to intersex youth:Addressing discrimination against intersex women in sports
In 2009, in response to the treatment of black South African track star Caster Semenya, who was rumored to be intersex, Viloria lobbied as an independent intersex activist for equal rights for intersex female athletes on television and in print on CNN.com. In February 2010, then as Human Rights Spokesperson of the Organisation Intersex International, s/he authored a petition to the International Olympic Committee demanding that intersex women athletes to be allowed to compete as is, and be de-pathologized. The action resulted in Viloria being invited to participate in the International Olympic Committee's October 2010 meeting of experts on intersex women in sports, in Lausanne, Switzerland, where she lobbied against adopting regulations which require intersex female athletes to undergo medically unnecessary medical procedures in order to compete as women, and against athletes being referred to as individuals with "disorders of sex development". As a result of Viloria's advocacy, the IOC and IAAF discontinued its use of "disorders of sex development" to describe the athletes in question, and replaced it with "women with hyperandrogenism".Viloria has argued since 2009 that Olympic sex testing is applied in a way that targets 'butch,' or masculine-looking, women. In 2012, Viloria co-authored an article in the American Journal of Bioethics, with intersex Spanish hurdler Maria José Martínez-Patiño, the athlete responsible for overturning the IOC's long-standing mandatory chromosome testing policies, which critiqued the IOC's proposed regulations for women with high levels of naturally occurring testosterone. Upon the release of the I.O.C.'s final regulations for intersex women with hyperandrogenism in 2012, s/he collaborated on an opinion piece with scholar Georgiann Davis and also told The New York Times that the issues for intersex athletes remain unresolved: "Many athletes have medical differences that give them a competitive edge but are not asked to have medical interventions to 'remove' the advantage.... The real issue is not fairness, but that certain athletes are not accepted as real women because of their appearance."
On Human Rights Day, 2013, Viloria became the first openly intersex person to speak at the U.N., by invitation, at the event "Sport Comes Out Against Homophobia", along with fellow "out" pioneers, tennis legend Martina Navratilova, and NBA player Jason Collins.
In 2014, Viloria advocated against the IOC and IAAF's regulations for women with hyperandrogenism on a panel on the Aljazeera television show The Stream. She also wrote about the interphobia and common misunderstandings around naturally occurring testosterone which drive sporting regulations for intersex women, in The Advocate.
Birth registrations
With the advent of a new German law assigning visibly intersex infants to an 'indeterminate' gender, Viloria has argued that this approach to birth registrations fails to provide adequate human rights for intersex people, and fails to address the most critical need: for an end to normalizing surgical and hormonal interventions on infants and children.In April, 2017, Viloria became the second American recipient of an intersex birth certificate, issued by the city of New York.
National and global affiliations and activism
In spring 2010, Viloria joined the Organisation Intersex International, or OII, the first international intersex organization, was appointed Human Rights Spokesperson, and began lobbying against discriminatory regulations for intersex women athletes. In Spring 2011, Viloria was voted Chairperson of OII, upon founder Curtis Hinkle's retirement. Viloria stepped down in November 2017, when Intersex Campaign for Equality left OII.In the fall of 2011, Viloria founded the Intersex Campaign for Equality, to work for equality and human rights for intersex Americans. Her first action, in December, 2011, was contacting former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to request inclusion of intersex people in human rights protocols and protections. In early 2012 she received a response from the U.S. Department of State in early 2012 affirming the importance of including the intersex community in human rights work.
In 2012, Viloria spearheaded the first unified, global call for human rights by and for intersex people, in a letter signed by thirty leading intersex advocacy organizations, to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
In 2013, Viloria served as one of three intersex co-organizers of the Third International Intersex Forum in November 2013, in Malta, which led to the creation of the Malta declaration, the most widely agreed upon statement of human rights' demands by the international intersex advocacy community.
In 2016, Viloria became a board member of Genital Autonomy America, an advocacy organization working with groups worldwide who are seeking to end non-therapeutic genital cutting of all female, male, and intersex infants and children.
Media
Viloria spoke about being non-binary, also known as genderqueer, in the groundbreaking, award-winning 1999 documentary Gendernauts.In 2002, Viloria spoke about feeling blessed s/he did not experience forced infant genital surgeries on 20/20.
In 2007, on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Viloria likened society's lack of understanding of non-binary people, and the pressure non-binary people experience to identify as men or women, to what people of mixed African-American and caucasian race sometimes experience, saying, "Society pressures you to choose sides, just like they pressure mixed race people to decide, you know... 'Are you really black? Are you really white?'" Viloria went on to say "I have both .".
In September 2015, the UN's Free & Equal Campaign for Equality produced a video of Viloria in conjunction with the release of their groundbreaking resource the Intersex Fact Sheet, and in 2016 Viloria was one of the "Intersex Voices" featured in the Free and Equal Campaign for Equality's Intersex Awareness Campaign.
Viloria has also advocated against Intersex Genital Mutilation via essays, and in he/r 2017 memoir, Born Both: An Intersex LIfe.
In 2019 Viloria was featured in the Smithsonian Channel documentary, The General Was Female?, which explores compelling evidence that General Casimir Pulaski, revered as the father of the American Cavalry, may have been intersex.
Selected bibliography
Book reception