From misrecognition to autonomy: advancing human rights for intersex adolescents

Intersex adolescents occupy a critical yet neglected position in international human rights law. While global advocacy has increasingly condemned non-essential surgeries on intersex infants, the unique rights of adolescents, whose evolving autonomy requires direct participation in healthcare decisions, remain under-theorised. This article argues that the Convention on the Rights of the Child, read through Articles 5, 12 and 24 together with General Comment No. 20 (2016), requires a presumption of deferral for all non-urgent, irreversible procedures until informed adolescent consent is possible – whether that consent ultimately affirms or declines intervention. It further advances a recognition-theoretical framework, drawing on Honneth, to demonstrate that respectful adolescent participation is not solely a matter of cognitive capacity but of social and institutional affirmation. Surgical interventions performed without adolescent consent constitute institutionalised misrecognition and violate the rights to bodily integrity, identity and an open future. By integrating doctrinal analysis with recognition theory, the article proposes a transformative legal model for adolescent decision-making that centres dignity and relational autonomy as foundational. It concludes with practical recommendations for States to prohibit non-consensual surgeries, embed participatory rights in intersex healthcare and ensure that intersex adolescents are recognised as full rights-holders capable of shaping their own embodied futures.