Violence against intersex people in EU 'alarming': rights agency

Several dozens of people protest with rainbow flags outside the Hungarian embassy in Oslo against the ban of Pride parades in Hungary, on March 28, 2025. [AFP]

Intersex people are increasingly facing violence and harassment, the EU rights agency said on Wednesday, adding levels were "alarming" as disinformation "campaigns" target them.

The EU's rights agency (FRA) published its second report following an online survey of 1,920 intersex people in 30 EU and Western Balkan countries in 2023.

"Intersex people in the EU experience alarming levels of exclusion, discrimination and violence," FRA director Sirpa Rautio said, calling for "an urgent response".

One in three people reported having been physically or sexually assaulted in the five years before the survey, a "sharp increase" from the last survey in 2019 and "three times higher than the rate for LGBTIQ people overall", FRA said.

More than two out of three respondents, or 69 percent, said they see the main reason for the increase as "the negative stance and discourse by politicians and/or political parties".

FRA said the LGBTIQ community was being "instrumentalised" in "a climate of increasing or persisting intolerance and bigotry, as well as intense online hatred campaigns through social platforms and in the public sphere".

"Such campaigns spread disinformation and fuel hatred and violence" against intersex people, FRA said.

The survey found 57 percent of respondents have had surgery or other medical treatment to modify their sex characteristics "without their informed consent", while 39 percent "had to go through 'conversion' practices to change their sexual orientation or gender".

Intersex people "are born with innate variations of sex characteristics... that do not fit the typical definition of female or male", according to FRA.

In the EU, only Bulgaria and Hungary "do not provide any possible pathway" to legal gender recognition.