Republicans across the country have spent the better part of 2021 trying to cut off transgender children’s access to gender-affirming health care. Some have falsely compared it to child abuse, “genital mutilation,” and even Nazi war crimes. But for children born with intersex traits, or in a body that differs from social expectations about “boys” and “girls,” legislators on the right are more than happy to let doctors perform surgeries—sometimes without those children’s knowledge. So far this year, legislators in at least 18 states have introduced bills that would block trans kids from gender-affirming health care. But 16 of those bills, according to a VICE News analysis, contain a startling exception: They explicitly do not apply to the medically unnecessary surgeries performed on intersex children. No state has passed a law to directly ban these procedures. “Intersex,” an umbrella term that encompasses upwards of 20 conditions, describes individuals whose combination of chromosomes, gonads, and genitalia place them somewhere on the spectrum between typical definitions of “male” and “female.” As many as 1.7 percent of children are born with intersex traits, according to the United Nations. Some children may need surgery for proper functioning. But medically unnecessary procedures are also sometimes performed on kids to normalize what doctors call “ambiguous genitalia” or to remove gonads that don’t match social expectations. It’s a practice that human rights groups and intersex activists have spent years trying to end. “The exception to the ban on gender-affirming care for trans children that allows doctors to impose actual sex changes on unconsenting intersex children reveals the true evil of these proposed laws,” Cary Gabriel Costello, associate professor of sociology and director of LGBTQ+ studies at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, wrote in an email. “They seek to treat children as objects, who can have no say into how they will be treated, by society at large or by the medical profession.”