LGBTQ+ Celebrities: Hida Viloria

Hida Viloria is an intersex, nonbinary & genderfluid Latine American writer, producer, and activist for intersex & nonbinary rights who uses they/them pronouns. They are also the founding director of the Intersex Campaign for Equality (formerly OII-USA) and have worked as a consultant with the United Nations OHCHR, United Nations Free & Equal Campaign, Lambda Legal, Human Rights Watch, Williams Institute, IOC.

Hida was born with a form of congenital adrenal hyperplasia and a greatly enlarged clitoris as a result. Their father, a physician, and mother, an ex-school teacher, chose to register and raise them as female without subjecting them to genital surgeries, which were generally recommended at the time as corrective procedures for infants with disorders of sexual development. Their father felt that a surgery to reduce the size of Hida’s clitoris was medically unnecessary and therefore presented unjustifiable health risks.

In 1996, Hida participated in the first international intersex retreat. They were eager to meet people like themself, instead they 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 Hida to become an intersex activist. Since 1997 they have been advocating publicly against the use of medically unnecessary cosmetic surgeries on intersex genitals and hormone therapy for intersex infants and minors. In 1998 Hida graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with an interdisciplinary studies degree in Gender and Sexuality with high honors and high distinction. And then in 1999 Hilda spoke about being non-binary and genderqueer, in the award-winning documentary Gendernauts.

In 2002, they spoke about feeling blessed they did not experience forced infant genital surgeries on 20/20 and in 2004 Hida testified before the San Francisco Human Rights Commission on the need to ban medically unnecessary cosmetic genital surgeries on intersex infants and children.

In 2006, the international medical establishment replaced the terms "hermaphrodite" and "intersex" with the term "disorders of sex development". Hida, among a handful of American intersex activists, opposed the use of the term "Disorders of Sex Development" since its introduction. In 2007, they publicly critiqued the label and the homophobic and transphobic reasoning behind the replacement of 'intersex' with DSD. They also argued that being raised to define oneself as disordered is psychologically harmful to intersex youth. Also in 2007, on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Hida compared 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 sides".

In 2009, in response to the treatment of black South African track star Caster Semenya, who was rumored to be intersex, Hida lobbied as an independent intersex activist for equal rights for intersex female athletes on television and in print on CNN.com. In spring 2010, they joined the Organisation Intersex International (OII), the first international intersex organization. Hida was appointed Human Rights Spokesperson and began lobbying against discriminatory regulations for intersex women athletes. In February 2010, they authored a petition to the International Olympic Committee demanding that intersex women athletes be allowed to compete as is and be de-pathologized. The action resulted in Hida being invited to participate in the International Olympic Committee's October 2010 meeting of experts on intersex women in sports, in Lausanne, Switzerland, where they lobbied against adopting regulations that 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 their use of "disorders of sex development" to describe the athletes in question, and replaced it with "women with hyperandrogenism".

In spring 2011, Hida was voted Chairperson of Organisation Intersex International, upon founder Curtis Hinkle's retirement. In the fall of 2011, they founded the Intersex Campaign for Equality, to work for equality and human rights for intersex Americans. Their first action, in December 2011, was contacting former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to request the inclusion of intersex people in human rights protocols and protections. In early 2012, they 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, they 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, Hida served as one of three intersex co-organizers of the Third International Intersex Forum that took place 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. On Human Rights Day, on Dec 10th, 2013, Hida 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, they advocated against the IOC and IAAF's regulations for women with hyperandrogenism on a panel on the Al Jazeera television show The Stream. They also wrote about the interphobia and common misunderstandings around naturally occurring testosterone which drives sporting regulations for intersex women, in The Advocate.

In September 2015, the UN's Free & Equal Campaign for Equality produced a video of Hida in conjunction with the release of their groundbreaking resource the Intersex Fact Sheet, and in 2016 they were one of the "Intersex Voices" featured in the Free and Equal Campaign for Equality's Intersex Awareness Campaign. In 2016, Hida became a board member of Genital Autonomy America (GA 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.

Hida has also advocated against intersex genital mutilation via essays, and in their 2017 memoir, Born Both: An Intersex Life. In April 2017, Hida became the second American recipient of an intersex birth certificate, issued by the city of New York. In 2019 Hida 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.

More recently in December 2021, they Spoke on the LGBTQ&A podcast. On the podcast, Hida said, "The reason I did my memoir is because I felt like there's a story that we don't hear enough of about intersex people, which is that it's amazing and wonderful to be intersex. That's literally my experience."