Depathologization of Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Intersexuality: Human Rights and Legal Perspectives

The Rutgers Center for Gender, Sexuality, Law and Policy, in partnership with the Transnational Legal Initiative welcomes Eszter Kismödi, JD, LLM, Visiting Fellow, Global Health Justice Partnership, Yale Law School and Yale School of Public Health, for our lunchtime lecture series. Kismödi will present, “Depathologization of Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Intersexuality: Human Rights and Legal Perspectives”

The lecture is free and open to the public but guests must register in advance by emailing their name and affiliation to cgslp@kinoy-new.rutgers.edu.

Eszter Kismödi is an international human rights lawyer, specializing in sexuality, gender, sexual and reproductive health and human rights. She holds a Master of Laws (LLM) from the University of Toronto Law School and a law degree (JD) from the University of Pècs, Faculty of Law, Hungary. Currently she is a visiting fellow at the Global Health Justice Partnership of the Yale Law School and Yale School of Public Health and most recently, she was a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School.

She works as an independent human rights lawyer for a number of UN agencies and international organizations, and she is the Director of Advocacy at CREA, an India based women’s rights organization focusing on sexuality, gender and rights. Previously she worked as a human rights adviser at the World Health Organization, Department of Reproductive Health and Research for ten years (2002-2012), and as a patients’ rights lawyer in Hungary  between 1997-2001. She was a research fellow at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Faculty of Health Sciences  between 1999-2000.

Her current work includes research and policy development on human rights, legal and policy aspects of depathologization of (trans)gender identity and expression in relation to the WHO ICD reform process; legal and policy research on legal gender recognition in 9 Asia Pacific Countries with UNDP; engaging in human rights standard development on sexual and reproductive rights and disability and enhancing government accountability in South Asian and East African Countries; developing technical guidelines on sexual rights for the World Association of Sexual Health; working with UNAIDS on human rights country validation processes on elimination of mother to child transmission of HIV.

She is an editorial board member of Reproductive Health Matters, a special adviser for the World Association for Sexual Health (WAS), a board member of the Durex Global Advisory Board for Sexual Health and Wellbeing and a member of various technical experts group in WHO and other UN agencies. She is a regular guest lecturer at various universities, such as the University College London and the University of Oslo. She published extensively in international journals, and she is the author of and contributor to several WHO publications.