So just to once again bring up the debate from class about when/if surgery or hormone therapy should be done on an intersex baby… first, I do feel that there is no one-size-fits all answer. Some may be happy, others unhappy that the decision was made for them early on.
But it does seem that our current knowledge of the factors that can lead an intersex person to gravitate toward one gender or another is still rather limited. The success of decisions made at birth may be due often in part to luck rather than a true understanding of what’s going on biologically or what will happen psychologically and hormonally as the individual grows up. The links between body, mind and emotions are very complex and we have still only uncovered a little bit of this complexity; gender and sexual identity definitely bridge all three. Some of the individuals in the video we watched were uncomfortable with the gender originally assigned to them—if their original gender had been “forced” on them by surgery or hormone therapy, their lives could have turned out very differently. It’s this possibility that one could be wrong, that there may not be sufficient understanding to justify a decision, that seemed to be an important point of these videos.
I think it would be interesting to see what a medical guide/handbook would say about how it is decided whether a procedure is done and how a gender is chosen. While ultimately the decision does rest on the parents—will they pick the gender of their child, or will they let things run the course and see what the child decides?— it does become irresponsible to decide “it’s a boy” or “it’s a girl” and remove a testes or ovary without awareness that the wrong decision could easily be made.
On a slightly different note, here’s an article that I stumbled on in a LL conference yesterday:
“Man-made chemicals blamed as many more girls than boys are born in Arctic.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/gender/story/0,,2167005,00.html
To be honest, I’m not sure how accurate the article is, but it is interesting that they don’t mention how that if their theory is true, then it would mean that rates of intersex births pretty high and rising in these regions. There are other possible explanations not mentioned in the paper—for example, the chemical could reduce the survival of male babies compared to females.
4 comments:
Yes the potential to be wrong is there. I wonder though how thinking about sex as a spectrum, versus a binary changes the notion of the "wrong decision". What I'm getting at is whether or not biomedical science will ever be able to make a "right" or correct decision about the sex or gender of an individual, be they intersex or not.
I think that you will find that article very useful in our discussion on 11/16.
I'm not so sure that parents ever get to choose whether they prefer a boy or a girl if a child is born intersex and they decide to go ahead with surgery. As I understand it, the doctors recommend the most feasible surgical procedure based on the child's chromosomes and the genitals and internal sexual organs that the child is born with. According to http://www.isna.org/compare, the doctors that follow the "concealment-centered model", which I would expect that the majority of the medical community does, choose the gender based on the following:
The doctors decide based on medical tests. If the child has a Y chromosome and an adequate or “reconstructable” penis, the child will be assigned a male gender. (Newborns must have penises of 1 inch or larger if they are to be assigned the male gender.) If the child has a Y chromosome and an inadequate or “unreconstructable” penis according to doctors, the child will be assigned a female gender and surgically “reconstructed” as such. If the child has no Y chromosome, it will be assigned the female gender. The genitals will be surgically altered to look more like what doctors think female genitals should look like. This may include clitoral reduction surgeries and construction of a “vagina” (a hole).
good observation Rachel.
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