How Hermaphrodite Children Should Not Have Gender Assignment Surgery

Sexuality and gender identity issues have had a long history in the fields of mental health and public policy. There has been much debate surrounding the inclusion of issues related to gender and sexual identity in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual since its initial stages of development (Drescher, 2010). Debates in this field of interest have been fragmented between several stakeholders (Ehrbar, 2010). This fragmentation has created complications in the process of developing United States policies that are inclusive of individuals with gender identities that do not match the gender to which they were assigned at birth. Specifically, policies surrounding gender reassignment surgeries have been difficult to develop and

In “Parents Keep Child’s Gender Secret,” Jayme Poisson describes how one family choses to raise their child genderless. They are also keeping the child’s sex a secret, although it is not clear if they are trying to allow the child to define its sex. Gender and sex are two different distinctions that are often mistakenly seen as the same thing. Society places gender expectations based on sex, so it’s easy to see why they are looked at as the same thing. It’s important to remember that gender represents a choice, while sex is determined before you are born. The option of choosing is important when considering the ethics of raising a child. It’s why I believe that it is ethical to allow a child to define their gender and unethical to allow a child to define their sex.

Bradley et al., also mention a similar case in which a 2-month year old male was injured during an electrocautery circumcision and his entire penile shaft was burned and the penis eventually sloughed off. At 7-months the rest of the penis and testes were removed and the parents made the decision to reassign their son to a female and to raise him as a girl. The patient was interviewed at two separate times. The first time was at age 16 and the patient stated that she had been living a female life and had no uncertainty about being a woman. The patient mentioned that during her childhood she viewed herself as a “tomboy” but she still maintained her circle of friends to mainly girls. She wanted to have sexual intercourse with males so she arranged a vaginoplasty. She was interviewed once more at age 26 and reported that she had been attracted to women in fantasy, and enjoyed experiences with both women and men. She now

The child is just born like that. AS Judi Herring said in her Ted talk as that we are sacred because “they don’t conform to what is somebody’s idea of what they must look like” is not something we can “fabricate” (Gender Bound). We ae no body to change that person, but that person themselves. I feel that more institutional training should be added, so that medical doctors can try to find a better solution to this situation. I suggest maybe waiting to do anything until the child is at their teens year where they can understand the situation better and let them decide what they want to do. That the doctors give them a variety of options that they can take if they want to change their body to the gender they feel they are. As well as educate the public in this issue, so parents are aware of this and can be paper if it ever does happen to the.

Through examining the ways intersex individuals are treated in a medical setting, one can see how science only allows binary bodies to be created. Crawley et al. (2007) discusses intersex individuals and the standard treatment of intersex children, being to alter their ‘abnormal’ genitalia to resemble one of the two genders. This has become the normal treatment as if this is necessary, but the only threat the child is in danger of is not fitting perfectly into the heteronormative standard of correct genitalia. Because surgical intervention proves we alter and change one’s sex, it becomes difficult to claim that sex and gender are solely biological, when clearly one’s gender and sex becomes largely altered the moment they are born into society. Anne Fausto Sterling, outlines her concept of the five sexes, explaining that intersex is a term used to describe any individual that doesn’t fit into the narrow categories of male and female. She explains that the same process that was in play in the Middle Ages is

The term “intersex” can be used to describe many conditions that can make a person not be typically male or female. These conditions affect the human’s reproductive anatomy. “… a person might be born appearing to be female on the outside, but having mostly male-typical anatomy on the inside. Or a person may be born with genitals that seem to be in-between male and female types…” (http://www.isna.org/faq/what_is_intersex). In addition to these conditions, a person can be born with “mosaic genetics” which means that some of their cells contain XX (female) chromosomes, while others contain XY (male) chromosomes. Although the term “intersex” describes certain conditions or categories that a person may have, there’s some ambiguity. Doctors have varying opinions on what exactly should count as “intersex”.

“The Five Sexes Revisited” focused on the importance of therapy over surgery. Medical ethicist Laurence B. McCullough of the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Baylor Collefe of Medicine in Houston, Texas “contend[ed] that in the process of assigning gender, physicians should minimize what he calls irreversible assignments: taking steps such as the surgical removal

As a parent, I only want what is best for my child. At first, surgery seemed like it would fix everything and give my baby a normal life. After a great deal of research, I learned that surgery did not simply entail removing extra tissue without any consequences. My child could either grow up to be physically and psychologically affected by this one clinical decision, or the surgery could prove to be completely beneficial. Too much uncertainty lies in performing this surgery. No one, not even our doctor, knows which gender he or she will grow up to identify with. I could never forgive myself if I forced my child into conforming to certain gender norms, only for him or her to feel trapped in his or her body later

Parents often go through a period of shock when they learn that their new baby is neither boy nor girl. Most doctors suggest that "corrective" surgery should be done as soon as possible. There is a vast amount of controversy over whether a baby should be surgically "fixed" to look normal. Uprimny suggested, "surgery makes parents and doctors comfortable, but counseling makes people comfortable too..."(2004). Everyone can agree that parents always have their child's best interest at heart.

By having the responsibility of gender assignment belong to the medical professional of children at birth, children and their parents have suffered after the details of their physical beings had been disclosed. The results of this inappropriate use of genital surgeries for gender assignment usually lead to bullying, gender identity disorder, self-harm, and suicide. However, when this treatment came into practiced, doctors had believed that it would be traumatic for a child to remain intersexed. It was also widely believed that by fixing the child’s gender immediately after birth that the child would have a better chance at becoming “normalized.”

379). The authors then explain that there is an ethical dilemma that cisgender individuals have an easier time accessing medical interventions compared to transgender patients and this is based on the immediate need of the patient (Bouman, et al., 2014, p. 380). Later, some arguments are brought up as to why two signatures are necessary for transgender interventions including: removal of healthy tissue, irreversibility of surgical procedures, limiting regret of sex reassignment surgeries, loss of fertility, and protecting clients from single practitioner errors (Bouman, et al., 2014, p. 380-382). Then there is a comparison made between the need for two professional referrals/signatures and the lack of consistency of two referrals. The authors conclude that two signatures/referrals should not be necessary for genital surgeries and that two signatures should be implemented only if the mental health professional is uncertain of diagnosing a client with gender dysphoria and needs a second

The article mainly discusses the life of being born as a hermaphrodite and the contradictions that medical management and medical investigators have on them. The author of the article, Anne Fausto-Sterling, believes that hermaphrodites are human too and that the medical field should only worry about the hermaphrodite’s health conditions rather than their physical appearance. The article states that Western culture strongly agrees that there are only two sexes, so being a hermaphrodite is none existing. They are simply unexplored by science itself (pg. 2). Sterling believes that hermaphrodites have needs as well as problems that need to be met and that they deserve to be accounted for as sexes.

In 2006 Jazzy Jennings (then 6) was the youngest publicly documented child to be iden-tified as gender dysphoric; from then on in it wasn’t all easy goings for young Jazzy and her family as they faced schools denying the girl the right to dress how she wished. Alongside this they also denied her the right to use the toilets of the gender in which she identified herself as just because they thought it was the wrong choice and they were thinking of the other children.

Hermaphroditism is a rare case in humans, it happens when they are born with both Male and Female organs, testicular and ovaries tissues which change at puberty, with the development of a penis and the closure of the false vagina. There are two terms used for the people born with such phenomenon which is Hermaphrodites and True Intersex, people

The choice to perform surgeries on intersex bodies are not only violent but continue to institutionalize gender roles and norms. 1 in 1,500 children are born with atypical genitalia (“How Common Is Intersex”) and about 10,829 children are born each day, causing 7 intersex babies to be born daily (“How Many Babies are Born Each Day”). As doctors continuously choose to implement surgical procedures to “correct” intersex infant’s genitalia, doctors are also choosing to further marginalize the intersex population. Many children who undergo gender corrective surgeries are never told about the procedures, with the idea that it will help the children more easily conform to their newly assigned gender. However, by decreasing the population of intersex