Medical Intervention for Intersexed Children: Gender Unknown

“The surgery makes it easier for your child to identify as either a boy or a girl because as of right now, it’s neither.” That was it. The only real reason my child needed surgery was because of an arbitrary cosmetic requirement for classifying genders. I was speechless, livid, and borderline aggressive. I told the doctor I needed to sleep and that I’d think about it the next morning, but truth of the matter is that my constant worrying is keeping me up all night.

As humans we nurture newborns and associate them with their gender immediately. Whether this be the colors concerning their gender before they are even born, their clothing as a baby, even the toys we supply them with as children, humans gravitate naturally to associate certain characteristics with gender. Unknowingly, parents find themselves setting their

Boy or girl? A question that is asked when soon-to-be parents find out they are having a baby or even in the mind of a child that was born androgynous. There are many ways and techniques to determine the gender of a person. Sometimes, although the anatomy of the person is male/female, the person feels that they should not be that gender. Science can help us determine gender in ways that people would never think possible. The article "How Science Is Helping us Understand Gender" by Robin Marantz Henig focuses on the confusion and the difficulty of people not knowing their own gender and the pain that surrounding people can afflict onto them because they are different or choose to be a gender they were not born to be.

A person 's sexual orientation is distinct from a person 's gender identity and expression, but without gender identity and expression, sexual orientation would be hard to distinguish. The term "gender identity," distinct from the term "sexual orientation," refers to a person 's innate, deeply felt psychological identification as a man, woman or some other gender, which may or may not correspond to the sex assigned to them at birth (e.g., the sex listed on their birth certificate). For example take a child who may be born a hermaphrodite or what is commonly known as an intersex. When birthed this child would have either male and female sex organs or sexual characteristics. Unlike those who are heterosexual, homosexual, or even bisexual, an intersexual in my opinion would have the most difficult time finding their sexual orientation, due to the fact at times they are given a gender identity based on their genital formation. When in the womb intersex infants can be spotted. The choice is up to the parent’s then if they would like to assign gender to the infant. Some of the following diagnoses at times seem to be the logical reasons behind assigning gender to the infant. Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH) is an inherited condition that technically can be found at birth and it does not allow the body to make enough cortisol. When the cells in the body try to make cortisol they began to become enlarged. If not

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.

First, it is shocking that some people will not even know if they are intersex. There have been occurrences where people have lived their entire lives without knowing they were intersex. Another interesting point on the site is that men can have “aphallia”, which means that they are born without a penis but have typical male anatomy (http://www.isna.org/faq/conditions/aphalia). Lastly, it was very surprising that in the past, doctors operated on children without consent to make them either male or female because they felt it was “necessary”

Due to social conformity, along with the advancement of technology and surgical procedure intersexed persons are aimed to be "fixed" at birth.  Although otherwise healthy, there is a need to perform surgery on the baby in order to remove certain sexual organs that don't fit with the perfect idea of what a girl or boy should look like.  This often leaves scars, and the psychological and emotional confusion along with it.

The gender of one’s child is also apart of the designer baby idea. Many couples are now spending so much money so they can get a boy or a girl. These companies who help select the gender of the baby are becoming multi-million dollar corporations. Such as The Fertility Institutes run by Doctor Jeffrey Steinberg since 1986. The original intention of this was to remove hereditary diseases. The Fertility Institutes now can remove over 400 hereditary disease with 98% accuracy. This procedure is much safer and more effective than CRISPR. But now parents are using it to guarantee the gender of their

Some of them use an alternative like the bathroom in the nurse’s office. Sex assignment surgeries can actually damage the sensitive genital tissues. Thankfully, treatment has greatly improved throughout the previous decade. Family involvement in the medical care of the child is now valued. An infant or fetus will heal much faster than a child or adolescent. This fact supports the method of giving infants and fetuses sex assignment surgeries. Parents usually make the decision to give their infant or fetus sex assignment surgery to avoid bullies and harassment. Because they are influenced by their mother’s hormones, infants can have swollen genitals upon birth. They will eventually shrink back down. Not all DSD’s are apparent at birth because they sometimes just affect the internal organs. It can sometimes be hard for people that were born with ambiguous genitalia to find love. They have to find someone that is more worried about their soul than their genitalia. In some countries, they can’t marry their love because they are considered to be of the same sex. Despite what sex they identify themselves as; they are just out of luck. Some DSD’s are hereditary. Hormone therapy can bring about sex

Although sometimes it is hard to realize it, a lot of the ideas we believe in and the way in which we understand them falls under social ideals. Due to what we as a society have developed to be categorized as the right and normal sex, rather than one that does not perfectly fall into either of the two categories we have set up, it is difficult to understand the science portion of the reasoning as to why such "abnormalities" are actually not so easy to categorize. It has never really come to mind that there was science behind all of those that we labeled as "intersex", rather it has always been society telling us about all those people who apparently were born strange.

Intersex Society of North America’s principle is that “one’s genitals are primarily for one’s own use, not for the comfort of others.” therefore, the patient should be allowed to choose for their own body and not have to stand by their parents preferences. There have been numerous cases, where an infant was given unnecessary surgery to "normalize" them to fit society’s standards. The family of the children were told to keep their condition a secret, sometimes even keeping the condition a secret from the child as well, just like Davis’ story. Today Intersex adults stand up against the medical treatment they were given as children to say the treatment they received was “harmful, lead to sterility, ongoing pain, scarring, and incontinence, loss of genital sensation and sexual function, and depression.” (The Interface Project) Through support groups members have discoursed their views and opinion of surgery performed on infants through their own personal experience advocating that child should be able to have a say in their

Let me give you a scenario; It’s 3:00am. Rushing down the halls of a hospital you are on your way to support a person who is doing one of the most beautiful and complex things in life. Giving birth. You are the doctor in the room. Cutting the umbilical cord you hand the mother her child. She smiles up at you with tear rimmed eyes and you wrap the child up in a blanket and hold out to her a beautiful baby _____. Boy or girl? It doesn’t really matter which you say so long as you say one or the other, right? Within a few moments after birth and a quick scan between the legs of the child will enable you to develop a gender label for the child that they will carry for the rest of their life relevant to their sex.

This option is to allow the child to chose the sex that they feel is right for them. In this option the parents allows the child to have the ambiguous genitalia until he or she is at the age to make the decision for themself. The benefits of this choice are that the child is the one that makes the decision about their body. This could make the child feel more accepted by society when the decision is made. However, this choice can also be very emotionally difficult for every member of the family. Parents would eventually have to tell the child about the situation when they feel that the child is able to comprehend the situation. The parents would also have to decide which bathroom they feel more appropriate for their child to use. I would recommend one with stalls for the child to prevent questioning. The child could also have an issue emotionally due to isolation in society causing the child to be depressed and possibly commit suicide. Growing up may be hard due to their different appearance, but the parents will just have to be supportive and explain to their child that they will be all right and that there are options for

However, while all of these reasons might be valid to some parents, they are always people who oppose these modern technologies. Hilary Freeman disagrees. She feels parents would want to be able to choose merely for social reasons. Plus, she values the ideal that “babies are not commodities. They are not born to satisfy our desires or dreams and we cannot dispose of them if they don’t meet our requirements” (2). She feels that there is one and only one condition in which the parents should be able to choose; and this is on the basis of medicinal purposes. If the child is likely to inherit genes for a condition which is harmful to them such as hemophilia or muscular dystrophy. She also adds that wanting a balanced family is a shallow concept. She doesn’t agree with it, or see any value in it.

I= Intersex - Intersex is a medical condition in which you are born male or female and have the opposite genitals to your sex or the both genitals. One in every two thousand people are born intersex