Choosing the Gender of Intersex Children-Courtney Brown

Choosing the Gender of Intersex Children

By: Courtney Brown

                Intersex babies are born each and every day and most people of the world have very little knowledge about it. It’s almost impossible to tell if someone has been born as an intersex without actually looking at their private body features. Prior to going to the first History of Sexuality class I didn’t have much knowledge about people being born intersex. Throughout the first class session I learned something really interesting that happened in early America with a young girl at the age of twelve living in England. Her name was Thomasine Hall and she had moved to America to become a servant. To be a servant she had to be male so she dressed as a man but on some days she began dressing as a woman. Long story short the people of the village became suspicious and bombarded her home and stripped her to see whether she was male or female. To their surprise she had a male’s anatomy according to them. She was charged with fornication for apparently messing around with another servant and was sentenced to dress as male and female every day to publish her identity to everyone.  Personally, I feel as if she cannot help her gender identity. This was the way she was born so therefore she shouldn’t have been punished for it. [1]

Recently I ran up on an article from ABC news online. The article mentioned that intersex individuals are a part of group that includes up to 60 conditions called DSD. DSD is the diagnosis of disorders of sexual development. When children are born with these types of conditions doctors are unsure what kind of sex to assign the child so they choose the one that would best fit the child according to the type of disorder they have and with the approval/input of the parents. Some children are born with disorders that have to be medically treated right away and then they are assigned a sex. Doctors do not know how a child will feel about their gender or sex when they reach a certain age which is why surgery should be left up to a child when they reach puberty because they haven’t fully developed. It is proven that surgically treating children with these conditions could potentially harm them in several ways including infertility.[2] These children who are assigned genders at birth with these various conditions aren’t guaranteed to feel or develop into the gender they are given. Therefore they feel ashamed and are seen as something shameful even to the medical community. Urologists say that surgery should be performed at birth which isn’t fair to the child because like I mentioned before they may not feel or develop into that certain gender that was picked for them. Experts agree that children should be assigned a gender based on careful thought and input from the parents but they also need to be checked in on by the doctor to make sure that there doesn’t need to be a gender reassignment. This means no gender treatment surgery until the child can give input on how they feel and what they want.

http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2013/05/south-carolina-lawsuit-state-assigned.html

http://thethirdgender.wordpress.com/faqs/

[1] Moore, Crystal, "The Study of Sexuality and Gender Identity". Lecture. January 14, 2014

[2]ABC News"Intersex Babies: Boy or Girl and Who decides?", accessed January 29, 2014, http://abcnews.go.com/Health/intersex-children-pose-ethical-dilemma-doctors-parents-genital/story?id=13153068&page=3