About Intersexed Children

Intersex, in humans and other animals, is a variation in sex characteristic including chromosomes, gonads, or genitals that do not allow an individual to be distinctly identified as male or female. Such variation may involve genital ambiguity, and combinations of chromosomal genotype and sexual phenotype other than XY-male and XX-female.

Intersex infants and children, such as those with ambiguous outer genitalia, may be surgically and/or hormonally altered to create perceived more socially acceptable sex characteristics. However, this is considered controversial, with no firm evidence of good outcomes. Such treatments may involve sterilization. Adults, including elite female athletes, have also been subjects of such treatment. Research in the late 20th century indicates a growing medical consensus that diverse intersex bodies are normal—if relatively rare—forms of human biology.

Alice Dreger - Professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at the Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. This was my stance: Children born with genitals that look funny but work fine should not be surgically altered just because their genital appearance upsets or worries some adult. Big clitorises shouldn't be shortened, and baby boys with very small penises shouldn't be sex-changed just because their phalluses induce Freudian crises of conscience in their caregivers.

Professor Dreger is talking, of course, about intersexchildren, that 1 in 1000 or so babies who are born with genitalia which seem to be neither quite boy nor girl. In some (rarer) cases, intersex people can possess both testicular and ovarian tissue in an ovotestis. Cases of intersex people have been cropping up in the medical literature for centuries (I recall coming across them as a student) and are depicted in medical textbooks naked, in black-and-white, with a bar over their face to cover their "anonymity".

Together with intersex friend Bo Laurent, Alice Dreger founded theIntersex Society of North America. Its purpose was to provide solidarity for intersex people, to realise they are not alone; to campaign to the medical profession for better, more understanding treatment of intersex individuals; and for more acceptance from society for intersex individuals.

Dreger: The problem in intersex care wasn't a problem of gender identity per se. The problem was that, in the service of strict gender norms, people were being cut up, lied to, and made to feel profoundly ashamed of themselves. Bo said it as plainly as she could: Intersex is not primarily about gender identity; it is about shame, secrecy and trauma.