If your child was born intersexed, with both a penis and vagina, would you
A. Have the doctors surgically remove one set of genitals to make it easier on your child to socialize and then pretend it never happened?
B. Let your child live with both sets of genitals and then decide later on in life if they want to choose one gender over the other?
C. Consider your child cursed and give the child up for adoption, not caring what was done to it, and try again for a normal baby?
D. Nothing, children can’t be born with both genitals?
2 comments:
i would wait until the child is about three or four (when the males nuts are likely to drop). If they don't then I will change the child back to a female.
no, you guys need to read up on intersexed individuals. you can't take the easy way out. the whole point is that intersexed individuals will probably be gender ambiguous for a lot longer than their first 3 or 4 years. it is only fair to let the child choose his or her own sexual identity, whether they decide to identify as male, female, or just keep an identity that falls somewhere in between, or even an alternative gender of their own conception.
@clever: you wouldn't even have the opportunity to ponder this at your child's birth. the doctor will tell you this is considered a medical "emergency" and would insist at the child's birth that you choose the gender for your child within 48 hours, often making suggestions based on the appearance of a newborn's genitals. have you seen newborn genitals? they're not very well-formed, and not very predictive of how the child will appear as an adult. most of the biggest changes will happen during adolescence. the problem with "removing" a "set" at birth goes beyond the possible mismatch with the child's preferred identity. they're often mutilative, rendering them permanently anorgasmic. you don't get a penis and a clit, afterall, so you don't really have two sets of genitals. so if your baby has a fully-formed vagina, and a teeny little nub of a clit/penis, you're taking away the most pleasurable sexual organ your child will ever have. but it's equally as ridiculous to "sew them shut" because, like most other genital plastic surgery, it requires maintenance and reconstruction every few years throughout their childhood. imagine how traumatic it would be to you to constantly have to go to the doctor to have your genitals operated on for their physical appearance.
letting the child choose doesn't come without its own problems. there will still be social stigma, questions you don't know how to answer, confusion, etc., for the child, because the rest of the world is going to want to make your child conform to one sex/gender norm or the other. while this will be hard on the child, it's not nearly as hard as discovering during puberty that you're going to be anorgasmic for your whole life, or deciding that you want one set of genitals, but had them removed without permission.
some forms of intersexuality are not chromosomally or hormonally healthy for the baby, and those can be treated with medicine and other non-invasive procedures. the fact that the readers of this blog don't know this isn't what offends me the most. the fact that the medical institution still considers it a state of medical emergency and sweeps under the rug the actually fairly high rates of intersexed births (greater than the number of people born albino, in fact), and doesn't educate parents to be, above all else, compassionate and accepting parents.
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