NEWSFLASH:"WHAT IF ITS (SORT OF) A GIRL AND (SORT OF) A BOY"

Amanda Eccleston

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/magazine/24intersexkids.html



“What if It’s (Sort of) a Boy and (Sort of) a Girl?” by Elizabeth Weil draws very similar connections to the struggles of being intersexed. Simple things like marking either male or female on a survey or walking into the men’s or women’s restroom signify societal gender constructions. Fausto-Sterling, as well as majority of the writers whose works we have read, points out that the social construction of gender is seen as a binary. A person is forced to be either male or female, and this is problematic that there is no room for the people in the middle and it does not account for the fluidity of gender. It is interesting to see an article on this becaue it is all about the people that western culture has forgot about, the intersexed people who are seen as being born “abnormal” with the condition of having genital, gonadal, or chromosomal characteristics that are neither all 'female' or all 'male’. In this article, Chase was born with ambiguous genitals that “looked like a little parkerhouse roll with a cleft in the middle and a little nubbin forward”, and initially raised as a boy for 18 months. However, once the doctor did exploratory surgery and found ovaries then they decided to remove the ‘clitoris’, move to another area and raise Chase as a girl and never look back. The most interesting part of the article was that the doctor convinced Chase’ parents to do this surgery by saying Chase would “grow up normal, happy, heterosexual and give them grandchildren” as if that you can guarantee that for any child. I thought this story was so important because it forced people to analyze medical research, interviews with adult intersexuals, parents of intersexed children, and physicians who treat intersexed infants, and discuss solutions to what is deemed as an intersexed “problem”.
There are three options when an infant is born interesexed: immediate surgery where the parents choose which sex to make the genitals, waiting to see what the child identifies with to do the surgery, or keeping the genitals the same and allowing for difference, society has created it as a birth defect that must be dealt with a protocol to immediately “fix”. However, feeling obligated to fit into “normalized” male or female genital categories is the real problem. Because being intersexed is generally not life threatening, it is the “fixing” surgeries that are more dangerous. Society is shallow in that parents would rather put their children into genital surgery to appear normal, even when post surgery genitals are usually not fully functioning and this is especially true in this instance with Chase because the entire clitoris was removed. Another problem with this is doctors encourage parents to make quick decisions entirely affecting their child’s future while they are infants, and this decision is commonly based solely on the size of the penis or the appearance of the vagina, which does not take personality or any other factors. Surgeries often psychologically damage the intersexed persons and just serve to promote societies construction and normalization of gender. Without giving in to the pressure and genital surgeries, the intersex community can challenge the socially constructed notions of gender, and some of the biggest critics of intersexual surgery are post surgery intersexual individuals themselves so that should say a lot in itself.
Intersexuality is not a problem because gender is not necessarily necessary. Society has an obsession with genitals as the essential markers of gender, taking genitals too seriously and therefore gender too seriously. It shouldn’t matter if a person is a man, woman, or somewhere in between, and people shouldn’t feel forced to fit into these culturally established molds if they born outside of them. To solve this negative notion towards intersexed persons, there calls for a moratorium on infant intersex surgeries. It is believed that if parents raise their intersex child as a boy or girl and do not surgically alter their genitals, it will eventually break down gender in society. Ideally we would be better off with a world where gender doesn’t matter so much, and there is no need to intervene medically with an intersex infant. By refusing to give in to the binary, it will cut the connection between gender and genitals.
This article really opened my eyes to the struggles intersexed people are put through and helped me to understand a new type of person. Before reading it and taking this course, I fit right into societies ideal of thinking anything other than a “normal” male or female was strange and should be fixed. However, she showed that just because intersexed people are born with something that is not common, they are still human beings and should not have to go through painful procedures to try to secure a place in our constructed idea of “normalness”. I also thought this article was powerful because it talked about the parent’s prospective, and the role they played in decision making and raising their children. All the blame is usually put onto the doctors in these situations, but parents are ultimately agreeing to the surgeries. Yet although it would be ideal to have a society where we could stop these surgeries I have to wonder still what I would do if my child were to come out intersexed. It is hard to think that we can just stop surgeries and everything will be happy go lucky for these people. Homosexuality has been attempting for several decades to become normalized in society and has only had some success, but propositions to ban same sex marriage are just one example to show how difficult it is to change ideologies. I feel that intersexuality would be more extreme and a harder case to improve upon because it deals not only with sexuality, but sex and gender.