Boys Don’t Cry: The Problems That Arise From Infant Genital Surgery

In chapters 3 and 4 of “Sexing the Body,” Fausto-Sterling discusses many of the ways in which inter-sexed individuals are unfairly treated in today’s society. Even though Fausto-Sterling found that 1-2% of births are inter-sexed (making this event much more frequent than is commonly thought), these individuals are immediately molded and mutilated by surgeons, in order to conform to society’s accepted standards. Fausto-Sterling conveys that oftentimes this genital surgery is done unnecessarily (in that it is not obligatory for infant survival), and it is never done with patient consent.

I want to be a doctor someday (and a un-biased one, at that), and thus, Fausto-Sterling truly got me thinking as to why our society feels the need to carry out painful and potentially dangerous medical procedures on inter-sexed babies, immediately after birth. She suggests that this phenomenon could be due to the “threat of homosexuality” that exists today. Fausto-Sterling points out that homosexuality was thought to be a disease in society up until the 1970s when it was removed from the DSM. Many religious organizations also viewed homosexuality as a behavioral “choice.” However, through the research of Simon LeVay, it was found that there are neural ties to homosexual behavior, and thus, it is highly ignorant to deem this behavior as a decision or as abnormal in any respect. Overall, since ambigious sexual desire in inter-sexed individuals threatens our constructed norms, perhaps it can be seen as a part of this inherent stigma against homosexual behavior that is present in our world.

Similarly, when inter-sexed surgery goes awry (aka when constructed females begin carrying out masculine behavior, or visa versa) our society is threatened. I witnessed just how uncomfortable social groups can become from gender-ambiguous behavior when I was in middle school. An older classmate of mine (I will call her Jen) was known to be a female when she was developing as a child, but when she hit puberty she began to identify more with the male-sex. Jen cut her hair and solely dressed in men’s clothing, and was then incessantly gossiped about in the cafeteria. It was not known to my classmates what her status was as an inter-sexed individual (i.e. whether her underlying chromosomal layout was truly inter-sexed, or whether she was a cross-dressing individual); all that was known was that she had a girl’s name and dressed as a boy. I constantly felt awful for Jen because she was repeatedly made fun of for no other reason than how she choose to present herself.

As Fausto-Sterling illuminates, Jen’s story of gender-ambiguity is highly common in society. Since one’s gender identification comes from both his/her environment AND his/her neural wiring, it becomes impossible for anyone but the individual to make a choice regarding one’s gender. Overall due to this problem, I think that in order to combat society’s completely accepted genital mutilation and (at times, seemingly arbitrary) gender assignment, inter-sexed individuals should be able to make up their own minds about genital surgery once they reach the late stages of development (as is discussed in the novel by Cheryl Chase, the founder of Intersex Society of North America). Thus, instead of becoming human experiments, these individuals will be able to make a decision themselves, not based on who they are socially expected/ molded to become, but based on what they feel deep inside.