Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Intersex
You would be surprised how many intersex births occur yearly. With the Harvard Study, they came to the conclusion that 1.7 percent of all births are intersex. With a population of 300,000 that would be 5,100 people. That is more then albinism which is about 20,000 babies. So parents ask what to do when they have an intersex baby? Doctors say that it depends on many different tests that they can run in order to pick the "right" gender. But how do you know your actually picking the right one? If you pick a girl and she becomes lesbian, did you pick wrong? Or is that just her preference? These questions can worry many people. Doctor Money suggests that "all humans are gender neutral at birth" (67). His method was proven wrong by Doctor Diamond and the story of John/Joan. When at the age of 2 John had his penis removed in an accident so they made him a girl and with therapy made him believe he actually was a girl. When he turned 13 he felt wrong. He walked, talked, and acted like a boy with girl parts. So they changed him back and now he is married living happily. Diamond believes that gender is assigned to you when your born and you can't just change it. So how do you know if you are making the right decision? Sexual and gender are connected. Just because you are a certain sex, it doesn't make you a specific gender. Doctors believe that "gender role and sexual orientation are more strongly influenced by biologic factors than is gender identity formation" (71). I think there could be a new gender forming and we don't have to have two sexes only.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I think the story of Joan/John is representative of a major problem we have with doctors and intersex babies; that is wanting a "quick fix". Just because there was something wrong with John's penis at an early age, a decision was made that it was no longer fit, I guess, to be a male individual and thus was changed into a female. That just seems so silly to me. I think an equivalent statement to illustrate the craziness of this would be when women with breast cancer have mastectomies to remove one of their breasts so that the threatening disease does not spread. Now, these women's gender distinctive parts are no longer "normal". Should we socialize them now to be male, or is it different because they are older? Because it wasn't a reproductive organ?
ReplyDeleteKendall,
ReplyDeleteYour concern about women who have had their breast remove because of cancer, does society still consider them to be female is a legit question. And bringing up the distinction between whether who determine a person sex based on his/her physically attributes or his/her reproductive organs is noteworthy because we as a society gets to challenge what does it actually mean to be a man or a woman. This conversation reminds me of my Legacies class where my professor posed the statement: if you are a man stand up. Naturally all the boys stood up and my professor challenge them to justify what makes them a man. Some said because they have a penis, others stated that they have characteristics that is associated with being a man. Ironically a girl also stood up and most of the class were confuse to why a girl stood up for this statement. This comes to show that being a specific gender goes beyond the physical appearance, genitals, and gender behaviors. Society is less of a binary than our systems portray (and showing statistics of how common intersex babies occur supports that).