Tuesday 22 June 2010

Money Quote

From Declaring With Clarity, When Gender Is Ambiguous - New York Times:
Q. Because of all this new research, is the accepted standard of care of intersex children changing?

A. There's no one standard now. Five years ago, a genetic male child born without a penis or a severely inadequate one almost universally would have been assigned female at birth. Today, about two-thirds of the pediatric urologists say they wouldn't go that route, which means that one-third still might. That says that we're not sure of the right way, yet.
*SIGH* And someone has to pick up the pieces. We're making progress, but 2/3 is not 3/3, and lives continue to blighted just so others can feel comfortable.

Here's the key:
Q. What conclusions do you draw from your study?

A. That sexual identity is individual, unique and intuitive and that the only person who really knows what it is is the person themselves. If we as physicians or scientists want to know about a person's sexual identity, we have to ask them.
Exactly.

3 comments:

M Italiano said...

Dear Ms. Brain, Thanks for this link. I think it is good that Dr. Reiner is using the word intersex instead of DSD (although there is still alot of pathological terminology in the article). Clearly many of the individuals he is discussing have XY cloacal extrophy and not an intersex condition that directly involves
altered endocrinology as its generative mechanism. It would be nice if the article also discussed the fact that there are plenty of XY individuals who have a female gender identity. Some people may
think (based on this article) that gender identity follows in accord with X and/or Y chromosomes. Of course as an intersexed woman yourself, you know that it often doesn't and that many other XY intersexed women like yourselves have a female gender identity.

M Italiano, MB BS (AM)
staff OII & Gendercare

HHB said...

It seems such an easy solution would be to not given any child a gender until they are old enough to chose their own.

Really, what is so hard about that, kids know when they are ready to choose and some will be ready at a younger age than others. In 99+% of cases it won't make any difference but in the rare case it might save a huge heartache.

Battybattybats said...

HHB, it's an easy solution but one people seem terrified of making.

It's the only Ethical response, all others are Unethical. Yet people react as if it were the height of wrongoussness to do the only right thing.

What feared or imagined consequences are so terrible that to avoid them people are happy for childrens lives and bodies to be so disaterously and unneccessarily interfered with? I wonder.