Quote:
Originally Posted by henrydawg87
Biologically speaking, society decided that there would only be man and woman. Doctors are the ones who decide whether the baby is a “boy” or a “girl.” But what happens when the doctor decides that the genitalia is “too small” to be a boy (like Ken) or that it is “too big” to be a girl (like Barbie)? Most times, the doctor will just operate and “fix” the “problem.” I don’t see how a doctor and his or her subjective opinion should control the future of a child. What if a doctor guesses—literally—incorrectly? Poor child.
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I think it's a little more complicated than just rushing to a surgery table. I remember from gynecology-obstetrics classes that when children are born with indefinite genitalia, the first attempt is to discover if a real health problem is present. Some can be life threatening hormonal deficiences. My professor was saying back then that in cases of intersex, the parents were adviced to raise the child to the closest gender the intersex led to, or to the more physiological one the condition generated and then as years pass by, they check with the child is maturing to be a boy or girl and get treatment accordingly (hormone replacement, surgery if necessary). I'm sure it's not a simple decision and not a decision taken by a single person, at a single specific moment and it has to be thouroughly discussed as the child develops with the help of a multidisciplinary team and the family. Obviously, though, a decision has to be made at some points. This is one of the parts of medicine that msotly intrigues me, because I think it's a really complicated matter and the decisions taken can have serious implications on the life of the affected person. She then proceeded to explain how gender and sex can be separated into so many complicated things: role, orientation, external genitalia sex, internal genitalia sex, chromossomal sex, and the list goes on. If you starting mixing combinations of those it can really drive someone crazy, and people who are ignorant in the matter will obviously fail to understand how extremely sensitive this matter can be. I was discussing with another doctor one of these days about something related and she seemed to have a very closed mind about sexuality matters. When I touched the subject of intersex, in order to show how she was being close minded, she sort of crashed and bugged, she couldn't just answer to it other than saying I was complicating things by pulling something that is relatively rare, and I told her that even no matter how uncommon intersex can be, that it exists and that she couldn't just dismiss it because she was unfamiliar with it.