Is it a boy or is it a girl?

 

 

In our Bodies in American Culture class we have started out the semester by reading and having discussions about sex, intersex, and gender. So far we have read authors such as Elizabeth Reis and Anne Fausto-Sterling. A reading by Elizabeth Reis, called Divergence or Disorder?: the politics of naming intersex, was the one reading that stood out to me the most.

Reis says on page 536, “In this paper I explain the ongoing debate and suggest a new term, divergence of sex development, that might reduce some of the conflict and satisfy intersex people, their parents, and physicians.” Not only was her main argument compelling and interesting, it struck me personally because she backs up her proposed change from “disorders of sex development” to “divergence of sex development” with reasoning from the disability rights movement. This reasoning explains that the word disorder connotes a need for repair and that maybe unusual sex anatomy doesn’t need surgery or hormonal correction. I grew up with people in my family and in my neighborhood that had severe mental and physical disabilities so I was never shy or scared of people with disabilities and I hold the whole disabled community close to my heart. Because of my background, I am extremely interested in the disability rights movement and using that reasoning and applying it to intersex people and their so called “disorders” really made me feel attached to the reading. So not even four pages in and I was already hooked personally, but the most important parts of this reading that inspired me to blog about it were the parts that made my brain stretch. Reis’s paper proposed ideas and facts that I had never thought of or knew before.

Firstly, Reis explains that infant genital surgery is possibly unnecessary on page 538, “there is little evidence that infant genital surgery does what it has been assumed to do: improve attachment between child and parents, ease parental distress about atypical genitals, ensure gender identity development in accordance with the assigned gender, or eliminate the intersex condition.” She even goes on to say that the normalizing genital surgery does not “cure” the intersex condition and is often simply cosmetic and that it sometimes does more harm than good. And that many of the people who have undergone these surgeries do not end up leading happier or more successful lives than those who avoided surgeries. I read the book Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides my senior year of high school and we had many discussions about intersex anatomy so I was already aware that people were born intersex. But the way it was taught in class made the surgeries seem like they were what was supposed to happen when Reis made me think about it in a new way. Her paper made me think about medicine in a new way because in my mind the medical world is supposed to fix injuries and make right of what is wrong but being born intersex is not wrong.

Secondly, on page 538 and 539 Reis talks about how our culture gets in the way of what is medically necessary as well as normal and natural by saying, “Using the word disorder elides a crucial point that some of these surgeries, such as clitoral recession, have primarily social rather than medical goals. As Suzanne Kessler (1998) declared, “gender ambiguity is ‘corrected’, not because it is threatening to the infant’s life, but because it is threatening to the infant’s culture”. Reis later states on page 539, “The ways in which intersex bodies have been scrutinized and pathologized have been negative, harmful, and based, not on medical necessity but on social anxieties about marriage, heterosexuality, and the insistence on normative bodies (Matta 2005; Reis 2005) The prevention of homosexuality has long motivated surgical and nonsurgical sex assignment in this country…Those with atypical genital anatomies have had their bodies reshaped and sculpted to look (and presumably act) more typical, even though evidence suggests that many of those who have undergone such life altering surgeries have not had more successful outcomes and happier lives than those who have avoided surgery.” So yes I was aware of the intersex community I just didn’t know enough of the medical information to realize that maybe these surgeries are unnecessary and are completely an act based on cultural beliefs. I always just thought that you were either a boy or a girl because that’s what I grew up surrounded by because that is our culture. I love the quote Reis got from Suzanne Kessler that talks about how gender ambiguity is corrected because it threatens the infants culture not its life. Kessler is completely right. If I had a child I would want it to be happy and healthy. Unfortunately parents are horrified when their babies pop out with ambiguous genitalia and to be honest I would be too, because that’s how I was raised. To only see pink and blue.

            Lastly, on page 539 she explains a new way to think about sex and gender, “Some have corroborated the feminist supposition that we should think of sex, like gender, on a continuum, as something more flexible than strictly female or male.” This reading taught me that being born intersex is natural and thinking of sex as only male and female is what is not natural. This part of her paper really caught my attention because I know it is talked about in psychology all the time that sexuality and gender should be understood as fluid, flexible, and on a spectrum. So it was really easy to wrap my head around the idea that sex should be looked at on a continuum but it was really hard to digest because all I am thinking about is what I know and grew up with: is it a boy or is it a girl?

            After reading Reis’s paper I kept feeling the same way every time I would finish a paragraph. I honestly felt like a little kid finding out Santa is not real. I felt like I had almost been lied to my whole life. It is not like being born intersex is some mysterious thing! But I kept coming back to this same question of why is it treated as some secret? As some taboo topic that I didn’t hear of until senior year of high school or when I entered college. And when will intersex not be such a hush hush conversation? I believe that intersex is so taboo because we are so used to and comfortable with one or the other: a boy or a girl. Imagining naming your baby as something else seems terrifying because it is breaking what our culture knows to be true. I also believe that it will take a long time for this idea of sex on a continuum to even enter conversations. Because I was fascinated by this topic being kept secretive and taboo I found someone breaking that barrier online. Phoebe Hart challenged the “culture of silence” by making a documentary about her personal experience with androgen insensitivity disorder and other people whose bodies don’t fit into our cultures idea of a normal body.