The Relationship Between Intersex Children and Their Parents

In the reading by Suzanne Kessler, “The Medical Construction of Gender: Case Management of Intersexed Infants”, she discusses what the thoughts of medical experts in the field of pediatric intersexuality are on what happens once an intersex child is born. The experts mostly discuss what happens right after the child is born and how they talk to the parents as well as how the decide to do surgery or not. I was surprised by how many of the actions right after the child was born were focused on making the parents feel better. Specifically how often the doctors admitted that telling parents that their child was intersex changed the way the parents treated the child. There was a lot of delicate wording for the benefit of the parents. It seemed that often the doctors assured the parents that the child would ultimately be either a boy or girl, even though at the time of birth they may not fit neatly into one sex over the other. What struck me the most was how often the doctors talked less about preforming surgery on the children for their sake, but more about preforming surgery for the sake of the parents. The section on page nine that said gender assignment and genital reconstruction has to happen as soon as possible because otherwise the way that parents interact with their child will change was the most blatant instance of where the parent’s needs were put before the child’s.  

     The implication of this paragraph is that the interaction will change in a detrimental way to the child’s health. The doctors were freely admitting that it is hard for parents to accept their children as intersex and often pressure the doctors to assign a gender to the child as soon as possible. This idea that a parent is having trouble accepting their newborn baby is incongruent with how the relationship between newborns and their parent’s are generally depicted. Parents are thought of as unconditionally loving and being in love with their newborn children. Meanwhile in this scenario it seems that parents are puzzled and unsure of their new children. Specifically that they do not know exactly what to do with them since the child is neither male nor female. The dilemma of how to address the parents popped up over and over again throughout the paper. More than anything else it seemed that the doctors were dissuading the parents from trying to accept the child as it is, or accept that the child’s genital and sex are ambiguous but instead encouraged them to concentrate on other things while the sex was determined.

     Ultimately what I began thinking about was how often when discussing individuals born with ambiguous genitals the focus on why the genitals are operated on is with the thought that they will be better off socially. The individuals will live a better life because they will fit in with cultural perceptions of boy and girl. However, often the first people to push these cultural perceptions on them are parents and doctors when they are not even a day old. Often when we discuss the societal pressure for intersex individuals to fit in the gender binary we ignore that that pressure comes from parents before anyone else. In addition, parents are also under that pressure to have a child that fits that binary and are equally drawn into cultural perceptions of what is normal and what is not. One source of pressure for intersex individuals to conform to one sex over the other comes from their family members.

     Hopefully this trend is changing. Although it is still popular for most doctors to opt for surgery on an intersex child there are parents who are refusing to do this or are letting their children grow up and decide for themselves. Recently one family from South Carolina sued the state because when their child was born he had ambiguous genitals and surgery was conducted to change his sex to female, however, now that he is older he identifies as male. The family is arguing that removing his genitals was unconstitutional and violated his basic rights.      

This trend is very encouraging because it shows a family vocally declaring that their child was born intersex and deserves to decide what sex and gender he is for himself. However, it does still stick to the gender binary.  It is possible that one reason this family is so openly and vocally fighting for the child is because he still identifies in the gender binary and gravitates towards something they are familiar with. A trend that is still unseen is doctors or parents embracing that the child does not fit into the gender binary. To allow them to live their lives with the genitals they were born with and decide later on if they want surgery or not.

     The video linked above discusses the case with the family suing the state. What is most interesting about this video is that the newscasters both agree that the doctors should have waited until the child was old enough to make a decision on their own. They both think that it would be better for the child to grow up not neatly fitting into the gender binary so that later on they could choose which gender they identify with more. It is encouraging to see two people of different ages agree that a child growing up with ambiguous genitals would not be worse than the child being assigned the wrong sex. Especially because based off of this article doctors think the opposite is true and that the child is much better off having one sex assigned to them, even if the sex is wrong in the future.

     However, the newscasters both do think that eventually the child will choose one side or the other, and the idea that perhaps the child didn’t want any surgery was never mentioned. Nevertheless it is still encouraging and may suggest a change in society that these people think surgery on infants should not be preformed, and that waiting several years and being raised as neither a boy or a girl would be better than having that decision made for you. Perhaps in the coming years medical practices will change and children will be allowed to decide on their own time whether or not they want surgery.