A group of intersex people met in the summer of 1996 to share their experiences. According to one participant, doctors reduced her clitoris as a young child to make her look like a woman.
This resulted in nerve damage that would blunt sexual sensation later in life, as well as stigma that made Walcutt feel like hiding in the closet. Shame, confusion and anger were reported by others in the group.
The Intersex Society of North America, founded just three years earlier by an activist using the name Cheryl Chase, made a documentary about the encounter. Chase has a new name.
Intersex is an umbrella term for variations in reproductive or sexual anatomy that may appear in a person's chromosomes, genitals or internal organs. There are more than 30 medical terms for different combinations of sex characteristics.
In the second episode of Scientific American's documentary series A Question of Sex, we look at how people with sex variations are challenging traditional notions of sex in medicine.
According to a survey conducted in 2020 by the Center for American Progress, nine in 10 people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer have poor physical health. More than four in five people who said they experienced discrimination in the previous year said it had an effect on their financial well-being.
International human rights groups condemn medically unnecessary intersex surgeries, but science hasn't followed suit.
The first genital surgeries on intersex youth were done in the 1950s after a psychologist argued that a baby with genitals that were not clearly male or female should be assigned a sex at an earlier age. The penis was shaved down if it was found to be too small or large.
There are life threatening conditions in which genital surgery is needed. It isn't medically necessary to normalize their genital appearance to match a sex assigned in early age The decision should be delayed until people are old enough to make their own decisions, according to advocates.
Sean Wall was born with an intersex variation called androgen insensitivity syndrome, which causes him to be resistant to hormones.
Wall had a surgery when he was 13 to remove his internal testes, which were thought to have a cancer risk. He told Scientific American that he and his mom went to a consultation with the same doctor for a different procedure that involved shaving down his clitoris.
I would want a vagina, I would want to be in a heterosexual relationship, and I would identify as a woman.
When she found out her daughters were born with intersex variations, she had to rethink what she was taught in medical school. She points out that the push to treat genital differences doesn't square with how science thinks about other differences in the population.
According to Baratz, there is a spectrum of variation for just about everything. People with intersex bodies show us that their bodies are different. People want to think about gender in a different way.
She says that the majority of research on surgery focuses on the appearance of the patient. They will say they can put something in the vagina. Being able to put something in there of a certain size, they say the surgery was a success but then no information about how that will work out for someone who wants to be a sexual person.
One of Baratz's daughters is a Psychiatrist. There is a need for more community-based research on the mental health of intersex people.
After years of activism, the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago stopped performing surgeries on intersex infants and children.
Hospitals in more than one city have followed suit. New York City passed a bill to educate doctors, parents and guardians of intersex children about the risks of genital surgery.
Wall points out that the fixation on a sexbinary doesn't happen in a vacuum.
People ask if their child is a boy or a girl. I would challenge them to ask why. Why does it matter so much? Do you enjoy having a baby? Do you want to start a family? Quality-of-life questions are often overlooked or missed in this discussion.
The economic hardship reporting project supported the article.
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