Gender's Up to Five-Year-Old Hermaphrodite, Not Parents

JeanneSager — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 12:35:00 GMT

Their child is a boy . . . and a girl. And as far as the Colombian courts are concerned, the 5-year-old hermaphrodite's parents do not have the right to sew the child's vagina shut and remove an ovary to allow for normal development of the penis and testicles.

Born with both female and male sexual organs, the youngster has been raised as a boy since birth. That's why his/her (I'm not being sarcastic, I really don't know quite which to say) father has been pressing for the right to schedule the surgery. But the court says at 5 it's too late for the parents to be making the decision - it's up to the child. I'd tend to agree - especially in light of the stories I've heard from the transgendered community over the years about the first time they remember feeling like they were in the "wrong" body. But what if the child chooses wrong?

Kids, by their nature, love to role play. Until adults start putting ideas in their head that somehow their behavior is abnormal (ugh), little boys will parade around in their sister's tutu or announce themselves as "Dora" today. The same goes for girls who might one day insist they're a boy, the next they're a girl, and back again. It can be a phase or it can be a sign of things to come. So how do you let a 5-year-old make this kind of decision?

The Intersex Society of North America, a non-profit advocacy group for the "intersex," actually advises against surgeries for children with both male and female reproductive organs - unless medical intervention is necessary for a child's health. Interestingly, they do advocate "gender assignment," essentially treating the child as one sex or the other from birth. In this case, the family has done that, choosing to treat their child as a son. But the ISNA says that has to be done after doctors do a complete evaluation to determine which gender the child is more likely to identify with as they grow up. Although it can't be 100 percent (think about the numbers of people seeking gender reassignment surgery), they say there are some markers within the body that give a general sense of how the rest of the body will develop.

Makes sense to me, and clears up a portion of the worry about letting a 5-year-old make such a huge decision. If doctors can say the body is developing one way or the other, and a child has significant support from the medical community (including counselors), this kind of decision should rest in the body of the person who will have to live with the results. Even if they're 5 years old.

Image: Mother Jones

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Do Doctors See Young Women as Baby Machines?

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:30:00 GMT

The New York Times unwittingly opened up a can of worms when they wrote about a recent report on the health risks of sharing prescription drugs. The warning was targeted mainly at women of child-bearing age, since drugs can pose a risk to a developing fetus. Many women commented on the article, but not because they cared a whit about the health issues discussed.

Rather, they were outraged that the danger of sharing prescription drugs was framed as specifically problematic for women of child-bearing age. “Not all women are “pre-pregnant,” one reader wrote. “We are more than our uteruses!” Another wrote that she was “tired of being thought of only as a breeding machine who should be regarded as ‘pre-pregnant’ at all times.”

While I am completely sympathetic to these sentiments, I don't quite understand the outrage these women felt toward this particular article—if you don’t want have to kids, ignore the warning. Enough women in their twenties and thirties do want to have children that it only makes sense to issue warnings to this age group about how to avoid cause harming to fetuses.

That said, I definitely think that many doctors inappropriately view women as “pre-pregnant.” An OB-GYN once said to a happily childless, 30-year-old friend of mine, “Now go out there and make some babies!” Needless to say, my friend got a new gynecologist.

Image: svmomblog.typepad.com

Strollerderby : reproductive organs

Gender's Up to Five-Year-Old Hermaphrodite, Not Parents

Do Doctors See Young Women as Baby Machines?