Juvenile rights: "What if It's (Sort of) a Boy and (Sort of) a Girl?"

[kiahzero]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/magazine/24intersexkids.html
What if It’s (Sort of) a Boy and (Sort of) a Girl?

When Brian Sullivan — the baby who would before age 2 become Bonnie Sullivan and 36 years later become Cheryl Chase — was born in New Jersey on Aug. 14, 1956, doctors kept his mother, a Catholic housewife, sedated for three days until they could decide what to tell her. Sullivan was born with ambiguous genitals, or as Chase now describes them, with genitals that looked “like a little parkerhouse roll with a cleft in the middle and a little nubbin forward.” Sullivan lived as a boy for 18 months, until doctors at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan performed exploratory surgery, found a uterus and ovotestes (gonads containing both ovarian and testicular tissue) and told the Sullivans they’d made a mistake: Brian, a true hermaphrodite in the medical terminology of the day, was actually a girl. Brian was renamed Bonnie, her “nubbin” (which was either a small penis or a large clitoris) was entirely removed and doctors counseled the family to throw away all pictures of Brian, move to a new town and get on with their lives. The Sullivans did that as best they could. They eventually relocated, had three more children and didn’t speak of the circumstances around their eldest child’s birth for many years. As Chase told me recently, “The doctors promised my parents if they did that” — shielded her from her medical history — “that I’d grow up normal, happy, heterosexual and give them grandchildren.”

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I'm curious what people think on this topic. Here's my reaction (so you should probably read the article before reading this):

This article is another way of demonstrating the root of injustices that many young people face: rather than being treated as people, they are seen in the law and in society as property of their parents, to do with as the parents see fit. This is most clearly demonstrated at the end of the article:

Over coffee, Sandberg told Chase that he, too, could not yet join her in taking the position that cosmetic genital surgery on infants is always wrong, and Chase was trying hard to understand why.

“But is there ever a good reason for reducing the size of a clitoris?” Chase pressed Sandberg.

“If the parent cannot tolerate it,” Sandberg replied.

In other words, there is no medical reason for the procedure. Only social reasons. In such a case, shouldn't the person in question have a say in the matter? Why does what the parents can "tolerate" matter at all? The infant is a person. The parents have an obligation to care for and nurture them. Nowhere in that obligation is a right to change the child to match what the parents can and cannot "tolerate."

Let me be clear. Infants cannot consent to operations, so it is obvious that the parents must act in the child's best interest and give consent to medically necessary operations. However, extending this right to taking drastic, irreversible steps to force the identity of a child into a preconceived notion of who they should be is a perversion of morality. I condemn the religious brainwashing many conservative parents subject their children to, but at least that has a chance of being undone. When you start mutilating your child's genitals because they don't fit into your narrow-minded view of how the world should be, you've permanently and irreparably harmed them.

If we, as a society, believed that children were people with the same fundamental rights as adults, there is no possible way that such behavior would be tolerated. Can you imagine an adult being treated in such a way? Western society rightfully condemns forced female genital mutilation as cruel, barbaric, and immoral. Intersex genital mutilation of infants is no better. I ask, what are the possible relevant differences that would justify destroying a part of someone, likely causing them lasting harm, just so that their caretakers will "tolerate" them?

[KurtNYC]

1. Gender differences are exaggerated and misunderstood

All fetuses are essentially female for the first 3 months of development. Something like 1% of infants are born as hermaphrodites and there are 5 common types of hermaphrodites. But society wants to create mutually exclusive categories for everything, especially gender.

I can only think that the parents wanted to do what they felt was best at the time. In their minds they made a false choice -- believing that an inter-sexed child could never be happy in the uptight world of the 1950s, they took the advice of their doctor and tried push the child toward one gender or the other. They still have/had an inter-sexed child but now had one with medically altered genitalia.

As for the other question, if they left it up to the child or waited until a suitable age of consent, I doubt that there would be any male who would choose to be circumcized.

[JuniperLea]

2. Leave the kid alone! That's my take.

OH. MY. GOD!!! I say let the child grow up, be honest with the child when questions arise and hopefully, with proper guidance and strong, loving parenting, the child can decide who he or she is at a later date! Sex altering surgery is common now. As long as there are no urinary issues, leave that kid alone!

And people have the nerve to continue with the myth that homosexuality is a choice! You can see in this instance that the child clearly had physical traits that could not be explained. What if, just what if when gender doesn't match the outward genitalia (by our determination) yet there are some unseen, but totally natural differences? What if the wrong decision is made? What if the child is changed to look female yet feels totally male, or the other way around?

If a caretaker cannot find the love in their heart to "tolerate" a child with an issue, I would question whether they have enough love in their heart to raise a "normal" child! That is the most disgusting part of this whole story.

I hope we as a society have learned something in the past 50 years. This is so sad.


Ugh.

[Berry Cool]

3. What I find saddest of all

is the idea that the child's sex organs should have been altered based on what the parents could "tolerate."

What in the hell should THAT have to do with anything?

[JuniperLea]

8. Yep.

Parents should be tolerant of everything they are dealt when it comes to their own flesh and blood child.

[kiahzero]

9. It all comes back to the belief that children are property

The thinking seems to be that you can do whatever you want to a kid if "you think it's in their best interest," even if the science is against you, the procedure is irreversible, and it's likely to do a great deal of harm to the child.

Here's a hypothetical: Say you have a child that's born male. Should you be able to decide that the child should actually be a female, and transform the genitals the child was born with into the genitals you feel the child should have? I'm willing to bet that every single one of those parents would say "absolutely not," even though there's no difference between that and what they're subjecting their own children to.

But, given that we have the dubious distinction of being the only nation with a government to speak of that has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, I feel that it's unlikely we'll resolve this problem any time soon.

[Glenda]

4. I read this in the NYTimes

I am glad the woman is speaking out and trying to educate the parents and drs.

[kiahzero]

5. I think the doctor's recalcitrance is a sign of how far we have yet to go

They flat out admit that there's no medical reason for this mutilation, but they go ahead and do it anyway. In my mind, there's a word for that - "child abuse."

[Glenda]

6. yeah, i think i remember reading that when they got

a bunch of adults together who were intersex at birth, the one person who had not been operated on was the most happy and well-adjusted.

[Bluebear]

7. “If the parent cannot tolerate it,” they should adopt the child out.

To someone who CAN "tolerate" it.

[eridani]

10. What a wonderful day it will be when parents in that situation--

--can answer the question "Is it a boy or a girl?" with "We don't know--s/he hasn't told us yet."

[lostnfound]

11. Leave kid alone, and it's a damn good example to use when talking to

sincere-but-ignorant fundies about homosexuality.

In such cases, on what should gender be based?

Obviously (to believers) God makes variety..who are we to question it?

[pitohui]

12. well that's awfully cheap, isn't it? easy to say now, isn't it?

If we, as a society, believed that children were people with the same fundamental rights as adults, there is no possible way that such behavior would be tolerated

i was not gender ambiguous but i was an FLK -- funny looking kid -- and if this lady thinks she would have been happier if she had been left alone to look different from everybody else then she is absolutely so far out of touch with reality that i can only envy her

she is really being completely unfair to her parents and to her doctors, whose wish was for her to fit in and not be a freak

i was a freak

if any doctor, anywhere, could have made me look like the other kids i would have fallen on my knees and worshipped that doctor to the end of my days

if you can seriously say that you would not allow your child to be operated on to look normal, then i really don't think you should be having kids, frankly

it sounds like this woman was destined to be unhappy anyway, there are many people who are unhappy even though they are successful and can pass for normal, that is an unfortunate reality of the human condition

but if she seriously thinks that she would have been happy or that she would have had a better life if she had spent her entire childhood completely different from all of the other children, then she's out of her freakin' gourd, i'm sorry

there are plenty of kids who would have killed to have had something that could be fixed by a surgeon

the way you are treated when you don't look like the rest of the kids...it literally isn't worth living, every day of my childhood was spent fantasizing about killing myself and killing other people

i look normal today and i can have a normal life but if i was meant to be an FLK forever it would have been better for me if i had never been born

seriously

parents who love their children want them to fit in and not be torn apart as freaks, it seems a bit harsh to crap on the parents for trying to do their best with the knowledge and tools they had at hand

[kiahzero]

13. Yeah, I imagine having your gender fucked with is a positive experience

Having your body parts lopped off because your parents can't "tolerate" that you look different is the same type of attitude that led to people "tearing apart freaks." Sadly, that's literally what happened: parts of her were torn off because she was considered a freak by her own parents

This, of course, looks past the fundamental gender identities at question here. Her parents decided who she was going to be, and then took irreversible steps to enforce that decision. This also looks past a more fundamental point - who's going to be looking in her pants to see that her genitals were different?

Don't you think it's better to work for a society where people don't "tear apart" people that look or act different then them, rather than surgically altering people to look "normal?" I know I'd rather be who I am then try and shed the things that make me different just to try and meet someone else's expectation of who I should be.