Intersexed Children
...been born with a birth defect that fortunately could be corrected surgically, but only if the surgery took place immediately. Of course Robert consented, being led to believe that had the surgery been postponed, the defect could not have been corrected. Robert went back into his wife’s room and told her that the child was going into surgery to repair a birth defect and would be fine when the surgery was over. Robert then went to the surgical waiting room to await word of the child’s condition. Although it has been asserted that the frequency of intersex births can be estimated as large as 1.7%, it is more likely that the “prevalence of intersex conditions is estimated at one in 2,000 live births.” Unfortunately, the story of Robert and Melissa is all too common for the parents of a child born with an intersex condition. “Quietly and in near secrecy, pediatric urologists and other specialists decide what are the minimum qualifications for manhood, correcting any babies with ambiguous genitalia -- known as "intersexed" -- before their births are announced to the world. Under the urgent conditions of a medical emergency, they decide whether a smallish appendage is a proto-penis or a maxi-clitoris, and perform the surgery to make it so -- sometimes without even telling the parents the truth about their child, and rarely revealing anything to the patient as he or she grows up. Guiding the doctors' work is a commonly accepted theory, pioneered in 1955 by Johns Hopkins University sexologist John Money, that infants are psychosexually neutral at birth. If a surgeon sculpts a baby's undersized, oversized or otherwise confusing genitals to match a sex label within a few months of birth, normal psychosexual development will follow.” Most children born with an intersex condition are surgically altered into girls. Pediatric physicians generally employ a rather archaic “yardstick” to determine the surgically altered sex of the child. “If a penis is less than one inch (2.5 centimeters) at birth, it doesn't count. And if it's more than three-eighths of an inch (0.9 centimeters) long, it can't qualify as a clitoris either. Any appendage that falls in the middle must be fixed.” Unfortunately, by either excising the clitoris or reducing its size, the physicians create problems with the future sexual functioning of the child. “Until the late 1970s or early 1980s, clitorectomy—the removal of both the corpora and the glans—was the usual procedure.” In order to reduce the adverse sexual effect on the child, “(c)litoroplasty, which involves dissection of the clitoral skin and removal of most of the paired clitoral corpora with preservation of the glans and dorsal neurovascular bundle, has become the usual procedure.” Why is it so important to perform surgery on the child? Why cannot we wait and let the child decide? Historically, the Greeks (who honored the god Hermaphroditus) killed their intersexed children at birth as did the Romans later on. Du...