[Gem]

Originally Posted by Starman

Actually, there are three sexes; male, female, and hermaphrodite or “intersex.” It is estimated that about 1 in every 1,500 to 2,000 babies that are born have some sort of hermaphrodite variation, and some won’t show that variation until later in life.

Back in the 1980’s, while working in a hospital in Colorado, I witnessed a baby born with both a virginal canal and a distinct penis separate from the vagina. The medical staff in charge moved quickly to determine the baby’s dominant hormone, and they did a full hysterectomy on the baby and sewed up its’ vagina. Because they had determined, from their tests, that the baby was a male.

The intersex issue seems to be a sex issue, but it is really a gender issue. Just to clarify, sex is the biological condition and gender is the paradigm about sex. When an intersex baby is born, that infant does not fit the dual gender story, so the first line in the narrative, 'it's a boy' or 'it's a girl', doesn't apply or becomes ambiguous. The institutional form of a birth certificate becomes meaningless as we cannot fill in the Male/Female boxes, nor further organise sex for the sake of cultural reproduction. Most intersex babies have no harmful health condition, so the operations they are subjected to are not performed for health reasons. They are performed for social reasons - to make the body conform with the gender paradigm.

What made it even worst is that all of this was done without the parent’s consent, just like male babies routinely received circumcisions back then without their parents consent. I don’t know what the practice in the U.S. is today. It many countries, especially in Asia, hermaphrodites retain both their male and female genitals, but usually they are born sterile and can not bare children. There are lots of variations of hermaphrodite.

It would not surprise me if some transsexuals had their genitalia altered at birth. Americans are just now struggling to come out of the dark ages on sex, as well as other nations around the world, who outlaw homosexuality and would not even consider transsexual assignments, their views are even stricter than some have here in the U.S.

I theorise if we were not hell bent on the gender paradigm and people who are male, female or intersex were not brutally forced to conform in order to make that paradigm seem valid, then individuals would be more enabled to self-expression through the body they were born with, and be less inclined to undergo surgery in order to fit a socially determined box.