Suzanne Kessler’s article, “The Medical Construction of Gender” discusses the occurrences of intersexed infants. This idea is rarely discussed in our culture and after reading the article, I would think most people would never want to be in a similar situation. She discusses how some babies are born without a distinct sex; they are neither inherently male nor female. In these cases the parents and doctors must work to try and discover the true sex of the child, and then once discovered, they must correct the outward appearance. I found this article difficult to read, in the sense that I could not imagine being a parent of an intersexed child. While I agree with most parents cited that changing the outward appearance of the child would be necessary, I’m not so sure I agree with the process of deciding what the child’s true sex is.
Many of the pediatricians and physicians cited in this article say that they judge a child’s sex based solely on the size and looks of the phallus. For example, Kessler gives the example of a child with XX chromosomes and a normal female reproductive system, yet also with a “perfect” penis. Where some doctors would advocate raising this child as male, I think I would want to raise it as a female. In my opinion, I would want the least amount of pain or humiliation done to my child. If the problem could be fixed with simple surgery, and no hormone therapy was necessary, that would be the path I would choose.
In Book One of Middlesex, we discover that Cal was really born as a female, but changed his gender and sex as he grew older. As he states at the beginning on the book, “If you were going to devise an experiment to measure the relative influences of nature versus nurture, you couldn’t come up with anything better than my life.” (19). While Cal represents a typical male, he admits to having female urges that he is unable to stop. He also recalls being brought up as a girl and being forced to memorize family lineage such as a girl would. He didn’t have a typical “boyhood”. I think this refers to our discussion in class on Monday about nature versus nurture. While it is true that Cal was raised as a girl (with feminine gender), nature ultimately won the fight because Cal believed he was a boy. This is an example that as much nurturing as society gives us, nature is all-powerful, and can determine gender.
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2 comments:
I completely agree with you that I could not imagine being the parent of a hermaphrodite and having to make a decision about my child's sex. In class, someone mentioned that today, parents are more frequently choosing to wait until the child has grown up to make this difficult decision. If it were me, this would probably be the path I would take. I would want to see what the child was like and try to have nature have more of an impact, rather than nurture. As you said, nature should always be omnipotent. This is the case with Cal in Middlesex. Unfortunately for him, nurture dominated his life for a long time. His parents should have given Cal time to grow into himself before forcing feminine characteristics upon him.
Nice discussion and critique of the set of issues raised in Kessler's essay and Middlesex. I appreciate your personal take on how you might handle the situation. Part of what Kessler points out, though, is that parents are not always given the "full story" or informed of the extent of their options. Why might this be -- and how can we (as a society) change it?
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