Gender Binary, US Health Care and Intersexed Babies

The segment which follows Leslie's fifth chapter in Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink and Blue is 'Portrait' by Cheryl Chase. The article criticises policies in the USA which on the one hand criticise African cultures for ignoring, promoting and approving of genital mutilation of girls whilst not addressing the genital mutilation of USA citizens carried out in response to the cultural desire of parents (and others) who want to know 'Is it a girl, or a boy?'

Cheryl tells us that:

Since the late 1950s in the United States, it has been standard to treat the birth of a child with unusual genitals as a 'social emergency', and to remedy the discomfort of parents and doictors by genital surgery on the infant. Motivated in part by a fear that the children might grow up homosexual, doctors performed cosmetic genital surgery on about 1 in 2,000 children. The vast majority medically unnecessary, these surgeries remove clitoral tissue, excavate vaginal cavities, or move or extend urethras. Outcomes are poor in functional, cosmetic, and emotional terms. Surgeries are often repeated, sometimes over a dozen times."

Cheryl Chase also claims that "surgeons assign nine out of ten intersex infants they see as girls" and, citing Suzanne Kessler, also asserts that "genital ambiguity is 'corrected' because it threatens not the infant's life but the culture the infant is born into".


I was aware this sort of thing went on, but even Chase's article doesn't give us real figures for how often it occurs. I suspect there are no figures recorded. Until we, the adults, stop asking "Is it a boy or a girl?" the mutilations will continue and the world will be the poorer for it. Diversity is the catchphrase my own government uses when talking about Equality. I want my government to mean what it says and to accept that the 'gender binary' is a lie, a myth, an unreality, and recognise that gender comes in diverse forms too.
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