Based on the responses I’ve heard from surgically altered adults born with ambiguous genitalia, I would definately let them choose. Until then, I would raise them according to their genetic gender (if they had one), otherwise I’d take my best guess for them. I don’t think it would be THAT huge a task to not show your penis or lack thereof until the time came to do something about it.
erm, how about simply letting the looks decide? surely by the time the kid is ready for school the child will outwardly look either more male or female. that should hold out until he or she is old enough to choose… this way avoids doing anything sugically and settles the issue of social adjustment until the kid can decide
(off topic?) which brings up an issue, is it required by law for you to choose? can you put ‘undecided’ under the column for sex?
Nothing. It’s my child’s decision when they are old enough. The horror stories of those who have had a gender imposed on them have convinced me.
Well, first off, I’d name the kid Pat. 
I think that quite a bit of this discussion could benefit from a definition of terms. Seems a lot of people are using ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ interchangably – and they are not.
Sex = male, female, or ambiguous (this is the biological, physical, genetic, ‘innie’ or ‘outie’ stuff)
Gender = masculine, feminine, and all shades in between (this is the mental, psychosocial stuff)
Keep these in mind, and we’ll avoid having to use linguistically torturous terms such as “mental gender” and “physical gender” and “opposite gender” and the like.
That is all.
English class dismissed.
Now it’s time for Health and Hygiene. All the boys go with Mr. Harris and all the girls go with Ms. Norris.
Pat, you stay here.
Generally sex and gender are the same for most of us. In utero, if the child is a boy, the XY pattern causes the gametes to begin to release testosterone, causing development of primary sex characteristics (a penis forms, the gametes become viable testes). Further the sexually dymorphic nucleus in the hypothalamus of the brain develops larger than it would in females, giving the child the sense of being male…no XY, no testosterone and none of this happens. In some pregnancies, the fetus can be exposed to too much testosterone, or too many androgen blocking chemicals (which would reduce the level of testosterone). This would result in a child with ambiguous genitalia. As the “gender” is set at birth (the the sexually dymorphic nucleus)…switching the gender of the child according to what is “convenient” may result in disaster…particularly as it is difficult to ascertain exactly WHAT went wrong in utero. The child will develop a sense of being male or female without needing to be raised as either gender and in most cases will be able to express that gender by around age 3…before they ever have to worry about phys ed class.
My personal decision would be to wait until my child could communicate some preference. If any doctor told me it “had to” be done before age 2 because by then gender is “set” I would suspect he was not up on the most recent literature and seek out a different doctor…gender appears to be set WAY before 2.
I’m with Goo and Stoid up to a point – I’d wait until the child was old enough to express itself clearly and see what gender it identifies as, and then have the appropriate surgery to enable it to live as that gender. I would presume that’s before the child is of school age.
And Rex, IMHO you’re saying two things I disagree with: (1) the child must conform to one of two categories because the school rules require it to? That’d be the point where I home-schooled or found a private school with the capabilities of dealing with an intersexed child with decency. (2) The child will be inevitably tormented? Nope – small children have an innate decency, and if a problem is explained to them, they’re more than willing to help and defend their friends. “Richie got hurt in a car accident, so he can’t walk well” from the teacher results in “I’ll get him what he needs” and “Don’t you pick on him for walking funny – he’s my friend!” from the kids. “Almost everybody is born a baby boy who grows up to be a man, or a baby girl that grows up to be a woman, but Pat accidentally got a little of both” would explain it in a way that kindergarten kids can accept and deal with.
My newborn has an ambiguous gender, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt…
Nothing.
This will result in teasing and other social problems until such time as the kid is old enough to choose for themselves.
Having the child surgically altered will result in a life of emotional problems. Depending on the condition(androgen insensitivity, clitoromegaly, etc), surgery will likely destroy any sexual function. It may also destroy any sexual sensation.
Rexdart-Refering to KellyM as “s/he” is insulting.
Hopefully this is relevant- i remember reading this story a while back its a nice concept but i am not sure how feasable it is in real life
http://www.devrandom.net/~aidan/baby_x.html
I really think that the OP opinion is disingenuous. The parents of said infant can go ahead and have genetic testing done on the infant to determine whether or not it is a male or female, regardless of the genitalia.
It’s a nice thought that we can just use science to resolve all these issues. But it’s not that simple.
First off, chromosomes can be ambigous. Many- perhaps most- people with unusual chromosomes are never diagnosed.
But it doesn’t matter, because gender isn’t about chromosomes. We put people into gender catagories every day of our lives without ever resorting to a blood test. For all we know, none of their genders could match their chromosomes. And frankly if I got a test tommorow and it said my chromosomes were a non-XX variation, that wouldn’t make me any less of a girl to myself or those around me.
It’s just not that simple. We are going to have to admit one day that gender and sex are not neat little scientific catagories. It all gets a little messy sometimes, and there is more variety the most of us have ever dreamed of.
FWIW, the abstract of the state of the art about this in the medical literature:
J Pediatr Endocrinol Metab 2001 Nov-Dec;14(9):1575-83
From another source
PEDIATRICS Vol. 110 No. 3 September 2002, pp. 616-621
Maybe surgery should be delayed. But gender assignment is likely best made early with a knowledge of what is doable and what others’ outcomes have been.
We discussed this a lot in my sex and gender psychology class last semester. I think I’d just allow the child to remain ambiguous, provided that (s)he was healthy. Gender is pretty much a social construct, and if I ever have kids, I’ll probably raise them androgynous anyway. If my child ever wanted to be one gender or the other, I’d allow them to go through with the operation if they were serious about it. I don’t think it’s a good idea to have sexual assignment surgery unless the person is suffering from emotional problems because of their sex (or lack of a specific one). Of course, if I ever have kids, it probably won’t be for another 5-10 years (I’m almost 20, so I’m still living it up as a youngster), and my mind could always change between now and then.
Having read none of the thread - I just wanted to talk about one of my ex-housemates:
He was born like this, and the doctor’s decided without consulting his parents to ‘fix’ him and make him a boy. (his parents had already chosen a girl’s name for him, but hadn’t made it official)
Forward thirty years +, and he’s now undergoing the procedure to get this reversed, because he has NEVER been comfortable as a man (he didn’t find out about all this until he was about twenty). Oh, and he’s taking the name name his parents wanted to give him at birth
I think you must be thinking of gender role not gender. Our psychological perception of gender (being male or female) is dictated to us by the hypothalamus…specifically the sexually dymorphic nucleus. The specific behaviors that are expected of a male or female (such as females can wear dresses but men can’, at least in this society…on the whole that is…I don’t want to start a cross-dressing debate)…in other words, gender role, are what are taught to us by society…particularly our parents.
No infant surgery. But I have no idea what I’d tell co-workers, neighbors, distant cousins, the people in Grandma’s parish, old high-school acquantances I run into at the grocery store. First question: boy or girl.
You seem to be more optimistic about the innate decency of children than I am. Kindergarten kids could probably accept and deal with all that; sadly, kindergarten kids have many influences. At least one of the kids will have an ignorant and bigoted parent at home who will be suspicious of Pat and refer to him or her as “the little freak.” It’s all downhill from there. And third-graders can be notorious fascists.
Him or her. There you go. How would Pat’s classmates refer to Pat? It? Pat, always, no helpful third person pronoun?
I’d hope that the child would identify as one gender or the other by grade school; otherwise, how to handle the issues of slumber parties, Little League vs. softball, Cub scouts or Brownies? Without a gender, no matter what, the kid will feel left out. In addition, I might move my family at this time so that rumors don’t get around. Ambiguous gender is nothing to be ashamed of, but humans being stupid and small-minded, it’s not always prudent and safe to discuss it in open company.
Would I drop out of society, move to an old monestary on an uninhabited small island off the west coast of Ireland, and homeschool until either my kid either identified as a boy or girl, or I knew that my kid felt confident enough to face an often hostile world as just Pat?
The language question. How to refer to little Pat. The idea here is for Pat to find Pat’s own gender without feeling coerced, influenced, or pushed by anyone. Especially us, Pat’s parents. How the hell are we going to go all this time without ever needing to use a subjective, objective, possessive, or reflexive pronoun in reference to Pat? If we slip and refer to Pat with a “he” or a “herself,” surely that will cause Pat to feel we have decided on the gender; if we slip and refer to Pat as “it,” surely that will make Pat feel like a freak.
Poly is looking at childhood through more than rose colored glasses … sort of a “noble savage” version of the beast.
Kids can be and often are vicious. Just survey people on this board to find out what percent were bullied or bullies. A sizable minority was likely one or the other … or both at different times.
And from early on gender identification is a critical part of normal social development in all societies. By late preschool most kids have self-segregated. What bathroom does Pat use in 1st grade? Which gym class?
The data shows that most kids do well with either gender assignment.
I’d have to agree with this. Plenty of studies to back up the idea that children are inherintly cruel and physically aggressive. Some kids are “nice” but the rest won’t respond to explanations. Even adults don’t always.
I disagree. Once you’ve allowed surgery, there is little or no chance that the child can switch later on. He or she will be stuck with whatever was done. The individual can decide to dress as, and live as, the other gender from the one he or she was assigned to, but they can’t undo the surgery. And it is unlikely that he or she will be happy with what was done. Who would be happy with having been castrated as a baby? And that is what the surgery will amount to. Something vital will have been removed. Doctors who urge parents to authorize surgery claim that the child will grow up to be able to experience sexual pleasure, but from what I understand, this seldom turns out to be true.
What is life expectancy for a child born in the developed world today? Seventy-something? You want to let your child be operated on so he or she will look like a regular boy or girl, in order to insure that they will fit in during their childhood and teen years? That’s a small portion of their life. What about their adult life? It’s possible that they will spend their whole life very disatisfied with the condition that was imposed on them, especially if the surgery denied them any chance to ever experience sexual pleasure, as is quite likely to be the case.
And how many children really fit in? There are so many things that can prevent a child from fitting in. Many people emerge from a childhood spent as a social outcast to have a happy adult life.
As a girl child growing up in America, there was never any occasion when I had to let other people see my genitals. If they had been “different,” no one would have known. With a child being raised as a boy, the parents may need to come up with a way to keep their son from having to expose his genitals in men’s rooms and during showers after phys ed (showers were compulsory for boys in my youth, but not for girls). One solution would be home schooling.
When a child is born with ambiguous genitals, the parents have to decide if they should raise the child as a boy or a girl. The child needs to be raised as one or the other. But IMO, surgery in babyhood is not necessary. When the child is old enough, he or she can decide what they want to do. My guess is that, if given the chance to choose, most will not opt for surgery. The choice will be, which sex do I want to live as? But who would choose to have part of their sex organs cut off?