Countries Expand Recognition For Alternative 'Intersex' Gender

[question everything]

Germany on Friday will become only the second country, after Australia, to allow parents to leave the gender blank on a child's birth certificate, as people born without a clear sex gain more rights and recognition, especially in Europe. The European Union cited so-called intersex people in June for the first time in its antidiscrimination guidelines. A month later, Australia adopted guidelines saying people filling out any official forms should be able to choose male, female or "X." Switzerland's bioethics commission last year said gender equality "also applies to people whose sex cannot be unequivocally determined."

While the U.S. hasn't granted formal recognition, American surgeons, like their European counterparts, are increasingly holding off on some operations designed to immediately assign a gender to babies born with what doctors call ambiguous genitalia, opting to wait until the child can make a choice.

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An Interior Ministry spokesman in Berlin said the goal of the legislation, which passed the Bundestag unanimously in February, is "to take the pressure off parents to commit themselves to a gender immediately after birth," so that they don't feel compelled to seek surgery right away.

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The condition is fairly rare: Heino Meyer-Bahlburg, professor of clinical psychiatry and psychology at Columbia University, estimated that one person in 2,000 to 4,000 is born with ambiguous genitalia. About half of the cases result from an identifiable abnormality in the genetic makeup. Others have a murkier genetic foundation, or stem from another factor like drugs taken by the mother during pregnancy.. While "surgeons have become more reluctant" to operate on mild cases, "in more severe cases, at a minimum because it looks very unusual, people are less likely to hold off," Dr. Meyer-Bahlburg said. Most people end up keeping the assigned gender, though some switch and a small number decline to identify with either gender at all.

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Some people view the trend toward greater recognition of intersex status with alarm. "I think providing any option other than male or female is dehumanizing and medically inaccurate," said Rob Schwarzwalder, senior vice president of the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian group.

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http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323893004579058822738037190

(If you cannot open by clicking, copy and paste the title onto google)

[TheDebbieDee]

1. My personal opinion is that the human race is......

EVOLVING from two sexes to three. We will have males, females and the range of sexes in between the two. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

[Initech]

2. Hey I've been saying for years that there's no black or white when it comes to gender anymore.

There is straight male and straight female, but there's no straight line between the two anymore.

[icymist]

3. In my opinion the human race has always been five sexes.

Here's an interesting article I found (Dogpile is my friend):

Human Hermaphrodites

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Hermaphrodites have created some interesting situations. In 1843, Levi Suydam, a 23 year old resident of Salisbury, Connecticut, asked the town magistrates to validate his right to vote as a Whig in a particularly divisive local election. The opposition party raised objections, saying that Levi was really a woman and therefore unable to vote. A doctor examined him and declared that he had a penis and was therefore a man. Duydam voted and the Whig candidate won by a single vote. Within a few days after the election, Suydam had his monthly menstrual bleeding (Fausto-Sterling, 1993). Hugh Young (1937) relates that one of his patients, a hermaphrodite named Emma had a penis-sized clitoris and a vagina. Raised as a girl, she could have "normal" heterosexual relationships with both men and women. And she did. She functioned sexually as both male and female all her adult life.

However, as medicine became more sophisticated, it decided that society did not tolerate hermaphrodites and parents wanted their babies to be either male or female. In the early 1900s, "true" sex was said to be the sex of the gonads. Thus, people having androgen insensitivity syndrome were classified as "really" males, even though their entire physical appearance and usually their sexual orientation was female (Dreger, 1998). It was thought that society could not deal with people who were not either one or the other sex. (And, as Dreger demonstrates, this was stated explicitly by several physicians). Our birth registries still demand that a newborn be quickly placed into one or the other category, and in the early 1900s, knowledge of the "true" sex of a person was thought to be critical to prevent inadvertent homosexual relations. Our current classification scheme of male and female pseudohermaphrodites reflects this gonadal (and later, chromosomal) assignment of sex. A male pseudohermaphrodite (usually caused by androgen receptor mutations) has a female phenotype but male gonads, while a female pseudohermaphrodite (usually caused by congenital adrenal hyperplasia where the adrenal gland secretes testosterone) has a male phenotype but has ovaries.

Starting in the 1960s, babies born with ambiguous genitalia were "assigned" a sex that seemed appropriate based on the genitalia that they had. Those with large phalluses had their labia closed and became males, while those with smaller but still larger than normal phalluses had them surgically shortened and became females. In the 1990s, some of the individuals who were surgically assigned their sex founded the Intersex Society of America (ISNA) and lobbied to speak to physicians to have them change their usual practice of surgically amending nature. Their arguments convinced many physicians that having a baby of ambiguous sex was not a medical emergency, that interventions should be reversible, and that time should be taken to discuss these issues with parents and patients with such conditions. Some physicians have argued that having a child with ambiguous genitalia is an emergency to the parents of such a child who want to know what sex their child is and to tell their friends and relatives that they have either a girl or a boy. The arguments of the ISNA group are summarized in an article by Alice D. Dreger and in presentations comparing surgical intervention with what they hope will be a patient-centered therapy approach.

http://9e.devbio.com/article.php?id=266