Word: genitalia
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Kelli went on to have three more surgeries to construct female-looking genitalia. But the matter wasn't settled. At the age of 4, she started asking, "Mommy, am I a boy or a girl?" When she was 6, she questioned her mother about all her surgical scars, and when Kelli was 8, her mother told her the whole story...
...years doctors believed that the best treatment for an obviously intersexual newborn was a swift one. The reproductive system and genitalia were surgically refashioned to conform to one sex or the other. (In practice, this often meant deciding that the child should be a girl because, in the indelicate phrasing of the surgical world, "it's easier to make a hole than build a pole.") The goal was to minimize the amount of time the child spent with a nonstandard body in the hope that he or she would find it easier to develop a conventional sense of gender...
...syndrome (AIS), a condition that affects prenatal development. All embryos start out with the rudiments of male and female reproductive systems. A sort of developmental tug-of-war ensues until, generally speaking, the male reproductive system predominates in XY fetuses and the female in XX fetuses. The external male genitalia will not take shape in an XY fetus, however, until after the embryonic testes form and begin to produce testosterone...
...changes in gender roles in recent decades, our society is still fixed on the idea that there are just two separate sexes. Is the rush to early surgery a matter of medical necessity, or is it a matter of social bias that leaves doctors and parents uncomfortable with nonstandard genitalia? It's a question that more intersexuals are raising. "Doctors have found a medical solution to what is essentially a social problem," insists Thea Hillman, board member of the advocacy group Intersex Society of North America www.isna.org) "The problem has to do with differences and people's fear of differences...
...occurs when a gene on the X chromosome prevents the fetus from responding to that prenatal testosterone. Because the genitalia cannot be masculinized, they assume a more female structure. But that's not all. In the complete form of AIS, the body cannot respond to testosterone at all and the baby develops as a female, although without a functioning reproductive system. When Sherri was 11, she was told that she could never bear children because she had been born with "twisted ovaries" that had to be removed when she was a baby. In fact, the "ovaries" were her testes...