| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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Since many surgeons felt that they weren’t “very good,” as Gayle suggests previously, “at creating the big, strong penis they [society] require men to have,” female conversion was carried out for those boys that did not measure up (Fausto-Sterling 59). Writing in 1997, Lori Sherman, a practicing endocrinologist, reveals this cultural influence when she states in a matter-of-fact way that regardless of whether the child has an XY (male) chromosomal pair, “[I]f the phallus is deemed inadequate to assure normal sexual function…then a female gender assignment should be made with eventual removal of the gonads and construction of female external genitalia” (201).
Such a position, one that governed surgical treatment of children born too close to the line between normal and abnormal, provoked harsh responses from intersex activists, and a corresponding abundance of rhetoric meant to counter it in the hopes of changing it. The problem intersex activists see in doctors operating on children with intersex conditions is not necessarily that something is done when it should not be done. In some cases, such as hypospadias, when the urethral opening is awkwardly placed or the penis is too small for any sort of future sexual reproduction, surgery to lengthen the penis, as well as testosterone treatments to promote growth, does seem like a viable option. But the problem is that many past decisions to operate to surgically correct intersex “abnormalities” were not motivated solely on the basis of medical need. The fact is that many children declared abnormal and treated as such are not technically Intersexed, nor are their conditions life-threatening so as to require emergency measures. They were operated on quite frequently, then, without the consent of the patient because parents wanted them to be normalized and because the prevailing discourse dictated that such normalization should occur. The discourse’s rules, not medical need, therefore, required doctors to enforce normality.