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What makes intersex people similar is their experiences of medicalization, not biology. Intersex is not an identity.”
Until the last two decades, and in fact not uniformly until the last few years, those born with intersex conditions were treated quickly, usually in the first 18 months of life, long before they had enough knowledge and maturity to agree or dissent to treatment. Very often this treatment involved surgical conversion so that the “afflicted” intersex child could be made into a normal-looking male or female. Almost always the decision to do this was one that did not adequately involve parents or did not properly inform or educate them. Certainly the patient, the intersex child, had no say, and standard practice after treatment included covering up any knowledge of the treatment itself, meaning that many children grew up not knowing what had happened to them, not knowing that there were others like them. The result, therefore, for so many children born with an intersex condition was that they were subjected to a life of shame, of secrecy, and of enervating stigmatization that made them feel isolated and abnormal.
But a rise in intersex activism, fueled primarily by intersexed persons who have come of age, along with medical practitioners they had persuaded to become allies, has led to remarkable changes to the previous medical paradigm that had been subjected upon literally thousands of intersex children.
Previous Literature
A great deal of important literature has been dedicated to the origins of this intersex activism as well as the history of the treatment that necessitated it. There is, for example, Alice Domurat Dreger’s landmark book, Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex (1998), which traces the growth in medical authority over the body, as well as the historical and cultural trends that led to intersexuality as an abnormality that required immediate medical and often surgical treatment.