Another story about why surgical operations on intersex babies is not a good idea

Kristina gave birth to a baby who had a rare intersex condition called partial androgen insensitivity syndrome with mosaicism. The condition caused the child to have both XX chromosomes and XY chromosomes and genitalia that doctors did not consider clearly male or female.

The doctors identified the baby as being female and pressured Kristina to agree to cosmetic surgery to make the baby appear more clearly female. Fortunately Kristina immediately refused.

Kristina faced criticism from some extended family members who believed she was placing an enormous burden on her newborn in choosing not to have the surgery.
"But I just completely disagreed," she said, "because I was like, 'You can't undo surgery.'"

Since she couldn’t predict the gender her child would embrace, she said, it didn’t seem like her decision to make. And she recalled that none of the doctors could tell her how the surgery, which involved altering sensitive tissue, might affect the baby as an adult.

Based on the advice of medical professionals, Turner and her husband decided to raise Ori as a girl, because they were told that was how the child would likely identify.

Around the age of 7, Ori came to Turner one night and said, "I feel like I was supposed to be a boy."

"I was like, 'Oh my God, thank God I didn’t make a huge mistake,'" Turner said of her decision not to do the surgery.​

'You can't undo surgery': More parents of intersex babies are rejecting operations (nbcnews.com)

So this intersex child turned out to be more of a BOY, and the doctors had wanted to take away what little bit of a penis this child actually had.

Horrendous...

Thankfully this didn't turn out to be a tragedy.


By the age of 11 the child was acting like a feminine boy. Well, maybe not that surprising since the parents had been raising him as a girl for the first 7 years of his life.
The child's face looks about halfway between a boy and a girl, slightly a little more like a boy, although 11-year-olds do not have very strong gender characteristics yet. (The child's voice is eerily halfway between a boy and girl, though)

 

babies should decide all things sexual for themselves when they grow up... even circumcisions

 

I agree with you overall, as long as it is recognized that some intersex conditions might require early surgeries, due to other medical issues. Basically, when it's for cosmetic purposes only, then no. But here is the question that goes with that. How far do you go with that idea? After all, cleft lip and club foot would be be only for cosmetic or comfort purposes to have them corrected. Should those also be put in off? What about cosmetic surgery for damage after birth?

 

I think some intersex conditions on babies should be surgically treated but many should absolutely not be treated. And the decision to do it should not be left up to the parents, or individual doctors. The question of when to do it starts to become more complicated.

Basically I would say that if there is any chance whatsoever the child might not be the gender they are trying to turn the child into, or if there is any significant chance the surgery could cause a disaster or take away sexual feeling, then it should not be done.

I am okay giving the parents veto power to not have the surgery done, because I do not think there are situations where the child should get the surgery but the parents would say no. (Unless maybe if the parents are extremely poor and it is a matter of money)

The point is we cannot entirely simplify this into a simple yes or no answer. But overall, I think we should be strongly mostly no on these surgeries.
There should be a huge burden of proof before any surgery is done. It should go before a bioethics counsel to verify it.

I realize the correct procedure to make these decisions may be too complicated for many people to easily understand. And unfortunately, typically when that is the case nothing gets done about it, and people revert to wanting simple solutions (like let the parents decide), except there is something very wrong with that.

 

Unlike many progressives and many conservatives, I am against genital mutilations of all kinds.

I guess you could say I am very consistent in my position on this.

It's not merely just a matter of "personal choice", like you seem to be viewing this as. It's a matter of making the right decision.
But personal choice is an additional factor. It's all the more terrible when the wrong choice was made and the person whose body was involved didn't get to make the decision.

 

agree, you can't undo a circumcision, a sex change, ect, and they are not items that "need" to be done as a baby - people can choose for themselves when they are old enough

 

My thoughts in the matter were more along the line of if the condition caused developmental problems or life threatening issues. Not being up on all the intersex conditions I can't say what all these might be, so I proposed a rule of thumb. For instance, I do know that an intersex condition can cause the development of the penis where the ureathal opening is not on the head, but along the shaft. Corrective surgery for that, IMHO, is proper and quite honestly, does nothing to inhibit the person in making a transgender choice in the future.

Agreed. And as another poster said, this kind of principle needs to extend to things like circumcision. These kind of things need to be adult decisions if they are permanent and not life or health threatening.

Now when it comes to events in the later life, there is more grey area. Hormone blockers are not the horror that opponents make them out to be (this is as opposed to the medical personnel who are not sure about the benefits), and a teenager does have the capacity to make that decision, since much of what happens can be corrected later on.

 

Sadly, I disagree as far as right decision. The right decision is for the person as an adult to make the decision. I don't have to agree with their decisions to defend their right to them. Whether it is circumcision, or Prince Alberts, or full out removal of the testicles and keeping the penis itself, or whatever. BUt as we have been pointing out, the child's body should remain as close as it was at birth, short of health issues, such as heart problems and the like. One exception I would make that is not directly health corrective (such as the aforementioned heart issues) would be a tattoo in place of a med alert bracelet. This could be life saving for the child at some point.

 

Well, we both mostly agree that the decision should NOT be made for a baby who is too young to be able to make the decision.

An exception might be something like a urethral congenital malformation, where the hole where the urine exits isn't where it should be. That has nothing to do with gender, and the doctors are trying to correct a malformation that no normal human beings have.
I can't imagine there would be any adults who would not want to have this surgery done.


If a person later wants to f(*)(*)(*) and mess up their body as an adult, that is a separate issue.
Definitely should not be done to baby who is not choosing it.

If we are talking about "gender transition surgeries", 99+% of those are being done in persons who were not born intersex.

 

Yeah, imagine that a woman has a boy, and then she says "No, I wanted a girl", and had a sex change operation performed on her baby.

Of course these days there are women aborting in the womb because the baby was not the gender she wanted, so I guess that would just be all part of a woman's choice.

Over in the abortion section, I proposed the hypothetical of what if the woman had the surgical operation done on her baby while it was still in the womb.
Surgeries done on babies while they are in the womb are not uncommon these days.

 

Show me that. I'm not convinced. We don't do any kind of testing on transgenders. We don't know whether or not they are intersexed or chimeras. So how do we know that a intersex or chimera is not a common, even if not the majority, cause? We used to think that miscarriages were rare, but we now know that they are a lot more common that we realized, with woman having them before they knew they were pregnant.

 

This is a myth. Aside from the face that there is not a doctor out there who would do this (otherwise a lot would problem happen in China turning girls into boys), parents are not the ones wanting the change in their children. Surgeries don't happen until the later teens at the earliest save for the deformity ones we discussed earlier.

Good luck on finding a doctor to do a sex change in the womb. Of course you will still have the LBGT's on you because you still are forcing a sex/gender on a child. While you can make the false claim that they are allowing the child to have surgery too young, they are not pushing the idea that a child should be forced to be one or the other.

 

It seems this "corrective" surgery is more about making the parents or the medical professionals feel better.

The only reason to operate would be to avoid life threatening issues.

 

Tell me how is this different from a child with more definable visual sexual characteristics deciding that they feel they are not the gender that their visual organs display them to be?

I wish we would follow the Pacific Islanders idea of just assigning “Mahu” or middle for those who do not fit into defined categories

 

Because somebody born intersexed has a birth defect. I wouldn't consider gender dysphoria a birth defect.

We do, they are called intersex.

 

There has been ONE case that was even remotely like that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer
And it reaffirmed that gender identity is inherent and cannot be influenced or moulded

 

No... It affirmed that a boy still has the mind of a boy even if he lost his penis at birth and the parents try to raise him as a girl.

That's a little bit more narrow of an affirmation than what you were describing.

Well that's irrelevant to my point, isn't it?

You do realize that a hypothetical doesn't have to be real to demonstrate something, prove a point, or make you think?