The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [65]
Surgery thus became the solution to the riddle of gender.
As the theories of John Money and his colleagues became increasingly influential, their views on the need for surgical intervention for intersexual children became standard practice. Those views are neatly summarized by Money himself in the second edition of his text Sex Errors of the Body and Related Syndromes: “Before contemporary medical interventions, many children born with a birth defect of the sex organs were condemned to grow up as they were born, stigmatized and traumatized. It simply does not make sense to talk of a third sex, or of a fourth or fifth, when the phylogenetic scheme of things is two sexes. Those who are genitally neither male nor female but incomplete are not a third sex. They are a mixed sex or an in-between sex. To advocate medical nonintervention is irresponsible. It runs counter to everything this book stands for, which is to enhance health and well-being to the greatest extent possible.”
“Enhancing the health and well-being” of intersexual infants and children required a wide range of surgical and hormonal manipulations, all focused on transforming anomalous genitals into the standard model. Clitorises larger than the norm and penises smaller than one inch were amputated, so that the genitals could be shaped to look more like average male and female genitals. Testicles and ovaries were removed so that they would not secrete at puberty masculinizing or feminizing hormones at odds with the assigned sex. Adolescents were dispensed synthetic hormones (usually estrogen) to promote the development of a secondary sexual morphology to match their assigned sex. The bodies of intersexual children became a map, says historian Susan Stryker, on which was inscribed the cold war view of sex—you are on one side or the other. “I think that many other binaries were structured by that binary,” says Stryker. “Material conditions do affect ideology, not in a strictly Marxian way, but they’re not unrelated, however complexly related they are.”
John Money’s views on the need for surgical reconstruction for intersexual infants were to remain virtually unchallenged for decades. Though the goal of such surgery was ostensibly to maximize health and well-being, when intersexual people themselves began to speak out about the effects of these surgeries on their physical and emotional well-being, their testimony directly contradicted that of the psychologists and surgeons who had instituted the neonatal intersex protocol. In contrast with the “health and well-being” predicted by Money, intersexual patients suffered physical pain and scarring from repeated genital surgeries, and emotional torment as the secret of their births was withheld from them by parents trying desperately to adhere to the facade of normalcy. Very few genital anomalies were “fixed” by a single surgery in the weeks after birth; instead, intersexual children often endured repeated surgeries and doctor visits focused on their genitals throughout childhood—often without any explanation by their parents or the physician about the nature of their problem. The secrecy created a deeply rooted feeling of shame and isolation, akin to that suffered by victims of childhood sexual abuse. Like sexual abuse victims, intersexual children suffered from an excess of adult interest in their genitals, and their privacy and bodily integrity were violated systematically by various health care providers over the years of “treatment.”
In 1993, Cheryl Chase founded the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA), a support and advocacy group, which began to break down the walls of “shame and secrecy” that had imprisoned intersexual people, ending their isolation. At the first weekend retreat of ISNA, participants