Update 3/8/14: Advocates for Informed Choice just posted an annotated video of the segment, and it is fantastic. A recent Nightlight segment featured a promising story of the treatment of individuals born with atypical sex anatomies. It included the story of … Continue reading
MTV’s half-hour romantic comedy series, Faking It, will feature a character with an intersex condition (or DSD) this season (see the Hollywood Reporter story here). This is not the first time a character with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS) has appeared … Continue reading
MTV’s half-hour romantic comedy series, Faking It, will feature a character with an intersex condition (or DSD) this season (see the Hollywood Reporter story here). This is not the first time a character with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS) has appeared … Continue reading
Knowing something about my work on ethics and atypical sex anatomies in children, several people have recommended Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity (2012). Each of the chapters is devoted to children with … Continue reading
Over the last week news outlets—from Der Spiegel to the Wall Street Journal—have reported that Germany has become the second country to permit a “third” gender option for the birth of children (Australia was the first). These reports suggest that … Continue reading
May 27, 2013
Ruby’s passing immediately preceded the announcement of the suit filed against South Carolina on behalf of the eight-year-old who was, like Ruby’s daughters, subjected to surgeries to “normalize” atypical sex anatomy, or what is known as an “intersex” body. I believe she would have celebrated the news of the lawsuit by Advocates for Informed Choice and the Southern Poverty Law Center. I thank her daughters for allowing me to share this essay.
May 9, 2013
The woman I called “Ruby” died this week. Her experiences and example have been central in my thinking about the ethical problems raised by the medical management of children and young adults with atypical sex anatomies over the last fifteen years.
Ruby was the mother of two children born in the 1960s, each of whom went into adrenal crisis shortly after she brought them home from the hospital. Both had been announced boys when they were born, and both were reassigned as girls after doctors came to understand they were genetic females with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH).
Continue readingThis week Advocates for Informed Choice and the Southern Poverty Law Center, with the help of two private law firms, filed what promises to be a groundbreaking lawsuit. According to the press releases, “M.C.,” a child adopted as a toddler in South Carolina, had been born with atypical sex anatomy and assigned female. Now eight years old, M.C. has rejected his assignment, and identifies as a boy. Like a similar case of sex reassignment in Colombia that led that nation’s highest court to issue of the first of what would be, over 1999-2000, a series of decisions prohibiting unnecessary normalizing surgeries and specifying the limits of parental consent to such surgeries, the case could set a new precedent regarding the performance of normalizing surgeries in the US.
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