From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Wed Feb 02 2000 - 21:01:55 MST
At 07:25 PM 2/02/00 -0800, Eric wrote:
>> Do we decline to
>> intervene with hydrocephalic babies
>And I doubt my friends who were born intersex would much relish
>being compared to hydrocephalics.
Why? Hydrocephaly, as I understand it, can usually be corrected (like
enzyme disorders that require a careful diet for life) with no bad
side-consequences, in this case by early surgical intervention. However, I
do see that this is not the case with most or some intersex folks, who
actually *are* mutilated in order to `normalise' their appearance.
>I have moved among the viable parallel community
>made of intersex people (yes, it is a very small one), many of whom
>now suffer sexual dysfunction not resulting from their congenital
>condition but from postnatal genital mutilation (i. e. attempts to
>"repair" them)
Terrible, awful. Still, what is it like for those intersex folks, if any,
who escape this treatment, do you know? Given the abominable treatment any
slightly deviant person receives growing up (too skinny, too fat, too
smart, too slow, too cross-eyed, too wrong-tinted, too homosexual, too
Jewish, whatever), I shouldn't think that visibly intersex people would get
through childhood and adolescence without really gruesome psychic scarring.
Is that the case?
Damien
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