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Andrew Brock assignment 3

Suzanne Kessler, in her essay ” The Medical Construction of Gender, describes how the condition of intersexuality is handled from a medical and cultural standpoint. She provides many examples of how doctors and parents of intersex children go about dealing with children that are intersex. The main point of her text seems to be that in order for doctors and parents of intersex children to deal with an intersex child, a gender must be determined whether or not at a later time the assigned gender would not make sense. She finds this to be a problem because the concept of changing the genitals of a child to what sex a person deems the child to be  goes against her belief that there can only be two concrete genders. Doctors have several protocols when it comes to dealing with intersex children. Kessler describes the complications of how certain sets of chromosomes can affect surgery that is undergone to make a child the gender they are seen as. When children are born with XX chromosomes, surgery can be preformed almost immediately to reduce the phallus size. In cases of XY chromosomes the process of reassignment is much more complicated. These cases require tests to be taken, for example if the child can produce testosterone and whether the phallus can respond to testosterone. Results from these tests can come back negative and the child cannot be seen as officially male. When parents have intersex children, determining the gender of the child can be a major factor in coming times. A common problem with solidifying the sex of an intersex child is described by one of the doctors Kessler interviewed. They explain that when an obstetrician is inexperienced it can lead to miss-gendering children and affect how that child is raised once the parents are told the gender of the child. Parents will commonly go about naming and raising the child as if they are a certain gender far before any conclusive results are made on the official gender of the child. These examples of handling cases of intersex children may be the most important factor as to how the child is dealt with later in their life. At the time of adolescence the child may not go through normal puberty for a girl or boy of their gender which could easily lead to the child having an identity crises. This would no doubt require counseling for the child. Kessler recounts that in order to avoid this physicians would have to lie to the child which in its own way may be the correct thing to do.