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Assignment #3

According to Kessler’s essay, the factors that impact the medical condition of intersex are; the advancements in medicinal analysis and technology (physical factors) and the concept of gender identity (societal factors). These factors are rooted in the concept of being that there are only two possible genders, either male or female. The intersex gender is considered not “natural” in the eyes of society, so therefore when a child is determined to be intersex, the “real” sex of the baby has to discover/reconstructed to fit into one of the two “natural” genders.

The advancements in the medical field allow doctors to control the gender of the baby if he/she has an unclear gender/ambiguous genitalia. Various methods can be applied to determine the sex of the child on the chromosomal level, allowing for guidance in shaping the gender of the child. Further procedures are applied such as genital surgery and growth hormone treatments which are used to directly change the gender of the child. An example of this is if a child has a micropenis, in which a doctor would recommend to the parents to change the gender of the child to a female by having genital surgery, changing the micropenis into a uterus.

As for the concept of gender identity, there is a bias of how gender is defined. As previously mentioned, there are only two options that is “acceptable”, either being male or female. This way of thinking influences the perception of viewing intersex as a condition that needs to be corrected immediately, so that the child may live a “normal” life. When a case involving an intersex child occurs, doctors and parents might have a hard time dealing with it as it is out of the norm in society, which might lead to negative opinions about the situation. An example of this in Kessler’s work is a situation in which parents have an intersex child, they would tell others that they had twins when the gender of the child was not determined, and when it was assigned, the parents would say that one of the twins died. Rather than saying they had an intersex child, the parents lied which shows the stigma associated with intersex children.

To conclude, Kessler’s work involved various situations and issues that involved the theory of gender identity and how it affects parents and doctors alike. As technology advances, so does the method of determining and assigning gender, which reinforces the concept of intersex being a condition that needs to be “fixed.”