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Assignment Three

Kessler’s “The Medical Construction of Gender” explores the way physicians handle cases of intersexuality with infants. Intersexuality is when an infant doesn’t have an identifiable gender (i.e. the genitals of the newborn don’t fit the defined characteristics of a boy or girl). Kessler interviewed six medical experts – a clinical geneticist, three endocrinologists, one psychoendrocrinologist and one urologist. Research indicates that hermaphrodites are rare – it is more common that the infant has ovaries or testes but the genitals are ambiguous. Attitudes towards intersex are influenced by advancement in surgery, modern feminism, and new attention focused on the psychology of a “gendered identity”. Because gendered identity is so important, it is thought that assigning a gender to an infant with ambiguous genitals must be done as fast as possible so the child can properly grow into a male or female gender.

In 1955, John Money, J.G. Hampson and J.L Hampson (later developed in 1972 by Money and Anke A. Ernhardt) argued that gender identity is changeable in the first few years of development (from 18 months to a few years old) – this way the proper genitals, information and hormones can be administered to the child and it wouldn’t retain the potential trauma of undergoing surgery.

Some physicians argue that it is necessary to assign a gender early because parents need to know how to deal with their child (assuming it is difficult to parent a child without an assigned gender). If gender is not properly announced, it can be difficult for the parents to understand how to proceed (i.e. how to name and begin to raise their child as a boy or a girl). If physicians aren’t careful about how they speak to the parents and the patients, they can misconstrue the perception of gender. This can result in physicians lying to patients due to their bias about what they think would be good or bad for the parents or patient. Kessler concludes that it is important to understand the concept of what is natural – sometimes surgery is performed in an attempt to return the body to what it is supposed to be (i.e. a gendered male or female). It is argued that these physicians perpetuate male or female gendered identities, creating anxiety for the patient and parents involved rather than a proper understanding of the child’s condition.