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The Medical Construction of Gender

Kessler provides many factors that impact the way the medical community explains biological gender to parents of intersex children. The physicians base their assessments of gender ambiguous children on theories that gender must be determined by eighteen months, without this announcement the child’s community won’t know how to treat the baby. Based on the social constructs of gender that the parents are assumed to uphold, the physicians are under extreme pressure to clearly determine a gender and saving the family from potential embarrassment of a boy playing with a doll or a girl playing with a truck. This theory of malleability is rooted in the plasticity of children and gender, not a fluidity of gender as if putting a dog in a cat suit would change its bark to a meow.

The major psychological issues of castration far out-weigh vaginal reconstructive surgery so it is not uncommon to construct an aesthetically appropriate penis and hope for the best, especially if the parents have a preference to raise a boy over a girl. If the child can pass as male with believable genitalia then it is best for the child to be raised that way, otherwise you risk raising a tomboy and further obscuring gender norms. The physicians and parents aren’t the only factors, birth certificates need to be filled out for the state with a definitive gender, an assignment often must be made before any hormonal testing can determine a biological gender. The most disturbing idea of this reality is that a team of people, if the determination of the natural gender takes too long, are deciding what opportunities will be provided for this baby before it can recognize faces, tastes or smells and under the preference of social factors over biological. If the child struggles with the management decision in adolescence then, miraculously, the child is treated as if it was not an abnormality, which it isn’t, and that gender is not as clearly defined in biology as it is demanded to be in society. Ultimately, if a gender preference did not exist in Western society then fluidity of gender would be more acceptable and physicians could focus on the health of the baby and not concern themselves with what toys it will be bought for birthday parties.