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Assignment #3

In the essay “The Medical Construction of Gender”, Suzanne Kessler showed that physicians in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries decided the gender of the infants by biological factors, and parents and their children with intersex just followed the data that was given from laboratory. However, as the time passed, people started to realize that cultural factors are more important than biological ones to decide the sex of the patients. There are the factors that changed considerations of physicians, parents and patients towards intersexuality.

In eighteenth century, people thought gender is decided by the complex tests such as genetics, and physicians were choosing the gender of male or female by the size of the penis. For example, if penis was too small compare to ‘normal size of penis, physicians told parents that it as clitoris and asked them to take surgery to remove it. However, when the endocrinologist asked there’s no point of taking all tests if parents are going to choose gender by genitalia, parents were hard to choose their child’s gender.

This problem appeared because parents weren’t knowledgeable enough to understand intersexuality. For instances, people in France started to choose the neuter names like Jean, because they were unsure of their child’s sex. Therefore, physicians were also started teach the parents about intersexuality, and normalized the intersexuality to them. For example, physicians teach parents normal fatal development characteristics of male and absence of maleness shows that baby has femaleness. In addition, they also make parents believe their baby is normal by telling them its small defects like mole or hemangioma. Most importantly, physicians started to mention that social factors are more important than the biological factors for development of gender. Although they used all biological tests to figure out the gender, they said it’s really depend on how people treated their child as male or female.

In conclusion, physicians, parents and patient add lots of effort to decide the gender from either male or female, but just as Suzanne Kessler mentioned, most important thing is not putting gender just into either female or male but consider intersexuality as a gender.