I want to focus on the injustice done to intersex babies at birth and in early childhood in comparison to the denial of sex reasingment surgeries to trans men and woman seeking a change of sex. Specifically how the medicalization of the body of the trans man or woman is desired and how the medicalization of the body of the intersex baby is forced.
Concerning the intersex babies there is much discourse which the ISNA- Intersex Society of North America- is a part of. They describe the surguries small children face, for reasons unexplained to the children, enunciating that these surgeries are done in response to a psychosocial emergency- which means the surguries are performed not to save the life of the child but to comfort the parents and doctors who brought the child into the world. Post surgery, of which 90% of the results are female sexed, parents are encouraged to raise the child as a specific gender, usually a girl.
Correctly, forced sex reassignment surgery has been compared to the african clitorectomy, also called genital mutilation, ceremony of certain tribes accorss Africa. But the many people in the medical profession refuse to see this similarity. When and if they do, unfortunately, surgery to 'fix' intersex genitals still continues.
Cheryl Chase asks participators in the intersex discourse to think about how forced sex assignment surgury affects the intersex children in their childhood and long after they have graduated from elementary school. Once aware of the discourse, aware of the work Intersex Society of North America has done, readers realize that the intersex children are scarred victims of their society's propriety requirements and fear of anomale.
This same fear of difference or insanity in a society is what causes a trans woman or man to be required to go through excruciatingly intimate interviews with not only a doctor who will be allowing the surgery but also possibly two psychoanalysists only to be refused the surgery. The medical profession labels transsexuals as peaople with gender dysphoria disorder or as people with gender identitiy disorder. This medicalization of the bodies of trans people has lead to them being considered only in terms of their bodies and in some cases institutionalization of certain trans people.
Sex reassignment, highly sought after by most trans people with money, is desired because the attainment of the surgery is a form of self expression. While the experience of being trans is not a choice, the ways in which one expresses their trans-ness is a series of personal, perhaps some subconsious, choices. Therefore, when a trans is denied sex reassignment surgery, they are denied a freedom to happiness which is supposed to be an inalienable right. In other terms trans people's highest desire is to pass, which in some ways means to fit in, in other ways means to become invisible in order to cover up the real problem and in a third way means to express themselves to the fullest. Sandy Stone encourages trans people to do more than just pass, but to look at themselves, where they stand in reference to society around them and society in history, to take a look at their own history and discover a new way to be themselves without the need or desire to pass as anyone other than themselves.
Both the forced sex assignment surgery of intersex babies and the desired but denied sex reassignment surgery of trans men and women have to interact with the idea of medicalization. It is paradoxical to the point of pause to ponder how the medicalization of one body is desired and the other deffinetly not (and how society and patient are opposites in each situation). Furthermore, Eli Clare encourages medicalized bodies to move past these labels of disability and gender. Though trans and intersex people are physically shaped by knives, they can shape themselves any way they desire by moving past a medicalization of their bodies to a definition of themselves unrelated to the medical profession.
Stone, Sandy. "The Empire Strikes Back." The Transgender Studies Guide. New York: Routledge, 2006. 221-35. Print.
Clare, Eli. "Body Shame, Body Pride: Lessons from the Disabilities Rights Movement." Speech.ECommons. Web. 15 Feb. 2011.
Chase, Cheryl. "Hermaphrodites with Attitude: Mapping the Emergence of Intersex Political Activism." The Transgender Studies Guide. New York: Routledge, 2006. 300-14. Print.
