Money’s prescriptions for managing intersexuality paint him, and those who agree with him, into an ideological corner. On the one hand, they believe that intersexuals inhabit bodies whose sexual development has gone awry. On the other hand, they argue that sexual development is so malleable that if one starts with a young enough child, bodies […]

A specter is haunting medicine—the specter of homosexuality. What seems to be a recent focus on the connection between gender and sexual orientation only makes more explicit concerns that have long motivated scientific discus­sions of gender and intersexuality. It is impossible to understand the continu­ing arguments over the treatment of intersexuals without putting them in […]

The underlying assumptions of the surgical approach to inter sex babies have not gone uncontested. Not everyone believes that sexual identity is funda­mentally malleable. By far the most dramatic of these debates has been an almost thirty-year battle between John Money and another psychologist, Mil­ton Diamond. In the 1950s Money, together with his collaborators, the […]

Although influential researchers such as John Money and John and Joan Hampson believed that gender identity formation during early childhood is extraordinarily malleable, they also thought that gender ambiguity later in life was pathological. How, then, was an intersex infant to make the transition from the open-ended possibilities present at birth to the fixed gender […]

If there has been no prenatal ‘‘fix’’ and an intersex child is born, doctors must decide, as they would put it, nature’s intention. Was the newborn infant ‘‘sup­posed’’ to have been a boy or a girl? Dr. Patricia Donahoe, Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and a highly accomplished researcher in the fields of […]

To produce gender-normal children, some medical scientists have turned to prenatal therapy. Biotechnology has already changed the human race. We have, for example, used amniocentesis and selective abortion to lower the frequency of Down Syndrome births, and in some parts of the world we have even altered the sex ratio by selectively aborting female fetuses,26 […]

When a mixed-sex child is born, somebody (sometimes the surgeon, some­times a pediatric endocrinologist, more rarely a trained sex education coun­selor) explains the situation to the parents.11 A ‘‘normal’’ boy, they say, may be born with a penis (defined as a phallus that has a urethral tube [through which urine flows] running lengthwise through its […]

States or Western Europe. The attending physician, realizing that the new­born’s genitalia are either/or, neither/both, consults a pediatric endocrinolo­gist (children’s hormone specialist) and a surgeon. They declare a state of medical emergency.1 According to current treatment standards, there is no time to waste in quiet reflection or open-ended consultations with the par­ents. No time for […]

Until the early nineteenth century, the primary arbiters of intersexual status had been lawyers and judges, who, although they might consult doctors or priests on particular cases, generally followed their own understanding of sexual difference. By the dawn of the twentieth century, physicians were rec­ognized as the chief regulators of sexual intermediacy.36 Although the legal […]

Under the mantle of scientific advancement, the ideological work of science was imperceptible to turn-of-the-century scientists, just as the ideological work of requiring Polymerase Chain Reaction Sex Tests of women athletes is, apparently, to the I. O.C. (See chapter 1.) Nineteenth-century theories of intersexuality—the classification systems of Saint-Hilaire, Simpson, Klebs, Blackler, and Lawrence—fit into a […]