Abstract
This article explores the relationship between gender, technology, language, and how infants and children born with disorders of sexual development are shaped into intelligible members of the community. The contemporary medical model maintains that children ought to be both socially and surgically assigned and reared as one particular gender. Gender scholar Suzanne Kessler rejects this position and argues for the acceptance of greater genital variability through the use of language. Using a Heideggerian lens, the main question I seek to answer in this article is: does Kessler’s approach succeed in its aim to better treat individuals born with disorders of sexual development? I argue that Kessler is successful in offering practical solutions for persons with intersexed conditions to exist and flourish as intelligible members of the community, but that her project ultimately relies on power to “challenge forth” greater acceptance of genital variance. Building on the work of Kessler and Heidegger, I argue that a better approach to making intelligible the existence of an infant born with a disorder of sexual development is not to rely on the manipulation of language, but to instead reinvigorate a sense of the sacred in response to having an intersex condition.
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Notes
AIS stands for androgen insensitivity syndrome; in complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS), persons are genotypically male with external female genitalia; these persons are unable to respond to testosterone and are generally reared, successfully, as females. Persons with CAIS almost always identify as female and are attracted to men.
“As a young woman, Sherri Groveman, who has AIS, was told by her doctor that she had ‘twisted ovaries’ and that they had to be removed. At the age of twenty, ‘alone and scared in the stacks of a medical library’ she discovered the truth of her medical condition” [7, p. 31].
The Prader scale is a diagnostic tool used to score the degree of virilization, otherwise known as genital masculinization. A score of 0 indicates a female child absent of virilization. Stage I indicates a child with an enlarged clitoris (cliteromegaly) who is absent of labial fusion. Stage V indicates a scrotum-like labia, penile phallus, and a urethral meatus at the tip of the phallus.
Even though Reimer was not born with a disorder of sexual development, his condition and treatment protocol mirrors that of male infants born with a micropenis. In this sense, Reimer acquired a disorder of sexual development and was medically treated as such. Some scholars, such as Sharon Anderson, classify penile ablation as a disorder of sexual development.
“While some physicians practice gender on others, transgenderists, only sometimes with the help of physicians, practice it on themselves” [1, p. 121].
See [1, pp. 22–23]. Kessler identifies four key components of the normalization process. First, “physicians teach parents usual fetal development and explain that all fetuses have the potential to be male or female.” Second, “physicians stress the normalcy of other aspects of the infant.” Third, “physicians (at least initially) imply that it is not the gender of the child that is ambiguous but the genitals.” Finally, “physicians tell parents that social factors are more important in gender development than biological ones, even though they are searching for biological causes. In essence, the physicians teach the parents Money and Ehrhardt’s theory of gender development. In doing so, they shift the emphasis from the discovery of biological factors that are a sign of the ‘real’ gender to providing the appropriate social conditions to produce the ‘real’ gender. What remains unsaid is the apparent contradiction that a ‘real’ or ‘natural’ gender can or needs to be produced artificially.”
References
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Baker, L.L. Gender by Dasein? A Heideggerian critique of Suzanne Kessler and the medical management of infants born with disorders of sexual development. Theor Med Bioeth 38, 447–463 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-017-9424-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-017-9424-x