Trapped in a Male-Female Box

Fausto-Sterling’s chapter “Of Gender and Genitals” further stressed the importance society places on fitting into the two-sex model of normality. Despite the risks involved with prenatal treatment and surgery, we have become fixated on the notion that humans must be either male or female, and when a baby is born, “before twenty-four hours pass, the child must leave the hospital ‘as a sex,’ and the parents must feel certain of the decision” (Fausto-Sterling 45). Our obsession with categorizing people as males or females results in rushed decisions that are made with uncertainty as to how they will affect the child’s future. Genital correction surgery is supported by the feared alternative of freakhood and a future as a social misfit, and such conceptions of intersexuality as a deformity are perpetuated by our perceived need for corrective management and our fear of difference. Dewhurst and Gordon illustrate this mentality of the condemnation of intersexuality with their rhetoric of tragedy: “‘One can only attempt to imagine the anguish of the parents. That a newborn should have a deformity…(affecting) so fundamental as the very sex of the child…is a tragic event which immediately conjures up visions of a hopeless psychological misfit doomed to live always as a sexual freak in loneliness and frustration’” (Fausto-Sterling 47). They imply that the only way that the child can lead a normal life is if it is “fixed” and becomes either male or female; without identification with an accepted gender identity, it is doomed to a life of tragedy. Not only is this obsession with choosing a gender restrictive, it is also rash, and with the enormous amount of uncertainty surrounding gender and sex, and nature and nurture, it often results in confusion and future consequences.
Considering the enormous impact that gender identity holds in our society, I found it extremely shocking that parents of intersexuals are not adequately informed about intersexuality and when asking about its frequency among children are often told “the condition is extremely rare and therefore there is nobody in similar circumstances with whom they can consult” (Fausto-Sterling 51). Instead of promoting intersexuality as a condition that affects 5,100 out of every 300,000 people, it is equated with extreme abnormality and genital “fixing” is put forward as the only option. In addition, Fausto-Sterling writes that physicians actually hold back information from their patients to ensure that they develop a “clear-cut gender identity.” An intersex child who is operated on to become a girl, for example, will not be told that she had a testis, but rather that she had an imperfect organ that needed to be removed. Fausto-Sterling asserts that through this withholding of information, “medical practitioners unintentionally reveal their anxieties that a full disclosure of the facts about intersex bodies would threaten individuals’—and by extension society’s—adherence to a strict male-female model” (65). What is interesting is that in society’s obsession with the male-female model we are not given the opportunity to think outside of the restrictive box. Before we can consider the idea that there exists a middle ground between male and female, medical technology prescribes that bodies are rendered to be male or female, and surgery is conducted to pinhole people into socially determined roles. How can we move past this restrictive view of gender and sexuality when we are sheltered from the truth about intersexualty, when sexual difference is equated with freakhood, and when even our doctors vow allegiance to the strict male-female model by withholding information about intersexuality?