"Ambiguous sex" - or ambivalent medicine? Ethical issues in the treatment of intersexuality.: An article from: The Hastings Center Report

This digital document is an article from The Hastings Center Report, published by Hastings Center on May 1, 1998. The length of the article is 8861 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

From the author: What makes us "female" or "male," "girls" or "boys," "women" or "men"--our chromosomes, our genitalia, how we (and others) are brought up to think about ourselves, or all of the above? One of the first responses to the birth of a child of ambiguous sex by clinicians, and parents, is to seek to "disambiguate" the situation: to assign the newborn's identity as either female or male, surgically modify the child's genitalia to conform believably to that sex identity, and provide other medical treatment (such as hormones) to reinforce the gender decided upon. The assumptions that underly efforts to "normalize" intersexual individuals and the ethics of "treatment" for intersexuality merit closer examination than they generally receive.

Citation Details
Title: "Ambiguous sex" - or ambivalent medicine? Ethical issues in the treatment of intersexuality.
Author: Alice Domurat Dreger
Publication:The Hastings Center Report (Refereed)
Date: May 1, 1998
Publisher: Hastings Center
Volume: v28 Issue: n3 Page: p24(12)

Distributed by Thomson Gale