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Female-assigned intersex kids’ vaginal canal size is also assessed by doctors, to ensure that it’s long enough to fit a penis inside of it. Doctors might surgically construct or re-construct vaginas, which can result in a host of health problems and necessitate multiple, multiple surgeries. This is especially the case since most intersex kids have these surgeries very young, and when their bodies grow into their adult forms, more surgeries are necessary to keep their vagina size in proportion. Non-surgical methods are also used to increase or maintain vaginal length by regularly using medical dildos to stretch the vagina over months and years. (It’s kind of like braces for your vagina, but much, much worse.) Just like there are no standards for how long a clitoris “can” be before it’s classified as a penis, there aren’t absolute standards as to how long a vagina is for it to be of “normal” length.
I had a dilation procedure performed for almost every exam I had with intersex doctors from the time I was 8 until I was 16, so that they could check how long my vagina was as I grew. I absolutely hated these procedures. I mean, imagine a man as old as your father or your grandfather, who you don’t know, inserting a medical dildo into you each time you saw him, knowing that you can’t question the doctor’s orders and just accept that you have to undergo these uncomfortable procedures for your health. Imagine a decade or so later, realizing that these procedures did nothing to track your health, and had everything to do with grown men feeling good about the fact that you could fuck some dude someday like a “normal girl”. That all those traumatizing procedures weren’t actually medically relevant at all, and it actually was within my right to refuse those examinations.
I didn’t know any of that at the time.
I also had no idea that I wouldn’t want to ultimately have the kind of sex they assumed I’d be having, adding yet another layer of this-was-totally-unnecessary/messed-up to my history.
Other kids shouldn’t have to go through this. Other adults shouldn’t have revelations some day far into the future that what was happening to them WASN’T okay, and their traumatic feelings ARE valid, and the whole system of how intersex people are conceptualized and “treated” IS entirely fucked.
And it’s gotta change. We’ve gotta change it.
I just read this article and was reminded once again how invisible the intersex community often is… we need to signal boost this shit to let people know that this kind of “medical treatment” is NOT okay.
so fucking disgusting there aren’t even words for it.
Alicorn and I want to have kids soonish and we’ve talked about this. We figure, if we have an intersex kid, tell the doctors to put their fucking scalpels away (actually probably tell them prior to the birth? Just in case?!), give the kid a unisex name (Alicorn likes Skyler) and then check in with them when they’re, I dunno, 15, see where they want to go from there. Does that seem about right or is there something important we’re missing?
Please note that the below comes from very little experience in intersex issues or child rearing and draws largely from my own experiences with bullying as a child.
Your idea to delay surgery sounds like a healthy way to raise the child in a setting where androgynous children can grow up in a safe environment until they are old enough to decide for themselves what they want their genitals to look like. However one of the elements of growing up that many parents struggle to control is the peer group. It is very difficult to send a child to school and be certain that they will be able to learn in a nurturing and accepting environment.
It has been my experience, and I shall admit that my own anecdotal observations should not be taken as heavily weighted evidence for making decisions on rearing your children, that young children will often find other children who are different than them and treat them as pariahs. My own experience as an introverted, socially awkward child found myself being treated by my classmates as though I had a terrible disease, and I became the butt of many jokes and ostracized; though by and large I ended up ostracizing myself; something that is much easier when one has a twin brother who is with you in exile. One question I ask myself now and then is how much growing up a social pariah affected myself in my adult life, and how much of who I am is just who I was born as; essentially, nature versus nurture. Regardless of my end outcome, I don’t expect I shall ever look positively upon the bullying I experienced.
Of course, young children are largely sexless, the only really gender identifiers being the clothes and hairstyles afforded by society, so it may seem that a child raised to be androgynous would largely fit in in such an environment. However, it is those societal gender specific dress and other identifiers that leave children firmly rooted in the belief that there are either boys or there are girls, and boys look one way, and girls look another, and someone who is neither or not clearly either is readily identifiable as an outlier. Of course I can not say that this will lead to bullying, or that good parenting and a well managed social interaction will lead to acceptance from other children, but I can not stress enough that there are many examples in our society’s past of homosexual/transgender/*different* people facing extreme prejudice in school amongst their peers.
Of course, none of this is a reason to take a 50/50 chance that you will assign your child the right gender, or rather to take away that agency from your child. It is merely a consideration one must take before raising a child who is perceptively different from others. I cannot say what the best course of action is to raise a happy and healthy intersex child, but I can not stress enough that a child’s peer group has a large impact, and that while I don’t think that a child should be taught to hide their identity from their peers, I do believe that parents of young children should attempt to guide their social interactions until they are old enough to navigate the oft treacherous paths of social interaction.
I dare say that all of this seems rather non committal but in the end there are a great many ways to raise children well, and a great many complications that arise when raising any child.
BTW, how soon is soonish.
ABTW, my computer doesn’t seem to recognize intersex as a word, and that seems fairly horrible.
We’re going to homeschool all our kids regardless, around the children of our friends; it should be pretty straightforward to shoo any obnoxious others whether they’re being obnoxious about a Skyler-gender or something else.
