Posted on 02/18/2005 3:09:21 PM PST by srm913
"Intersex," aka "sexual being" is where the homosexual movement is moving, whether rank and file homosexuals know this or not.
Movement ideologues envision a 'utopia' in which all human beings will have been liberated from the 'onerous and repressive' burden of sexual identity {being either male or female}. The Episcopal Church, academia, etc are already promoting this lunacy.
Read:
"While dominant society has embraced a binary gender system (male-female), Ms. Mouse believes this is only a construction. Gender is a fluid and mutable category, open to a range of emotion and identity. We cross the boundaries of the traditoinal binary gender system all the time in our daily lives. In short, Ms. Mouse is a transgendered mouse. She believes that what you look like to others doesn't matter, it's how you identify that counts."
- "Chapelle (nee Chap) Mouse" - a transgendered puppet used to promote chapel activities at Episcopal Divinity School (Cambridge, MA). Ms. Mouse "came out" in a column in Common Fare: The Newsletter of the Episcopal Divinity School, where he/she was promoting the upcoming Queer Week at the school
Another program of moral relativists; fools attempting to overturn the immutable laws of nature. Like two year olds railing against the parents.
They are driven to destroy everything. They are "championing" a tiny percentage of sad cases of a rare birth defect and turning it into a revolutionary cause, under the banner of gender identity.
They damage everything they touch. They hate God and His laws, and are attempting to break every single one. What they don't understand is that every single religion on the face of the globe accepts, to one degree or another, that God is the One Who sets the rules; not humans. And when humans break those rules - especially as a special program - and try to proselytize breaking those rules - there will be grave repercussions, the like of which they can't imagine in their wildest nightmares.
I appreciate that. Thank you.
In her 20s, by accident, Judy discovered the source of her troubles: She was really a man.
Known as an "intersex" baby, Judy was a child born with ambiguous genitals.
There always have been such babies, but it wasn't until the post-World War II years that the American medical community developed the skills and tools to surgically correct genital abnormalities. Surgery soon became routine for the one in 2,000 children born with a genital malformation.
But now many experts would like to see a change in that routine. They contend that surgery should be put off until the child is old enough to have a say in the matter.
"The surgery isn't actually done for the baby," says Cheryl Chase, founder and executive director of the Intersex Society of North America, located in Ann Arbor, Mich. "They do it because they think it's disturbing to the parents."
"When a child is born with unusual genitals, the doctors take over," Chase says. "They say, 'We can fix it.' Parents don't have any information."
"The problem is, doctors aren't necessarily the people in our society who have a special understanding of sexual issues or emotionally difficult issues," she says.
In Judy's case, she was born in New Jersey in 1966 with a tiny penis, undescended gonads and curious genitalia called "fused labial-scrotal folds." Judy's parents and doctors decided she should be raised as a girl, even though her chromosomes were predominantly male.
Months after birth, Judy underwent surgery to remove her penis and gonads. Later, she took estrogen shots to develop her breasts. At 15, surgeons built her a vagina.
In her 20s, she married, but she was never happy. Filled with shame over her body, Judy decided she was a monster.
One day, seeking copies of her old medical records, she mistakenly was given pages that revealed her sexual history. That was the first time she learned about her background.
Building a new life
Now 34, Judy has changed her name to Max Beck, is married -- to a woman -- and has a 9-month-old daughter conceived through artificial insemination. Living in Atlanta, Beck is piecing together a new life as a man, and says he wants to help other children avoid the torments he experienced growing up.
He's become a vocal opponent of corrective surgery for intersex children.
"I know three or four dozen intersex adults," Beck says. "Of those who were operated on [as infants], I don't know any who feel they benefited from it. And those who weren't operated on are just glad they escaped."
Chase agrees. "It's better for people to have control over their own bodies," she says.
Like Beck, Chase was in her 20s before she discovered the truth: that she had spent the first 18 months of her life as a boy named Charlie before her parents and doctors decided that her ambiguous genitalia were better suited to a female identity.
"My parents didn't tell me that that happened," Chase says. "My genitals don't look normal. There's a big, flat scar where there should be a clitoris and inner labia. There's just a hole."
Because of the surgery, Chase says, she lost the chance to make her own decision about her sexual identity.
The medical establishment generally has defended the surgeries, saying that intersex children would be ridiculed for not conforming to societal expectations of genital appearance. But critics don't buy that explanation.
"Some kids are born with big ears," says Alice Dreger, an assistant professor of science and technology studies at Michigan State University who has researched extensively on intersex issues. "Do we say, 'My God, this kid can't survive with big ears?' "
The birth of an intersex baby, Dreger says, is not a medical emergency but a psycho/social emergency.
"But we almost never call in a psychologist," she says. "We call in a surgeon."
Surgery's serious side effects
Surgeries and hormonal treatments are not reversible, she notes, and that can cause problems if adults -- like Max Beck -- don't fit the sex chosen for them in infancy. Surgery also can have side effects such as incontinence or a loss of sexual sensation.
Dreger proposes that "intersex" be treated as an anatomical variation, like differences in skin or hair color, rather than as an abnormality.
Families of intersex children should receive psychological support, she says, and early surgery should be done only when there's a real medical concern, like urinary infection.
Dr. William Reiner performed nearly 100 genital reconstructive surgeries at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore before deciding to look at the psychology of intersex. He went back to school to get certified as a psychiatrist and now counsels intersex patients and their families as a professor of child and adolescent psychology at Johns Hopkins.
He, too, has become an advocate for delaying genital surgery on intersex babies.
"I think people are hung up about genitalia and sexuality," Reiner says. "We get mixed up, and these things scare us in some way. It may stimulate a drive to correct, a drive to make things right. Pediatric surgeons see all kinds of anomalies, and they are trained to make those anomalies normal."
But Reiner doesn't blame surgeons, saying they merely reflect the beliefs of society.
"We can't really blame this all on medicine," he says. "Part of it is a social problem. We have treated science as if it has the truth. It doesn't. Science is just a model."
"But we thought we were finding the truth," he says. "We thought we were God. We didn't realize that you can't make anybody anything. They are what they are."
"Philosophers have known for thousands of years that identity is built in, but in the last half of the 20th century, we thought identity could be created by society," Reiner says.
Nature, not nurture
In two studies published last year, Reiner and other Johns Hopkins researchers found that prenatal exposure to normal male hormones determines male gender, even in chromosomal males born without a penis.
The researchers studied 27 genetically male children born with testicles but no penis, 25 of whom had been castrated at birth, "reassigned" and raised as females.
All 27 children showed strong male behaviors, and the majority reassigned themselves as males between the ages of 5 and 16.
"Rather than the environment forming these children's gender identity, their identity and gender role seem to have developed despite a total environment telling them they are female," Reiner says. "They seem to be quite capable of telling us who they are."
The two children in the study who weren't reassigned as females at birth were developmentally more like their male peers and psychologically better adjusted than the sex-reassigned children, the study shows.
"The solution is to leave them alone," Reiner says. "Most of them, by the time they're of kindergarten age, will figure out who they are."
And there still will be a role for surgeons.
"Eventually, they are almost all going to want surgical reconstruction," Reiner says. "So surgeons are still going to be reconstructing these kids."
"But instead of doing it at two days, two weeks or two months, it's going to be later," he says. "Will the surgeries be more difficult? Sure. But that's life."
"Better to have a difficult surgery on a 15-year-old than a beautiful surgical outcome on a 1-year-old that turns out to be the wrong sex," he says.
What To Do
To learn more about intersex children, visit the Web site of the Intersex Society of North America. To read about intersex research, check out Johns Hopkins University online.
Or, you might want to read previous HealthScout articles on other issues related to sexual identity.
I didn't say that. Don't put words in my mouth. I was just suggesting that there are agendas at work here other than the best interests of a child born with this condition. Other freepers in this thread are pointing out evidence of possible motives of these doctors and researchers. See post 103.
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