Intersex People: The Missing Vagina Monologue

[queerunity]

http://queersunited.blogspot.com/2008/0 ... agina.html

Take action to have IS people fairly and accurately depicted in V-Day.

[Ryles]

Intersex as in Intersex to Female or just Intersex? I'm not really sure why non-females would have a Vagina Monologue.

[Garçonne]

Many intersexuals are already born with vaginas, and most intersex-to-female surgeries are performed on infants with no consent.

[Ryles]

Many intersexuals are already born with vaginas, and most intersex-to-female surgeries are performed on infants with no consent.

I remember hearing about some of those. That's got to really suck, finding out that your body is wrong because some surgeon thought it'd be a good idea to cut on a baby. Unless it's life-threatening, they should really wait until the kid's old enough to say "yes, I'm a girl" or "No, I don't want that".

[Garçonne]

A lot of the ones who say "yes, I'm a girl" don't want surgery, either. I remember reading a really cool article about two intersex people (one was AIS and I think the other had MRKH) who were born with female external genitals, but no vagina. Both of them were raised as girls and neither of them had any surgery when they were babies.

The one with MRKH later transitioned to male, while the one with AIS is a woman, but she hasn't bothered having any surgery because she can still enjoy sex without vaginal penetration.

[koitsuki]

This is the sort of thing that really... really annoys me. I can understand their concept, that performing these surgeries will make the child 'normal', but it won't! Who knows how that child will develop? The desire for society to make people normal above allowing that person to develop into their own NATURAL identity. A baby certainly hasn't given consent.

[Zekris]

This is the sort of thing that really... really annoys me. I can understand their concept, that performing these surgeries will make the child 'normal', but it won't! Who knows how that child will develop? The desire for society to make people normal above allowing that person to develop into their own NATURAL identity. A baby certainly hasn't given consent.

My mother's a nurse, and she tells me that with babies born with ambiguious genetalia, they check the chromosomes to determine if it's "supposed" to be male or female, and then preform the surgery accordingly. When I asked her why not wait for the kid to be old enough to decide for themselves, (because they might get it wrong) she told me that a parent will want to know the sex of their baby. Her tone made it pretty clear that that's all that really mattered - that a mother would find it unacceptable to have a baby and not know if it's male or female.

When I kept pressing the point that the doctors might get it wrong, she kept insisting that a mother wants know whether their little kid is a boy or a girl and started to get angry, so our conversation ended there.

[Ryles]

Yet another reasonw hy I want to avoid doctors completely in my strictly hypothetical child's first month of life.

That's awful- do they at least ask the mother if she wants that?

[koitsuki]

Her tone made it pretty clear that that's all that really mattered - that a mother would find it unacceptable to have a baby and not know if it's male or female.

When I kept pressing the point that the doctors might get it wrong, she kept insisting that a mother wants know whether their little kid is a boy or a girl and started to get angry, so our conversation ended there.

See, to me, the doctor should be able to give the answer, "intersexed"- it's just the forced categorisation of binary gender, of male and female, from birth. Now, I know this is how things work in our current society, but when it comes to non-consensual surgery, I vehemently find this unforgivable. What is to say the kid won't even WANT to make a choice, but remain intersexed? Obviously it is a natural occurrence, so why can intersex not be a valid sex on its own?