They have to
Pediatrician delivers child: “Congratulations. It’s a, a, um, uh…. It’s healthy?”
I’ll never forget the Saturday afternoon when BBC radio ran a documentary (this is from a later TV production) profiling adults born with intersex traits (nearly 2% of the general population). I’d never heard of it. Decades before DNA testing (and not so long ago) it was something the medical profession and families hushed up. Hospitals had teams who conducted “gender assignment” surgery on infants born with ambiguous external genitalia.
Doctors instructed parents to tell no one and to raise the children as whatever sex the plastic surgeons had assigned using the tissues they had to work with. (Female was most often easier.) It was horrifying. It was barbaric. IIRC, one British family moved to the U.S. to avoid the stigma.
I never saw the world the same again. Theirs isn’t any “lifestyle choice” or any other such phobic B.S. It’s a medical fact. God doesn’t make mistakes, you say? Well then, this is normal. The surgeries are not.
Now amidst the right-wing panic over all things LGBTQ, “Every Body” is an intersex documentary opening in just days (AP):
Like some 260,000 Americans, Sean Saifa Wall was born with significant intersex traits. The sex on the birth certificate was checked “ambiguous” and then crossed out.
Wall was instead labeled female on the document and, at the age of 13, after his mother was inaccurately warned of a cancerous threat, his testes were removed. Doctors told his parents to raise him as a girl, though Wall later developed masculine features and now identifies as a man.
In a country obsessed with gender, intersex people are often erased entirely. Sean Saifa Wall, Alicia Roth Weigel, and River Gallo are here to change that. Recounting their individual experiences with stigma, social pressure, and nonconsensual surgeries performed on them as minors, these three make the case for the much-needed rethinking of both archaic medical practices and binary ideas of gender and sex.