Week-old baby undergoes sex change operation

[Shana A]

Week-old baby undergoes sex change operation
Kulsum Yusuf, TNN 9 September 2009, 10:22pm IST

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/news/city/rajkot/Week-old-baby-undergoes-sex-change-operation/articleshow/4991922.cms

RAJKOT: Seven days after a boy was born to a city-based family, doctors have medically proved that the baby is a girl. The baby went through an
operation on Wednesday for a sex change.

After a sonography, city-based doctor Dr Atul Hirani confirmed that it was a baby girl. The baby had male genital organs but female sexual organs inside the body.

The family realized that something was amiss and took the baby to a paediatrician and after various tests. After consultation and discussion with doctors, they were convinced to take a practical decision for the better future of the baby. Had the family chosen to keep the baby as it is, it could have led to psychological and social problems for the baby. The family belongs to middle class strata.

[Virginia87106]

I could not disagree more with this.  Who knows if this surgery will traumatize the young person more than having ambiguous genitalia.

Beauty is a culturally learned behavior, not a universal truth.  A mixed gender body is beautiful.

[Miniar]

They may be in luck, and the child may grow to become a woman.
But what if it grows up to be a boy?

[Suzy]

According to a friend of mine who is a pediatric nurse, this happens a lot more often that anyone would know.  Most are made "girls" because it is easier to do.

Kristi

[Northern Jane]

It's a crap shoot - 50/50 chance of them being wrong, particularly with an Intersex baby. They are just beginning to understand that gender doesn't lie in the sex organs.

[Alyssa M.]

As much as the title of this article made me cringe initially, I fear it might be accurate. They might have just forced a baby boy to live as a girl. You hear right-wing paranoid conspiracy theories about how the queers are recruiting; here we have regular old traditional, conventional folks potentially creating trans people out of their fear of intersexed people. Good job, guys.

[Calistine]

Thats cool and all but I think that the decision to have the operation should have been up to the child when they were old enough. The baby could want to be a boy and if they find out they once had a penis they will feel awful.

[Nicky]

I wonder what the outcomes are for babies like this that don't get operated early vs those that do? Perhaps when you way up the costs and benefits on the balance it may be better to operate early if you get better outcomes on average than otherwise. Has anyone done any research on this?

Even so I think it should be the persons decision.

[heatherrose]

"As Nature Made Him"

[fae_reborn]

The baby will be able to live a normal life as a female child.

Just what the hell is "normal" anyway?!?!  And how do you egg-heads know if the child identifies as female or not?

GODDESS, I agree with Virginia, this is horrible!  Unless there was a life-threatening, medical condition which required this (which I doubt), then this shouldn't have been done.

[MMarieN]

I just cringe whenever I read stories like this. It's just so messed up.

[placeholdername]

I don't know why this is news -- happens all the time from what I've read.  It's like Schrodinger's Baby -- 50/50 chance they just screwed things up, but we'll never know until they open the box (aka in 20 years).

As tragic as it could (possibly) be, we also do have to keep in mind that there's a chance the baby is female and the surgery did spare them a lot of suffering.  If so, count me envious .

[heatherrose]

Thats cool...

What about the story was cool to you?

[Alyx.]

Had the family chosen to keep the baby as it is, it could have led to psychological and social problems for the baby. The family belongs to middle class strata.

Oh, really?

[heatherrose]

As tragic as it could (possibly) be, we also do have to keep in mind that there's a chance the baby is female and the surgery did spare them a lot of suffering. If so, count me envious .

The suffering begins when a child is forced to conform to a gender
that they do not identify with. In this case, the child is probably going
to be in for some level of suffering because even if the surgeon made the
correct choice and the child does turn out to be content with being female,
the parents are probably going to be hyper sensitive to her displaying ANY
interest in anything considered to be associated with masculinity (i.e. tomboy).
In my opinion the way that this should have been handled, is as long as the
child wasn't faced with any immediate medical emergencies resulting from
the child's intersexed condition, the child should have been allowed to
grow free of gender constraints and allowed to make their own
indication of gender identification. Which really would not take
all that long, as most of us can attest to, children make
their own gender identification at a very young age.

[placeholdername]

The suffering begins when a child is forced to conform to a gender
that they do not identify with. In this case, the child is probably going
to be in for some level of suffering because even if the surgeon made the
correct choice and the child does turn out to be content with being female,
the parents are probably going to be hyper sensitive to her displaying ANY
interest in anything considered to be associated with masculinity (i.e. tomboy).
In my opinion the way that this should have been handled, is as long as the
child wasn't faced with any immediate medical emergencies resulting from
the child's intersexed condition, the child should have been allowed to
grow free of gender constraints and allowed to make their own
indication of gender identification. Which really would not take
all that long, as most of us can attest to, children make
their own gender identification at a very young age.

Yes I agree that this is the *better* way to handle it, but regardless of the way it 'should' be done, there's a very real chance that what *was* done was actually more helpful than what you describe.  Chances are if you buy a lottery ticket, you won't win the lotto, but eventually someone does win the lotto.  The chances for that baby winning that particular lotto are pretty high (40% or more by wild speculation).

So yes we can agree that many intersexed babies are harmed by this practice, but many also turn out just fine.

[Luc]

Well... chances are, the kid will grow up as a normal female and will never feel any differently. Roughly 1 in every 2000 babies is born with ambiguous genitalia, and most of those are assigned to one sex or the other at birth, and given corrective surgery if necessary. That's far more than the numbers for transsexuals, which probably indicates that the majority of ambiguous genitalia gender assignments are correct. However, who knows whether it's more likely for someone who was born with ambiguous genitalia to realize he/she is transgendered later in life? I do think it's ridiculous that surgeries like this are done, don't get me wrong. But hopefully, this child will grow up as a "normal" female.

SD

[heatherrose]

To win the lottery you must make the conscious, informed decision to
purchase the ticket. If the child's physical heath is not in danger, because of
their intersexed condition, then the "Doctors" need to keep their knives and
archaic opinions of the child's probable quality of life, to themselves. The
difference between a lottery and the life of this child is, if you do not win the
lottery, you are out a buck or two. If this child comes out on the crap side of
the odds, life WILL be a living hell, especially should the child discover that
they were born with the correct primary sexual characteristics and
some butcher cut them off, with Mom and Dad's approval.

[placeholdername]

To win the lottery you must make the conscious, informed decision to
purchase the ticket.

If someone buys you a winning lottery ticket, would you be upset?

If there had been a test the doctors could have given my mom to tell if I was TS and had hormones/srs growing up instead of 27 years too late, you can bet I'd want my mom to have gotten that test.  And there would be people crying foul about parents mutliating genitals there too.  The fact is, for intersexed 'corrections' and transsexual SRS, in most cases the only difference is the lens we look through, either way someone's cutting something to fit someone's idea of what the gender should be.  Who are we to say that the parents aren't right about the baby being a girl if we don't want others to say that we aren't right about being girls/guys ourselves?

The only difference there is that the parents are making decisions about the child.  And like I said above, if my parents could have made that decision when I was born I damn well would have wanted them to, whether they had my informed consent or not.

So it's a question of chances and probability.  How many borked intersex corrections outweigh the potential suffering of those who get corrections and are perfectly happy the way they are now?  You can't put a calculus on human happiness and suffering, there's just what happens.

[heatherrose]

If someone buys you a winning lottery ticket, would you be upset?

No, as long as the person buying the ticket, is doing so with their own money
and not using the ATM card of someone incapable of speaking for themselves.

How many borked intersex corrections...

You first, 'cause figure the odds, me one out of three hundred million
U.S. citizens, I know of three, two on a personal level.

Who are we to say that the parents aren't right about the baby being
a girl if we don't want others to say that we aren't right about being girls/guys ourselves?

The parents may have made the right decision, I hope for the child's
sake they did but the fact still remains it was not their decision to make, it is
not their life that will be messed up, if they are wrong and the same goes
for someone who thinks they have something to say about my life.