Stuck in the Middle with You: Inventing "Normal" for Sex and Gender
By Anat Shenker-Osorio
April 6, 2010 - 4:15pm
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2010/03/31/stuck-middle-inventing-normal-genderAn Amish couple walks into a hospital, only there's no joke here. This could be the hook to a story Dr. Tracy Bekx, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, told me. Having safely given birth with a midwife on their farm in rural western Wisconsin, the family she was called in to attend found themselves in a thoroughly modern setting -- with an ancient predicament.
Their newborn had a noticeably large clitoris, a tell-tale sign of congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) -- the most common of the conditions grouped together under the term intersex or disorders of sexual development (DSD).
Historically, and still today in many places, the solution to these conditions is surgery; this implies, of course, that there is a problem. In fact, the variable terminology named above stems from this very issue -- is intersexuality an identity or a disorder?
