Anne Fausto-Sterling Summary

Anne Fausto-Sterling’s original article contends that the absolutes of our current two gender classification system fail to recognize the intersex individual. Fausto-Sterling suggest that three additional sexes, Hermaphrodites, Male Pseudo hermaphrodites and Female pseudo hermaphrodites should accompany male and female for a total of five sexes. Acknowledging that “Some find the changes under way deeply disturbing, Others find them liberating”, Fausto-Sterling writes that turning a blind eye is not an option, there are too many people that fall into the categories of herm, merm and ferm. Research provided in the article states that” for every 1,000 children born, 17 are intersexual, or 1.7% of the population
Fausto-Sterling highlights the work that activist Cheryl Chase has done to change outdated treatment protocols for infants born with a mixture of both male and female anatomy, or genitals that appear to differ from their chromosomal sex. We are told that it is common practice for doctors to have sole discretion in the matter and made a gender assignment based on what would be the easier sexual genitalia to keep. The parents were counseled that if they raised the child, according to the selected gender, adjustment to that gender would be natural, “through surgery, the physicians were
Once the medical community acknowledges that being born with ambiguous genitals is not a medical emergency it will pave the way for the rest of society and hopefully give parents the confidence to delay surgical