Intersex in Humans

From the day of birth the majority of humanity is taught that we are split into two categories: male and female. As a child, it may be hard to understand otherwise, and these two genders serve specific roles in society. But as one grows older they find that there are people who try to break one barrier and go into another and some with reason enough because they were born differently, and their genes dictate that they are neither 100 % male nor 100% female. With people that don’t understand this concept, the infant born this way may be forced to be one gender and not the other, despite their physical attributes. Variables that cause intersex in humans arise before birth in the persons’ development, and this may cause social problems that one will have to cope with. To be clear, to be an “intersexed” person, means to be one who is “born with various ambiguities of genital appearance or chromosomal or hormonal differences”, defined by Fausto-Sterling (and cited in Crawley, Foley, & Shehan, 2008, p. 24). These differences are caused by either an excess of an opposite sex hormone, such as androgens in women, causing congenital adrenal hyperplasia, or a strange pairing in the XY or XX patterns in sex chromosomes, which could be a mosaic of intermixed XY or XX in the chromosome. But because this pattern isn’t the only cause in determining a person’s sex, there isn’t a true simple way to identify gender that’s the same with all persons. It is also important to point out that a person physically cannot be all male and all female, the term for this being hermaphrodite. This is an “outdated nomenclature”, as stated by the Intersex Society of North America (Is an intersex…, 2008). But this term seems to be debated amongst researchers and scholars, because of findings of some who are claimed to be true hermaphrodites. If this is possible, the occurrence of a true hermaphrodite would be extremely rare because of other variables such as hormones. Intersex is commonly

References: Crawley, S.L., Foley, L.J., & Shehan, C.L. (2008). Gendering bodies. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Hughes, I.A.(2002). Intersex. BIU International, 90. doi:10.1046/j.1464-4096.2002.02920.x Intersex Society of North America. (2008). Is a person who is intersex a hermaphrodite? Retrieved from http://www.isna.org/faq/hermaphrodite Kaneshiro, J.K. (2011). Intersex. Retrieved from http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001669.htm Papalia, D.E., Olds, S.W., & Feldman, R.D. (2009). Human development. Eleventh edition. St. Louis: McGraw Hill Higher Education. Sloop, J.M. (2004). Disciplining gender. Rhetorics of sex identity in contemporary u.s. culture. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Thurer, S.L. (2005). The end of gender. A psychological autopsy. New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. Weston, K. (2002). Gender in real time. Power and transience in a visual age. New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.