I don’t have any actual experience with this issue, but since I did a bit of research a few months ago for a school project, I might as well thow in my :twocents:
a) Do you wait till see if he-she behaves like a girl or boy and then have one of the organs remove?
b) You just don’t touch what God give him-her?
c) Other option - tell what would you do…
The accepted response is A, sort of. Provided the person’s sex is truly ambiguous, infant surgery is not advised. Milder intersex conditions can be treated in a more straightforward manner. If it’s impossible to tell, it is best to wait on surgery, to avoid picking the wrong sex.
However, raising the child as a “genderless” child is NOT advisable. Parents are advised to choose a gender and raise the child as that gender, without having surgery. If the child grows older and embraces their assigned gender, so much the better, and you may remove the extra parts. If the child does not act like the assigned gender or insists that they are being raised as the wrong gender, the child may have been raised as the wrong gender. That’s OK, and the parents can make the decision to start raising the child as the correct gender from that point on, eventually having an operation if it works out.
If there’s ambiguous genitalia, what about doing DNA testing to see if there’s a Y-chromosome?
This is a good thing to do, but even genetic tests are not foolproof. For most conditions, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome will help in identifying the disorder. However, not everybody who has a Y chromosome is male. There are two rare conditions- Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome and Swyer Syndrome- which result in girls with an XY genotype. There is also de la Chapelle Syndrome, which results in a male with XX chromosomes, but these individuals appear to be and identify as males, despite being infertile, so their parents probably won’t have trouble deciding to raise them as male.
CAIS and Swyer Syndrome don’t affect how the children are raised, since children with these conditions appear to be girls and continue to identify as such. However, Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome represents a spectrum of intersex conditions ranging from males who are infertile to females who lack a uterus and ovaries. If someone has a severe form of Partial Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, it may be impossible to tell. The individual should not be considered definitely male merely because they have a Y chromosome.
Generally, the presence of a Y chromosome indicates a male, and the absence of the Y chromosome indicates a female. So, XXY (Klinefelters Syndrome) is a male with an extra X chromosome. XO (Turners Syndrome) is a female who is missing a chromosome.
For all other conditions, to my knowledge, the above explanation is correct. AIS is the only intersex condition I have heard of where genitalia can be ambiguous and chromosomes are not neccessarily the best way to judge.
There is no such thing as someone being both male and female. A hermaphrodite will still be , genetically speaking, male or female. The external malformation is just that, a malformation, usually caused by a hormone inbalance. It is not possible to have both male and female “parts” that are true, functioning organs.
This part is just my opinion, but I tend to agree with this. The child is ultimately male or female, their sex is just not as readily apparent as it is for the rest of us. Such situations are rare, but they do exist, so we should have some guidelines for dealing with them.
If someone is actually in this situation, they need to speak with priests and doctors. If it was just idle curiosity, I hope the above helps.
Again, I don’t really know that much or have any firsthand experience- so if you really want good information, you’ll have to do some more research!
