Gender policing is alive and well in our society--just saw a post the other day by a girl whose mother called her a "psychotic freak" whose friends will all "secretly hate her"...because she likes to wear basketball jerseys and baggy shorts.
Children with ambiguous genitalia are routinely operated on, and as other commenters have said, parents are under tremendous pressure to "normalize" their infants' genitals, with the implication that if they don't, they're bad parents and the child will suffer. Surgical intervention remains the standard of care, unfortunately.
I have a dear friend who was born intersex and also surgically "corrected" to be raised as a boy. She grew up always feeling like a girl, now lives as a woman, but still has pain and medical problems due to the doctors' "help", not to mention a substantial amount of trauma from being repeatedly subjected to exams and surgeries as a child without anyone explaining what had happened to her body until adulthood.
This, among many other reasons, is why we have to move beyond our current concepts of gender.
no subject
Children with ambiguous genitalia are routinely operated on, and as other commenters have said, parents are under tremendous pressure to "normalize" their infants' genitals, with the implication that if they don't, they're bad parents and the child will suffer. Surgical intervention remains the standard of care, unfortunately.
I have a dear friend who was born intersex and also surgically "corrected" to be raised as a boy. She grew up always feeling like a girl, now lives as a woman, but still has pain and medical problems due to the doctors' "help", not to mention a substantial amount of trauma from being repeatedly subjected to exams and surgeries as a child without anyone explaining what had happened to her body until adulthood.
This, among many other reasons, is why we have to move beyond our current concepts of gender.