re: #73 celticdragon

Inter-sexed people either have ambiguous genitals or a related condition that makes determing their gender difficult. Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS) is an example where a person is genetically male, but male genitals never form while the child is in utero…which results in a baby that looks quite convincingly female. This is often not discovered until concerned parents go to a gynecologist to find why their daughter is so late in starting her period. (IE, she doesn’t have a uterus or ovaries, for starters.). Sometimes, it isn’t found until the girl gets married and is wondering why she can’t get pregnant. Some of the taller beauty/fashion models are AIS women.

For the rest of us who don’t have issues that are quite that extreme, we just pretty much settle on “transgendered”, which usually takes in inter-sexed people as well.

Again, I know you were kidding around and meant nothing by it. I just wanted to let you know about the seriously negative connotations that surround the word.

My friend adopted from China and when she was looking through the lists of children, there were an inordinate amount of kids born with these issues. I mean, maybe a dozen kids throughout a number of agencies, which I thought was a lot.

These were part of the unwanted children, along with children with harelips, short arms or legs, clubbed feet, etc. For the hermaphrodite (how they referred to them - I don’t know if that’s offensive!) the Chinese automatically make them into girls. If they have both male and female genitals, they just remove the penis. It’s really awful because until puberty hits, you really can’t tell what the child is. From what I understand here in the states, they wait until the parents see if the child acts more female or more male and then apply surgery accordingly. The Chinese don’t want to mess with all that.

Anyway, it’s really awful. They don’t get adopted and basically live out their lives in these adoption agencies with pretty severe mental problems.