What is the traditional medical treatment for a child with ambiguous genitalia?
The traditional treatment is for the doctors to decide doom a predetermined checklist what sex your baby should be, and then surgically modify your child to resemble that sex. We disagree with this treatment for a variety of reasons. First, the deciding factors tend to be mostly ease of surgery, at times also sportive ambitions (“urologists like to make boys” quoted in Kessler’s 1990 article)… in other words, the pediatric surgeon’s convenience. Over 90% of intersex children are assigned to the female gender, because “it’s easier to make a hole than to build a pole” (quote from Gearheart, surgeon practising at Hopkins Univ., Baltimore, MD). Often the deciding factor is penis length. If the medical personnel feel that your child’s penis is not big enough, they will remove it and assign the child to the female sex. We feel that since intersex children have been affected by both male and female hormones before birth, it is impossible to tell what sex your child will prefer once he/she i
