Major Media Cover Intersex Issues

In Your Face News Service

A WEEK following the unprecedented protest of IGM at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital by Hermaphrodites With Attitude (HWA) and Transexual Menace, and a first- ever lobbying effort on Capitol Hill by the Intersex Society of North American (ISNA) major news stories about IGM appeared in the New York Times and Newsweek magazine.

The Times article by Natalie Angier was entitled "New Debate Over Surgery on Genitals," and appeared in the May 13th Science Section. In addition to covering the escalating conflict over IGM, it also detailed ISNA's lobbying efforts in Washington as part of GenderPAC's 2nd National Gender Lobby Day. The Newsweek story, titled "Gender Limbo," appeared in the May 13th edition, and featured several intersex activists in their struggles to overcome the effects of IGM.

With this increasing national exposure, Intersex Genital Mutilation appears poised to become an issue that must be addressed by the medical community. Declared ISNA's Ex. Dir., Cheryl Chase, in the New York Times article, "We're not going to go away, and we have more passion that they do."

Both articles stressed that although doctors performing IGM defend it as compassionate and effective surgery for the infant's good, there is no data to support such claims, and no follow-up studies have ever been performed. Indeed, the only data available on long-term satisfaction or efficacy has been the testimony offered by groups like ISNA, whose members are often derided by IGM physicians as "fanatics."

Typical of many doctors implicated in the practice of Intersex Genital Mutilation was the quote attributed to Dr. Antoine Khoury, chief of pediatric urology at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, who went so far as to declare genital ambiguity a "hidden disease." Responded GenderPAC's Riki Wilchins, "If the disease is hidden, it's only because it exists entirely within Dr. Khoury's mind. This doctor is probably going to help someone cut into a baby's genitals today, all because he can't sleep nights from imagining a silent plague of large clitorises stalking the land."

In fact, a mainstay of IGM physicians are otherwise normal infant girls who are not hormonally or chromosomally intersexual at all -- but simply have clitorises judged to be "too large" by the pediatrician. In many such cases, the clitoris is removed or dramatically cut down in the mistaken, homophobic belief that doing so will help prevent the infant from developing into a lesbian as an adult. Yet in spite of this, gay and feminist groups have been slow to speak out against the practice.

Concluded Ms. Chase, "Every major city has at least one hospital doing IGM. It's time to lift the veil on operating rooms in hospitals down the street from where you live."