Intersexuality is a topic that gets little positive attention which is incredibly unfortunate because it is very possible that these people and their unique conditions could possibly educate the rest of society on the mysteries of gender. We live in a society that is very closed to possibilities of variation amongst ourselves in many aspects. This is evident in a lot of facets of our existence in the form of discrimination on the basis of anything, race, sex, gender, age, wealth, religion, class, and many others. Our failure to overcome these restrictive ways of viewing diversity is really just preventing us from better understanding who and what we are as not only social but also biological beings. A lot of people feel that the intersexed person is a rarity and that they do account for a large part of out society yet there is evidence that intersexed people are much more common than we think, “At the rate of 1.7 percent, for example a city of 300,000 would have 5,100 people with varying degrees of intersexual development” (Fausto-Sterling p.51). The surgical altering of the genitals is also something that is not just a consideration for the child born with genitals that do not look the way some doctor thinks they should it is also abused in many other ways such as circumcisions that went wrong or even just a little girl who was born with a larger than average clitoris and it should be stopped for the sake of all people.

The fact that unneeded surgeries are so prevalent among intersexed people is one of the biggest problems that they are faced with in their lives. A lot of times these surgeries leave people so badly disfigured learning to live life after what has been done to them is even more challenging than coming to terms with their unique existence as being a variation on what it means to be male or female with in our society. People who are intersexed seem to have one thing in common amongst them, they almost always were not told the truth about their conditions. Many of these people had to do their own research into their medical background to find out exactly why they were so different. For example one woman named Cheryl Chase, who is a prominent figure within the intersexual community and “was the first person subjected to cosmetic genital surgery who broke the silence” (Coventry p.57). Chase, who through her own research, discovered that she had been born intersexed and had her clitoris removed because it was to big. It is not uncommon that these surgeries not only leave people misshapen and in chronic pain but also require them to rely on synthetic hormones to fix what problems result from the doctors attempting to “fix” them in the first place.

Another procedure that is performed on intersexed people is clitoroplasty which is a surgery that is done to reshape the clitoris. Conditions such as CAH can cause genital abnormalities one of which is commonly an enlarged clitoris which is often times mistaken for being a small penis. Either perspective on the genitals of a child with CAH is not good being that most doctors deem either a large clitoris or a small penis (on a baby) to be to abnormal for a healthy existence and therefore feel they should be altered or removed. Actually the full on removal of the clitoris is known as clitorectomy and is apparently not as common as it once was which really makes no difference considering “clitoroplasty often removes more [emphasis in original] clitoral tissue than does clitorectomy, and entails more extensive genital dissection and scarring (Chase p. 388). There is evidence to support that clitoroplasty and clitorectomy are both gambles when it comes to a woman being able to experience pleasurable feelings in her clitoris after these surgeries are performed, “clitorplasty attempts to preserve the tip, or glens of the clitoris on the theory that sexual function can thus be retained...Researchers in human sexuality have long known that wome

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