ABSTRACT
Do intersexed individuals – those of us born with ‘ambiguous’ sexual characteristics – have a political obligation to identify as members of a third, or even a fourth or fifth, sex? It would seem that the unwilling recipients of medical treatment for bodies that cannot be easily described as either male or female must decide whether to identify as intersexed, even after the body parts that medicine calls intersexed have been removed in childhood. This is because for some patients, the suggestion that genital surgery in infancy has successfully eliminated their intersexuality constitutes an unacceptable capitulation to medical normalisation. ‘I was not born with the genitalia of both men and women; I was born with child-sized intersexed genitals’, insists gender theorist Morgan Holmes (2000, 99). Seen in this way, a baby that has (for instance) testes and a small phallus without a urethra does not have an ‘ambiguous’ combination of male and female genitalia – male gonads and a clitoris, one might say – but rather a perfect, and perfectly comprehensible, set of intersexed genitals. Therefore in Holmes's view, genital surgery cannot clarify one's sex as either male or female; it simply injures one's intersexed genitalia. Accordingly, an identity other than male or female seems to be the most politically appropriate response to injurious genital surgery. In other words, only by refusing to identify as female or male can a post-surgical individual counter surgery's claim to make a patient readily determinable as either one sex or the other.
