When you perform cosmetic surgery on infant genitals you risk zero sexual sensation when the owner of the genitals becomes an adult.

Personally, I survived some pretty intense teasing as a child. I would not trade my ability to have an orgasm now to make that all go away then.

Kids usually know by the time they're toddlers what genders they are. Should surgery be done on them? That's their decision to make, and theirs alone.

These letters are a really interesting study in human psychology. The difference between "deformity" and "variation" is largely a matter of cultural attitude. Certainly there are many tratis caused by random genetic variation, some we consider handicaps, like mental retardation, some we consider "normal" or even interesting, like multi-colored eyes, and some we consider extraordinary like the athletic abilites of Lance Armstrong or Michael Phelps. What I think we are dealing with here is the ick factor, that the thought of being neither male nor female is something people (even the most liberal among us) cannot tolerate. While the argument that these children would face harassment is true, that is an admission that the fault lies in our society, not in being intersexed.

Recovering Catholic here: I don't buy the priest anecdote either. Catholics believe that suicide is literally the only unforgivable sin (presumably because you can't repent and confess if you're dead). Priests can, and have, done many despicable things but I don't believe for one minute that a priest would counsel one of his parishioners to kill her/himself.

I guess they just can't be happy unless they've filled every single thread on this site with their hateful horseshit.

Anyway, I have to post. My ex was born with an intersex condition and operated on just after birth. Nobody told her. She knew from early childhood that she was supposed to be a girl, but she'd been assigned male. Her parents were in complete denial about it. They never told her about the surgery. She had to request her pediatric records as a young adult to confirm her suspicions.

Now she's stuck, post-puberty, trying to correct this mistake that was made without her consent at great expense. Worried about little intersexed kids feeling like freaks in preschool? Try being an adult who has to transition after all of those secondary sex characteristics have kicked in wrong. Try going out every day to face that level of hatred and abuse, and tell me then about feeling like a freak.

Gender assignment surgery should NEVER, EVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES BE DONE WITHOUT THE CONSENT AND DIRECTION OF THE SUBJECT. It's just that simple.

"Does that mean if a woman cannot have children, she's not a female? Only women between menarche and menopause are female? Anyone with Premature Ovarian Failure is no longer female?"

I've had the same thought. Once you starting Othering someone into an "it" via a lack of procreative ability, decency demands that you consider children and post-menopausal women to be its.

Self-determination is the only response. We all should respectfully STFU and let people be what they feel themselves to be, but, as I've posted many times at Salon, we distract ourselves with Michael Jackson and other titillating topics and it's going to kill us, for we grow collectively fatter and deeper in debt and we're emptying the oceans and have reset the Earth's thermostat to slow sizzle, but hey, hey, hey, let's take a look at Michael Jackson's corpse! And let's feel superior to intersex people!

but maybe it's just knowledge he lacks. He's not an endocronologist but if he were he might know about Turner Syndrome or Klinefelter Syndrome and also know about Caroline Cossey whos chronosomes produced confusing symptoms so that her parents regarded her as a boy, calling her Barry. Eventually, she became the woman she really was and had a small part in a James Bond film. This week the NYT had an obituary on Shi Piu Pu, a Chinese spy who passed himself off as a woman for many years. Whether this person, who died in Paris, was a genuine "woman" or not has not been mentioned but it's hormonal disharmony in the womb that creates an "intersex" baby.

This is a serious subject and I think this article trivializes it. It provides no solid medical information and seems to be geared to blurring sexual identities. There is a sort of sensationalism about Dr. Callahan's assertions which fails to address the emotional distress of an "intersex" child or the child's parents. Hormonal/genetic disorders can cause deafness, Down Syndrome and many other "mistakes". Drugs and alcohol can affect the embryo but sometimes there are misadventures in nature for which nobody can be held responsible. Hyena can be coyote or dingo and it has nothing to do with human society. Caroline Cossey, former model, lives in the US, although she was born in Britain, and I wouldn't be surprised if she knew more about a perplexing medical condition than Dr. Callahan. She can do more than talk the talk; she has walked the walk. By pretending "We're all intersex" this doctor has done a disservice to those who need understanding and the help of those who are qualified to provide it.

I saw a fascinating documentary on intersex people a few years ago. There were quite a few stories from people whose parents had chosen the wrong gender for them because there's no way to tell at birth how someone will identify as they grow older. Sometimes the child doesn't even know until puberty hits. So what then? Huge medical expenses to have the mistake corrected and god knows how many years of growing up in the wrong body?

And sometimes those early surgeries can permanently affect the ability to feel sexual pleasure. Can you imagine finding out you'll never have an orgasm because your parents didn't want to deal with the discomfort of raising an intersex child? Most marriages/partnerships involve sex. Being devoid of sexual enjoyment, not because it's your nature but because of a decision that was forced upon you, could seriously impact your life later on. I don't think it's right to allow parents to make such a profoundly significant decision for a child. Wait 'til they're 16 or 18 and let them weigh their options and make their own decision.

Pick a gender to dress them as, raise them as male or female, get a physician's excuse to get them out of gym class (I had one for asthma--not a big deal, there's lots of reasons you might not be able to participate), but don't permanently damage your kid's genitals just to make yourself feel more comfortable with the child you're raising.

As for the priest story--I believe the article says she committed suicide a decade afterwards, so she may well have talked about it with other people by then, which is how it would have gotten out. Priests are human, not divine. Maybe he thought he was being compassionate by suggesting that God could forgive even that sin if your circumstances are dire enough. Maybe he had psychopathic tendencies and got off on it. If priests can aid and abet Nazi war criminals and molest children, I'm sure they can also give really fucked up advice. People who presume to devote their lives to God are often just as personality-disordered and fucked up as the rest of us. We just don't have access to a worldwide network to help us cover up our "mistakes".