(Catherine Opie for The New York Times)

The kids are alright....

When Brian Sullivan — the baby who would before age 2 become Bonnie Sullivan and 36 years later become Cheryl Chase — was born in New Jersey on Aug. 14, 1956, doctors kept his mother, a Catholic housewife, sedated for three days until they could decide what to tell her. Sullivan was born with ambiguous genitals, or as Chase now describes them, with genitals that looked “like a little parkerhouse roll with a cleft in the middle and a little nubbin forward.” Sullivan lived as a boy for 18 months, until doctors at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan performed exploratory surgery, found a uterus and ovotestes (gonads containing both ovarian and testicular tissue) and told the Sullivans they’d made a mistake: Brian, a true hermaphrodite in the medical terminology of the day, was actually a girl. Brian was renamed Bonnie, her “nubbin” (which was either a small penis or a large clitoris) was entirely removed and doctors counseled the family to throw away all pictures of Brian, move to a new town and get on with their lives. The Sullivans did that as best they could. They eventually relocated, had three more children and didn’t speak of the circumstances around their eldest child’s birth for many years. As Chase told me recently, “The doctors promised my parents if they did that” — shielded her from her medical history — “that I’d grow up normal, happy, heterosexual and give them grandchildren.”

Needless to say, doctors' predictions proved far from the mark. I met Bonnie/Cheryl at a party in San Francisco just around the time she was starting ISNA (and I was eager to begin transition). She is an absolutely brilliant person and has accomplished so much in the short period of time since then. I remain ever in awe of her.

Bravo to her and the other brave people who have come out publicly in their fight to end the barbarous practice of non-essential surgery on babies!

Chase’s position — that cosmetic genital operations on intersex children should be stopped and that children should be made to feel loved and accepted in their unusual bodies — is still considered radical. Most people believe, reflexively, that irregular-looking genitals would be extremely difficult to live with — for a child on a sports team, for an adult seeking love and sex — so why not try to make them look more normal? Katrina Karkazis, a medical anthropologist at the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford, interviewed 19 clinicians and researchers of various specialties who treat intersex individuals, 15 intersex adults and 15 parents of intersex children, and she found that a majority of the doctors and parents felt surgery was a good idea. “We chose surgery for my daughter mainly because we did not want her to grow up questioning her sexual identity,” one mother explained about her baby, who was born with congenital adrenal hyperplasia, a genetic defect of the adrenal glands that causes girls’ genitals to appear masculinized at birth. “We felt that she should look like a female, so we chose the clitoroplasty and the vaginoplasty. We felt that she would have a better self-image if she did not have a ‘phallic structure’ and ‘scrotum.’ ”

Within the medical community, Chase has been successful in tempering the explicitness with which people publicly make this argument. As Chase has explained innumerable times, intersex babies are not having difficulty with sexual identity or self-image. The parents are, and parental anxiety about the appearance of a child’s genitals should be treated with counseling, not with surgery to the child. [emphasis mine]

The article goes on to detail the discomfort some parents feel when their little "girl" starts to play with her enlarged clitoris around age two.

In other words, parents would rather subject a toddler to the physical pain and emotional trauma of surgery and risk destroying nerve sensation and their child's sexual functioning later in life, than deal with the reality that their child is a sexual being who may not fit into the neat little box the parent has constructed.

As for the prospect of children or adults living normal lives with “unusual” bodies, one of the most widely read articles I ever wrote was at Cheryl’s invitation for a special issue of Chrysalis focused on intersexuality.

In it, I explained a technique to shower in an open (male) gym setting when one lacks a penis. At the time I wrote it, I thought it would be read by all of 12 people. Instead, it is (to date) the sole piece I’ve written to be cited in a couple of professional books, journal articles and to have influenced (very slightly) a Pulitzer Prize winning author. Much to my chagrin (due to a playfully chosen title) it’s often the first link to come up when I’m googled

Chase's long-term goal is the eradication of infant genital surgery conducted for the sole purpose of altering appearance, a goal that the NYT article describes as "outlandish to many medical professionals and to most of the general public as well."

All I can ask is, "Why?!"