Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Susan Stanko on September 17, 2012 at 7:26pm

I guess he has never heard of intersex.

Permalink Reply by James M. Martin on September 17, 2012 at 7:29pm

Must be careful there, Susan.  Intersex often implies hermaphroditic person.  I learned that the hard way during my occult days, thinking the word was roughly interchangeable with androgynous, which it is not.  As an aside, when I was small, boys pretended to know a lot about something called "morphodites." I had to go to college to learn about things like Greek mythology and such and only learned of the "Divine Androgyne" from reading books about alchemy.

Permalink Reply by Susan Stanko on September 17, 2012 at 7:33pm

Realy?  I thought that was the correct term for someone with both male and female organs.

Permalink Reply by James M. Martin on September 17, 2012 at 7:47pm

I misunderstood your comment, sorry.

Permalink Reply by Susan Stanko on September 17, 2012 at 7:51pm

No prob.

Permalink Reply by Beth KZ on September 17, 2012 at 8:15pm

Intersex applies to a great many more people than you might think. This happens much more often than is usually believed - about 1 child in 100 is born with such a condition, and about 1 or 2 in 1000 have some sort of treatment or surgery for it. See Intersex Society of North America for much discussion on the matter. It often means ambiguous genitalia, genetic abnormalities (Not XX or XY - XXY being the most common of these) which leads to numerous and various physical anomalies, hormonal anomalies or hormone sensitivity anomalies such as Partial Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome or Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. Some of the physical anomalies are obvious (e.g., lack of a penis in an otherwise male body), and some may nob be as obvious or may be discovered in teen or adult years - such as ovo-testes - organs which remain in their foetal form, and fail to develop into either ovaries or testicles - which give off strange mixes of hormones and have a higher chance of becoming cancerous.

Someone who is a "true" hermaphrodite, with fully-functional reproductive organs and genitalia of both sexes have not been observed to exist. It's the same bit of foetal tissue that develops into male reproductive organs or female reproductive organs.

Many of them are assigned a gender shortly after birth, and often this entails numerous surgical and medical procedures, or artificial hormones. This causes some problems for many of them, and many do not feel as if they are "really" the sex they are assigned. They may feel that they are of the other sex, they may feel they are neither sex/gender, and some feel that they have attributes of both in various ways.

Permalink Reply by Chrissie Farthing on September 18, 2012 at 8:27pm

I guess I was very fortunate, I went to court and stated that I was changing gender and my name change was approved.  I then changed my gender with great assistance of Dr. Marci Bowers and more money than I like to admit.  I am pleased that that part all went well.  As I happened to make this change at the age of 76 I was on the Medicare rolls and that was another story.  They are so worried about Gay Marriage that they attempt to derail any change that could come under the same sex heading.  I had been married to a FEMALE and even though my wife had passed away in 03 I still had a "F" under my SSN. (that's right, wives are listed under their husbands SSN I mean they are only women or "property") and there is no way that you can have two Fs under one SSN. It took over a year and a threat to involve Associated Press in the case before I finally got my Medicare card with a Female designation.  The gender marker is in big black letters right in the middle of the card. The religious right is in to everything and in fact could teach the Teleban a few tricks.  Equil Rights for all, but the small print reads "as long as they are bible thumping straight Christians" I shudder to think of what our world will be if the Republicans including Judge Bill Graves manage to win the next election.. He is just the tip of that iceberg.