On a typical dreary Thursday afternoon, Suzanne Kessler began her speech by talking about nutritionists. She said recently she heard a nutritionist on the radio recommend that men eat nine servings of fruits and vegetables a day while women should eat seven servings a day.
“When I hear routine uses of the word men and women, I ask myself, ‘what do nutritionists mean by women and men?’” Kessler asked. “Do they mean people with clitorises and XX chromosomes should only eat seven or nine servings a day? Or people with Y chromosomes should eat more vegetables a day? Or do they mean people of a certain body weight; do they mean people with a certain metabolism of a certain muffin-fat ratio, a certain level of estrogen and androgen? Do they mean people who more or less like to wear pink nail polish? I don’t know. I don’t know what they mean by that.”
“It’s unethical not to specify what you mean by women or men,” Kessler said.
Nearly 100 various students and faculty members filled up 182 Lillis to hear Kessler, who is a professor of psychology and Dean of the School of Natural and Social Sciences at Purchase College State University of New York and author of “Lessons from the Intersexed,” talk on the ethics surrounding the treatment of those in an intersex condition.
The two hour lecture, which also featured bioethicist Alice Dreger of Northwestern University, was facilitated by associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies Elizabeth Reis and it provided insight into the life of an intersex person struggling to fit in.
Reis said Thursday’s lecture was organized as part of a grant from the Oregon Humanities Center to teach a new class called Sex and Medical Ethics, particularly in the 20th century.
“What Suzanne Kessler did so well in ‘Lessons from the Intersexed’ was to uncover social assumptions that guide clinical decision-making in regard to infants and children born intersex,” said Reis. Her book “provided the most comprehensive approach to the study of intersex that had ever been published up to that time. And it’s still a must-read for anyone interested in the medical management of these conditions, the importance of the social norms, or even more broadly the study of how we think about gender and how those decisions get made about who is a boy and who’s a girl.”
Kessler went on in her speech to explain that the treatment of intersex people is driven by the theory that there are two genders and if a child isn’t either, it needs to be altered surgically. She said that after having conducted interviews with physicians, she learned that they tell parents that infants need to be one or the other with pitifully little data. If a child has both a clitoris and testes, surgery is usually performed and a sex is chosen quickly.
“When surgeons described large clitorises as offensive and demanded surgery, they were revealing something about themselves,” said Kessler. “That they thought that these genitals were offensive. That they thought these genitals were somehow crying out, ‘Help, help, correct me please!’”
Kessler relayed narratives of intersex children who lived in families where they didn’t talk about what had happened at infancy, where the child received no counseling or where the child was lied to about surgery. She said the ramifications of this are substantial and that the child deserves to know his or her history.
Alice Dreger, who worked with Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) and does pro-bono work for people with uncommon medical discoveries, was the second speaker in the lecture series.
She also explained how motherhood is a big part of her life and how it intertwines with her profession. As a career mom, she said her son is exposed to information all the time.
“He’s the only three year old I ever knew who used to say ‘most boys have penises and scrotums,’” Dreger said as the audience burst into laughter.
Dreger continued her lecture by discussing physical and sexual ambiguity. She also relayed some textbook beliefs that she found preposterous. Married to a doctor, Dreger said she used to look at his medical textbooks for perspective.
“What it said, I’m not kidding, was that if a girl was born with a large clitoris, she might grow up to be a lesbian,” said Dreger.
Therefore, the doctors would feel obligated to perform a clitoris reduction. Dreger said she remembers feeling stunned at reading this.
Dreger also shared tragic stories she’s seen and heard to make the audience realize how serious these matters are. One story included a baby boy who had his penis burned off during his circumcision. At 18 months, the doctors changed the baby to a girl. After a hard life of not fitting in and secretly being attracted to girls, the child’s father told her about her medical history. At 14 years old, the child formerly known as Brenda became David.
In her speech, Dreger stated that she feels doctors are maybe taking on too many roles. She said the term “cosmetic medicine” is an oxymoron.
“I fully expect that I’m going to go to my gynecologist one day and be up there in the stirrups and she or he is going to be doing my pap smear, and I’m going to be offered a bikini wax,” said Dreger. “I think that’s part of what we’re dealing with, is this confusion about what medicine’s really for.”
University freshman Emily Malino is in Philosophy 170: Love and Sex. Members of the class were required to attend the intersex symposium after reading Dreger’s work.
Malino said she appreciated how the lecture was based more on the medical aspect of the issue as opposed to how people feel about it. Malino said she was interested in finding out more about the outcome of these procedures and why intersex people are typically unhappy with the surgeries performed on them.
Reis said choosing to bring Kessler and Dreger to speak was also a no-brainer.
“It made sense to bring (to the University) two prominent people in the field,” said Reis. “When you think of intersex, you think of these people. They’re very prominent in the field, their books are widely read and well-reviewed and they are the top of the field.”
Reis was pleased with the lecture content. She hopes people learned about the significance of this topic, or at least that it is a matter of importance.
“I liked the way that Suzanne Kessler said that ‘whatever it is that’s considered natural in a society is actually about morals.’ I thought that was a well-phrased comment,” said Reis.
“I want people to recognize this as an issue. I think a lot of people aren’t aware of intersex as an issue,” said Reis.