England Leading The Way In Understanding and Accepting Intersexuality

England’s National Health Service is the first to base treatment on the assumption that it should be acceptable for boys and girls to look far from “normal”. That doctors may be better off doing nothing to “fix” the kind of confusing genitals that incite laddish, locker-room bullying. This approach asks provocative questions of the rest of us. What makes us the sex we are, and what makes that so normal in the first place?

“These conditions are relatively common,” says Professor Adam Balen, consultant gynaecologist at Leeds General Infirmary. “I wouldn’t say they are hidden because that is an emotive term, but we’re obsessed by sex, and whenever sex is raised all of a sudden a prurient angle comes into it. We are not open enough in our society to discuss the variations that come with disorders of physical development.

“How do you define your gender? Is it defined by sex chromosomes? Not always. Is it your sex hormones? Not necessarily. Then what?”

Take Gordon, a man who lives on the north coast of Britain, who “was a male child with ambiguous genitals”. Unusually for his time, he escaped surgery. He was raised as a girl until the age of 3, because of a genetic condition that drastically lowers testosterone levels. Then he was brought up, unhappily, because of changing-room bullying, as a boy. “I always had this idea that I had sisters that I was detached from. It has occurred to me that, since I was dressed as a girl as a baby, I was feeling detached from myself.” His condition was diagnosed and treated only in his middle age, after a lifetime of struggling to succeed in a macho family, school and workplace — never “feeling or acting right”. “Typical males would consider me a sad specimen. But my girlfriend thinks it’s great.”

So, on reflection, he is glad he was not “corrected” at birth. “I see a society that doesn’t want to admit variation exists.”

Sarah Creighton, a gynaecologist at University College Hospital, tracked down ‘normalised’ patients, and those left to develop naturally. Her groundbreaking study in The Lancet found that those who were left as nature made them fared as well, if not better, than those who had been ‘normalised’. Being yourself was more important than being like others. Creighton’s findings were to start a British-led revolution: first, telling parents the truth about their child’s ambiguous-looking sex and, even more radical, saying that perhaps he or she could stay that way