Medical student giving Intersex presentation

[davidlanham]

Hello, my name is David and I am a medical student in England. In a few weeks I will be giving a presentation on Intersex in order to raise awareness of intersex and in order to do this well I would like to hear as many peoples opinions as possible within the intersex community.
The two main areas I am interested in knowing more about is firstly the name Intersex, as oppose to hermaphrodite as oppose to DSD. Do people feel there is more stigma attached to any of these names.
The second issue I would like to cover is newborn gender normalizing surgery, what are peoples opinions. I have read up on what the medical profession feel about this but I am very interested to hear what the Intersex community thinks about this procedure.

Any comments would be greatly appreciated as I want to give the other student and Doctors an all around perspective on Intersex.

[KMJB]

hey, i would be willing to answer some of your questions.

1- Intersex can be a very vague terminology from what I've gathered, it can include CAIS, PAIS, Swyer's and others. If your going to refer to someone as a hermaphrodite i think its important to know where that person stand on the spectrum of DSD's are they made up of male and female parts?, there are people with CAIS who dont have any secondary sex differences, and there DNA is just different so to call them a hermaphrodite( atleast to call me a hermaphrodite, may be extremely insulting) I'd much rather be refered to as someone with CAIS.

2- Im not really sure about what to say about the surgeries. In my class we studied the Brenda/Bruce Rhiemer case( if thats at all helpful, its basically about whether gender is nature vs. nurture)