I don't recall seeing a specific thread here about this subject so I thought we should have one. If there already is a thread for this please let me know. Anyway, I thought it would be a good idea to have a listing of some sort for doctors that we know of that are sensitive to IS conditions. I'd also suggest maybe having a list of docs to avoid but am not sure if that would touch on slanderous. Back to my point. If you know of any good doctors that are sensitive to us & to IS conditions, please, by all means, post what you can about them here.

Andi

Andi,

If you write Betsy she can give you a list of IS friendly docs in your area. I think there might be legality issues of listing good & bad docs on the board itself. Anyone has access to the boards and might choose to cause problems for doctors that are listed as IS friendly. What few docs that care about us should be protected.

Angela

OK, I see your point. I certainly didn't intend to be truoblesome.

Andi

__________________
No good deed ever goes unpunished

It's really not a problem...

Most doctors who have your respect are quite honored by it---they are the ones who know and understand how badly some mistreated us.

we do maintain a small database of doctors and psychs that we know are IS friendly...usually we get the names from someone who is seeing one they like and they either ask if they can pass their names on to us or just tell us. I do try and get permission before officially adding them to our list.

We also get names from the docs themselves...usually via email letting us know that they support our efforts and then I ask to include them.

Some of the psych providers are listed on line in our psyche section. I never added the medical providers...no particular reason, I just never did it. I am hoping that the lists will be expanded and eventually online in a searchable database sometime this year.

With that in mind, please do tell us who is good. If they are not good, and you can share that as well as long as it is done in a non-slanderous way. If you would rather not share online, write me (with good and bad) so I can add them to our offline list.

Betsy

__________________
Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is. --Margaret Mitchell

MARC R. LAUFER, MD
Assisant Professor of Obstertrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology
Harvard Medical School
Chief, Division of Pediartic/Adolescent Gynecology
Division of Reproducitve Endocrinology
Gynecologic Surgery

Brighams and Woman's Hospital
center for Reproductive Medicine in Boston
also at Children Hospital


This Doctor is very sweet, smart and understanding and is helping me now. My other doctors that I had as a child are much older then him but are still in practice. Dr Hendren, and Dr Crawford. Hendren can be reached at the Children's Hospital, and Crawford at Mass Genral Hospital.

Crawford is one of the leading Hermaphidite specialist in MASS.

Hendren, although he doesn't operate due to his age, is still in the Children Hospital as the Cheif of surgery.

Hendren is one of the best Children Doctors in the world.

He has many books written about him, the best book about him, one that is one of my favorite read is:

The Work of Human Hands
By: G. Wayne Miller

He has helped a thousand of sexualy ambigous children, and has separated siamese twins, preformed open heart surgery on new borns, and has successfully rebuilt children with deformities so severe that other surgeons would not dare risk a operation.
I have done lecturing for Hendren at M.G.H. to other Endocroligists under him.

I hope this imformation helps someone.
Good Luck!! to all! :D

__________________
You really have to love yourself, to get anything done in this world!

Julanne

Hi Jules,

With the exception of Laufer, who comes highly recommended, I'm having issues with the old surgeon.

I don't mean to offend, but I am having problems processing how doctors who spend a lifetime mutilating intersex babies and children can be all that great. In my mind, they have earned their living in blood money mutilating children that had nothing wrong with them except for genitals that don't fit what they think is normal. I'm sure few, if any, of their minor patients gave permission to have their genitals mutilated. Surgeries on children are done out of a misguided fear that we can never be happy with the body we were born with, paternalism, and homophobia.

I wonder if the children (now adults) who he mutilated without their consent would feel he's all that great. If I am wrong, please feel free to let me know why you feel that way.

Betsy

__________________
Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is. --Margaret Mitchell

Now, from what I have read and studied on my own, Doctors have been only operating on ambigous children for about forty-five to fifty years or about the time that they learned how to put babys under sucessfully. Have you ever looked at the whole history of intersexed people long before surgery was a major option? In almost all cases from 1940 and back, intersexed people grew up in total isolation and rarely found partners. The truth is, before 1940 the highest sucide rate among people born with birth defects of any kind were, yes, you should have guessed it, people with gentic anomolies of the gentails.The sucide rate was staggering. I would guess that not being able a find a wife or husband durring times when this was very important to our cultue had a lot to do with it. Also this was a time when there was no support for these people as. Less then 5% of interesexed people before the days of surgery had a chance of anything like a normal life. Now ambigous gentails, boys with breasts, and girls with a penus have been around a lot longer then people have been operating on them, But most of them were concidered strange in the way they looked unclothed or in the way they acted. Even their parents back then disowned them and sucide was a big option. If not sucide then alot of them ended up (sadly)in mental wards. The whole idea in the first place of correcting them with surgery was so that they could fit in better with there family, find partners, and live a normalized life. The intersexed state didn't seem as complex when the first gential surgery was preformed, and the outcome was to help, not hurt these children. Now fifty years later the issues of being intersexed are much different. There are support groups and much better education about the topic. There was the Gay movement in the seventys, that helped to open peoples mind up about gender bending, and the different kinds of intersexed states are far more documented. Now in 2003 the issues of gentail surgery are much different. You can't just only say "Make it a girl" "Like they did in 1945. What they documented was that with corrective surgery, 20% of the children operated on had normal lives as adults. That was a improvment from 5% so they saw a reason to continue on with the operations.
Infants are genderless in the way they self preceive themselfs. How can you take away a right to choose your sex when at that age you don't know what sex and gender is never mind your own? It is up to the choice of well educated Doctors and parents to ask themselves which is the worse of the two evils. Being intersexed will be a struggle but can those struggles be made eaiser if the child feels when they are old enough to know the difference that their gentials at least look like other peoples? Of course with all the different intersexed states, not all of them need surgery. Some still develop well with theirpy and nurturing, love and understanding, but some intersexed children will never get that enviroment, maybe thats what the sucide and depression rate is still high for this condition.
Dr Hendren was best known for solving the colceal disorder, Being born with out a anus and rectom. In fact, as a child at nine years old I had to have semial vesticals removed. Many of my roomates in the hospital had the colceal dissorder and had to have the bags for stool and urine stapled on there stomach. He was the only surgen skilled enough to rebuild these children so not only could they go to the bathroom normaly, but looked normal well. I also had a roomate that i will never forget, a boy with two penuses. He was only six at the time and he pulled down his pants to show me both before and after the surgery. Hendren was also the first Doctor to teach other Doctors how to operate without removing sexual senitivity. And he made a gideline for what children should be operated on and what children shouldn't. Most children that passed through his hands were better off and over 20,000 children did, some with gentials problems, other with heart problems, and others with medical problems so unbeleviable it was nothing short a mircale that he was able to give them a normal life. I was his 55th operation in 1968 and he gave me a normilzed life. Are all doctors as gifted as Hendern? No! Many of them are still act like they are in the 1940's and without much thought will say"Make it a girl" and chop away. I think that is very sad. Some parents to are to blame as well, they don't want the responobilty of saying " well, maybe I should wait and see" or "I'm going to have to explain to my child that they are different" They want a quick fix which is a operation. Your a boy or a girl and thats that. You and I both know it is not that simple. Maybe there just not educated enough.
Dr Crawford is old but is very kind and has seen many many intersexed children grow up, some have gender problems their whole life regardless of wheather they had operations. Some of his paitance, like me are in that 20% and are living a normaized life. I would only post doctors that I feel are understanding. LAUFER, I must add stuided under Hendren.
SO that leaves us on the ground that the surgerys had the best intention when they started, but good intentions can pave the way to hell. Now Doctors need a little more common sence and less " Lets make it a girl!" Parents need better education about the effects of suregry. We may need more theirpy for children and less operations, but operations need to be kept open as a option in case the child wants to change gender, or in some cases when you can't tell the gender. I could go on and give you many pages about case historys and the history of the intersexed before 1940 but it is very sad and I think I made some points here.
WIthout a doubt some Doctors, and parents are clueless and make very bad choices for the intersexed and there faimlys. I say lets look at the doctors that have done right by us. they diserve credit from us for tring to give us better lives:)

__________________
You really have to love yourself, to get anything done in this world!

Julanne

Hi Jules,

I'm sorry I haven't had time to get back to this before now, and I need to make really brief as I am barely conscious. It was a really busy weekend (4 presentations...each 1.5 hours in three days and rehearsal for Monday all afternoon)

Anyways, I wanted to point out something from a paper that is posted on this website (and cutting and pasting instead of properly citing). It is from the paper that Dr. Nina Williams had published last year. Nina is one of the psychotherapists leading the way in the psychological care of intersex today:


)One of the few studies of the psychological adjustment of intersexed people was done by Money, the psychologist later responsible for the argument that intersex children should be surgically altered in infancy. Money’s study, done before the advent of modern treatment protocols, led him to conclude that his subjects were “living testimony to the stamina of human personality in the face of sexual ambiguity of no mean proportions” (in Colopinto,1999, p. 235). Inexplicably, Money would later call intersexuality, “the syndrome that stigmatizes the child as a freak - a sexual freak” (1987).

Nearly fifty years later, virtually the only long-term outcome study to evaluate psychological functioning found the picture was dramatically different for a contemporary sample treated with sex assignment, genital surgery, and psychological counseling of parents and child. Nearly forty percent of these intersexed children had developed psychopathology by age sixteen (Slijper, Drop, Molenaar, & Keizer-Schrama, 1998).



It's ironic that Money first thought we were quite well-adjusted and then decided we "needed to be fixed" (my quotes) I have a copy of that paper he wrote before he saw mutilation as a good thing. He expected to find a high suicide rate, instead he found happy, well-adjusted people.

You can read the whole paper at http://www.bodieslikeours.org/resea...s_2002_apa.html

I think you will be surpised to find out how well-adjusted we were before the doctors such as the one you mention began looking at our bodies as a problem.

Betsy

__________________
Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is. --Margaret Mitchell

"I think you will be surpised to find out how well-adjusted we were before the doctors such as the one you mention began looking at our bodies as a problem. "

Betsy
__________________________________________________ _

No surprise to me.

Andi

__________________
No good deed ever goes unpunished