NY Times, May 27, 2003 If Biology is Destiny, When Shouldn't It Be? Dr. Barron H. Lerner recently published an article in the New York Times about intersex issues and the controversy surrounding treatment, including the lack of data regarding appropriate care and the need for continued research. While Lerner cites recent studies showing the harmful effects of surgery, such as the Minto et al. study (link here), he also quotes Dr. Kenneth Glassberg, who suggests that not performing surgery on intersex infants is “more of an experiment” than surgery itself. The article can be accessed here. Read the article at ISNA (PDF) Courtesy of ISNA.

Maclean's, May 26, 2003, Gender Paradoxes (MacLean's is a Canadian publication) contains an excellent article on intersex alongside several other articles on gender in the May 26 issue. The article features people with intersex conditions (including ISNA's founding director Cheryl Chase) and offers a fairly accurate and balanced take on the medical debate surrounding "treatment." Read the article online.

Girlfriends Magazine, May 2003. Born Between Two Sexes. Girlfriends Magazine, a best-selling lesbian magazine publishes an article in their May, 2003 issue about "...the Nascent Intersex Movement" that is being led mostly by women. The article puts much of it's focus on Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia. Interviewed for this article was Janet Green of Bodies Like Ours, along with Monica Casper and Thea Hillman, both of ISNA. Look for the issue with Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the cover. Read the article online.

Ellen K. Feder, 2002, "Doctor's Orders: Parents and Intersexed Children." Pp. 294-320 in The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency, edited by Eva Feder Kittay and Ellen K. Feder. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc

Dr. Ellen K. Feder, of American University, has written an excellent and important chapter on parents and intersexed children in a volume on care and dependency. The work is significant in that it is the first account of intersex based on interviews with parents. Dr. Feder argues that the isolation of parents and medicine's failure to take account of their experiences is unfortunate; but more than that, parents' isolation and confusion are built into the treatment process itself.

Unlike other situations in which parents with disabled children are provided access to resources and support groups, the parents of children with intersex conditions are treated instrumentally, primarily as the source of informed consent to support a doctor's decision. Parents are not given crucial information about their child's condition and are not connected to important social and psychological resources. The end result is that while parents attempt to do the best they can for their children, their decisions are shaped within a medical context that privileges expert knowledge over full disclosure, and normalization over a child's future sensation and qualify of life. **Abstract courtesy of Monica Casper, ISNA Read the article on-line.

Born Between Two Sexes. The Online Sun. UK A candid article with Melissa Cull, the founder of an UK CAH organization. Read the article.

Emi Koyama from the Intersex Initiative Portland has had a paper published in the Fall/Winter 2003 issue of Women's Studies Quarterly. Here is the synopsis from IPDX.org: This paper, published in the Fall/Winter 2002 issue of Women's Studies Quarterly, analyzes how intersex issues have been taught in Women's Studies and other related fields (Gender Studies, Queer Studies, etc.) and proposes a new model that integrates activist and academic approahes to thinking about intersexuality. Read the entire paper by visiting the website of Intersex Initiative Portland.

The Rocky Mountain News has an article about one of the early researchers in the area of intersex. From the headline: Living on the periphery of British imperial power in the 1800s gave Dr. James Barry more space to be his flamboyant and complicated self. As it turns out, he had his own secrets and motives. Read the article.

Bodies Like Ours was featured in an article published in Just Out, a queerweekly in Portland, OR. Read the article.

Columbus Alive, a weekly alternative newspaper in Columbus, OH, has published an article about PFLAG's adoption of an Intersex Policy Statement. Janet Green of Bodies Like Ours was interviewed and quoted for the article. To read the article, please visit the website of Columbus Alive.

Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychology. Intersexed experience has been explored in only a handful of psychoanalytic reports, none of which examine the effects of this treatment paradigm . This paper presents the case of a woman who feared she is intersexed. The dynamics, transference, and countertransference configurations reenact the empathic failure implicit in her medical treatment and her family life, namely a caretaker’s preoccupation with the patient’s unusual anatomy, rather than her trauma. Williams 2002, Psychoanalytic Psychology, Vol. 19, No. 3, 455-474. Reprinted here with permission of the author and the Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychology. Read the entire paper. The author of this case study paper, Dr. Nina Williams, Psy.D is a Founding Board member of Bodies Like Ours.

Fathering Magazine online published an article by Alice Dreger about intersex. It is primarily a comprehensive Intersex 101 for new and expectant parents. Read the article here. That link will take you to Fathering Magazine online. Bodies Like Ours has also reprinted with permission the entire article. You can find it here without all the annoying pop-up ads.Rocky Mountain News has a story about an intersexed person who tried to keep her medical condition a secret. A police officer thought it would be fun to see if anyone he knew had a record and discovered her secret. The result has been an egregious invasion of privacy and has caused her massive amounts of grief. The county of Denver has paid her a small settlement. Here's the story.

NOW Times Summer 2002 issue publishes an article about atypical genitalia and surgery. The article includes the personal stories of Janet Green of Bodies Like Ours, and Debbie Hartman, the mother of a child with Mosaic Syndrome. Janet has from Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia. Debbie is on the Board of both Bodies Like Ours and ISNA Both are tireless advocates for the elimination of cosmetic infant genital surgeries. Janet's story was written under a pseudonym of Dandara Hill

Recent published articles appear to show a link between enviromental hormones and the development of abnormal sexual characteristics. Read More

NOW Times Summer 2002 NOW Times Summer 2002

September 2000 article in John Hopkins Magazine reexamining current thought in the treatment of atypicle genitalia based upon the research of Dr. William Reiner and others Into The Hands Of Babes

NYTimes, July 28, 1998. An essay by Alice Dreger about living with an intersex condition and the current medical protocol When Medicine Goes Too Far in the Pursuit of Normality

The Tyranny of the Esthetic | Martha Coventry Online article by Martha Coventy about the ethics of intersex genital mutilation:

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