Intersexuality - Dealing with Intersexuality

Socio-cultural Attitudes - Medical Traditions

Just as the law, medicine also has religious roots. For many thousands of years, only the spirits, the gods or God could heal. When a shaman, witch doctor, medicine man, or priest tried to cure the sick, it was well understood that his treatment alone could not make them well again. Much more important was the help of divine forces. In the Western world, the physicians of ancient Greece and Rome were the first to break with this tradition. They began to disregard the supernatural and to apply scientific principles to the practice of medicine. In the Middle Ages, their work was preserved and further developed by great Islamic doctors. Their combined knowledge, in turn, laid the groundwork for the first Medical Schools in Europe, and the accumulation and acceleration of research conducted in these institutions eventually produced the enormous scientific advances we have seen in modern times.
However, there was one exception: Well into the 20th century, sexual medicine remained tied to unacknowledged religious, prescientific notions. It simply redefined the old sins and vices as diseases and saw its duty in preserving or restoring sexual conformity. Therefore, just as the theologians before them, the doctors had little patience with sexual variations of any kind. In the case of intersexuality this usually meant the earliest possible sex assignment and “corrective” surgery. There was no doubt that a prompt “normalization” of an intersexual body was always “in the best interest of the child”. After all, there were only two sexes, and anything in between had to be eliminated or suppressed as unhealthy. Medical terms like “defect”, “disorder”, “malformation”, and “abnormality” reflected this view.
Of course, for a very long time the causes of intersexualty were unknown. Only modern genetic and hormonal research finally opened the door to the essential discoveries, but even today not everything is fully understood. Still, doctors have learned enough to be more cautious and to respect personal differences. Accordingly, they now grant every patient the right to self-determination as a matter of course. As long as individuals are content with their atypical physical development, they increasingly find themselves accepted on their own terms. After all, even an “uncorrected” intersexual condition does not diminish a person’s dignity in any way.