Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

'We don’t know if your baby’s a boy or a girl': growing up intersex

"Debate: Why should gender-affirming health care be included in health science curricula?
"4 out of 5 parents support teaching gender and sexuality diversity in Australian schools ""

This should be an interesting article for any concerned about the level of anguish so many young people and their parents suffer.

For generations, children with male and female characteristics have been assigned a sex at birth. Is there an alternative? Parents, doctors and intersex adults share their experiences


Juliet Swire with Jack. Photograph: Sophia Spring for the Guardian

Jenny Kleeman
Sat 2 Jul 2016 18.00 AEST
Last modified on Sat 2 Dec 2017 03.14 AEDT

When Juliet Swire gave birth to her third son in February 2014, doctors told her not to tell anyone he’d been born. She didn’t announce Jack’s arrival for weeks – not even to close family and friends.

Jack was born with both male and female anatomy, with ovarian and testicular tissue, and genitals that could belong to either a boy or a girl. He has one of at least 40 congenital variations, known collectively as disorders of sexual development (DSD), or intersex traits. It was months before Juliet and her husband, Will, were told Jack’s specific diagnosis, of mixed gonadal dysgenesis .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/45%2CX/46%2CXY_mosaicism . While they waited, all his parents knew was that Jack’s sex couldn’t be determined at birth, and that their doctors needed time to assign it.

“One of the beautiful parts of having a baby is being able to share the joy that this tiny, newborn person has entered the world,” Juliet says. “We could have announced that our baby had been born with complications that mean we don’t know if he’s a boy or a girl. But the doctors took that away from us without any explanation.” By encouraging them to keep Jack a secret, the doctors made them feel there was something shameful about his condition, she says. “It set the precedent for how other people were going to perceive it.”

--
I'd assumed that XX is a girl and XY is a boy. People don't know
there are variations, so when they occur it's freakish
--

Jack’s specific diagnosis is rare, but being born with a blend of female and male characteristics is surprisingly common: worldwide, up to 1.7% of people have intersex traits, roughly the same proportion of the population who have red hair, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights .. https://unfe.org/system/unfe-65-Intersex_Factsheet_ENGLISH.pdf . The British charity DSD Families .. http://www.dsdfamilies.org/ .. estimates that around 130 babies born in this country each year need investigations before their sex is assigned .. http://dsdfamilies.org/docs/Midwives%20article.pdf . Other people may have problems with their hormones that aren’t visible at birth.

Jack’s parents knew he was different before he was born, when a routine scan couldn’t determine if he was a boy or a girl. Juliet was referred to a consultant at the local hospital, followed by meetings with geneticists and neonatologists, blood tests and an amniocentesis. She was told her baby was genetically male, but that this didn’t necessarily make him a boy. “It was very hard. I’d just assumed that XX is girl and XY is boy,” Juliet says. “Because people don’t know there are variations, when they occur it’s a freakish thing. But actually, he is just a normal child.”

Bouncing around the living room of their home in the West Midlands, Jack looks completely ordinary. With mousy, curly hair, a runny nose and a toothy smile, he clambers over Juliet and chucks a green football at me, oblivious to what his mother is telling me.

“My entire pregnancy, I’d worried that I wasn’t going to be able to love my baby because it wasn’t a he and it wasn’t a she,” she recalls. But when Jack was born, he was blue and floppy. “Although it was awful at the time, it was the best thing that could have happened: I would have done anything to have made sure he was breathing again.” Her eyes fill with tears. “Quite quickly, he was crying. The relief was unbelievable. He was a baby and he needed feeding. Making sure that he was cared for was my priority, not poking around in his nappy.”

Then someone from Bounty (a baby merchandising company whose sales reps, controversially, are allowed on maternity wards to collect mothers’ details for marketing purposes and to sell photographs .. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/the-womens-blog-with-jane-martinson/2013/sep/26/kick-bounty-out-maternity-wards-parenting-clubs ) paid her a visit when Jack was a day old; Will had just gone home to rest. She told Juliet she was there to take pictures of the baby: was it a boy or a girl? “We had no idea. Because I was tired and emotional, I just said, ‘Oh, he’s a boy.’ She then got a blue blanket and a blue teddy and a label that said ‘I’m a boy’, and put it on him to take photographs. She never even asked permission to be there. When she left, it was the biggest meltdown I’d had yet.”

The Swires say they still feel let down by the team who were supposed to be looking after them – not just the photographs, but being advised by doctors not to announce Jack’s birth, by the fact their midwife didn’t read Juliet’s notes before delivering him, by the fact other people working in the hospital were not stopped from asking them the sex of their new baby. Most of all, they felt isolated by how little medical professionals knew about disorders of sexual development. “The midwives have never heard of it. Our GPs have never heard of it. A&E doctors don’t know, nurses don’t know. It’s rare – but it’s not that rare.”

When it comes to wider public awareness of what it is like to be intersex, there is almost none. ...

Continued - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/02/male-and-female-what-is-it-like-to-be-intersex

One recent example of the unbelievably insensitive and unempathetic public lack of awareness, rooster's, And this is why Desantis will be president…
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=168519228