- Joined
- Jul 22, 2015
I watched a documentary years ago where an intersex woman was trying to come to terms with surgery she'd had when she was a teenager. She was born appearing female, but when she hit puberty, hidden testicles started to descend. The doctor's advice was to have the testicles removed without telling the girl what the operation was for. In later years, the now adult woman tried to come to grips with it, but her mother refused to apologise, saying that she'd only done what the doctors had told her to do.That poor, poor kid. Sophie has done well to put her (and I will call her that, this is not a case of troonism) life absolutely destroyed by surgeons playing god.
This is not supposed to happen any more. Any kind of ambiguity or genital defect is supposed to be left until the sex of the baby is established. In the uk you need to register a birth within a set time but you can get an extension in such cases, to allow full genetic work to be done. ONLY immediate life saving work can be done - and a bladder prolapsing outside the body would be something that needs immediate work but the testes and penis should be left. You basically just need to make sure the baby can urinate and defecate safely.
I very much feel for Sophie. If I was her I think I might have gone and shown the surgeons the other end of the scalpel. Monsters
In Sophie's case, as the article said, the microsurgery that such a case would receive today just didn't exist. The surgeon was following accepted best practice at the time. It's an insanely difficult position to be put in. 'Female' genitalia is much easier to construct than 'male'. I really feel for Sophie, but medical technology wasn't that great forty years ago.