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MixedNuts comments on Can the Chain Still Hold You? - Less Wrong
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Yep, sorta like gender roles affect gender, so if you wear dresses you can't be a Real Man, etc.
The second part doesn't follow from the first. We give intersex babies unnecessary surgeries, but these surgeries try not to cause sterility (correct me if I'm wrong), we don't discourage fertile intersex people comfortable in the gender they were raised as from having children, we don't selectively destroy gametes and embryos likely to result in intersex children, and we certainly don't chide binary-sexed people from having children likely to be intersex. (We do sterilise trans people, though.)
Aren't most intersex individuals infertile to begin with? It also seems valuable to point out that the sterilization of trans people is generally at their request.
My experience with intersex individuals is limited to one, but he deeply wishes he had had the 'unnecessary surgery' when he was young instead of after years and years of infections.
Lots are, lots aren't, I have no idea where to get reliable stats.
Much of the time, but "you must be permanently sterile to change your legal sex" is a completely unnecessary law. I've known someone who isn't getting a vaginoplasty just in case uterus grafts become possible in her lifetime and the op would compromise that. Trans men don't usually get bottom surgery, so sterility is impermanent (just get off T when you want kids); many do get hysterectomies, but only get their ovaries removed because of legal requirement. And there's no reason not to freeze gametes.
Well yeah, that's one reason we shouldn't give kids surgeries just to make their junk look normal - so that we can actually believe doctors when they say it would improve their health.
No you are correct. My response would be that an inefficient cleansing is still a cleansing. At this time we do not stop intersex people from procreating. We do highly stigmatize in society and we do traumatize them by denying their existence as natural and forcing/pressuring them to undergo extreme operations. Isn't this a more PC way of intentionally limiting their reproduction?
Imagine if you were playing a game where you had to obtain 100 signatures to win and before that game I told everyone else in the room that you were a child molester, and if they gave you their signature that meant they wanted a child molester to win. It would make it significantly harder for you to win right? This situation is analogous for the intersex person's situation in a society that views anything existing outside the traditional dichotomy as unnatural. They are stigmatized. It becomes significantly harder to find a job, mate, to feel self-worth, build confidence, trust, all the things humans need to successfully establish themselves and their genes in society. Sure, there is a lower tier of society bracketed off for them. They can work in the carnivals, whorehouse, etc, but they are in some sense blocked from "normal" society.
It would be interesting to look at suicide and marriage rates among hermaphrodites in Europe and America. Which would you guess is higher?