Understanding and Raising Intersex Children: A New Perspective

Everyone dreams of the day they will meet their children. From a young age, you can hear people saying the plans and desires they have for their future boy or girl. Our society is constructed in such a manner that everything operates under this male-female dichotomy. However, this system of operation is not always applicable. Cases where this is evident is when intersex babies are born. Intersex babies are born with genitalia that do not pertain entirely to either males or females, hence the term, intersex. Parents are unsure of what to think about their child. What should they name it? What colors shall they dress them in? Will they raise it as a boy or a girl? They are consumed with questions that are normally answered by assignation to a sex category.

When I first thought about what it would be like to have an intersex child, I drew a blank. The reason being that I had never even considered it a possibility. This stems form the serious lack of knowledge of the subject from the general society. Upon further consideration, I thought to myself, why should ambiguous genitalia affect in any way how I feel about my child? Having a boy or a girl makes no difference to a parent. All they care about is that they have a healthy baby. This would be my only concern in this situation. A child’s genitals should not be changed if they are born intersex. Who we are is defined by much more than our biological features. There are so many different things that influence who we are that it is impossible to use something like a penis or vagina to determine what role we will play in society. That decision should be entirely our own, which is why I would raise my intersex child with no gender