Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Essay on pregnancy and childbirth
Essay on pregnancy and childbirth
Essays on childbirth
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Essay on pregnancy and childbirth
Hermaphrodites What is a hermaphrodite? Until reading this article I had little to no understanding of the term. A hermaphrodite is a person born with both male and female sex organs or other sexual characteristics. I choose the article “GENDER X the Battle Over Boy or Girl” because I wanted to see how families are effected by a child being born as a hermaphrodite.
The periodical “GENDER X the Battle Over Boy or Girl,” A police officer, Aaron Thompson (not his real name) cuts the umbilical cord between his wife and his first born child. His daughter had endocrine disorder congenital adrenal hyperplasia. Which limits hormone production in the adrenal glands. She had both male and female genitalia. Aaron Thompson had no idea there was such
…show more content…
Also, credible people are used in the article such as, Katrina Karkazi, a research scholar at Stanford’s Center for Biomedical Ethics. She discusses how narrow ideas about gender, societal and medical discomfort influences parents’ belief that they need to result to surgery to make their child normal. The source of the article is Stanford Medicine; Winter2011, Vol 28 Issue 1, p20. The author is Dianne Klein, whom is the author of Sandford Medicine Magazine. The article was written for a general audience. The personal stories of a child being a hermaphrodite, and how the parents’ feelings about it gave me a better understanding of the disease. Also, I could easily understand medical terminology because it was broken down and background information was present in helping me understand the material I was reading.
The article was in depth, it was carefully worked out and detailed. Prior to reading this article I had little understanding of a hermaphrodite. After reading this article I learned a lot. I never was aware of how difficult it must be for a parent to decide between a surgery to “fix” a baby’s sex, or leaving the child’s genitals intact. Letting the child make the decision would not be any
In Ruth Gilbert’s At the Border’s of the Human, she discusses society’s interest in hermaphrodites in terms of “people’s desire to examine, scrutinize, and display objects which are alien, strange and other” (6). The anomalous and bizarre spectacle of the hermaphroditic body has drawn the focus of scientists since the early sixteenth century. Hermaphrodites have long evoked a “mixture of disgust and desire, and fear and fascination”(Gilbert 150) that has led to their position as objects of scientific scrutiny. As defined by Random House Webster’s College Dictionary, a hermaphrodite is “an individual in which reproductive organs of both sexes are present”. Besides hermaphrodites challenging society’s physical norms, they challenge and have recently changed its cultural norms as well.
A gynaecologist can easily perform an ultrasound and tell parents what gender to expect their child to be. Reasonably, parents have the choice to learn the gender or to keep it a surprise. However, For parents to know they are expecting a daughter by chance or for them to choose that they want a daughter are two different cases. There are a variety of methods that allow parents to choose the gender of their child. In some cases, there may be fear of passing down a sex-linked genetic disease and so a certain gender may be preferred to protect the child’s health. However, a contentious issue is whether or not gender selection for non-medical reasons is ethically defensible. There are three positions that one could take: gender selection can never, sometimes, or always be ethically defended. In this paper, I intend to argue that gender selection is always permissible.
I believe that the reasoning behind our society’s strong need to maintain sexual dichotomy is the fact that if it changed it would contradict a long- established belief of what is considered normal. She cites Anne Fausto- Sterling saying “are genuinely humanitarian, reflecting the wish that people be able to ‘fit in’ both physically and psychologically” (183) as she stresses this it revels that doctors are making a decision to try and help children fit in to what is considered ordinary or usual as talked about in “The Five Sexes, Revisited” and now
Specifically, “In fact, it’s hard to believe that this hard-won loosening of gender constraints for women isn’t at least a partial explanation for why three times as many gender reassignment surgeries are performed on men.” In the author’s opinion, “brains are a good place to begin because one thing that science has learned about them is that they’re in fact shaped by experience, cultural and otherwise. The example Burkett uses is Ms. Jenner’s experiences she had when he was a men and how he wouldn’t have had those experiences if he was a women than. Burkett added “...he never had to figure out how to walk streets safely at night… Those are realities that shape women’s brains…transgender take a similar tack, ignore those
Shulevitz uses various different strategies and sources throughout her article that appeal to ethos and strengthen her credibility among her audience. Firstly, she has situated ethos with her audience because she is an established writer, as well as editor, for The New Republic. Secondly, Shulevitz invents her ethos bringing attention to the fact that she herself is an older mother to a child with a birth defect. This first hand experience creates an air of credibility and good character for the audience. With her first hand experience, the audience draws a conclusion that she is writing this article to bring light to an experience she has had. Her credibility is further strengthened by her ethical appeals when she cites sources such as The Centers for Disease Control, the New England Journal of Medicine, psychiatrist Dolores Malaspina, Dr. Jay Gingrich, and Michael Davies. By citing these sources Shulevitz shows that she has done her homework on the subject, using expert opinions and statistics to support her
Gibson, B., & Catlin, A.J. (2011). Care of the Child with the Desire to Change Gender-Part 1.
When two people are in love and plan on having a family, they look to the future and look at all the wonderful events to come. Yet, they do not think of any negative outcome that may lie in the future. No one likes to think that something different or unexpected can happen to his or her family, but rather image and focus on the great future that is yet to come. However, It seems that people are encountering more conflict with their gender identity and not only the individual but the families as well. This paper will point out how having a child who is gender confused suffers as much as the parents. It is hypothesized that parents who have a transgender child have a hard time accepting the child for who they are because of the negativity that
Cisgender, for example, is the word that describes when your gender identity aligns with your sex. It is the reverse of transgender. Most people identify as cisgender or 'cis' without even recognizing it, but it is a gender identity, too.
is not the same as their biological or anatomical sex. This is a disorder also known as Gender Identity Disorder (Understanding Gender,2014).
In the past Johns Hopkins was a center for patients with a gender disorder. John Money, PhD worked in the Psycho-hormonal Group as a head. He had a very strange theory. He would apply his theory to actual patients, not knowing or expecting what would happen. The experiments he attempted on children and adult literally had no boundaries. One of well-known cases of gender identity disorder was about a boy. He was inducted into the Johns Hopkins center because of what happened during a normal ‘surgery’. The boy’s penis was accidently burnt during the circumcision. He underwent a surgery that made him have female body part. The little boy was raised as a girl. The boy raised as a girl felt as if he was a boy. When the family decided he was old enough to know they told him about what had happened during his circumcision. Once he had heard of this he decided to not be living as a female anymore. He later committed suicide. What we have learned from this experiment is that it comes with a lot of depression. Van Meter stated, “Because of the failures that began to materialize from Money’s ideology, the Psycho-hormonal group was abolished and Money was forced into retirement.” (239.) They are steps being taken to provide the best medical treatment and social environment with those who are suffering GID. I added this piece of information because I thought it was something we all show know about how the past has
In another article by Emily Greenhouse “New Era For Intersex Rights” she tells us the story that Jim Ambrose (an interssex born child) lived while undergoing this condition, taking us back to Kitzinger’s definition of intersex. He tells us about his horrific childhood he experienced due to his parents not having been given much of an option by their doctor but merely “they had a problem and they could correct it” showing us “consequently, in the typical circumstance of a child being born with ambiguous genitalia, a ‘psychosocial emergency’ is declared with the intent of ‘fixing’ the child” (Kitzinger, 1999). His whole life growing up he lived as the opposite sex not being able to enjoy his childhood or even his life. Could not go on vacation with his friends because he had to go “get his testicels chopped off” instead. Ambrose tells us how he would have preferred to be allowed the opportunity to explore his own identity and then, him choosing “to later, have surgery” which would have made it easier for him identify formation as an adult. One final thing that i took from this article that really opened my eyes when he said that he has talked to many intersex people and says that not one of them has been happy with the treatment they have received from their physicians”. This is why it is important to educate ourselves on the matter on the specific interesex condition
It meets the guideline with its’ attention to assert a concern on gender identities and our scientific understanding of them. The writer essentially focused on scientific theories by Dr. Kranz and Dr. Cecelia Dhejne that the foundations of sex-reassignments are based upon a mismatch between gender-specific brain developments and how they are “scientifically” formed and the high suicide effects of it subsequently. Using important information such as transgendered people with brain structural differences reports relevant information in relation to the controversial idea of how changeable is gender and how it affects lives to this day.
Martin, Emily. "The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles." Gender, Sex, and Sexuality. New York: Oxford University, 2009. 248-53. Print.
There are three distinct points which determines if you are a girl or boy. If you fall under the .9 category congratulations you are a girl although if you are between .9 and 2.5 you need surgery. Therefore, if you are at the 2.5 mark you are a boy. Another connection I made while I was listening to the lecture was another article I read in class called “Naming all the parts” by Kate Bornstein. In that article Bornstein made a direct relationship to Alice Dreger’s lecture because Bornstein discussed gender assignment, gender identity, gender role, and gender attribution. Dreger discussed how these people that have DSD are not different than a normal human. Many articles that we read tie in with this talk because of the discouragements many people go through because they are
Part Two of Kartina Karkazis’ novel Fixing Sex focuses on the reality parents face when their child receives an intersex diagnosis. Karkazis illustrates what a couple experiences when they discovered their baby girl was not in fact a girl, in accordance to the socially constructed understanding of a female. She also covers the importance of choosing a sex with an intersexual baby when society is involved. A great example from the text is, “Bodies with atypical or conflicting biological markers of gender are troublesome because they disturb the social body; they also disrupt the process if determining an infant’s place in the world” (96). It ties in perfectly to the purpose of paragraphs four, five and six: The Ramifications of Corrective Surgery (Good and Bad). The quote highlights one of the “bad” ramifications of intersexual corrective surgery. It has progressed to the point where society has such a large impact on what is classified as a “proper girl” or “proper boy” that if a baby does not classify into one of those categories, then the child is no longer accepted.