8/14/2023 0 Comments X word in sexRather than take a “wait and see” approach, doctors often still feel compelled to choose one sex for the baby. A baby may have a womb and may also have testicles inside their body. To complicate the process, the results from each of these tests may not be clearly male or female but could fall somewhere in between. Doctors also look at the hormones being produced and try to guess how the baby’s genitals will develop. When genitalia is ambiguous, doctors try to determine biological sex by examining many indicators. In addition to chromosomes, doctors will examine if the baby has ovaries or testes, and whether or not they have a womb. The doctors are looking at their chromosomes, their gonads, how their tissues respond to various kinds of hormonal influences and seeing what they think will happen if they try to give this kid a male assignment or female assignment, and that can be a messy process.” In fact, research indicates that about 2% of the population is born with these ambiguous traits. Those born with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), for example, are chromosomally female but may have very masculinized genitalia. Despite the ambiguity, biological sex is often assigned to these individuals within a few days of birth.Ĭlinical psychogist, Tiger Devore, an outspoken advocate for individuals with DSDs who was born with ambiguous genitalia, describes the process that occurs at the birth of a child with ambiguous genitals, “People create radio silence and they wait for the doctors to come up with some kind of decision about this. The presence or lack of a penis is often thought of as another clear indicator of biological sex, but that’s not a decisive way to divide the sexes either. Some individuals are born with ambiguous genitalia and are not clearly male or female in genital appearance at birth.
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