-
Rightings: Ethics and Human Sex Variation
- IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 8, Number 1, Spring 2015
- pp. 201-221
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
This review assesses a rare and insightful philosophical examination of the ethics of the medical management of sex-atypical children. In Making Sense of Intersex, Ellen K. Feder crafts an ethics that would shift several common foci of the contemporary debate on her topic: from questions of gender to the ethics of normalization; from individual or parental autonomy to a general corporeal vulnerability; and from parental medical proxy rights to the interdependency of parent-child relations. The review identifies some seemingly unavoidable conundrums that would remain unsolved after such shifts: the continuing role of gender in normalizing medical aims, the utility of an undifferentiated concept of vulnerability in medical decision making, and the place of cosmetic medicine in general.