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7 Practicing Virtue A Parental Duty recall the pair of studies presented by Suzanne kessler in her 1998 book, Lessons from the Intersexed, discussed in chapter 2. in one study, college students were asked to imagine that they had been born with an atypical sex anatomy and to consider what they would want their parents to decide on their behalf. in the other study, students were asked to imagine that they had a child born with atypical sex and to consider what they would decide for their children. in their responses to the first study, students strongly opposed surgery on their own behalf while nearly 100 percent of students participating in the second study would support normalizing surgery for their own children. On the one hand, it is easy to make sense of these studies. responses to the question posed in the first study confirm how unappealing the prospect of compromising erotic response for the sake of cosmetic enhancement appears to be. responses to the question in the second study support the idea that as parents we want what is best for our children and, if it is possible, to spare children stigma, particularly that associated with atypical sex. Certainly, this study seems to say, we parents should do what we can to defend our children against any harm we imagine could result from such a difference. But, on the other hand, even if we can understand the students’ responses to the individual studies, bringing them together demands, once more, that we ask how it can be that parents would consent to procedures on behalf of their children that they would decline for themselves . Beginning with an examination of parents’ own “derivative” dependency as parents (kittay 1999, 42), my aim throughout this project has been to gain a better appreciation of the conditions that make surgical normalization appear, from a parental position, to be the good—even the obvious—choice. if those imagining themselves as parents in kessler’s study make the same choices as those parents who decades ago agreed to normalizing surgery for their children, and those parents who still ask for—or even demand—such surgeries, this near universal impulse seems to suggest that the choice is perceived to be required in order to fulfill parents’ fundamental duty to protect their children. if, from the perspective of those who imagine themselves as candidates for such surgery (as well as from those who actually underwent such surgeries as infants or young children), this choice does not seem at all obvious but, on the con153 154 | Making Sense of intersex trary, wrong and a violation, then we must understand the ethical challenge presented here to involve closing the distance between these two positions that are not only far apart but also fundamentally different.1 The commitments each entail conflict in ways that should signal the presence of a greater risk than has been acknowledged by proponents of normalizing interventions for DSD. Those supporting the current standard of care identify a “stalemate” resulting from critics’ challenges to both the standard of care and physicians’ and parents’ support of that standard (e.g., Warne and Bhatia 2006, 183). (Though, given what we know from the twentieth-century history of the medical treatment of atypical sex anatomies, it appears that “checkmate” more accurately describes the state of the conflict.) They recognize the irreconcilability of the two positions as most understand them—precisely in the terms in which kessler’s studies were designed. instead of seeing in the difference between the positions of parents and children the difficult challenge of how to bridge the gap between them, proponents of the standard of care seem to see in critics’ demands an unreasonable and irresponsible call that parents abandon their parental role by adopting the perspective of the child. i want to begin by proposing that we identify proponents’ defense of the standard as a recognition that parents’ practice of their duties as parents often involves just the kind of conflict illustrated by kessler’s studies and that parents’ firm, insistent, and loving occupation of this position vis-à-vis their children requires parents to maintain their position as parents, that they not “switch sides.” Let me be clear that i do not think that critics of the standard of care are asking parents to abandon their positions as parents. it has been difficult to articulate criticism of the standard of care in ways that are not susceptible to proponents’ characterization of the alternative to normalizing...

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