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2 “in Their Best interests” Parents’ Experience of Atypical Sex Anatomy in Children For Ruby, in memoriam in a study conducted by psychologist Suzanne kessler, college students were broken into two groups by gender. The women were asked to imagine that they had been born with “clitoromegaly,” a condition defined as having a clitoris larger than one centimeter at birth. in response to a question regarding whether they would have wanted their parents to sanction clitoral surgery if the condition were not life-threatening, an overwhelming 93 percent of the students reported that they would not have wanted their parents to agree to surgery. kessler reports, “Women predicted that having a large clitoris would not have had much of an impact on their peer relations and almost no impact on their relations with their parents . . . they were more likely to want surgery to reduce a large nose, large ears, or large breasts than surgery to reduce a large clitoris” (1998, 101).1 These findings, kessler reflects, are not surprising given that the respondents characterized genital sensation and the capacity for orgasm as “very important to the average woman, and the size of the clitoris as being not even ‘somewhat important’” (101–102). Men in the study were faced with a different dilemma, the one facing parents of boys with “micropenis,” a penis smaller than the putative standard of 2.5 centimeters stretched length at birth. Their question was whether to stay as male with a small penis or to be reassigned as female. More than half rejected the prospect of gender reassignment. But according to kessler, “That percentage increases to almost all men if the surgery was described as reducing pleasurable sensitivity or orgasmic capability. Contrary to beliefs about male sexuality, the college men in this study did not think that having a micropenis would have had a major impact on their sexual relations, peer or parental relations, or self-esteem” (103). in a separate study, kessler and her team asked a different group of students to imagine that their child was born with ambiguous genitalia. Students in this study indicated they would make what kessler describes as “more traditional choices” to consent to “corrective” or cosmetic surgery. Their rationales mirrored those of parents of children with atypical sex: students reported that they did not want their child to feel “different” and believed that early surgery would be less traumatizing than later surgery (103). Like parents over the last sixty years who 44 “in Their Best interests” | 45 have been faced with these difficult decisions, students did not reflect on the somatic experience of the child and with it the possibility of lost sensation that so concerned the students in the first study. kessler’s paired studies confirm a kind of common sense that individuals, as individuals, are disinclined to compromise their erotic response for the sake of cosmetic enhancement. at the same time, parents, as parents, want what is best for their child, and the promise of a normal life figures prominently in that conception . The juxtaposition of the two studies raises the obvious, if nonetheless vexing , question: why would parents consent to procedures on behalf of their children that they would refuse for themselves? The work of social theorist Pierre Bourdieu provides a powerful descriptive framework to account for what might be characterized as the ambivalence that marks parents’ experience and the heavy responsibility they must bear to conceal that ambivalence from others and from themselves. as i learned from speaking to parents of children born with atypical sex anatomies, this responsibility is continuous with the vulnerability that attends all parents’ efforts to do what is best for their children. all parents are, as parents, “vulnerable”: in ways large and small they must rely on others in order to do their work as parents. and yet this vulnerability can be masked by parents’ roles as protectors of their children (kittay 1999; Lindemann 2006b). Though the parents with whom i spoke live thousands of miles away from one another, and a thirty-year difference separated the births of their children, their experiences were remarkably similar. all talked of their isolation as they carried the burden of the secrets doctors encouraged them to keep from their children, their neighbors, and their extended families. Those with grown children recounted the anger and despair of sons and daughters who could not have satisfying sex lives and who held them responsible for the silence to which they were subject. The situation of being...

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