To open a glans ‘like a book’is to make it signify. The phenomenon to which clinicians respond by opening a glans ‘like a book’, along with numerous other medicalized body modifications that I will discuss in this paper, is intersexuality. Intersex bodies have genetic, hormonal, and anatomical configurations that cannot be adequately apprehended by hegemonic discourses of sexual difference. Their genitalia have tended to be called ‘ambiguous’, which does not mean that they intermittently change shape into other body parts, or that they vacillate in and out of the universe. Instead, to have ambiguous genitalia is to have genitalia that are difficult to understand. Most intersex infants are not born ill; they simply arrive with ‘genitals that are pretty confusing to all the adults in the room’, as medical historian Alice Domurat Dreger notes adroitly (in Bloom, 2003, p. 103). What are they called, these labia that surround a small penis? And what do they do, this large clitoris and shallow vagina? Non-intersexed parents, clinicians, and lovers displace such cognitive ambiguities onto the flesh of the intersexed body and so label it ‘ambiguous’. Genital surgery, established as a protocol in the 1950s (Diamond, 1999), takes place in order to make intersexed bodies more easily understood by the nonintersexed. It is a significatory fix. One estimate in the late 1990s said that this happens five times a day to infants in American hospitals alone (Kessler, 1998, p. 135, n. 4). If the semiotic process at stake when scalpels break the skins of intersexed bodies is that of signification, then I want to question the limits of signification, because these are the limits that I experience as an intersexed person. I wonder, when genitalia are surgically designed, of what they are an imitation. I wonder where the original