Intersex and the Rhetorics of Healing

Abstract

Intersex children are born into a state of liminality, a state wherein their “deviation” from physiological norms is understood, in social, legal, religio-ethical, and medical terms, as “illness.” The naturalized assumption of an exclusively binary sex system (male/female), informed in the West by a biblically derived view of heterosexual marriage as God-ordained in creation, continues to play itself out in other institutions. Western legal systems, with their roots in property and family law, deny the legal status of intersex by requiring the individual to be identified either as male or female according to chromosomal gender. Christian moral responses to intersex are framed within context of sexual ethics that views intersexuality as a result of the “fallen” state of humankind; such responses often discuss intersexuality in relation to moral issues concerning homosexuality. Even counter-culture critics such as feminists and queer theorists have responded to the liminal state of intersex by shoring up their own agendas: Feminists like Germain Greer respond with a reactionary rejection of intersex people as “not real women”; transgender and gender theorists respond by subsuming intersex to another political agenda. To be neither clearly male nor clearly female is to elicit a profoundly powerful reaction from our society that does not know what to do with sexed “deviations” that undermine fundamental assumptions upon which major social, legal and moral systems have been based. Intersex people begin their lives in liminality, and are threatened with social and legal sanction if they do not conform to the gender binary of the dominant society. Accordingly, the dominant values of the community take supremacy in medical

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