What do doctors do with a hermaphrodyte birth?
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I had a neighbor that was when I was growing up.And she told me that her parents were gonna wait til she got older to decide.To see what she she favored and wanted to be.
pick the most developed sex and remove the other. It's a parents choice tho...
"hermaphrodites" = outdated possibly offensive term for "intersex."
Western doctors tend to make the majority of intersex births into female children (I believe I've heard the rather offensive explanation of "It's easier to poke a hole than make a pole.") that will have to take hormones come puberty.
There is activism within the intersex community against this at-birth surgery, as often the choice results in gender/sexuality/identity confusion come puberty and can make the child's life just as if not more hard than if they "weren't quite" a boy (girl, whatever) on the playground. Many doctors, despite medical evidence otherwise, seem to think that if you raise a child girl or boy then it doesn't matter what their genetics or natural hormones indicate.
Doctors are supposed to consult the parents prior to the surgery, though with a lack of public knowledge (despite its relatively common occurrence) of intersex people, most parents just go with what the doctor will recommend which is not always in the best interest of the child in the long term. (There have also been cases where the doctor did the surgery without the consent of the parents - can you imagine? Oyi.)
I saw a film on this on TV a few months ago. The general decision of the doctors on this program, after years of study of children that had had newborn sex operations, was that letting the child develop as it was until hormones began to increase and there was proof of a definite sex was the best way to go. In these cases the child was able to live the life its' body had actually chosen for it and not live the 'female' or 'male' role chosen by the doctor and parents at birth.
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