Intersexualität: zerrissen zwischen Wissenschaft und Realität.
Zur Problematik geschlechtlicher Zwangszuweisung aufgrund eines bipolaren Geschlechterkonzeptes

(Intersexuality Torn Between Science and Reality:
Problematical Compulsory Sex Determination and Gender Assignment Based on Bi-Polar Sexuality Concepts)

Nowadays children born with intersexual structures are usually pressed into the bi-polar gender model prevalent in our culture. Available pre-natal diagnostic techniques increase abortions of intersexual foetuses. If they are allowed to be born at all, their innate sexual structures are routinely subjected to medical, physiological, and psychological tampering of the most massive kind. The origins of such (surgical) interventions into the innate integrity of body and mind of intersexuals are to be found in the human experiments of the Nazis in Hitler's "Third Reich", but in the early Fifties of the 20th century they became generally accepted medical standard.

Many - in fact, nearly all, from my point of view as a person who looks after other inter-sexual persons -, people confronted with what I call a forced sex assignment in early childhood suffer from grave physical as well as psychological problems for the rest of their lives. This is basically the consequence of an ideology, bowing to the demands for the absolute bipolarity of the sexes, that terrible dichotomy of "either/or". The results are, more often than not, self-mutilation, social failure, lifelong loneliness, and eventually suicide. According to various sources there are 13.7 of such children subjected every day to such treatment. Their sufferings are known. The question is if the medically feasible is also the morally, ethically, and humanely justifiable?

In two thirds of the people coming to see me, medically classified as transsexuals, it was possible to prove that they actually had an intersexual disposition but had been treated in early childhood as transsexual. Usually the persons affected do not know anything about that. But if their intersexuality was not discovered and they were wrongly diagnosed as transsexual, they had to undergo a forced castration, in course of the German transsexuality law ("TSG") process, and they have to accept a wrong entry into their official birth documents.

Medical diagnostics as well as legal morality have to be urgently revised, because a wrong medical diagnosis and treatment must not be documented by a public stigmatization in the birth records. An individual's sex - male, female, or intersex - cannot be assigned arbitrarily. All sexual operations elicit and create irreversible facts. With intersexuals as well as with transsexuals the surgical genital changes and interventions are practiced physical reality. Treatments and support for the newly created psychological, social and legal realities are woefully lacking.

It is not the task of science to help force anatomically, physiologically and psychologically non-conforming individuals into standard patterns of society. Instead, their task should include to support people and, by increasing our knowledge and thus creating a wider basis of education, to work for the acceptance of all human beings who differ from the bipolar sexual norm, and that they are not regarded as sick, but as a normal part of society.

About the Author:

Jürgen Claudia Clüsserath, born in 1958. Vice Chair, Deutschen Gesellschaft für Transidentität und Intersexualität (dgti - German Society for Transidentity and Intersexuality) and counsellor of intersexual people. Ex-serviceman in German army in charge of special tasks, business woman in retail and recreation activities. Birth records: originally "female", subsequently changed to "male". Abt. two years reared by parents in female role. Several times re-baptized. After birth subjected to repeated surgical and medicinal treatments to "correct" sex, so far 14 surgeries (lasting betweens 6 and 11.5 hours each) because of "malformations". Most surgeries due to laterally disturbed LH/RH ossification and with high probability direct consequences of early childhood treatment.

According to the latest genetic test results he/she probably is a chimera (mixed being) and as such - despite his/her human looks - not really human and not protected by constitutional guarantees.

Address:
Jürgen Claudia Clüsserath
Servaisstr. 46
D-54293 Trier
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eMail: wedernoch@aol.com