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From a Stifling Binary Aesthetic to the Beauty of Emerging Possibility: Celebrating Intersex at

Birth
Candex Louie
Department of Social Sciences
Pasadena City College
Contact: candexlouie@gmail.com

ABSTRACT
Understanding aesthetic consciousness as a phenomenon that limits emerging possibility,

this work aims to expose the binary conception of biological sex as being reductive and harmful.

This paper first turns its attention to the issue of sex determination. The process of assigning

male or female at birth poses a problem for infants who do not fit into either category. Intersex is

a term that encompasses a host of variations of chromosomal, hormonal, or anatomical patterns

that do not clearly fit into the binary notions of male or female. The modern practice of sex

determination, based on the “optimum gender of rearing” model, encourages surgical

intervention to assimilate the intersex child to their assigned gender (Grayling 2008:48). In favor

of conforming infants to a societal standard, parts of their bodies are removed without consent,

and they are often later led to believe that the way their bodies naturally manifest is shameful and

wrong. By exploring the human body through various frameworks as being unlimited in

expression—as opposed to correcting ‘errant’ bodies from a traditional dichotomy—this work

seeks not only to reveal the problems created by a socially informed clinical approach, but a

solution through ontological praxis.

Keywords: Intersex, Gender, Sex Determination


Biological sex is a notion that is largely unquestioned. The conception of the two human

sexes (male and female) is reiterated in medical literature, used in determining physical health

and social status, and is likely one the first questions that parents get asked about their infants: Is

it a boy or a girl? Gender essentialism is the assumption that the binary categorization of sex is

an immutable, unchanging biological fact, and that any human would necessarily fit into one of

the two categories. However, the nature of the human endocrine system and the multiple ways

that sex can be expressed pose a problem for this binary. For example, sex can be determined by

multiple criteria, including: genitals, chromosomes, hormones, gonads, and secondary sex

characteristics, and variation within and between these sex determinants are not atypical. Quoted

in Nature, John Achermann, a Professor of Pediatric Endocrinology at University College

London notes, “I think there's much greater diversity within male or female, and there is

certainly an area of overlap where some people can't easily define themselves within the binary

structure” (Ainsworth 2014:288). Achermann is referring to people with intersex conditions,

clinically known as disorders of sex development (DSDs). Intersex is a term that encompasses a

wide range of biological variation regarding sex characteristics. The Intersex Society of North

America explains, “a person might be born appearing to be female on the outside, but having

mostly male-typical anatomy on the inside.... Or a person may be born with mosaic genetics, so

that some of her cells have XX chromosomes and some have XY” (Intersex Society of North

America n.d.:para. 1). Intersex traits can manifest in multiple ways and are visible at birth in

some instances but may not become apparent until puberty in others, and in the case of

chromosomal intersex variations, traits may not take on any physically discernible characteristics

at all (United Nations for Equality n.d.:1). In a study led by Valerie Arboleda, a doctor at the

Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at UCLA, “DSDs are estimated to occur in

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approximately one in 100 live births” (Arboleda et al. 2014:604). This may even be a

conservative estimate, as again, a person's intersex status is not always visibly apparent at birth.

Despite the proliferation of data suggesting that biological sex may be anything but a rigid

binary, standard practices and medical attitudes reflect strict adherence to the binary model

regardless of any quantifiable benefit for the non-conforming patient.

Theoretical Framework

Several theorists have responded to the conception of the binary, and the idea of

normative forms. For Judith Butler, an American philosopher and gender theorist, the imposition

of a binary norm on the human body greatly affects the psychological and social identity of

people who do not fall neatly within binary criteria. In Undoing Gender, Butler questions the

validity of gender essentialism through the case of David Reimer. As an infant, a significant

portion of Reimer's penis was burned off in a hospital accident, and he was subsequently made

the subject of a gender experiment by Dr. John Money, who suggested that he undergo male-to-

female surgery and live the rest of his life as a “normal girl” (Butler 2013: 744-745). Butler

argues that although Reimer is not intersex, the denial of his consent to surgery and the

subjugation to a normative ideal is parallel to the deeply traumatizing experience that intersex

children continue to face today. In Mindfields: Between Male and Female, A. C. Grayling notes

that Dr. Money actually developed the “optimum gender of rearing” model that is used to

determine the procedure for intersex cases: “This system encouraged ‘gender assignment’ of

those with ambiguous genitals, including surgical intervention at the earliest possible stage in life

to encourage the effective socialization of the resulting individual into their assigned gender”

(Grayling 2008:48). Further, in Promoting Health and Social Progress by Accepting and

Depathologizing Benign Intersex Traits, Hida Viloria, an intersex writer and activist, provides

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insight from an intersex perspective. Responding to a quote from Dr. Kenneth Glassberg

justifying intersex genital mutilation (IGM) by arguing that “society is not ready for [intersex

genitalia]” Viloria writes, “The doctor's assertion that IGM is performed because society is not

ready to accept intersex people also confirmed what I'd long suspected: that IGM exists to

benefit non-intersex people—such as our parents—rather than those subjected to it” (Viloria

2015:116).

Although he speaks more broadly about the concept of beauty and appearance, Hans-

Georg Gadamer, a German philosopher, makes a similar criticism of what he calls aesthetic

consciousness. Aesthetic consciousness is an important framework through which understanding

aesthetic cultural phenomena—including the binary gender system—can unfold. In Truth and

Method), Gadamer argues, “For just as the art of ‘beautiful appearance’ is opposed to reality, so

aesthetic consciousness includes an alienation from reality” (Gadamer 1997:73). For Gadamer,

aesthetic consciousness is like a lens that not only paints what is real in an abstracted or unreal

light, but also refuses to allow the subject to speak or reveal itself. Like Viloria, Gadamer seems

to suggest that understanding does not come from subjecting something (or someone) to an

aesthetic ideal.

The Issue with Sex Determination

Despite what intersex activists and philosophers seem to be calling for, in Consensus

Statement on Management of Intersex Disorders, cross-national experts on endocrinology write,

“The birth of an intersex child prompts a long-term management strategy that involves a myriad

of professionals working with the family” (Hughes et al. 2006:554). Within the statement, they

outline the importance of multi-disciplinary professionals’ involvement in the course of the

child’s life, as well as suggested gender assignment and surgery based upon sex characteristics.

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Although the medical experts acknowledge the future autonomy of the child, the promise of a

‘long term management strategy’ reveals that the child is not really a child, but a project. In

presenting an aestheticized version of ethics, the experts fail to recognize the intersex child’s

humanity and instead, maintain a false binary.

The optimum gender of rearing model, the system developed by John Money that

encourages ‘gender assignment’ and infant genital mutilation (IGM), has framed intersex

children’s identities in ways that create lasting psychological trauma. Physician and Director of

Pediatric Endocrinology at Children's Hospital of Oakland Jorge J. Daaboul explains:

To achieve this secure gender identity, the parents of the child with intersex

needed to be convinced that the child was the gender chosen by the physicians

and subterfuge and dissimulation were accepted tools to achieve this purpose.

Consequently, early surgical intervention to make the child look more like the

assigned gender quickly gained favor. In addition, subterfuge and dissimulation

were also used with the intersexed individual so there would be no doubt as to

gender. Implicit in this reasoning, of course, is that individuals with intersex were

flawed and could not function well in society. [Daaboul 2000:para. 4]

Daaboul notes several key points that warrant further inspection: not only are intersex

individuals framed as dysfunctional, but the binary gender assignment they receive is so crucial

that physicians are encouraged to lie to the parents and child to maintain that the gender that is

assigned is not questioned. As well, ‘surgical intervention’ in this model is encouraged based on

the notion that the gender the physician assigned has a ‘look’ about it, and to achieve this ‘look’,

surgery can become necessary.

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Binary Aesthetics and Psychological Harm

The optimum gender of rearing model and the process of sex determination then, does

not seem to be concerned with intersex as a medical condition, but an aesthetic condition based

on gender essentialist ideology. The bodies of intersex children are not recognized as intersex,

but instead become a space where the aesthetic binary model can come to be. By refusing to

allow intersex bodies to be as they are, physicians assert what is then physically allowable. The

reasoning behind corrective surgery is that the intersex child would otherwise grow up

psychologically traumatized, and not know how to navigate in a world where their body and sex

was not accommodated for. Intersex writer Esther Morris notes, “Many [intersex] adults argue

that correction creates its own stigma that leaves them struggling with identities and loss of self”

(Morris 2004:para. 10). As well, a model centered around concealment is not only poor medical

practice, but reinforces stigma and self-hatred. In the film Intersexion: Gender Ambiguity

Unveiled, founder of Intersex Society of North America, Cheryl Chase, shares “I remember

thinking, ‘man, I am really pissed. If I’m gonna [sic] do this, I’m gonna find the surgeon and I’m

gonna kill myself in front of him’. That's the moment I realized, the thing that is making me

miserable isn’t the clitorectomy, it’s the shame” (Chase 2012). Like Chase and many intersex

individuals, being lied to about the reality of their biology is what incurs psychological trauma

rather than the truth of it.

Another oversight in continuing to apply normative binary standards as a measure of

success is that in surgically altering bodies in order to reach a gender essentialist ideal,

physicians seek to reach a telos (end goal) that is not often achieved. In the case of David

Reimer, Money had planned a series of feminizing surgeries: at eleven years old, Reimer was

asked if he wanted a ‘real vagina’, even going so far as to promise that he might be able to give

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birth (Butler 2004:745). This was a blatant lie; Reimer was genetically, chromosomally, and

anatomically male despite the fact that his external sex organs were removed. Whether Money

constructed a vagina or added a complete uterus, Reimer would never be able to conceive, much

less give birth to a child. Butler also notes that in the clinic where Money was conducting these

‘gender experiments’, “[Reimer] and [his] brother were required to perform mock coital

exercises with one another, on command” (Butler 2004:745). This was traumatizing for the both

of them, and a highly questionable practice in the way of consent for certain, but Money's

intention was clear: in order to become a girl, Reimer would not only need component female

body parts, but was also expected to behave as a heterosexual female that would have

heterosexual sex. This sentiment is echoed in an interview in the film Intersexion: Gender

Ambiguity Unveiled with Esther Morris. After finding out her intersex status during a check up,

she recalls, “I was then told that I would have to have surgery, so that I could have a normal sex

life with my husband” (Morris 2012). This is noted with an air of sarcasm, as Morris is lesbian.

This presupposition of heterosexuality as a justification for intrusive, medically unnecessary

surgery is an interesting point because here, heterosexuality becomes a prescriptive norm. The

assertion is not only that intersex bodies are an atypical aberration, but they are an atypical

aberration because of their departure from binary and heterosexual functioning, and so are

corrected in the image of that form.

The Corrective Posture of the Clinic and the Invention of “Normal”

The medical model then, is not about assessing where intersex people are or what

intersex bodies are capable of. Instead, intersex health becomes corrective: because these

people's bodies are not congruous to what is considered normal, they must be fixed. This is

problematic not only in that it otherizes intersexuality, but also in the way that normal is not

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definitive. In a study that seeks to determine a qualitative system by which to gauge whether

clitoromegaly (atypically large clitoris, associated with certain intersex conditions) is present, it

is noted: “There is currently no consensus among authors as to which clitoral measurement

parameter confirms the diagnosis of clitoromegaly. Some authors use the clitoral index or the

clitoris width, while others prefer the clitoris length” (Kutlu et al. 2011:498). The ambiguity with

which experts approach the possibility of genitals being intersex illustrates how arbitrary and

entirely cosmetic many of these surgeries can be. In trying to conform intersex people to a binary

ideal, the reality of biological diversity is ignored in place of aesthetic consciousness.

In the face of criticism, medical researchers often justify surgical procedure by

pathologizing intersex traits. An often-cited statistic is the risk for gonadal cancer, which has

been estimated to be as high as 22% to as low as 0-8% in intersex people who have undescended

testes in their abdomen (Deans et al. 2012:894). This variance is enough to raise questions about

the validity of this data, but as the Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome Society—an intersex

organization—notes, “The incidence of breast cancer is 1 in 8 females and yet the breasts of

young women are not routinely removed just in case they might develop breast

cancer”(“Gonadectomy” n.d.:para. 3). As well, while the internal testes do not provide

reproductive function, the androgens they produce are necessary hormones that are linked to

osteoporosis (a disease that has to do with the demineralization and subsequent weakening of

bone). Without them, the body must be regulated with hormone replacement therapy (Duhaime-

Ross 2013:para. 13). As well, there is also evidence that normal, healthy intersex lives exist

without surgical intervention. This was the case for a 70-year-old man who had previously

fathered 4 children, and in undergoing hernia surgery, was found to have a completely intact

uterus (Sherwani et al 2014:1285). He had lived his entire life with his intersex anatomy intact,

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and he had not suffered trauma regarding his identity because of its existence. This was also the

case for Viloria. She writes, “I was born with ambiguous genitalia and it was a doctor who, by

honoring my bodily integrity and not ‘fixing’ me, gave me the greatest gift I’ve ever received”

(Viloria 2015:114). She describes her relationships as being positive, and without the deep

psychological shame that many of her intersex peers report.

This psychological shame is a consequence of aesthetic consciousness; instead of coming

to understand intersex individuals and discover the ways that biology diverges from the socially

conceived binary notion of sex, physicians often try to correct intersex bodies in the image of a

normative male or female one. This not only often fails in execution but illustrates a failure in

judgment. In calcifying the image of humanness, health and happiness as being one in line with

an idyllic binary body and seeking to find disease in any form of deviation from it, the doctor

does not see a patient, but an affirmation of their prejudice. The wielding of a knife is a defensive

stance against the ‘other’. It does not seek to ask, “What are you?” but rather articulates, “This is

what you are,” and in doing so, arrests the potential unfolding of truth.

Michel Foucault, a French philosopher and social theorist, similarly notes the

dehumanizing effect of the ‘medical gaze’; a pathologizing lens that sheds some light on

medicine as a discursive authority. In Birth of the Clinic, he notes, “This is the period that marks

the suzerainty of the gaze.… The ‘glance’ has simply to exercise its right of origin over truth”

(Foucault 1976:4). Foucault argues that medicine has become an institution of power, and the

danger is that its power resides in its medical gaze, one that reduces humanity to pathology. This

is evident in how the intersex person is reduced to their intersex traits and organs and is regarded

as needing correction. This detachment from humanity is a fear for Foucault because denying a

person’s wholeness is to misunderstand the issue. In treating the “problem” of internal testes in

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the abdomen without understanding how they might function in the intersex body, (providing

necessary hormones to regulate the body as well as bone growth) medical professionals with the

opinion that the intersex body needs correction miss the point of medical practice: health. An

underlying danger is the reliance on medicine as a discursive authority; because medicine touts

logic and reason, as Foucault says, it simply ‘exercises its right of origin over truth’. Rather than

confronting the truth of reality, the authority of medicine is naively clung to as it provides quick

solutions. It is in this haste to arrive at conclusions and universals that models like the optimum

gender of rearing are created and relied on.

Solutions through Ontological Praxis

Of course, while these criticisms may be valid, solutions may prove to be less than

practical, some may argue. After all, if medicine is to be discounted, then to what authority is the

case of sexing infants supposed to fall to? Identification forms and institutions often require that

any given person identifies with either one or the other of the two sexes. Is this not prioritizing

philosophy and identity politics over practicality? Despite everything, don’t intersex individuals

also need a gender? Eve Sedgwick, gender theorist and queer scholar, also notes the problem of

gender, stating, “The impasse of gender definition must be seen first of all the creation of a field

of intractable, highly structured discursive incoherence…. I have no optimism at all about the

availability of a standpoint of thought from which either question could be intelligibly, never

mind efficaciously, adjudicated” (Sedgwick 1990:90). The sentiment here is the impracticality

and incoherency of gender; in fact, Sedgwick conceptualizes the definition as being an

impasse—a situation of deadlock, a point where no further progress is possible. If gender cannot

be defined, if medicine’s authority is discounted, if the question of sex and its relationship to

gender is complicated and both concepts are essentially nebulous, and nearly every aspect of

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these social identities is problematized, where does that put the intersex individual exactly? Is

there any possible, rational, reasonable solution? Is progress possible? Anne Fausto-Sterling,

Professor of Biology and Gender Studies at Brown University, humorously attempts to mollify

this issue by redefining gender, describing a five gender model to replace the existing one: “I

argued we should also accept the categories herms (named after ‘true’ hermaphrodites), merms

(named after male ‘pseudo-hermaphrodites’) and ferms (named after female ‘pseudo-

hermaphrodites’)” (Fausto-Sterling 2000:78). Here, Fausto-Sterling makes a point of how absurd

prescriptive and clinical labels are regarding identity, while also taking a jab at the idea that

finding the right labels will somehow absolve people from confronting the complexities of

gender and sex.

Why exactly is this confrontation so uncomfortable? What is so inherently wrong about

uncertainty? Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher, explores these questions through his

conception of aporia. He explains, “the non-passage, the impasse or aporia, stems from the fact

that there is no limit. There is not yet or there is no longer a border to cross, no opposition

between two sides: the limit is too porous, permeable, and indeterminate” (Derrida 2006:20).

Aporia for Derrida is a state of confusion or doubt, but not a dead end or something to be

embarrassed about. Unlike Sedgwick’s conception of impasse, which was expressed as being a

space where nothing intelligible or meaningful could be deduced, Derrida’s aporia has an open-

endedness that reflects infinite possibilities or limitlessness. For Derrida, aporia is a reflection of

the complexity of the human mind and is demonstrative of the complexity of reality. For him,

this uncertainty is not shameful, but rather, an affirmation of limitless possibility, and the real

shame is that aporia is frowned upon. The reluctance to accept aporia as a mode of being stifles

the ability for people to understand the reality of biological diversity, and the infinite nature of

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the human body. A large part of understanding problematized concepts is how problems are

conceived. If the only way problems can be addressed is by capping them off with a simple

solution, then there will always be problems that are not neatly solved, because they are by

nature limitless.

Like Derrida’s aporia, Gadamer’s notion of the ‘horizon of the question’ invites

possibility. For Gadamer, questions allow for the unfolding of truth, where problems are

questions forced into frameworks of thinking. He argues, “Problems are not real questions that

arise of themselves and hence acquire the pattern of their answer from the genesis of their

meaning, but are alternatives that can only be accepted as themselves and thus can be treated

only in a dialectical way” (Gadamer 2004:376). For Gadamer, problems remain problems

because solutions are not always available or viable, whereas questions seek to open up, inviting

further questions. Unlike problems, questions have emergent horizons, and bring about

undetermined possibilities. Does biological sex not also share this characteristic? In the infinite

possible variations of human sexual biology, from not only genitalia, but chromosomes,

hormones, gonads, as well as secondary sex characteristics, in the conception of a child, none of

these things are predetermined. The child is an emerging possibility of genetics and

environmental affectations, and will continue to be throughout their life.

In order to respect the nature of the human body as a question, rather than a problem, it

necessitates the undetermined-ness of the body’s possibilities. To question something is to note

that the answer is not already apparent. Gadamer argues, “There can be no tentative or potential

attitude to questioning, for questioning is not the positing but the testing of possibilities”

(Gadamer 2004:375). He notes here that questions don’t necessarily presuppose certain answers,

and questions that would are not authentic questions. For the question of biological sex then,

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definitive or prescriptive attitudes or solutions would not respect the nature of the question, and

would deny it its horizon, treating it as if it were a problem. This is where the medical model

fails; in aestheticizing health as being synonymous with one of two normative body types,

biological sex is not allowed to exist as the varying, undetermined, continuously unfolding

process that it is.

Moreover, in understanding the unfolding nature of biological sex and the possibility of

intersex individuals is the act of not taking a corrective posture when it comes to intersex health.

Respecting the intersex body as a possibility rather than a problem calls for a shift in procedure

from unconsented medically unnecessary surgery, to actually providing healthcare to intersex

patients. It calls for studies to be done with a curiosity of the possibilities of human variance,

rather than the application of the medical gaze and ‘research’ done for the sake of affirming

culturally constructed and informed prejudices. It calls for medical attitudes that center the health

of the patient rather than focusing on what the patient is not. It calls for an invitation of dialogue

between doctors, patients, and parents rather than dissimulation and subterfuge as a means of

best shielding the family from the reality of biological sex or most effectively carrying out the

assigned gender. It calls for the end of infant genital mutilation, as it not only presupposes a

correct form of the body, but it also does not give the intersex individual the right of consent and

doesn’t allow them to be in dialogue with the physician, their caretakers, or even themselves.

Full disclosure is necessary for all parties involved to deem any surgery informed and

consensual. It calls for an openness to and consideration of the intersex person’s autonomy and

the understanding that gender and sex are complicated, but that doesn’t mean that they’re

problems, or that uncertainty about indefinite concepts makes them impossible to grapple with or

understand. Pidgeon Pagonis and Hida Viloria, intersex activists, both identify as nonbinary, not

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only because they have always felt that they didn’t fit within the gender binary, but also as a way

to identify with the reality of their intersexuality. While sex and gender are both topics that are

difficult to accurately confine or define, and any given person’s relationship with either is highly

personal, identity is best designated to the person navigating it for themselves. Personal bodily

autonomy is an important aspect of how anyone might relate to themselves, and in the violation

of bodily autonomy, an intersex child may grow distrusting, or may feel psychological shame,

which they may carry for the rest of their lives. On top of the risk of genital surgery to the

subject’s overall health and sexual pleasure, the choice is often completely out of their hands.

Another important aspect of intersex health is the recognition of intersexuals as experts.

Alice Domurat Dreger, a historian, bioethicist, and former Professor of Clinical Medical

Humanities and Bioethics at the Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University notes,

“A major failure of the [medical] model has arisen from the failure to recognize intersex people

as experts of their own experiences” (Dreger 1999:19). Recognizing and respecting intersex

experience is important for the phenomenological praxis of medical practice because it not only

requires recognizing the intersex person as a person with being, but also endeavors to understand

the intersex person as being beautiful. Gadamer explains, “the beautiful is a kind of experience

that stands out like an enchantment and an adventure within the whole of our experience and

presents a special task of hermeneutical integration, what is evident is always something

surprising as well, like a new light being turned on, expanding the range of what we can take into

consideration” (Gadamer 2004:486). For Gadamer, the notion of the beautiful is important

because it is not only like an experience in that it is an event, but it calls attention to not only

itself but makes other things intelligible that were not previously intelligible. Beautiful here is

not used in a strictly aesthetic sense, and it does not exist as an adherence to standard

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conventions of beauty or dogmatic ideals (like traditional gender binaries, for example). For

Gadamer, beauty takes on ‘the mode of being of light’; this is to say that it has an illuminating

quality. It reveals itself in the quest for good, and in the way that the disclosure of understanding

broadens a person’s horizon, beauty allows the viewer to be closer to truth. Intersexuality too,

shares this mode of being in that it allows for the expansion of what can be considered, and what

becomes intelligible because of the way that it illuminates the state of humanity.

The conception of intersexuality as being illuminating, however, is not the advocacy of

clinical displays of intersex individuals. Dreger explains:

Virtually all of the intersex people who write in this volume stress the trauma of

being repeatedly ‘put on display’ for medical students, residents, and attending

physicians. While medical professionals need to be educated about intersex by

seeing real cases, they must also recognize the psychological harm done to

intersex patients—especially children—when they are repeatedly obligated to

make their genitalia available for visual and physical examination by students and

physicians. [Dreger 1999:19]

While intersex education is necessary, the display of intersex individuals as educational

specimens is otherizing and psychologically traumatizing. It is the experience of beauty that

allows for truth to unfold, yes, but it is not in treating intersex individuals as subhuman

experiments or in forcing intersex children to reveal their genitalia that an authentic encounter is

made. The medical gaze here, especially, becomes a violating one; it exercises authority and

subjects patients to scrutiny for the sake of medical practice and education, but at what cost? The

notion that doctors always know best is a dangerous one; it not only takes choice out of the

patient’s hands but comes from a naïve trust of medicine and the clinic as being the only kinds of

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experts. The optimum gender of rearing model was made to be beneficent, but has in numerous

cases afflicted psychological and physical scarring. Rather than promoting paranoia of hospitals

and medicine as an industry, this approach is more of a reckoning: The doctor may only really

know just as much as the caretaker what the sex of the child is.

Instead of prescribing aesthetic judgements as an affirmation of cultural prejudice in the

clinic by applying corrective measures to the intersex body, perhaps it would be prudent to

recognize its being and respect the human body as a question: one that manifests in many

possibilities. And rather than the shaming of intersexuality for existing outside of a traditional

model, perhaps it is Gadamer’s notion of beauty, calling for an expansion of what can be

considered. Or perhaps it is the necessary call to face aporia as the condition of the infiniteness

of human being.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I graciously thank Dr. Anna Kryzcka for her valuable advice, patience and support, Dr. Shane
Underwood for pushing me to write this paper, and Dr. Lauren Arenson for encouraging me to
get my paper out there.

This paper is by no means an exhaustive inquiry into the issues of binary sex determination, and
further investigation into the aesthetics of the social construction of the binary ideal and its
repercussions on identity, the human psyche, and truth is required for further understanding.

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