Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Case Study


Currently reading through a case study available through the PubMed Central Database. Many of you are having a difficult time understanding the difference between intersex, transgendered or the term transsexual when discussing hermaphroditism on this site. While browsing through PubMed Central, a case has been pulled that sheds light into the subject at hand. After reading through this case, one has concluded that a human labeled as transsexual, transgendered or intersex, falls under the term Hermaphrodite or pseudohermaphroditism.

Click here to read more.

27 comments:

  1. “Passing” for a transgendered person refers to the experience of being perceived as gender-normative. In other words, a transgendered woman ‘passes’ when everyone around her regards her as a female-born woman without realizing that she is transgendered ( was born male).



    “Coming out” and “passing” are very different experiences, and, in some circumstances, they may even be opposed to each other. For example, there is a certain proportion of post-op transsexuals who live “stealth,” concealing their transgender identity and living in their chosen gender as if they were born into that sex. In other words, a post-op MTF (male-to-female) co-workers, and others the fact that she was really born male, or an FTM (female-to-male) transsexual may live as a man without revealing to others that he was actually born female.



    Page 107

    Embodying Asian/American sexualities

    By Gina Masequesmay, Sean Metzger

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  2. A lifetime of hormonal treatment is also necessary. Male-to-female transsexuals take estrogen. It causes fatty deposits to develop in the breasts and hips, inhibits beard growth, and softens the skin. Female-to-male transsexuals take androgens, which promote deepening of the voice, masculine hair distribution, large muscles, and loss of fatty deposits in the breasts and hips. The clitoris may also grow larger.



    It is not possible to construct internal genital organs or gonads, so gender-reassignment surgery is mostly cosmetic. Male-to-female surgery is usually more successful because it is easier to construct a vagina than a working penis.



    …It is estimated that every year in the United States about 65,000 babies are born with ambiguous genitalia.



    Page 242

    Exploring the dimensions of human sexuality

    Jerrold S. Greenberg, Clint E. Bruess, Sarah C. Conklin

    ReplyDelete
  3. According to legend, there once were three kinds of humans-the male, the female, and the androgyne. All humans had two sets of arms and legs. The males and females had two faces and two sets of genitalia of the same gender. The androgynies each had one masculine face and one feminie face, one set of female genitalia, and one set of male genitalia. This group of humans had tremendous strength and an arrogant nature, which offended the gods.



    Zeus, to punish them, split the androgynies in half and remade them as hemipeople. Thus, men and women have lost their other half and seek it in other people.



    The word androgynous originated from the story of the androgynies. An androgynous person is one who has a combination of masculine and feminine characteristics-one who exhibits some traits of both masculinity and femininity as defined by the society. Thus an androgynous male might be nurturing, in addition to providing, and an androgynous female might be assertive as well as soft-spoken. The idea of androgyny can serve as a means of doing away with gender-role stereotyping.



    Page 246

    Exploring the dimensions of human sexuality

    By Jerrold S. Greenberg, Clint E. Bruess, Sarah C. Conklin

    ReplyDelete
  4. Intersexuality as a physiological and psychological category has since been associated with ‘atavism’, which is an inhibition in bodily and/or psychological development. This is an explanation that is still given to parents in the West whose child has been intersexualized: they are told their baby is unfinished. This means the intersexualized baby is supposedly not fully developed as distinctly male or female, even though in most cases their bodies are perfectly healthy. The problem of clear category of male or female obviously also concerns the sexual orientation of the child; you cannot say the intersexualized adult is homo- or heterosexual if their sex is not clearly defined.

    The notion of natural selection made it possible to view hermaphroditic bodies as anomalous ‘throwback’. This the hermaphrodite came to be seen as atavistic and unfinished in its development. Although Havelock Ellis noted that ‘strictly speaking, the invert is degenerate’ (Dreger 1998:138) he did not like the term and made clear that he only used the term in the most scientific sense, which meant that the hermaphrodite ‘has fallen away from the genus (Dreger 1998:138).

    Critical Intersex
    By Morgan Holmes
    Page 46

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  5. Only when the simple rules of Mendelian heredity are understood does it become comprehensible of Mendelian heredity are understood does it become comprehensible why rare recessive traits, such as albinism, occur particularly often in the progenies of those who have married cousins or other relatives.



    Marriages of first cousins are common enough in at least some populations to make the collection of statistically meaningful data practicable. Aunt-nephew and uncle-niece marriages are generally infrequent, even where legally permitted. Marriages between second or third cousins are common, but the probability of homozygosis in the resulting children is much lower than in first-cousin marriages. In recent years, studies of progenies or marriages between relatives, as compared to those of unrelated parents, have been made in several countries. Despite heterogeneities in the result, due in large part of differences in the criteria used, the greater frequencies of stillbirths, infant deaths, and malformations among children of relatives are manifest.



    Genetics of the Evolutionary Process

    By Theodosius Grigorievich Dobzhansky

    Page 115

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  6. Intersexuality as a physiological and psychological category has since been associated with ‘atavism’, which is an inhibition in bodily and/or psychological development. This is an explanation that is still given to parents in the West whose child has been intersexualized: they are told their baby is unfinished. This means the intersexualized baby is supposedly not fully developed as distinctly male or female, even though in most cases their bodies are perfectly healthy. The problem of clear category of male or female obviously also concerns the sexual orientation of the child; you cannot say the intersexualized adult is homo- or heterosexual if their sex is not clearly defined.

    The notion of natural selection made it possible to view hermaphroditic bodies as anomalous ‘throwback’. This the hermaphrodite came to be seen as atavistic and unfinished in its development. Although Havelock Ellis noted that ‘strictly speaking, the invert is degenerate’ (Dreger 1998:138) he did not like the term and made clear that he only used the term in the most scientific sense, which meant that the hermaphrodite ‘has fallen away from the genus (Dreger 1998:138).

    Critical Intersex
    By Morgan Holmes
    Page 46

    ReplyDelete
  7. ..The other major type of male pseudohermaphroditism is known as 5-alpha-reductase (5-AR) deficiency. This is one of the most striking forms of hermaphroditism because it results in an apparent female-to-male transformation at puberty. During fetal development the “male” child’s testes produce testosterone. But in order for the developmental “message” of the testosterone to be “heard” in the child, the tissues must have the enzyme 5-alpha-reductase, which converts the testosterone into “readable” dihydrotestosterone. If it is lacking, as it is in cases of 5-AR deficiency, the fetus will develop female-like genitalia, including generally a short vagina and apparent labia and clitoris. At puberty, however, the testes of these individuals produce more testosterone, and for the pubertal changes to occur to the body doesn’t need the converting work of the 5-AR enzyme. So now the testosterone messages are read, and “masculinizing” puberty occurs. The body grows taller, stronger, more muscular, usually with the addition of significant body and facial hair but with no breast development, and the voice drops. Often at this time the testes descend into the assumed-labia, and the penis/clitoris grows to look and act more like a penis.



    Hermaphrodites and the medical invention of sex

    By Alice Domurat Dreger

    Page 39

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  8. Anthropological fieldwork beginning in 1974 made me dimly aware of a few slightly unusual persons, whom I at first misinterpreted as transvestites, only later to realize that, when Sambia referred to them as turnim-man, they meant some form of biological and anatomincal transformation. In short, these persons, classified in local culture as kwoluaatmwol (“changing into a male thing”), are what in the Western tradition would be called biological hermaphrodites in interssexed persons (reviewed in Herdt and Davidson 1988). I have studied one of them in depth, a male pseudohermaphrodite named Sakulambei, over a ten-year period, originally because of his role as a powerful shaman and later because of his

    Hermaphroditic gender identity (Herdt 1987a: 63-64; Herdt and Stoller 1985). Sakulambei sensed himself as a third sex, albeit more in the direction of being a male, and his mildly incestuous marriage and adopted child…



    Sambia Sexual Culture: Essays From The Field

    By Gilbert H. Herdt

    Page 256

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  9. A critical reinterpretation of this study required two new “insider” understandings of how the Guevedoche cultural system works. First, the sexual culture of the Dominican Republic villages seems to code not two but three sexes. It is striking that neither the medical researches nor their critics have noticed this simple yet profound social fact (Sagarin 1975). In the 1979 report it is noted, “The phallus enlarges to become a functional penis, and the change is so striking that these individuals are referred to by the townspeople as Guevedoches ---Penis at 12” (Imperator-McGinley et al. 1979:1213). This anatomical differences are explicit in the local culture since the hermaphrodites are ridiculed as Guevedoche or machihembra (“first woman, then man”) (1979:1235). This registers a cultural difference in the local system of commonsense sexual categories used in sex assigning and socializing Guevedoche. The villagers have more than a simple word or hermaphrodite; they have a triadic sexual code for classification. That the village…



    Page 255
    Sambia Sexual Culture: Essays From The Field
    By Gilbert H. Herdt

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