Welcome to Gaia! ::

@ killafrog - You lost me buddy.

@ HotPants - lol ur welcome, but that rant about psychopath parents was a little bit scary.

@Liada - It's unfortunate that by the time they are at the age where they need hormone therapy, it's well past the point of reversing or correcting what was finished. I just hope that the parents understand a little better what they did and that they are being supportive of their child.

Okay, educate me. What is intergendered? I did some reading and first of all it doesn't seem to have a single definition, like many things.

It doesn't /seem/ like it would require surgery or hormones. Is the goal here just to appear androgynous because we reject gender dichotomy? I have friends that do that quite well with clothing and grooming choices. Only their closest friends know their physical sex and it doesn't matter to anyone, unless you are fond of pronouns.

The English language needs a pronoun like ta1 in Chinese, which means he or she...the other person. They don't have words just for "he" or "she".

That helps. So, looking through the medical literature, I find that intersexuality refers to people born with ovarian and testicular tissue. They often have ambiguous external bits and chromosomal abnormalities, too but that isn't the issue here.
The issue is this: are they true hermaphrodites or do they have mixed gonadal dysgenesis?
True hermaphrodites have ovaries AND testicles. There are 11 documented cases of fertility in people with TH. Meaning, they gave birth.

People with MGD on the other hand, have ovarian streaks of tissue on one or both testicles.
● Patients with pure gonadal dysgenesis are raised as female since there is no sexual ambiguity at birth; however, gender assignment in patients with mixed gonadal dysgenesis is variable and depends on the degree of virilization
● Approximately 20% of patients with gonadal dysgenesis develop a gonadal neoplasm within the first two decades of life, usually gonadoblastoma; almost all cases of gonadoblastoma have been reported in patients with pure or mixed gonadal dysgenesis or male pseudohermaphroditism
● Other neoplasms include seminomatous germ cell tumors such as seminoma and dysgerminoma, nonseminomatous germ cell tumors such as embryonal carcinoma and choriocarcinoma, as well as non-germ cell tumors such as Wilms tumor
Since the risk of malignant tumor is so high AND one of the clinical features of MGD is sexual infantilism with or without gonads...meaning they aren't gonna go through puberty anyhow, doctors do recommend removal.
So, spinning this as, "it's horrible that the parents are selecting the gender-nads of their poor babies" is just poop.

Gender is such an interesting topic. Why does our society think that males/females should be raised a certain way and what really is the role of gender roles in our "modern" society?

bandaidd does make some great points: perhaps some cases are decided more for medical reasons rather than parents deciding what sex they want their child to be if they have both gonad types.

Granted, I'm sure there are plenty of times when the later is the case. Which is better: making a sex change decision about your child to attempt to make your child's life "normal" (50/50 chance!), or have them go through their own natural progression, but perhaps becoming a stigma in their community.

Hard decisions to make either way for someone you want to protect, especially a child.