Gender specificity is an unavoidable notion of human behavior that has existed in humankind's societies since the beginning of Homo sapiens, and will continue to exist in future societies. I would venture to assume that most of the general population of this earth is unaware that there are multiple conditions in which a person may be defined as neither male nor female, but as an "intersex." Defined as by simply having ambiguous genitalia, intersex disorders prove to be much more than just that, and as David A. Frederick and his fellow authors point out in their definitive article, "people can have chromosomes, genes, hormone levels, internal genitalia, external genitalia, and brains that don't all line up in terms of being male-typical or female-typical (Frederick, et al. 2008). They later go on to describe how this has now sparked controversial debates over what the definition of an intersexual person is, and whether or not these individuals should be described as having a "disorder", which implies the need for correction. In all of the studies and articles I reviewed for this paper, I found that the authors felt the need to define what they would refer to as intersex in their respective articles. This social confusion and stigma around the word intersex is a direct representation of how socially constructed and socially defined gender really is, and whether or not it benefits an intersexual individual to be surgically altered into a specific sex and gender. I propose that in order to eventually overcome these social stigmas surrounding gender, we need to be allow the parents of a newly born intersexual child to decide whether or not to surgically reassign their child to a specific gender. It should not be protocol for this reassignment to happen as every family approaches their specific situation with different ideologies and values that should be respected in every intersexual newborn.
