Intersex is a condition where a human being is born with reproductive anatomy that otherwise fits the native description of a person being a male or a female. However, in some cases, it does not show up at birth but may start developing gradually until the age of puberty (Hungerford et. al ., 1959). A good example of an intersex would be a person whose outside appearance fit the description of a male but the inside bears mostly female-typical anatomy or vice versa. Apart from that, a person may be born with mosaic genetics, in that some of the cells in a female have XY chromosomes while others have XX chromosomes.
The fact that person has XY chromosome does not mean that the person is male or XX chromosome that the person is female. The SRY gene on the Y chromosome makes the whole difference. It is responsible for informing a child to be a boy, and the absence of the gene typically makes the child develop into a girl (Ortenberg et. al ., 2002).
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
The anatomical categorization of intersex is not a discrete one because, in practice, there are very many different answers that people give to the question of anatomical categorization of this condition (Frader et. al ., 2004). The reason is nature conveys different sex spectrums and some physical attributes like breasts, labia, gonads etc. are just simplified to just male and female and in this case, intersex. Furthermore, there is no test to decide whether a person is male or female because of we as human beings, especially the doctors, come to certain decisions regarding the sexual anatomy or the peculiarity it shows before they pronounce a person as intersex, male or female.
Alice Dreger finds our nation’s founding fathers as anatomical activists because many of them sought to reject the idea of monarchy on the basis of the simplistic concept of anatomy, which according to her is not a definite test or measure of determining whether a person is male or female or just a one-dimensional entity (Dreger, et al., 2004). Furthermore, she contended with the founding fathers because they believed that all men were created equal. Furthermore, she spoke of how people decided that the anatomy that mattered was the anatomical commonality rather than the difference because as we continue learning about the anatomy, we continue being faced with difficulties in separating the genders.
References
Frader, J., Alderson, P., Asch, A., Aspinall, C., Davis, D., Dreger, A., & Kittay, E. (2004). Healthcare professionals and intersex conditions. Archives of pediatrics &adolescent medicine , 158 (5), 426-428. Retrieved from http://www.isna.org/pdf/Frader2004.pdf
Hungerford, D. A, Donelly, A. J. Nowell, P.C, & Beck, S. (1959). The chromosome constitution of a human phenotypic intersex. American journal of human genetics , 11 (3), 215.
Ortenberg, J., Oddoux, C., Craver, R., Mcelreavey, K., Salas-Cortes, L., Guillen-Navarro, E., & Sarafoglou, K. (2002). SRY gene expression in the ovotestes of XX true hermaphrodites. The Journal of Urology , 167 (4), 1828-1831.
