PSD’s – People in Search of a Diagnosis

DSD’s – Deluded, Simplistic, Defeated

by Curtis E. Hinkle

2006

Unfortunately, the latest trend I see in the US intersex movement, which has been exemplified by renaming intersex and replacing it with DSD’s, seems to be the final nail in the coffin of the US movement itself. As a linguist, I have been very interested in the linguistic contortions and obfuscations which have defined the intersex movement which began in the United States by Cheryl Chase. I was very impressed with the organization that she founded during the early years but over time I have been very disappointed with the evolution of the group and its attempts to find a more suitable or less stigmatizing term than hermaphrodite to designate intersexuals. At this point, I would rather have the word “hermaphrodite” back and forget all the politics of exclusion and elitism which have characterized the movement for many years.

During the early days of the intersex movement, the term intersex was the one that ISNA chose to replace the old term hermaphrodite and there were many good reasons for getting rid of the medical division of hermaphrodites into three categories based only on gonads as the true marker of one’s “real” sex. The true hermaphrodite was someone with both testicular and ovarian tissue. Everyone else was a pseudo-hermaphrodite. Also, as the term was used in biology, humans could not be hermaphrodites at all since no case of a human who could both give birth to a child and sire a child has ever been documented.

The term intersex opened new possibilities but once again it was vague and it was difficult to decide who was and who was not really intersex and this bothered more and more intersexuals who accepted their intersexuality as a medical condition only. They would have you believe they are the majority. I don’t think they can prove this. The statistics are simply not available. However, they do have almost all political power on their side – the whole medico-legal system. So, it is no surprise that they have been able to almost totally transform ISNA from its original mission. And what is even more disappointing is that after all these years, I am not aware of any hospital that has stopped the normalization surgeries, a rather bleak record of accomplishment if you consider that this was ISNA’s main goal.

Now ISNA has unveiled its latest production: DSD’s or disorders of sexual differentiation. But one must ask if this will really be any easier to define than intersex. Are we simply changing the name so as not to have a label that could also be an identity? It does appear that way because it would be hard to use DSD as an identity but the term intersex was more flexible and actually more inclusive of the diversity of opinion within the intersex community itself. One could use it as both a “disorder” and as an identity.

However, what ISNA is most likely going to have to face in the years to come is that creating a new term for something that is basically not just a single medical problem at all has left them in the same situation they were with the term intersex. It is still an umbrella term and it will be hard for people to know exactly if their condition is a “real” disorder or not and doctors will also have different views on when a condition counts as a disorder.

The disorder is really the whole notion that society should be artificially ordered and that everyone should come in neat packages such that the system is not challenged. Now we will have battles among intersexuals about who is the most disordered and who should count as really disabled.

The underlying flaw in thinking that DSD will be more effective as a replacement for the term “intersex” is that we are not really dealing with actual scientific categories which have precise definitions. We are dealing with social concepts which have become medicalized as a result of the current technology available. Some people might want access to this care and I think most would want them to have that access but many intersexuals would prefer not to live in denial of who we are and simply be the hermaphrodites we used to be.

Sorry, word games are not the solution. Human rights are.

For a list of articles by Curtis E. Hinkle: Click here