Hermaphrodites? Intersexuals? Men or Women?

9.08.2011 | By: T. B.

How much do you really know about people who are neither men nor women and are usually called intersexuals?

Research, knowledge and recognition of intersexuality are definitely a great challenge for our society.

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Do intersexuals present a taboo in today's society?

Research, knowledge and recognition of intersexuality are definitely a great challenge for our society. We have created a society of both sexes. This separation was driven to such an extent that sometimes it sounds, when we speak of men and women, as if we speak about two completely different species of humans. We have formed social bipolarity, although nature, with the differences it creates, again and again shows us that in nature balance is not created by the two tips on the scales, but it is diversity that balances the world.

Intersexuals or hermaphrodites?

Hermaphrodite is a medical term defining people who are born with untypical structure of chromosomes, genitals and sexual glands, while the Queer Organization introduced the term intersexuality. In some societies, intersexuality was accepted, however, the acceptance of intersexuality is decreasing again.

Intersexuals and their right to choose

Parents already decide upon the birth of a child to undergo the operation and hormonal therapy which changes the child’s sex and thus makes him or her socially acceptable. However, such a decision by parents usually does more damage to the child that one could imagine. Intersexual children usually face the feelings of mutilation later in their lives and do not accept the body that has been defined for them by physicians, who establish the separation between men and women with these procedures. In addition, a possible consequence of the operation is the inability to experience sexual stimuli.

There are many opponents to this type of procedures and they claim parents should wait with an operation until the children grow up and are capable of deciding for themselves in which direction they want their lives to go. Their arguments are based, above all, on the right of any person to decide for his of her body, on the right for self-identification.