Curious Findings...

During the course of our controversial viral marketing campaign, I have played about a dozen scenarios in my head. I wonder if it will be successful and catch on. I wonder what the exact responses will be and from whom they will come from. I wonder what sort of feelings we will elicit. I wonder if we will offend anyone. I wonder if anyone will find the attention brought to the issue of child gender reassignment as a positive contribution. I did some browsing and found this video on YouTube. There are some points in this outdated video that I found quite interesting.



(mind you the
video does appear biased) First of all, the mere fact that castration occurred without consent of a parent is absolutely astonishing. The reporter mentions that the family is "suing"--- I was incredibly surprised that a much more forceful term was not used, like up to the neck in malpractice law suits. Which on perhaps a more humanistic level, I wonder what possessed this doctor to perform an illegal surgery. I wonder if he felt that he was in the medical right or if he felt some form of a moral obligation my some set of beliefs to do this. Either way, what he did WAS illegal. When I came across this video, I noticed it was entitled "Surgical Abuse of Intersex Child." I never considered the fact that gender reassignment could be abused. I further found in my research that some of the associations that create awareness for intersexuality are severely opposed to infant gender reassignment. Some of these surgeries are results of not only ambiguous genitalia, but also botched circumsion. Now that I have seen some of the responses from different spectrums of people involved, I keep their point of view into consideration while creating our viral campaign.

Comments

arturo said…
This is quite a compelling video, I just don't know if it is merely fabricated based on actual similar cases, and if so it does a good job. In any case it is definitely a dramatization, music and all. Have you tried to do a search for that particular case? I did not find any evidence.
In any case this is a (possibly) good site for info on the subject:
http://www.isna.org/
Anonymous said…
@arturo: It's a real case. iirc it was part of a Discovery/Discovery Health special on intersexed children that aired a couple years ago (it might be older, I'm pretty sure when I caught it, it was a rerun). Well, not that they couldn't fabricate something, but it's not something they generally do.
Minh-Tam Le said…
Yes. I also saw it on the Discovery Channel a few years ago. My mom was astonished that the doctor performed the surgery without consent. I still do not understand why the doctor was so insistent on removing the organ when it was clear that the parents were against it.
Minh-Tam Le said…
If a doctor was to perform malpractice to this degree, would he/she have her/his license to practice medicine taken away?
Anonymous said…
@Minh-Tam Le: As far as I understand it this sort of thing has been standard practice in the medical community for quite a while now (the prevailing thinking being that it would be in the child's best interest to have "normal" looking genitalia). It seems to fall into a sort of grey area, I guess? It is weird to hear about something like this happening today (sounds like something that might have happened in the 60s). I don't really know much about medical licensing/malpractice, but from my understanding immediate, "corrective" surgery, often without even telling the parents, is the standard procedure in cases of babies born with ambiguous or malformed genitalia. (I don't know how much of a defense that's-what-the-textbooks-say-to-do is though).
Krystal said…
Its so sad that this happened so many years ago, today they could reconstruct tissue and "corrective surgery would have been so heart breaking

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