THE CASE OF JOHN/JOAN
(continued from previous page)

At 19, Chase understood that she’d been subjected to a clitoridectomy. She began an investigation into her medical history but was thwarted by her doctors, who refused to reveal her past. It took three years for her to find a doctor who would show Chase her medical records. Only then did she learn that she had been born a “true hermaphrodite” – a person with both ovarian and testicular tissue – and that the operation she had undergone at age 8 (to relieve “stomachaches”) had actually been to cut away the testicular part of her gonads.

Horrified and angered at the deception perpetrated upon her, and aggrieved at the loss of her clitoris, which has rendered her incapable of orgasm, Chase began to seek out others like her for emotional support. Through Internet postings and mailings, she established a network of intersexes in cities across the country and, in 1993, dubbed the group the Intersex Society of North America, a peer-support, activist and advocacy group.

To meet with Chase and members of ISNA – as I did last spring, when they held a peaceful demonstration outside Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, in New York, where Chase’s clitoral amputation was conducted – is to enter a world where it is impossible to think of sex with the binary, boy-girl, man-woman distinction we’re accustomed to. There’s Heidi Walcutt (genetically female but born with uterine, ovarian and testicular tissue and a micropenis, she describes herself as a “true American patchwork quilt of gender”) and Martha Coventry, who was born with a penis-sized clitoris but a fully functioning female reproductive system and is the mother of two girls. Kira Triea was assigned as a boy at age 2 and did not learn of her intersexuality until puberty, when she began to menstruate through her phallus. She was a patient of Dr. Money’s at the Johns Hopkins Psychohormonal Research Unit from age 14 to 17; this was in the mid-1970s, concurrent with John Theissen.

They have never met, but Triea’s story bears striking parallels to his. She describes how Dr. Money, evidently attempting to ascertain whether she had assumed a male or female gender identity, questioned her about her sex life – in the frank language for which he was well known. “Have you ever fucked somebody?” she remembers Dr. Money asking. “Wouldn’t you like to fuck somebody?” She also describes how Dr. Money showed her a pornographic movie. “He wanted to know who I identified with in this movie,” she says. Contrary to Money’s theory that an intersex reared as a boy will likely develop a male gender identity, Triea’s sexuality and sense of self were far more complicated than that. At 17, she agreed to undergo feminizing surgery to create female genitals, but when she became sexually active for the first time, at age 32, her erotic orientation was toward women.

Impossible to classify as simply male or female, Chase and her colleagues want to, she says, “end the idea that it’s monstrous to be different.”

Chase emphasizes that ISNA’s aim is to abolish all cosmetic genital surgery on infants – whether it be the full castration and sex reversal of microphallus boys or the supposedly less intrusive process of reducing a girl’s enlarged clitoris. Chase says that such procedures are equally invasive. She denounces as “barbaric” the medically unnecessary treatments on newborns, who are not in a position to authorize surgery that may have an irreversible effect on their erotic or reproductive functioning. And Chase strongly endorses Diamond and Sigmundson’s new recommendation against operating on newborns with ambiguous genitalia.

The medical establishment, she says, has shunned ISNA. According to Chase, she has tried for six years to gain an audience with the leading pediatric endocrinologists and surgeons at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere. They have refused to speak to her. Indeed, in a 1996 New York Times article on Chase and ISNA, Dr. John Gearhart, head of pediatric urology at Hopkins, dismissed the group as “zealots.” In a conversation with me, he addressed ISNA’s complaints. He maintained that sex reassignment is a viable option for boys who are born with micropenises or who lose their penises to injury although he adds that advances in penile reconstruction make him more hesitant to recommend the procedure today. “If John/Joan happened today,” he says, “I would sit down with those parents and say, ‘The child has testicles; it’s a normal male child; and we can now make penises, and they’re pretty functional and pretty cosmetic’ – and I would probably not give them the option. I would suggest that youcould change the child’s gender, but I would not recommend that, because reconstructive genital surgery has come light years since John/Joan’s accident.”

Gearhart insists that advances in medicine render ISNA’s concerns obsolete. “When these people in ISNA were operated on, 25 and 30 years ago, there weren’t really children’s reconstructive surgeons around,” he says. “So most of [these babies] had their clitoris or their penis amputated. That was wrong. OK? That was wrong. But the surgeons didn’t know any better. Nowadays, people in modern reconstructive surgery are not cutting off little babies’ clitorises or penises, or anything along those lines.” Gearhart says that modern microsurgery retains sensation. “And if sensation is important to orgasm,” he says, “then we retain orgasm.”

Chase disputes this and says that Gearhart’s electric-diagnostic test of sensation, which is administered immediately following genital surgery, doesn’t prove anything. “How this [test] relates to sexual function 15, or 20 years later is anybody’s guess,” she says.

john-joan | page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15

top | continued

home ~ about me ~ intersexuality faq ~ intersexuality vocabulary ~ articles
real people ~ bulletin board ~