Leonard writes:
Did anyone happen to catch the second segment of ABC's PrimeTime last night? It was about the medical practice of surgically altering infants whose genitalia are 'ambiguous' at birth. In most cases, according to the report, such infants are surgica lly made into females 'because the surgery is so much easier'. They are then raised by their families as little girls. Trouble is, many of them feel really weird growing up, even as little children--they know they are 'different', they feel like 'somethin g's wrong', but they don't know what. One boy who was being raised as a girl said he had the equivalent of a nervous breakdown at age 9 because he knew he wasn't a girl at all. Later he had his manhood surgically restored. But he never got over the trauma of having been raised as something he wasn't.
The thing that hit home for me was how similar, if not identical, this man's experience is to my experience of growing up gay but being raised as straight. All the things this man said about how he felt, the clear sense of something being wrong, the me ntal and emotional collapse, and the knowledge that accepting and becoming who and what he really was--all this is exactly my experience of growing up gay, struggling with being different, trying to adjust and to live as something I was not and never was (though being outwardly quite successful at it), and finally coming to see and understand how wrong it all was, and embracing my true nature and becoming my true self for the first time.
The arrogance and hybris of the medics who make these radical decisions for the parents of these unfortunate children reminded me of the arrogance and hybris of the American Freudian psychoanalyst who took on my case when I tried at 17 to tell my parents that I'd fallen in love with a boy at school and that I understood for the first time what homosexuality really was about. I am still angry at the way he treated me and my 'illness' from his lofty omniscience, and I saw this omniscience again in these doctors who announced that they were determining the sex of these children simply by reconstructing their genitals.