And for those of you kinda between...

[lsanderson]

What if It’s (Sort of) a Boy and (Sort of) a Girl?
By ELIZABETH WEIL

When Brian Sullivan — the baby who would before age 2 become Bonnie Sullivan and 36 years later become Cheryl Chase — was born in New Jersey on Aug. 14, 1956, doctors kept his mother, a Catholic housewife, sedated for three days until they could decide what to tell her. Sullivan was born with ambiguous genitals, or as Chase now describes them, with genitals that looked “like a little parkerhouse roll with a cleft in the middle and a little nubbin forward.” Sullivan lived as a boy for 18 months, until doctors at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan performed exploratory surgery, found a uterus and ovotestes (gonads containing both ovarian and testicular tissue) and told the Sullivans they’d made a mistake: Brian, a true hermaphrodite in the medical terminology of the day, was actually a girl. Brian was renamed Bonnie, her “nubbin” (which was either a small penis or a large clitoris) was entirely removed and doctors counseled the family to throw away all pictures of Brian, move to a new town and get on with their lives. The Sullivans did that as best they could. They eventually relocated, had three more children and didn’t speak of the circumstances around their eldest child’s birth for many years. As Chase told me recently, “The doctors promised my parents if they did that” — shielded her from her medical history — “that I’d grow up normal, happy, heterosexual and give them grandchildren.” More

Comments

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Yes, I agree that in many cases conjoined twins face health risks that intersex children do not. And I generally wouldn't oppose conjoined twins being separated, if they could be, because there is always a health risk of some kind, even if it's just that if something happens to the health of one, it endangers the other.

[bchbum-98.livejournal.com]

Sometimes separation is certain to casue the death of at least one of them. It just depends. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abigail_and_Brittany_Hensel

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Yes, I know; that's why I said, "if they could be."