Insider/Outsider

Abstract

Insider/Outsider Catherine A. Ratliff (bio) Contesting Intersex: The Dubious Diagnosis Georgiann Davis NYU Press www.nyupress.org/books/9781479887040/ 240 Pages; Print, $28.00 Recent legislative actions in states such as North Carolina, Mississippi, and South Carolina have reignited public conversations surrounding intersex issues, visibility, and policing. Although restrictive legislation is obviously not a goal of intersex awareness, these political and legal maneuvers indicate that intersex topics are progressing more into public discourse—a move which offers the possibility for increased understanding of intersex and a breaking down of the limiting gender binary of male and female. Georgiann Davis’s Contesting Intersex: The Dubious Diagnosis works to help widen readers’s comprehension of intersex issues through a comprehensive examination of advocacy in the intersex movements, interrogation of the medial communities that diagnose and allocate labels of intersex and gender assignments, and the careful analysis of first hand interview data all through the effects of what she calls “pathologizing medical terminology.” It only takes reading a few pages of Davis’s text to feel a connection with her prose both academically and personally. Davis is able to capture her readers’s attention immediately with candid explanations of her own experiences and then seamlessly incorporate accounts of others, ranging from individuals with intersex traits, to those in the medical fields providing diagnoses, to family members of intersex individuals. Early in the Introduction, Davis’s alerts her readers to the fact that she occupies a “unique insider/outsider status” as a person born with an intersex trait, yet no direct connection with the intersex community. In this sense, Contesting Intersex serves as a kind of bildungsroman of Davis’s immersion in the intersex community of social and medical activism—from her first exposure to the concepts of intersexuality as a young college student to her election as president of the AIS-DSD (Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome —Disorder of Sex Development) Support Group—that her readers are able to experience alongside her. At several points in the text Davis questions if her own connection the topic of scholarly and scientific study on intersex will hamper her research or cause medical experts or scholars in the field to negate her findings; however, it is this connection that seems to propel the text beyond mere reporting to include genuine activism for the intersex community as well. The second chapter explores advocacy and intersex social movements. Specifically, Davis points readers to a focus on four major national organizations: ISNA (Islamic Society of North America), AISSG-USA (Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome Support Group—USA), OII (Organization Intersex International), and Accord Alliance. Forward movements in advocacy, aided by the Internet’s ability to disperse information, are assisting intersex advocates in preventing the manipulation of information by medical professionals to those facing dubious diagnoses. In addition, organizers, such as Cheryl Chase (who Davis mentions now uses the name Bo Laurent), are now more able to work in tandem with national organizations to solicit ideas, knowledge, and awareness education at conferences and meetings of groups like GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) and those mentioned above. Davis also reflects on the effects of the label of DSD (disorders of sexual development) within the medical intersex communities. What she calls an umbrella medical term (not one that expresses identity), DSD offered physicians an etymological alternative to more problematic terms such as hermaphrodite; however, this alternative etymology is not without problems because, and as revealed through multiple interviews in the second and third chapters, terminologies have potentially pathologizing powers. The potential power and influence of medical providers over intersex people is significant due to the pervasive idea within medical discourse that any physical characteristics outside of the male/ female binary are in need of “correction.” Even with increased awareness of intersex among physicians and psychologists, the push for classifications and defined diagnoses often still prevail. The result is the all too frequent force of surgical or medical intrusion on intersex bodies, many of which are often children unable to give or understand consent to gender assignment surgery. In her third chapter, Davis relies heavily on the work of The Johns Hopkins Hospital psychologist John Money. The 1972 publication by...