[quote PlanDeRaccordement]@CharlieParley
There is only one sex in humans capable of creating large immobile gametes, bearing young and giving birth. That sex is female.
However, for every 2 in 1,000 births a baby is born with ambiguous genitalia such that a specialist has to assign a sex to the baby and do surgery to remove the genitalia of the sex not assigned. As this is a human decision, it cannot be 100% correct sex assignment. So there are people assigned female, that are male and people assigned male that are female. (Again not talking gender identity for posters who haven’t read the full thread. Trans have hijacked the real plight of the intersex, and that is another subject).[/quote]
This is wrong.
Yes, 2 in 1000 babies are born with ambiguous genitalia requiring specialist input to determine the sex of the baby. But in 19 out of 20 of these babies, sex can be determined as clearly male or female. Sex is not assigned to these children but determined.
In one in 20 of these children, sex cannot be conclusively determined and is therefore assigned. This is based on the results of all medical testing and will usually involve a prediction how the child will develop based on the available data.
This assignment works for 9 out of these 10 children. For 1 in 10 however, the assignment is wrong and will then be corrected in adulthood.
In actual numbers that is one person in the UK every two years.
Whether sex is determined or assigned, in most developed nations following a modern treatment pathway for these children, corrective surgery is performed at a young age only if this is medically necessary. Advocates for people with DSDs recommend leaving any medically unnecessary cosmetic surgeries until the child is old enough to consent. (Like "dsd families", a Scottish charity supporting children with DSDs and their parents. I quoted their numbers here.)
I'm not sure you really understand what these conditions entail. These children are NOT born with two sets of genitalia.
I said that “intersex is both male and female” which is correct because there are different conditions, but all are due to the person having both male and female chromosomes and/or phenotype.
No. Really, these 40 conditions do not all result in babies being born both male and female. Most of the time these babies developed along just one pathway - male or female - but their reproductive system did not form properly. They are born with a congenital malformation of either the male reproductive system or the female reproductive system. Without developing any part of the reproductive system of the other sex.
Complete gonadal dysgenesis happens at one in 150,000 births. This means mathematically that a true hermaphrodite is born every 9hrs in the world, and there are around 52,000 are currently living in the world.
The phrase "true hermaphrodite" has a specific meaning. Which is an individual who has a functioning male reproductive system and a functioning female reproductive system either at the same time or in sequence (develops from a fertile male to a fertile female and vice versa). Neither type have been documented in humans, but they do exist in other species.
Complete gonadal dysgenisis does not mean that a baby is born with fully formed ovaries and fully formed testes. What it means is that instead of gonads (i.e. either ovaries or testes) the baby has fibrous, non-functional tissue that cannot produce the hormones that ovaries or testes produce and the child will not develop normally at puberty without receiving hormone replacement.
Individuals born with complete gonadal dysgenisis are infertile, because they cannot produce sperm or ova because they don't have testes or ovaries. Instead, they have non-functional clumps of tissue commonly known as streak gonads. These frequently become cancerous and their removal is recommended as soon as possible.
HTH