There are approximately 80,000 people in the Netherlands who were born with a gender anatomy that does not fully correspond to the norm for male and female bodies. This used to be called hermaphroditism or intersex conditions and in 2006 the term: disorders of sex development was proposed.
Because all three terms are still in use, we speak of gender variations here. From the 1950s, it became standard medical practice to protect children with a gender variation from social problems by assigning them a gender and then keeping that procedure secret. But what was it like for those kids? As now adults, how do they look back on the medical interventions and the secrecy? By rearranging and interfering the knowledge from the life stories with the knowledge from medical narratives, a multiple perspective is created. This makes it clear that medical interventions in the case of gender variations were justified in an asymmetrical knowledge network that was permeated with paradoxical messages. Knowledge productions and knowledge networks about gender variations may have been contingent, but not value-free. The underlying ideology that triggered the paradigm shifts, mistakes, and accommodations was and is primarily normative. This research aims to contribute to seeing these people as full-fledged with full-fledged bodies and full-fledged lives.
Author Margriet van Heesch studied philosophy and general literature at the University of Amsterdam. She was then appointed as a PhD student, first at the Belle van Zuylen Institute and then at the AISSR of the University of Amsterdam. Since 2008 she has been teaching various lectures at the departments of sociology, anthropology, political science and literature on theorising of gender, sexuality and the epistemology of romantic love.
Source: University of Amsterdam
Icon image: Afbeelding van Margriet van Heesch