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I find the contrast between the readings interesting. The interview with Katie seemed more medical oriented than Middlesex. “Intersex ... is a medical condition.” The pieces with Oprah also had a different feel to them. “she never felt pressure to choose a gender. 'Society pressures you to choose sides just like they pressure mixed race people to decide.' ... 'I have both, and I'm not going to .. hide it.'” The DSD Guidelines book seemed very parent-oriented (obviously), but I think that added a nice perspective. The first people we interact with, usually, are our parents. So it makes sense to study how parents react to intersex children so that we can try to understand how people in general react to intersex people. (I want to note at this point that my word processor dictionary does not recognize the word intersex). I imagined being a parent of an intersex child and my first thought was, what would I tell everyone else? I mean this first question about a baby, in my experience, is is it a boy or a girl? I remember when my parents had their third baby they thought about never telling anybody what gender the child was so that they could experiment with gender roles (I think they were joking at least a little), but within half an hour we tricked the gender out of them (a girl). During that half hour though was really frustrating because we don't have words to talk about a single human being without talking about their sex. We have he, she or it, neither of which appropriately describe a single human being! I think our language handicap indicates (and reinforces) our more social handicap of only being able to think about a person as a sex. Clearly this is not useful when trying to experience the range of possibilities for human sexuality, and at this point I am not finding a use for this binary-like distinction.

As for the medical language, I have always found the connotations of the words doctors use to desribe people that don't fit the average disturbing. I wonder if this is the fault of doctors' or if doctor invent a word to describe a condition that most people don't have and then people assign negative connotations to the word.