The evidence

Domain registration. The isna.org domain was registered on 1994-10-31 (31 October 1994, 05:00:00 UTC), per the domain registry’s record (Registered On: 1994-10-31T05:00:00.691Z).

Earliest known capture. The earliest snapshot of the site held by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine was captured on 1998-12-12 (12 December 1998, 03:00:50 UTC):

https://web.archive.org/web/19981212030050/http://www.isna.org/

Source & citation

This page is generated to mirror the catalog record, so the two never drift.

Suggested citation. Cheryl Chase, isna.org: the movement moves online. The Bo Laurent Papers, catalog isna-org-website. Earliest capture: Internet Archive Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/19981212030050/http://www.isna.org/, captured 12 December 1998. Domain registered 31 October 1994.

The letter

6 September 1994

Ms Natalie Angier
c/o New York Times
229 West 43d¹ Street
New York NY 10036

Cheryl Chase
Intersex Society of North America
PO Box 31791
San Francisco CA 94131
Tel 415-695-0975
Fax 415-695-1454
email cchase@ptechwest.com

Dear Ms Angier,

I  have² appreciated your articles in the Times about many aspects of sexual differentiation and,³ biology and gender, and the action of sex hormones. I hope that I can persuade you to write about the human consequences of gender ambiguity.

The Intersex Society is a peer support and activist group for individuals born with unusual genitals or some discordance between genitals and reproductive organs or chromosomes. I know from your writing that you must be familiar with the phenomenon.

However, because the topic is highly taboo, it is little known outside the circle of medical intersex specialists and geneticists. Intersexuals are not at all rare, but are typically so shamed by social stigma and so emotionally damaged by medical objectification and surgical mutilation, that few of us have dared to speak.

There are a few of us at ISNA who are determined to change that. We have found that the path to healing ourselves is to accept our intersexual bodies and to make political identity as intersexuals. We reject the medical model of intersex-as-disease. This model is as culturally biased and unscientific as that of homosexuality-as-disease.

The current climate of discourse about gender and the media fervor over African female genital mutilation, makes the topic of medical oppression of intersexuals a timely one. Intersex specialists claim that their ministrations allow us to live as nearly normal males and females, but they have consistently refused to do long term follow up studies. Based on my interviews with dozens of adult intersexuals, medical intervention allows parents to deny the fact and consequences of their child’s intersexuality. Parental distress is replaced with a “time bomb” for the intersexual patient, who will have to overcome great obstacles without help in order to learn the truth about his/her own nature and history, and live with sexual dysfunction consequent to surgical destruction of genital sensitivity.

If you will write about the “other side” of the story of medical erasure⁴ of intersexuality, I will be happy to act as a resource. In addition to being extremely knowledgeable about the technical issues involved, I am willing to relate my own experience, and can introduce you to others who will also do so.

I have enclosed copies of two recent letters to the editor of the Times, and the ISNA’s Annotated Bibliography. I hope to hear from you soon.

Yours Truly,

enc:

Annotated Bibliography

NYT letter Sept 6

NYT letter Sept 15

sample correspondence

Note on the source

The letter survives as one Microsoft Word for Macintosh 5.0 document (6,144 bytes, Mac OS Roman). The file had been fast-saved, so its current text was stored as scattered fragments with a piece table recording their order; read straight through, the bytes yield a truncated, garbled letter. The transcription above is reassembled according to that piece table.

Because fast-save appends revisions rather than rewriting, the file also preserved a trace of the author’s editing. An earlier draft of one sentence read “the story of medical treatment of intersexuality”; it was revised, before the final save, to “medical erasure of intersexuality.” The discarded word remains recoverable in the file and is recorded in the textual notes.

The sender’s 1994 telephone, fax, and email address (at a long-defunct domain) are transcribed as part of the historical document.

Source & citation

Generated to mirror the catalog record, so the two never drift.

Suggested citation. Bo Laurent [as Cheryl Chase], letter to Natalie Angier, 6 September 1994. Intersex Movement Archive, catalog letter-angier. Born-digital; recovered from a Word for Macintosh 5.0 file.

Read the original issue

Download the original PDF · 6 pages, US letter, born-digital (Adobe FrameMaker → Acrobat Distiller, 2000), ~550 KB.

Contents

The issue as it was laid out, in reading order. Each title links to its transcription below.

• Welcome, readers! — the editor, on why “Hermaphrodites with Attitudes”
• Case report — Will B. Dunn, M.D., FACS — a satire on cosmetic genital surgery
• The Awakening — Kira Triea
• Whose sex errors? — a reply to John Money’s Sex Errors of the Body
• Hermaphrodites on the infobahn — ISNA’s new email list
• Going home — Anne Ogborn — among the Hijra in New Delhi
• Thirty seconds over Penn Station — Kira Triea (poem)
• Hijras and intersexuals — Anne Ogborn
• Winged labia: Deformity or gift? — Cheryl Chase
• Morgan awarded M.A.! — Morgan Holmes defends her thesis
• San Francisco chapter meets!
• I am not alone! — from David’s personal journal
• Dr. Money and The Five Sexes — Cheryl Chase
• I’m still intersexual — Morgan Holmes
• Send Money! — an appeal
• Colophon

Full transcription

Case report

Will B. Dunn, M.D., FACS

The patient was a 2 year old reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) who was brought to the clinic by guardians for diagnosis of a disfiguringly prominent nose. Some even said it glowed. (fig. 1, left) Although no objective standards have been published for proboscal length in reindeer, it is a simple matter for the surgeon to judge.

Under general anesthetic, the offending tissue was excised and sent for frozen section microscopy. While awaiting the pathology results, an incidental tonsillecto-adenoidectomy was performed, as a prophylactic measure against the known possibility of sore throats. No pathology was detected in the frozen nose sections, and no etiology is apparent for the rumored “glowing.”

Follow-up at three weeks post-surgery revealed an excellent cosmetic result, the proboscis now displaying an appropriately diminished contour. Patient was discharged to guardian’s care.

(In the original, this piece began on page 1 and concluded on page 6.)

Going home

Anne Ogborn

It’s March, but already the sun is beating down on this little open footpath, sandwiched between two single room houses in the Nehru Stadium basti. The light stanchions of the stadium frame the sky. I’m in New Delhi, working. My job? Sacred dancing eunuch.

I peek into the dark interior of the house. Sonna is arguing with a woman in Bangla. The woman keeps pulling the end of her cotton sari over her head with one hand, while holding a baby wrapped in a blanket in the other. Finally she capitulates and hands the infant to Sonna.

I can understand her reluctance. Sonna isn’t exactly a person whose appearance inspires trust. She says she’s fifty. She looks much older. By looking at her, she’s half monkey and half child.

Actually, she’s one of the most delightful people I know. Sometimes she shows me how to play traditional Indian children’s games. I’m getting pretty good at playing jacks with chips of broken concrete. Always dressed in an androgynous kurta styled salwar-kameez, she looks like neither a man nor a woman.

And in truth she isn’t. We’re all Hijras—members of a religious order that is closed to men and women. For the last 2,400 years we’ve maintained the customs and beliefs of one of the oldest spiritual orders on earth, an order whose truths are inscribed not in words, but on our bodies.

Sonna, like most of my sisters, has no genitals. She has a urinary meatus with a faint ridge below it. I’m different. I have roughly female-looking genitals, courtesy of western sex change doctors. They love me anyway.

I’ve seen her genitals often. We curse people when they won’t let us dance by showing them our genitals. This makes people infertile. No, really—hey, reading about Renee Richards eventually made me infertile.

Everybody in my dance troupe joined later, but I met people who were raised from infancy as Hijras. Because non-transgendered people don’t understand us, we always say, “We were born this way,” when they ask us if we have been castrated and penotomized.

Anyway, Sonna takes the infant and holds it, puts a mark of vermilion and oil on it’s head, and looks at its genitals. Boys get one blessing. Girls get another. Everybody else we take with us to raise. This one’s a boy, she decides.

Look down and be proud.

Winged labia: Deformity or gift?

Cheryl Chase

One of the many genitally mutilated people who has corresponded with ISNA is a woman named Jean. Although Jean is not intersexual, she did undergo a clitoral recession as an adult. Here is her story.

At puberty, like other women, Jean’s inner labia grew larger. However, unlike most other American women, Jean’s labia grew very large—she characterizes them as five inches long, when stretched. One term that is used to describe such labia is “winged labia.” As most readers are painfully aware, genital diversity is not widely appreciated in our culture, and the adolescent Jean was confused and shamed. She investigated pornography to find pictures of someone else “like me,” but to no avail. Every image of female genitals that she could find had petite, ladylike labia. As many intersexuals have done, she took herself to the library to try to understand her body.

She found photographs of genitals like hers in older anthropological writings. In such tomes as “Woman: An Historical Gynaecological and Anthropological Compendium” (Ploss, Bartels and Bartels, 1935) she read that the form of her genitals was a “malformation” called the “Hottentot Apron,” that it was characteristic of “primitive Bushmen,” and that it was an atavistic throwback. Racist anthropologists characterized the “Bushmen” as similar to chimpanzees. (In fact, female chimpanzees have nearly absent labia minora.) Finally, most writings agreed that the Hottentot Apron was attributable to masturbation, and was deliberately produced.

She next turned to contemporary (mid-1970s) medical literature. Here she found a number of articles by plastic surgeons which addressed “labial hypertrophy” as a “developmental disorder” or “congenital anomaly” requiring surgical correction, by reducing the labial tissue under general anesthetic. There were citations of the racist literature which attributed winged labia in southern African populations to masturbation. Winged labia in Asian women were attributed to “prostitution or excessive intercourse” and “lack of cleanliness.”

Jean found a surgeon who said he could make her labia “normal.” She went under his knife, but when she woke she was left with absurdly small inner labia. She was still deeply distressed about the appearance of her genitals because her clitoral hood, which had been in proportion to her inner labia, now seemed too prominent. She submitted to a second surgery, and this time so much of her hood was removed that her clitoris was exposed, an excruciatingly painful condition.

Jean tolerated this pain for a couple of years before she located another surgeon who said he could help. His solution: a clitoral recession, just like what is done to intersexual infants whose clitoris is labeled “too big.” Jean’s clitoris was normal size, so the surgeon didn’t remove parts of the glans and shaft, as he would have done to an intersexual baby girl. He merely dissected the clitoris from the surrounding tissue, cut the suspensory ligament, and buried the clitoris beneath the subcutaneous tissue.

Jean feels that she was helped by this final surgery. It alleviated the excruciating pain, but it was “terribly desensitizing.” While she is still orgasmic, she says “if orgasms before the recession were a deep purple, now they are a pale, watery pink.” She regrets ever having considered surgery to “normalize” her genitals.

It wasn’t until after the surgeries that Jean learned that her mother and grandmother’s genitals were similar to hers. It is a family trait. Jean, who is African American, speculates that her ancestors may have been transported to the U.S. from parts of southern Africa where winged labia are prevalent.

The illustration on the previous page is an erotic woodblock print from Nineteenth century Japan. This illustration celebrates winged labia as a beautiful gift called the “long-tailed butterfly.”

Further Reading: See Anne Fausto-Sterling’s “Gender, Race and Nation: the Comparative Anatomy of ‘Hottentot’ Women in Europe, 1815–1817” (in Deviant Bodies, eds. Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline [Urla], 1993) to read about anthropological “rational investigation” of African women’s genitals.

Source & citation

This page mirrors the catalog record so the two never drift.

Suggested citation. Hermaphrodites with Attitudes, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Winter 1994), ed. Cheryl Chase. Intersex Society of North America. Born-digital; [Archive name], catalog hwa-01.

Transcription

Textual note

Copytext is the printed letter in The Sciences (July/August 1993, p. 3). A lightly revised version later circulated on ISNA’s own website (isna.org), and constitutes a distinct variant witness. Representative substantive variants in the web text include: “opportunity to meet” for the print’s chance to meet; “I believe that I can provide” for I think I can provide; “parents and doctors” for parents and physicians; “Some are transexual” for Some former intersexuals become transsexual; and a closing that names ISNA but drops the explicit postal address. A full collation is deferred; the print copytext is authoritative here.

Transcription is diplomatic: original spelling, capitalization, hyphenation of compounds, the spelled figure “4 percent,” and the em dash at “medicine—and” are preserved. The three Latinate terms are italicized as in the printed original; the magazine set the headline in full capitals.

Source and citation

Chase, Cheryl. “Intersexual Rights.” The Sciences, July/August 1993, p. 3. Intersex history archive, item letter-sciences-1993.

The annotated original

The letter as Suzanne Kessler read it — seven pages carrying her handwritten responses in the margins. Click any page to open it full size; the complete scan is also available as a downloadable PDF (7 pp.). A transcription follows below, and Kessler’s annotations are transcribed as a separate layer.

The letter

29 January 1993

Suzanne Kessler
Division of Natural Sciences
SUNY Purchase
Purchase NY 10577

Dear Ms Kessler,

Thank you for taking time to talk with me the other day about management of intersex children. I was surprised by your resistance to the notion that the surgery being done on intersex genitals today is at the expense of sensation, and therefore amounts to mutilation. Let me tell you some of the facts and experiences which have led me to that conclusion. ¹

One of the physicians who was responsible for my care at Columbia is now the grand old man of pediatric endocrinology in the US, and Chief of Pediatrics at a major teaching hospital. I contacted him last year by phone, and asked him why I had received no emotional care whatsoever. In fact, no doctor ever offered to talk with me, explain what they were doing or had done to me, and I was illegally prevented access to my medical records.² He told me that emotional care had always been strongly emphasized in his program at Columbia, and I would understand that when I got my complete records. I got the records last year, and they confirmed my recollection that there was no emotional care. Claims that such care is being provided today should be believed only if independently confirmed.

Intersex specialists claim that the surgery is intended to save the child from the pain and stigma of growing up as a hermaphrodite in a culture which does not recognize hermaphrodites. In fact, a recent personal correspondence from Dr. Randolph clearly indicates his position that I was well served by having “your feminine appearance improved” even at the expense of an entire lifetime of normal sexual gratification.³

However, my experience, and the several life stories I have thus far collected indicate that medicine does not even achieve that goal. The others I have been able to contact tell me that, as in my case, information about their history and diagnosis, as well as medical records, were hidden from them. However, each of us eventually managed to obtain our records, in many cases investing enormous amounts of time and energy to obtain every scrap of documentation of events that occurred decades previously. And, when we obtain our records, we learn – that we are hermaphrodites! Medicine thus inflicts exactly the harm it claims the surgery is intended to prevent. It hurts. It shuts people up.⁴

I talked last year with a woman surgeon, one of the most respected in the field of surgical “correction” of infant’s genitals, and Chief of Child Surgery at a major hospital. I told her that my clitoris had been removed, my gonads operated on, and none of it explained or justified to me. She was impressed with the gonadal surgery, and told me, “you have received really excellent care.” In fact, could I choose, I would be happy to trade the slight risk of gonadal cancer for the chance to escape the mutilation of my genitals.⁵

I told my story last year to many of my friends (perhaps twenty to forty people). In so doing, I turned up two other stories. One, a woman with adrenal hyperplasia, was clitorectomized at age 17, in 1970. She is now an emotional disaster. She remembers clearly what sexual gratification felt like, feels the loss very keenly. I spoke not with her, but with her former lover, who told me that this woman was “one of the most hurt, damaged people” she had ever known.⁶

Another is the niece of a friend. I was able to speak by telephone with the surgeon, a local urologist. He removed the erectile tissue and part of the glans from her large clitoris, at age three and half months, two years ago. He told me that he had never seen an intersex infant before, but he spoke at a convention with a surgeon from Columbia, and one from Boston Children’s Hospital, and they explained to him how to perform the surgery. I told him about my history, then asked him about the prospects for clitoral sensation after the surgery he had recently performed. His voice became so choked with emotion he was unable to speak. I asked the family about emotional care for family and child. They told me “she will have to take oral hormones at puberty, since she has no gonads. The doctors who give her the hormones will provide good emotional care, certainly.”⁷

The prospect for sensation after transexual surgery is not so rosy as you seem to think, either. I recognized that the experience of transexuals might be of some relevance to me, so I visited a therapist who does psychotherapy and sex therapy for transexuals. I asked her how much feeling a male to female transexual had in the vagina created by penile inversion. “Usually none.” Then what is their sexual experience? “Closeness. The joy of being penetrated by a man, feeling close to him, giving him pleasure.”⁸

I talked with the patient counselor at the office of a well known sex reassignment surgeon. She told me that 40% of her mtf patients end up with no feeling in the vagina constructed from the penis. All transexual patients at all programs are required to sign a release stating that they realize the likelihood of having no sensation at all in the reconstructed genitals, and of never again having an orgasm.⁹

I have talked with a number of mtf transexuals. All told me that they were willing to trade sexual gratification for having their bodies made to fit their gender. They were willing to live without the possibility of orgasm or genital sexual pleasure again. However, some of them do experience orgasm after surgery.¹⁰ Those who have talked about it with me tell me that it is difficult and unreliable, sometimes achievable with 90 minutes of stimulation, sometimes not at all. One has told me that she achieves orgasm by manipulating her urethra. Another says that she does it by manipulating the stump of the penis, or the prostate through the vagina.¹¹ In her case, the surgeon left behind some of the erectile tissue of the base of the penis so that this erotic sensation would remain.

The female to male surgery has such poor prognosis for preservation of erotic sensation that many people choose to leave their clitoris intact. Some have a penis constructed in front of their own clitoris, while some simply have the clitoris (grown to an inch or more after taking androgens) freed up from the surrounding tissue.¹²

I have discussed transexual genital sensation at length because it is relevant to the Lattimer surgery, in which nearly all of the clitoral erectile tissue is removed, as was done to my friend’s niece. This surgery cannot be any less traumatic to the innervation of the clitoris than is penile inversion.¹³ Further, penile inversion is only performed by plastic microsurgeons who specialize in genital surgery. Clitoral reduction is often performed by inexperienced local surgeons. It is also significant that ts surgery has been refined over decades, by surgeons conferring with the patients. Since surgeons working with intersex children don’t talk to their patients about sexual response, it is not clear how they can refine their procedures or hone their skills. In fact, most doctors working with children (not only genital surgeons) seem to have an extreme aversion to seeing adult patients.¹⁴

The innervation of the clitoris is identical to that of the penis. There are receptors in the erectile tissue of the shaft, as well as in the glans. When a clitoris grows larger under the influence of androgen, it does not also grow new receptors. The existing receptors are merely spread out over a larger volume. Removing the clitoral shaft destroys as many receptors as removing the shaft of a penis would do.¹⁵

The clitoris functions both afferently and efferently. Sexual arousal leads to erection (efferent route) which produces sensation (afferent route). This occurs even without direct stimulation, so removing the erectile tissue drastically reduces the functionality. This is confirmed by the fact that some women who were subjected to amputation of the external part of the clitoris report the ability to achieve orgasm by stimulating the clitoral stump.¹⁶

Scar tissue is detrimental to feeling. If I apply a vibrator to my genitals, even inside my vagina, the only result is an irritating itching sensation. Sex therapists tell me this is typical of scar tissue. One man I have spoken to, raised male although his penis was completely hypospadic, tells me that plastic surgeries, repeated many times over the course of his childhood, resulted in scarring on his penis and left him with greatly impaired sensation. Today he would probably be assigned female and most of the penis (now conceptualized as a large clitoris) removed. Would this have left him (her) with better erotic sensation? All clitoral reduction techniques require very deep dissection of the genitals, a part of the body that does not heal well.¹⁷

The refusal to conceptualize a child as a potential sexual being is not limited to doctors performing genital surgery on intersex children. I have talked with one of the founders of the Turner Syndrome Society. Turner syndrome girls have no gonads, and therefore must take oral hormones to produce feminizing puberty. She has told me that resistance on the part of doctors and parents to beginning the hormones, thus allowing “my little girl” to become a sexual, adult woman, is a widespread problem, one which often leaves the girl feeling helpless, stranded in childhood as her peers are moving into womanhood.¹⁸

The importance of preserving erectile tissue was recognized by Randolph. After co-authoring a how-to article on extirpation (Gross’66), he apparently changed his mind. Although he did not publish any negative results for clitorectomy, one suspects such results led to his change of heart: Randolph’70 emphasizes the importance of erectile tissue for erotic sensation, and describes a technique for relocating, rather than removing, the clitoris.¹⁹

Some follow up results were published in Randolph’81. This article reveals a very interesting episode. “Three patients had an unsatisfactory outcome with persistent enlargement of the clitoris. One of the three required clitorectomy, another has thus far refused additional surgery, the third will undergo further corrections later.” “The final patient in this group has adamantly refused further surgery in spite of disfiguring prominence of her clitoris.” Did she refuse because she was old enough to compare sensation before and after the surgery, and experience it as mutilating? Randolph doesn’t even speculate. He is merely sad for her “disfigurement,” unhappy that he was not able to fix it further.²⁰

Although the Randolph technique would appear to have better prospects for preserving clitoral sensation, the Lattimer technique seems to be more common, and even clitorectomy is still not dead. For instance, the chapter on disorders of sexual differentiation in a standard endocrinology text simply states, “One of the clitoral recession techniques is to be preferred to clitorectomy.” (Conte’89) I did, though, locate a urology text (Perlmutter’92) which stated “clitorectomy is mentioned only to be condemned.” It describes a whole slew of techniques for recessing the clitoris, concealing it by stitching up labia majora, plicating it (similar to a dressmaker’s pleats), or simply excising the shaft and grafting the reserved glans onto the stump.²¹

Last year I was examined by a surgeon who is experienced in sex reassignment. He used a sort of vibrator to measure tactile sensitivity thresholds in my genital region. When I asked him the result, he told me that it was difficult to tell. There are huge atlases of normal tactile sensitivities for the whole body, he explained, which are used to quantify peripheral nerve damage, yet these atlases omit any data for the genitals. (I have not yet confirmed this.)²²

I have spoken to several surgeons who are performing the Lattimer surgery on a regular basis. Two told me that they had no long term data because the surgery was too new, and humans take such a long time to reach sexual maturity. The Lattimer technique, however, was published in 1961. (Lattimer’61) One surgeon, questioned about long term results, changed the subject, waxing enthusiastic about the new possibility of constructing an adequate penis rather than reducing the clitoris (although he does “lots” of clitoral reductions).²³

I have asked some of these surgeons what they thought of Randolph’s technique for moving and recessing the clitoris, without removing any erectile tissue. They were uniformly ignorant of it. It seems they don’t have time to read after they leave medical school.

I talked with a pediatric endocrinologist about my experience of clitoral extirpation as sexually debilitating. “Wait a minute,” he said. “That’s not sexually debilitating. Do you know that they do it in Africa?” (Honest, he really said that. It is present in print, too – Gross’66, Randolph’81.) I have now had the chance to discuss it with several Somali women, who tell me that it most certainly is sexually debilitating, in fact the express purpose is to eliminate sexual feeling in the woman, lest she bring shame to the family. The existence of a bodily modification as a cultural practice is no proof that it is harmless. Consider foot-binding, or the castration of eunuchs, or cultures which require women to amputate a finger whenever a close relative dies.²⁴

I visited a woman endocrinologist who manages the care of girls with adrenal hyperplasia at Columbia, where the Lattimer technique was developed and is still used. This doctor examined me every year from age 8 to age 12, and never volunteered any information about what she was doing or what had happened to me. I asked her last year if she had seen any other adults who were former patients. “Yes, a few.” Did she ask them about their sexual response or adequacy of reconstructed genitals? “No.”²⁵

I asked her what she knew about the possibility of orgasm without a clitoris. “I don’t know. It sounds as if you are more knowledgeable than I.” I told her that Money had told me that in order to achieve orgasm I need to have a partner with whom I am deeply in love. She was shocked, told me that as a fully functional, married woman, she couldn’t imagine ….²⁶

I asked her if she knew of reports by Money that adrenal hyperplasia females were more likely to be lesbian than the general population. No, she was not aware of that, she admitted.²⁷

This woman is probably the parents’ only source of information about their child’s sexual prospects. These girls have a hard life; sexual understanding and openness on the part of the doctors could make it better, both through direct interaction and by educating the parents. It is hard enough to grow up lesbian without having parents who suspect you to be a sexual freak, and lesbianism to be a perverted aberration.

Finally, the medical idea of gender, and medical confidence that it can be fixed with surgery and hormones, is terribly mistaken. I know of one person, surgically and hormonally fixed to be female, who now lives as a man, with female genitals. He regrets the loss of his small penis, which the surgeons removed as a large clitoris. His female assignment was imposed, and he rejected it as soon as he became adult. I know a person, surgically and hormonally fixed to be male, who now lives as a woman. Her vagina was removed and her labia stitched together into a “scrotum”. This was done to make her genitals match her outsized clitoris, and to satisfy the doctors’ need to force her body to match a sex assignment imposed, not chosen by her, one which was rejected as soon as she fought past alcoholism and found the emotional strength to do so.²⁸

When I began last summer to search out intersex specialists, I expected to find some help. I thought that these doctors would have excellent connections to therapists skilled in dealing with histories like mine. They have none, nor do they have any sympathy.²⁹

I thought it would be instructive to learn about the current state of the art in clitoral reduction surgery. I learned that there is no consensus: amputation, removal of erectile tissue by Lattimer’s technique, preservation of erectile tissue by Randolph’s technique, and reduction of the length by grafting the glans onto the base and discarding the shaft are all practiced.³⁰ There is no consensus on the optimal timing. Some say the sooner the better, before the girl can be aware of her genitals. Some say it is better to wait until around age three, when the genitals are larger and easier to work with, the ultimate proportions are more easily discernible, and the child is better emotionally equipped to tolerate hospitalization and separation from the mother.

I found that follow up of adult sexual response is close to non-existent, and too timid, too shy about sexual explicitness, to be useful where it does exist. My offers to share my history, along with complete medical documents, were met with a collective yawn, in spite of the fact that as a “true hermaphrodite” and fertile female I am one of the rarer and more interesting types of intersex.³¹

I found that many medical texts and articles have photos of slightly virilized female genitals, not freakish or disfiguring, which are about to undergo clitorectomy or clitoral reduction. They are accompanied by medical illustrations of severely virilized genitals, poor little girls with penises for God’s sake. In fact, I have slept with a woman whose clitoris was large enough to protrude forward from between her labia when aroused. She told me that when she was born, in 1960, doctors told her mother that her clitoris was a disfiguring defect, and that they would remove it, a very simple procedure. Her mother was horrified, and refused to allow it. She has never suffered any ill effect from her large clitoris.

Ultimately I came to the conclusion that the purpose of the surgery is to ease the parents’ pain, at the expense of the child’s future as a sexual adult. Doctors will tell you about the “bad old days, we don’t do that kind of thing anymore.” This is what they have always said, and will continue to say. This facade is easy to maintain, because their charges are too young to speak or know what is being done to them. By the time they are grown, they will be too emotionally traumatized, afraid to be stigmatized as a freak, to speak out.³²

I hope that I will hear back from you. In particular, I would welcome any criticism you may have of my arguments.

Yours Truly,
Cheryl [surname redacted in source]

Recipient’s annotations

Suzanne Kessler read this copy with a pen in hand and left comments in the margins. They are transcribed here as a second layer, keyed by superscript to the point in the letter they sit beside. She numbered many of her notes (1)–(18) in the left margin; those numbers are given in brackets where present. Readings marked [?] are uncertain from the scan and need a second look against the original.

Source and provenance

• Item ID: letter-kessler
• Date: 29 January 1993
• From: Bo Laurent (signed Cheryl, surname redacted in the source scan), Intersex Society of North America
• To: Suzanne Kessler, Division of Natural Sciences, SUNY Purchase, Purchase NY 10577
• Medium: Typed letter, physical original, 7 pp., with the recipient’s handwritten marginalia
• Source file: sources/letters/kessler/kessler-1993-01-29.pdf
• SHA-256: 08d4763932574d141b1cf4bfed3f6177e1b8c5f41a834946591e216c48fc0606
• Held at: Suzanne Kessler papers in the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan
• Consent: Suzanne Kessler, 1 July 2026 — publish with her notes. sources/letters/kessler/consent-kessler-2026-07-01.eml
• Related item: born-digital source of this letter is item correspondence-kessler-1993-1994 (Word-for-Mac file, letter 1 of 9)

Provenance note. This is the canonical scan Kessler saw and approved. A single redaction has been made: a handwritten phone number on page 1 (Bo’s own, long disconnected) was removed. The signature surname is blacked out in the image (a pre-existing feature of the physical copy); the author is identified in full in the headnote and metadata. The upload’s filename carried a stray “1994,” but the letter’s dateline, 29 January 1993, is authoritative and is used throughout; the PDF’s internal title (“Chase to Kessler, 29 Jan 1993”) is correct. The scan was sent to Bo Laurent by Yarden Azoulay Katz via email/Dropbox on May 19, 2025.

Textual note — born-digital variant. A born-digital copy of this letter survives in the 1993–1994 correspondence file (correspondence-kessler-1993-1994). It is not identical to this mailed, annotated scan: the digital copy renders Dr. Randolph’s name as “Dr. -” (redacted) where the scan names him, and it omits the sentence about the adrenal-hyperplasia woman’s former lover (“one of the most hurt, damaged people…”) that appears in the scan. The mailed scan thus appears to be the later revision (or the digital master was redacted afterward) — confirm the direction before treating either as canonical.