androgen
- Andro=male; gen=making. Androgens are administered to infants to prevent their becoming
androgynes. See testosterone.
androgen insensitivity
- The condition of infants who callously refuse to respond to testosterone treatment; the
cause of many an endocrinologist's hurt feelings.
circumcision
- A mass-market edition of intersexed surgery, priced for the common man. The reasons for
circumcision are too numerous to treat here, but T.V.N. Persaud of the University of
Manitoba recites one ingenious opinion:
- Some conditions, such as phimosis, often lead to circumcision at a later age that could
have been prevented if it had been performed earlier.
- Physicians thus exhibit the same prescience as the Monopods in C. S. Lewis's The
Chronicles of Narnia, who boiled potatoes before planting them in order to save doing it
when they were dug up.
clitoral recession
- See female genital mutilation. Despite Webster's false cognate, "recession" is
derived from "rescission," the noun form of the verb "rescind."
Endocrinologists, like certain Congressmen, like to rescind budgets they feel are too
large, even when this means cutting off essential services.
clitoromegaly
- Micropenis in the female. A longer definition would be superfluous, since this condition
is apt to be cut off before the patient can pronounce it.
cryptorchidism
- A condition in which the testes (-orchid) are hidden (crypto-). Hidden from whom?
Obviously, from the doctors. Cryptorchidism is thus practiced by those discriminating
infants who do not wish to put pearls before swine.
distress
- A condition caused in doctors when their intersexed patients go unmutilated.
- A condition caused in parents of unmutilated
Intersexed children,
being lied to by doctors that their child HAVE TO HAVE surgery, because the gonads have tumors.
(The pathology report will state the gonads were normal and
non-tumorous)
estrogen
- 1. A character in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, who was just pining away for a
doctor to come change his sex. 2. A character in Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of
Darkness, who bloody well wasn't.
female
- 1. A male intersexual when the endocrinologist is through with him.
- 2. A female
intersexual whom the urologist has not seen yet.
- 3. a
patient with mutilated genetalia after the urologist has CERTIFIED
the patient.
female genital mutilation (FGM)
- The scarring or removal of the clitoris, performed by witch doctors and condemned by all
right-thinking people. If the clitoris is a bit larger than average, however, it is
performed by accredited surgeons and covered by all major insurance plans.
- Ergo 'Witch Doctor' becomes 'Which Doctor' in 'civilized western medicine'
gynecomastia
- Enlargement of the breasts in a patient whom we have decided to call male. In a patient
whom we have decided to call female, the same trait is called "excellent breast
development."
hypertrophy
- Literally, too much meat. How much is too much? More, madam, than your sister has; less,
sir, than you will have when we are through.
hypogonadotropic hypogonadism
- A condition in which the gonads are small owing to a lack of the chemical signals that
activate them. To be distinguished from hypergonadotrophic hypogonadism, in which the
gonads are small owing to an excess of the chemical signals that activate them. The
progress of medical science makes possible these ingenious explanations of formerly murky
phenomena.
hypospadias
- A condition in which the meatus of the penis exits elsewhere than the tip. The etymology
of this term is worthy of great meditation: hypo=too little; spadix is the Latin for
sword. If only the infant's sword were larger, he would be able to fight off the surgeon.
idiopathic
- Found in solitude. A condition that boors never allow to persist in women or in
symptoms.
- Contrary to previous report, idiopathy does not mean "stupid medicine," there
being no need of a special term to identify that thriving Science.
Klinefelter's Syndrome
- One of that large class of syndromes named for people who did not have the syndromes.
Even Lou Gehrig's Disease has been renamed for some doctor who probably couldn't even hold
a bat.
lusus naturae
- A freak of nature. It may at first surprise the reader that this term is not applied to
people who cut up perfectly healthy genitals; but while that behavior is certainly
freakish, nature has nothing to do with it.
male
- See female. Whatever you may say of medical Fascism, it does make the males run on time.
micropenis
- Clitoromegaly in the male. Cutting off the micropenis and rearing the child as female is
a common way of producing a satisfactory psychological adjustment;
- NOT!
presenting
- Having. As in, "The infant presented a hypospadiac micropenis" (said by
doctors) or "The jogger presented a large wallet" (said by muggers).
primary hypogonadism
- Primary hypogonadism reduces the body's sex hormones due to undeveloped testes or
ovaries; see micropenis, which it sometimes causes.
- It is not clear to the compiler of this Manual why some doctors feel that primary
hypogonadism should be followed by a genital election.
pseudohermaphrodite
- Pseudo=false; a pseudohermaphrodite is one whose falsely ambiguous genitals cruelly
mislead the doctor into hopes of publication. So, at least, says pseudoscience.
res ipsa loquitur
- Legal, not medical, Latin: "the thing speaks for itself." A sponge left in a
patient's body speaks for itself, and is well paid to do so; but for the sex organ removed
from the body, nobody will speak.
rights
- Wrongs. In medical literature, the 'rights' of the intersexed refer exclusively to their
right to be modified, never to any right to remain as they are. For example, one text
calls for hypospadias to be "corrected" even when it is purely cosmetic, on the
grounds that "by the age of five every boy has the right to be a 'pointer' and not a
'setter'."
- So the "pointers" can see who can piss the highest on the wall. Kind of like 'Taggers' with spray paint.
stenosis
- Narrowness. A condition of meatuses and minds.
surgical sex reassignment (infant)
- Making a sow's ear out of a silk purse. Known to cause deafness.
testosterone
- An androgen taking its name from the test in which it is applied to a micropenis.
Micropenises that do not grow must be cut off; if they do grow then no further treatment
is needed. Compare the water ordeal, beloved of witch-hunters, in which witches that float
must be drowned, while those that sink may remain as they are. We Americans may be justly
proud at the advances in our enlightened Society.
urologists
- Those benefactors of humanity who, with considerable difficulty, distinguish intersexed
infant boys from intersexed infant girls. These infants, when grown, may with equal
difficulty distinguish urologists from butchers.
- I pray that some day I will have the means to repay, in some measure, the American
Urological Association for all they have done for my benefit. I am having some trouble,
though, in connecting the timing mechanism to the fuse. Quoted by Megan Holmes, from a
letter by an anonymous intersexual
Remarks added