Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience

Drawing extensively on interviews with adults with intersex conditions, parents, and physicians, Karkazis moves beyond the heated rhetoric to reveal the complex reality of how intersexuality is understood, treated, and experienced today. As she unravels the historical, technological, social, and political forces that have culminated in debates surrounding intersexuality, Karkazis exposes the contentious disagreements among theorists, physicians, intersex adults, activists, and parents—and all that those debates imply about gender and the changing landscape of intersex management. She argues that by viewing intersexuality exclusively through a narrow medical lens we avoid much more difficult questions. Do gender atypical bodies require treatment? Should physicians intervene to control the “sex” of the body? As this illuminating book reveals, debates over treatment for intersexuality force reassessment of the seemingly natural connections between gender, biology, and the body.

• Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality
• Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death (California Series in Public Anthropology, Vol. 1)
• The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande
• Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography
• Lessons from the Intersexed
• Intersex and Identity: The Contested Self
• Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community
• Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology of Material Life (Body, Commodity, Text)
• Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex
• Contesting Intersex: The Dubious Diagnosis (Biopolitics)