As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who was Raised as a Girl

https://stars.library.ucf.edu/diversefamilies/2384/thumbnail.jp

RIGHTINGS: ETHICS AND HUMAN SEX VARIATION

This review assesses a rare and insightful philosophical examination of the ethics of the medical management of sex-atypical children. In Making Sense of Intersex, Ellen K. Feder crafts an ethics that would shift several common foci of the contemporary debate on her topic: from questions of gender to the ethics of normalization; from individual or parental autonomy to a general corporeal vulnerability; and from parental medical proxy rights to the interdependency of parent-child relations. The review identifies some seemingly unavoidable conundrums that would remain unsolved after such shifts: the continuing role of gender in normalizing medical aims, the utility of an undifferentiated concept of vulnerability in medical decision making, and the place of cosmetic medicine in general