Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience 1st Edition

by Katrina Karkazis (Author)

9 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-0822343189

ISBN-10: 0822343185

Why is ISBN important?

Have one to sell? Sell on Amazon

Added to

Unable to add item to List. Please try again.

Share <Embed>

Due Date: Dec 17, 2018 Rental Details

FREE return shipping at the end of the semester.
Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with rentals.

In Stock. Rented from eCampus_ , Fulfilled by Amazon

List Price: $28.95 Save: $3.95 (14%)

Free Shipping

Select delivery location

Add to Rental Cart

In Stock.

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.

This item ships to France. Want it Tuesday, July 3? Order within and choose AmazonGlobal Priority Shipping at checkout. Learn more

16 New from $23.94

Select delivery location

Turn on 1-Click ordering

More Buying Choices

16 New from $23.94 32 Used from $13.75 1 Rentals from $25.00

49 offers from $13.75

See All Buying Options

Free%20Two-Day%20Shipping%20for%20College%20Students%20with%20Amazon%20Student

What happens when a baby is born with “ambiguous” genitalia or a combination of “male” and “female” body parts? Clinicians and parents in these situations are confronted with complicated questions such as whether a girl can have XY chromosomes, or whether some penises are “too small” for a male sex assignment. Since the 1950s, standard treatment has involved determining a sex for these infants and performing surgery to normalize the infant’s genitalia. Over the past decade intersex advocates have mounted unprecedented challenges to treatment, offering alternative perspectives about the meaning and appropriate medical response to intersexuality and driving the field of those who treat intersex conditions into a deep crisis. Katrina Karkazis offers a nuanced, compassionate picture of these charged issues in Fixing Sex, the first book to examine contemporary controversies over the medical management of intersexuality in the United States from the multiple perspectives of those most intimately involved.

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.

Frequently bought together

Customers who bought this item also bought

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.

Victor M. Rios

55

Paperback
$20.50
Julia Serano

100

Paperback
$13.59
Elizabeth Reis

8

Paperback
$25.20
Paul Farmer

11

Paperback
$26.13
Jonathan Metzl

18

Paperback
$22.55
Oliver Sacks

49

Paperback
$12.73

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Fixing Sex is the best book I have ever read over the years which deals with the ethical issues which have plagued the intersex community, parents and doctors. One reason is that it is meticulously researched and in the introduction, the author helps the reader understand her methodology and also makes it transparent and easy to grasp for the reader who is not familiar with such research. . . . Katrina Karkazis has written a book that both I (an intersex activist) and a medical doctor can read and understand and not be upset about. Now that is a tour de force."

Review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product details

Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: Duke University Press Books; 1 edition (November 14, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0822343185
ISBN-13: 978-0822343189
Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 9 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #480,264 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #70 in Books > Textbooks > Medicine & Health Sciences > Medicine > Clinical > Surgery > Urology
- #74 in Books > Textbooks > Medicine & Health Sciences > Medicine > Clinical > Endocrinology
- #115 in Books > Medical Books > Medicine > Internal Medicine > Urology

Would you like to tell us about a lower price?
If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support?

NO_CONTENT_IN_FEATURE

Customer Reviews

4.8 out of 5 stars

5 star

4 star

3 star (0%)

2 star (0%)

1 star (0%)

Write a customer review

See all 9 customer reviews

Top customer reviews

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

A. Monroy

To a lay person like me, who indeed held hard feelings towards the ...

June 13, 2015

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

My only wish is that there could be a translation of this book to as many languages as possible. It has a very broad angle, and I thank the author for covering as many points of view as she could, while exercising an objectivity when focusing on medical protocols. To a lay person like me, who indeed held hard feelings towards the medical community for my personal case, and almost demonized John Money's work and life, this book was an eye-opener on how hard it is not just for them as practitioners, specialists and researchers but as human beings, framed within a society where there are unquestioned principles and uncontested claims on gender issues that intersex condition challenges. This leaves the reader with the mission of uniting the struggle to create consciousness about gender and sex not being binary nor determined by the traditional biological markers.

My only wish, apart from it being translated to spanish (I know a lot of people who could gain great insight and orientation but who are unable to read it because they're not bilingual), would be for the author to spread her observations and conclusions to a broader audience, since this topic is hardly exclusive to American cases (she acknowledges, for instance, the legal fight of a Colombian intersex teen). But that, maybe, is a task for each one of us.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Not Helpful

Comment

Dr Mew

Provides a useful perspective on intersex

April 22, 2010

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Let me first note that I'm an intersex person who tends to read whatever I can find on the topic. Over the past decade, there has been a modest burst of publishing on intersex status (or what the medical field now terms "DSDs" for "Disorders of Sex Development"), but much of what books cover overlaps. Books tend to fall into one of two categories. There are those with a hard science perspective, which take an "expert" standpoint to explain why people are born intersexed and what that shows us about prenatal development, evolution, the role of hormones, etc. Then there are those with an advocacy perspective, that point out that the current medical "treatment" for children born intersex--infant surgical sex assignment--is highly problematic, because it often leads to the sacrifice of sexual sensation, and because the sex assigned at birth can be the wrong one.

What Karkazis does in her book is to bridge the gap between a focus on science and a focus on the experiences of intersex people. She interviews doctors, parents of intersex children, and adult intersex individuals to lay out for the reader their various perspectives. Her basic conclusion is that medical practitioners are ignorant of or dismiss the experiences of intersex adults, which leads doctors to continue to advocate and perform infant sex assignment procedures despite the manifestly negative consequences for many intersex people. She also shows how doctors' stance--that intersex status is a defect, a social emergency that can and must be treated medically--convinces parents to consent to treatments that they often later regret condoning. So Karkazis' findings are in line with books written by intersex advocates. But by including medical information and interviews with medical practitioners, Karkazis shows her readers why the unhappiness of intersex people with treatment they receive has not done much to change medical practice.

11 people found this helpful

Helpful

Not Helpful

Comment

Gina R. Morvay

A much needed addition to literature on Intersex

February 12, 2009

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Katrina Karkazis' Fixing Sex is an ambitious attempt to deal with the multiple issues brought up by those born with Intersex Conditions (I'm going to use that term over DSDs) their parents and the doctors who 'treated' them. She comes clearly down on the side against performing 'normalising' procedures on infants often by performing surgery on larger than average clitorises (in some cases, performing actual clitorodectomies) or reassigning xy children with micropenises as female. She points out how doctors are slowly reevaluating how these procedures are done (or whether they're done) but are still highly defensive about the medical decisions they're made and, especially, about the harm they've caused.

For those following the Intersex community and their often heartbreaking stories, the book can be painful to read. But Ms. Karkazis tries to present the material not as an advocate, but as a medical ethicist and she succeeds brilliantly in shining much light on a lot of dark histories than are still threatening to all involved. It's in dealing with these bioethical questions the book finds its greatest success. She balances the choices parents and doctors made for infants with the anger and helplessness of those children who had to actually live with those decisions. She also points out how adherence to 'normality' and the gender binary had everything to do with many of these (often for the worse) life-altering decisions.

There are some parts of the discussion I wished the book had keyed into with more detail and first person narratives. She talks to almost no one who was gender reassigned, either those still living in their assigned gender nor those who were uncomfortable in their assigned gender and later transitioned back. I feel she shortchanges some of the connections between the Intersex and Trans communities, which includes a goodly number of people born with Intersex conditions. Perhaps it's Karkazis seeming connections to Bo Laurent (formerly Cheryl Chase) and Alice Dreger that kept her from discussing this important linkage between the two communities. I was also disturbed that Karkazis, in a discussion of David Reimer and gender identity, makes a fairly sweeping conclusion about in utero hormonal exposure, and CAH (and I don't think anyone would say exposure to hormones is the same for anyone, there are many biological and experiential factors that can alter the outcome) that I found myself shaking my head while reading.

Likewise, she makes a statement that David Reimer was one case, but there was another similar non-Intersex reassignment case where the reassignment worked and that, somehow modifies the conclusions of Milton Diamond and William Reiner and others. However, she gives information in her endnotes that suggests this reassignment might not have worked quite as well as how she referenced it in the main body of her text. It was a little sloppy.

Still, anyone interested in Intersex, bioethics, gender and just the intense human drama that surrounds how we 'normalize' sex and gender owes it to themselves to read Fixing Sex. The many anonymous quotes in the book and still-raging debates between defensive medical practitioners, angry Intersex adults, guilt-ridden parents and dueling support organizations show how painful an issue this is, and Karkazis has done a wonderful navigating through it.

13 people found this helpful

Comment

November 6, 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Everything A-Ok, thanks

Helpful

Not Helpful

Comment

Adrienne

How & Why Has This Happened?

April 9, 2013

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

In this highly detailed and thorough work, Katrina does an excellent job flushing out what has occurred over the past few decades to lead to today's viewpoints on disorders of sex differentiation (intersex). We seriously need to rethink our approach to any genital surgery on children, and her book offers great potential for us to see the forest and step out of our current box!

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Not Helpful

Comment

Most recent customer reviews

Debbie Garnett

Five Stars

Great book !! A++++++

Published 1 year ago

B. Garfinkel

The Forgotten Few

This book provides a well documented review of the evolution of "modern" medical therapy for those born with ambiguous genitalia and other categories of Disorders of Sexual...Read more

Published on January 9, 2010

Phedra

Outstanding!

We need to be informed to fully understand this important issue. it is exactly what this book accomplished, it is easy to comprehend, fascinating, educational and very well...Read more

Published on December 20, 2008

Curtis E. Hinkle

A tour de force

Fixing Sex is the best book I have ever read over the years which deals with the ethical issues which have plagued the intersex community, parents and doctors.Read more

Published on December 15, 2008

Set up an Amazon Giveaway

Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more about Amazon Giveaway

This item: Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience

Set up a giveaway

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.

Georgiann Davis

4

Paperback
$28.00
Suzanne J. Kessler

7

Paperback
$28.95
Thea Hillman

8

Paperback
$14.95
Elizabeth Reis

8

Hardcover
$58.00
Hida Viloria

49

Hardcover
$18.36
Julia Serano

100

Paperback
$13.59

Pages with related products. See and discover other items: duke university press

Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience 1st Edition

Sorry, there was a problem.

Sorry, there was a problem.

Rent On clicking this link, a new layer will be open $25.00 On clicking this link, a new layer will be open

Buy new On clicking this link, a new layer will be open $28.95 On clicking this link, a new layer will be open

Turn on 1-Click ordering

Frequently bought together

Customers who bought this item also bought

Sponsored products related to this item (What's this?)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Review

Product details

Customer Reviews

Top customer reviews

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Most recent customer reviews

Set up an Amazon Giveaway

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Rent On clicking this link, a new layer will be open

$25.00 On clicking this link, a new layer will be open

Buy new On clicking this link, a new layer will be open

$28.95 On clicking this link, a new layer will be open