Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 
1 Introduction
2 The Medical Construction of Gender
3 Defining and Producing Genitals
4 Evaluating Genital Surgery
5 Questioning Medical Management 
6 Rethinking Genital and Gender
Notes
Glossary
Biography
Index

About the Author

SUZANNE J. KESSLER is professor of psychology at Purchase College, SUNY. She is co-author of Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach

Reviews

Lessons from the Intersexed concerns how modern medicalized Western culture deals with sexual variation. Throughout, Kessler holds that variation is normal . . . and thus sees many treatment modalities for intersexuality as medically questionable, culturally dogmatic, and ethically very dubious. Although Lessons from the Intersexed does record a devilÆs garden of botched surgical and endocrinological interventions, it is neither a hot-headed rant nor a popular book retailing medical horror stories. Instead, Kessler writes with clear ethical purposes for a professional audience to ask what intersexuality is, and what we should do about it, if anything.
*Journal of Sex Research*

Lessons from the Intersexed is an incisive look at the fifty-year-old Western medical practice of surgically reconstructing the bodies of infants born with genitals that do not look wholly female or male. . . . KesslerÆs academic publication is the first to expose the medically acceptable range for the genitals of a newborn (0.2 cm to 0.85 cm for an infantÆs æclitoris,Æ 2.5 cm to 4.5 cm for an infantÆs æpenisÆ). We see that, in fact, it is the decision of the attending surgeon that determines whether or not a parent goes home with a little girl or a little boy.
*Whole Earth*

This is a brave book. Kessler says things that need to be said, and she says them clearly, concisely, and with respect for the people whose lives are most affected by the questions she confronts. A must read for anyone concerned with intersex issues.
*author of Gender Blending: Confronting the Limits of Duality and FTM: Female-to-*

While the physician's response to an infant with ambiguous genitalia has been to produce categories like the æsuccessful vaginaÆ and the ægood enough penis,Æ Kessler takes her cues from intersexuals themselves. This book is a brilliant and long overdue call for the reevaluation of gender variability.
*author of Female Masculinity*

Fascinating in what it tells us not only about situations in which sex assignment is uncertain but about the astonishingly weak empirical foundations on which the medical orthodoxies of binary sex and gender are built. A must for anyone interested in the ways widely accepted social beliefs and scientific explanations generate and reinforce each other.
*author of The Politics of WomenÆs Biology and Exploding the Gene Myth*