Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• FEDER, ELLEN K.
• KARKAZIS, KATRINA

Titel

What's in a Name?The Controversy over "Disorders of Sex Development"

Ist Teil von

• The Hastings Center report, 2008-09, Vol.38 (5), p.33-36

Ort / Verlag

Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2008

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Development of Terminology For centuries, people with atypical sex anatomy have been labeled hermaphrodite.3 By the late nineteenth century, a consensus emerged in medicine that gonadal histology was the most reliable marker of a persons "true sex" and that there were three classificatory types of hermaphroditism: male pseudohermaphroditism, female pseudohermaphroditism, and true hermaphroditism.4 People diagnosed with one of the forms of pseudohermaphroditism were those with either ovarian or testicular tissue whose phenotypes contradicted their "true sex" indicated by their gonads. It was first applied to sexual ambiguity in moths in the early twentieth century.6 Clinicians gradually adopted the term to refer to sexual ambiguity in humans, but its use over the intervening century has been inconsistent and variable.7 Despite a few isolated instances referring to intersex as a diagnosis (notably, an article by David Williams in 1952), clinicians have not viewed it as a diagnostic term.8 Rather, much like hermaphrodite, intersex is an umbrella term that medicine adopted to refer to a range of conditions in which sex development is atypical.