🔺 Syllabus topic:
➖ Sociology : : Gender; Inequality
News in short:
he Delhi High Court issued notice to the Delhi government and Delhi Commission for Protection of Child Rights (DCPCR) on a petition highlighting the need to ban sex-selective surgeries on infants born with “intersex traits”.
A Bench of Chief Justice D.N. Patel and Justice Jyoti Singh gave the direction on a petition by Srishti Madurai Educational Research Foundation seeking to declare a ban on medically unnecessary, sex-selective surgeries on intersex infants and children, except in cases of life- threatening situations.
SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
What is gender, sexual identity and sexual orientation?
- Gender identity is assigned at birth based on the anatomy (male or female sexual organs, both internal and external).
- Sexual identity is what one sees oneself as, and Sexual orientation is the sex a person is attracted.
What does intersex mean?
- Intersex refers to people born with physical and biological characteristics that are more diverse than stereotypical definitions of male or female bodies.
- The intersex condition arises when it is difficult to classify the reproductive organs as male or female.
- Genetically, the male is invested with XY chromosomes and the female, XX. In intersex, there are at least 40 different variations.
- In the field of medical genetics, it is believed that gender assignment is not merely the function of the X and Y chromosomes.
- Rather, hundreds of genes have been identified, mutations or changes in them lead to a ‘different kind of development’, impacting the gender of the foetus.
What is sex-selective surgeries?
- In Intersex infants, not all biological differences can be detected at the time of birth.
- When these differences are apparent at birth, parents are eager to resolve the question of the gender of the baby and pick a gender.
- They are ignorant of the fact that the child will have to pick a sexual identity in the process of growing up.
- This could lead to physical trauma, emotional turmoil and problems arising out of confusion about identity.