What about people who are born with both genders organs? How do they identify? Is it appropriate to perform surgery so that they become one or the other...and do you wait until they are old enough to consent? Just something I've often wondered about.
Well, you can't be born with both organs because they come from the same place. We all start off as what is called "proto-female" and then depending on chromosomes, prenatal hormones and some other factors, we either fully develop as females or develop as males. Sometimes the body gets mixed messages though and develops abnormally. There was a recent thread on Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH) and I posted a picture (behind a link) of an infant girl with CAH and ambiguous genitalia.
What is called a "true hermaphrodite" has one ovary and one ball (undescended, as I understand) since they were the same thing originally, but these are rare. When genitalia are ambiguous, doctors tend to give the children surgery to make them into girls simply because vaginas are easier to surgically create than penises. Things are getting better though, they operate less often than they used to and clitoridectomies are no longer performed (what is called "brutality" and "a human rights violation" when done in Africa is called "medicine" and "socially necessary" when done in the US).
The effort of the Intersex Society of North America (
ISNA) is to eliminate all medically-unnecessary operations on children intended to make their genitalia more "socially acceptable". Of course, not everyone agrees with this approach.
As far as I understand, the Church regards sex as defined by the presence or absence of a Y-chromosome, though obviously before this was discovered scientifically, methods were more crude and ambiguous. Thus, say, a child with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome who appears female and is raised as a girl but then is found out to be genetically male when she fails to start her period would be considered male and thus unable to marry (I don't know if it would be considered necessary for her to live as a man or not, I'm sure people are divided). My friend is a sonographer and actually discovered this in a teenage girl (he told me right after work), he scanned her to see if there was something physically wrong with her uterus and there was -- it was missing -- and he said her ovaries actually looked more like undescended testicles. Luckily, being only a technician, he didn't have to be the one to inform the girl that she was biologically a boy.
Intersex disorders are a complicated issue and so are transsexual issues. The two sometimes overlap -- intersex disorders are much more likely to be found among transsexuals than among the general population -- but they are different issues. I've had many trans friends, primarily female-to-male (FtM), and as a Queer person, I've not been distant from that (I'm not always as femme as my avatar). Indeed, I've dated a couple of trans guys and I was engaged to one (while still living as a girl, though by the end we were going to support group meetings and talking about it more).
So yeah, I'm conservative now and Christian and I don't support gay marriage but I'm hardly one to be objective regarding the trans issue. I can say on the one hand that medically unnecessary operations are sinful (in case anyone was considering a face-lift or a boob job...) and that fundamentally males are male and females are female, but on the other hand, I know what it's like to love someone who is different and hold them as they go through bouts of what is called "gender dysphoria" (opposite of "euphoria") and I sympathize. I'm undecided about what is allowable (and the Church has issues no general guidelines), certainly to suffer more is a greater cross and there are many graces laid up for those who suffer and don't give in to relief. I lean towards the opinion of doing whatever is necessary to live a functional life, as one of my FTM friends said to me a couple months ago. It's good to suffer, yes, but it's also not good to suffer so much that you can't hold a job or engage in acts of self-injury or even suicide -- there must be a limit.
