Anne Tamar-Mattis: “The silent majority”

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Anne Tamar-Mattis of Advocates for Informed Choice in the US has a guest post at Psychology Today on the “real silent majority”:

There’s a theory floating around the world of medicine that goes like this: while it is widely known that patients with disorders of sex development (DSD) are unhappy with the treatment they have received – cosmetic genital surgery, unwanted hormone treatment, and humiliating genital exams top the list – they can be safely ignored because there is actually a “silent majority” of patients out there who are doing just fine. This is a comforting idea … But no one can find them. After almost two decades of patient advocacy and active debate, decades in which hundreds of affected people have spoken out against the treatment they received, not one person with a DSD has spoken out publicly to say that normalizing treatment is just great. Not one.

But there is a silent majority out there in the world of DSD treatment. And I have found them. They are the clinicians, the researchers, the junior practitioners, the social workers, the nurses, the psychologists who know or suspect that there is something very wrong with current treatment models, but keep their thoughts to themselves. Or word them carefully, in deferential terms, to avoid making waves…

We believe that this is an excellent article, but we look forward to a time when medical journals, including psychology journals, will permit the discussion of intersex in terms that are not themselves pathologising.

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Anne Tamar-Mattis writes at Psychology Today, “The Real Silent Majority”