Infant Sex Changes In India

I really, really wish this was a satirical post…or even that I could find something funny about it. I couldn’t. Once in a while the Sexual Dark Age comes up with a way to horrify even me. This joins a trend of selective abortions, with female fetuses being terminated just for being female. You may have heard similar stories about China.

FYI, the long-term ramifications of a procedure like this are virtually certain to be horrible for the child.

From The Telegraph: Madhya Pradesh state government is investigating claims that up to 300 girls were surgically turned into boys in one city after their parents paid about £2,000 each for the operations…

Ranjana Kumari, of the Centre for Social Research and one of India’s leading campaigners against female foeticide, said the surgical transformation of girls into boys without their informed consent was a sign of India’s growing “social madness”.

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  1. Good heavens! Besides the moral and immediate health issues, what will that poor child go through as they grow older? Having a sex change when fully mature is traumatic enough for the body and mind. (Btw, not saying I oppose sex reassignments as some mature people do realize they are not the sex their body has been.)

    I guess I am flabberghasted on many levels.. the immediate pain and confusion.. the future physical and emotional issues.. and wondering how many will realize when they are grown what happened.. and then have another surgury to reverse the process?!?

    • I don’t know what the options would be for the child down the road, but I doubt any reverse surgical procedure could fully restore them. To me, that’s one of the reasons this is so sad.

  2. If you reassign someone that small… Would their body work correctly later? I know they can’t father children but… what about getting a hard on? Seems that the victim would find out the first time they have a serious health problem that their internal sex organs don’t match their external sex organs. So many issues… all that even assuming they adjust to the sex their parents chose.

    • I would imagine the results later in life would be far inferior to a sex change performed on an adult, simply because a child’s body with undeveloped sex organs just has to present an array of challenges on its own.

  3. I understand where this mentality comes from, although it makes me want to scream and shake people.

    As a first generation Indian-American, I know firsthand what is like to be unwanted simply because of your gender. My father’s family always wanted one of each, an older boy with a younger sister. Instead they got two girls, me and my younger sister. I spent 16 years being treated as a boy, and when I moved of the house just before I turned 17, it finally dawned on them that I was becoming a young woman. Suddenly, all the things I enjoyed doing were no longer valid pastimes in their eyes. No more working on my car, no more yard work, no more sports, no more guy friends. My parents never talked to me about being a first-generation American, much less dating and sexuality. I was a very angry child knowing that I wasn’t wanted and that there was nothing I could do to make my father proud.

    Girls are seen as generally inferior in that area of the world. All this despite the fact that young men in rural India are drowning in booze and drugs while the girls are being held back to take care of their ailing parents and the family businesses. Father’s are selling the family farm to marry off their educated daughters to drunks and addicts who didn’t graduate from high school simply to avoid shame. Saving face matters a lot in the East.

    Cultural norms have gotten the best of the people in that part of the world. Despite the women’s rights advocates, both secular and religious, things have yet to dramatically change. Women are really the only people that seem to be able to pull a family out of poverty there, and now this…

    • Thanks for the informed perspective, I had no idea things were that bad over there. I guess that’s one more reason to be encouraged about the show being popular in India. Maybe there can be some positive change from the ground, up.

      • I wish I had something like this growing up.

        We’re a people who talk endlessly around this subject without ever getting to the point. Women in particular need to come to terms with their sexuality and see it as an empowering thing.

        I was 12 when I realized that I was a bisexual. I had no one to talk to about it for years–I didn’t admit it to anyone until I was 17, despite dating multiple girls. If someone had told me that I wasn’t a complete fuck up, maybe my life would have turned out differently. But I digress.

        The fact that this blunt and honest podcast is out there for anyone to download is a wonderful thing. It’s really something that you make it a point to sit down and address each comment and post. Everyone is busy, but this is the sort of dedication the world needs, especially third world countries.

        Thank you.

  4. UG(the ultimate great) March 23, 2012 at 1:44 pm · · Reply

    I’m an Indian living in Madhya Pradesh & Man u can’t imagine how bad the conditions are here.Even today girl child is considered a curse & a burden in villages & fathers are made fun of as not having in them what it takes to produce “A MAN”.These people have no access to t.v. let alone the internet,yet they are somehow know about a sex change operation.Seriously though, I don’t think that this any worse than the alternative (infanticide) .We’ve fallen from the developer of kamasutra to infant sex changes.That’s just the fucked up dark age .

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