Protecting a Baby Born with Three Penises

 

 

This story has been circulating through media and social media a lot over the past month.

A child was born with three penises: a typically-sized one in the usual place, and two smaller ones down lower. So media and social media have been full of people going, "Wow! 3," because a lot of people find both penises and atypical bodies fascinating.

What happened to the baby? Why, doctors "excised the supernumerary phalli" and then got lots of fame and attention publishing a report that they had performed the first such procedure on a triphallic infant ever, as the "condition" is "extremely rare."

And there's been basically zero pushback. People just circulate the story uncritically. It is taken for granted that if you are born with more than the typical number of fingers or toes or penises, the "extras" must be surgically removed.

Why? A surgery performed on a child without their consent should be functional, not social or cosmetic in nature. "Extra" fingers or penises are not dangerous; on the contrary, they can give a person extra, special abilities. Twelve fingers can make for great piano playing or baseball catching. And more than one penis can provide extra functionality as well ("wow, 3!").

I strongly believe that in a situation where a person is born with a body that is atypical in a way that is not hurting them physically, a decision about whether to make their body look more "normal" must be left up to them. All of us deserve autonomy over our bodies. Some babies born with 12 fingers may grow up to feel unhappy about their atypicality, and wish to have their hands surgically normalized. Some will grow up to love their special hands, and be grateful for the way their "extra" fingers enable them to, say, play guitar.

This is even more the case when it comes to genitals. So many intersex people who have had surgery imposed on them as children grow up feeling betrayed and mutilated, as doctors advised and parents consented to surgeries that turned out not to be what the child matured to want. Our genitals are our own business. Decisions about changing them should be ours alone, never imposed on us when we are infants. Only we can know, as we mature, what will make us feel most at home in our own bodies.

This story of the triphallic boy is not just some medical curiosity tale. It is an example of an approach to genital atypicality that is unethical. And we must criticize the presumption that doctors can usurp a child's autonomy to impose aesthetic normalization on special bodies.

Testosterone and the Sex Policing of Athletes' Bodies

New policies for Olympic and other international athletes set an upper limit to the amount of testosterone considered "normal" for a woman, and require those women who have natural levels of T that are higher than this to have medical interventions to lower their levels. If the women are found to be intersex, these interventions include surgical removal of their gonads, and (though this has NO relation to testosterone production) surgical reduction of their clitorises if these are deemed "enlarged."

This is just crazy. Some facts: first, levels of testosterone vary a lot. Tests of elite athletes show that about 17% of male athletes have testosterone in the "female range" and 14% of female athletes have testosterone in the "male range." Secondly, there is no direct correlation between levels of T and athletic performance; that's simplistic and nearly magical thinking. And third, it makes no sense to define the range of "normal" T levels for women very narrowly (15 - 70 ng/dL) and for men very broadly (300 -1,000 ng/dL), in essence saying that there's no such thing as a natural level of testosterone too high in a man, but there is such a thing for a woman.

Bodies vary a great deal. Why do we focus obsessively on policing the sexed body of athletes, rather than on other "abnormalities?" Basketball players are abnormally tall, which actually does enhance their performance. Many gymnasts are double-jointed and abnormally flexible. In fact, most any sport rewards people with atypical bodies, and we *celebrate* that. But when it comes to sex variance, a variation that is associated with high performance more in fantasy than in fact is suddenly subject to extreme bodily policing, and that's just wrong.