Don’t pressurise doctors to change sex of children: Surgeon
THE Head of the Department of Surgery of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, Prof. J.E. Mensah, has advised parents not to put pressure on doctors to choose the gender of children whose sex are not clear at infancy.
He said all non-emergency surgeries on the genitalia of children with intersex problems must be postponed until adolescence in order to allow the children to actively participate in the decision making process.
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“If the gender is clear cut, there is no problem but sometimes it can be very difficult if you look at the external genitalia. As long as there has not been any surgery you can change it but if you do the surgery you cannot reverse it,” Prof. Mensah told The Mirror.
Gender dysphoria
The decision to postpone surgery also helps to reduce the incidence of gender dysphoria (a sense of unease that a person may have because of a mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity).
This sense of unease (or dissatisfaction) sometimes becomes so intense that it can lead to depression and anxiety and have a harmful impact on the person's daily life.
Challenge
Prof. Mensah said the issue of sex determination could be a challenge if the sex of a child was not clear, adding that in the past, the surgery to choose a gender was done quite early. “If it is a boy you remove the female things and if it is a girl you remove the male things,” he said.
“For those children, they have both gender features. Now, if this child grows up and it becomes clear that she is a girl but you have removed all the female features, then there is a problem,” he explained.
In effect, he said there should not be a rush to do any operation and that children should be allowed to grow up to see the dominant features, adding that such a decision was what was currently accepted worldwide.
However, he said society most often wanted the gender to be assigned as quickly as possible and that was not right.
Prof. Mensah was throwing more light on the issue which the Ghana Association of Urological Surgeons (GAUS) raised in its recent communique issued at the end of its Annul General Meeting held in Accra recently.
Example
Prof. Mensah, who is also the President of the GAUS, cited a case in which a child was brought up as a boy but who later on in life started showing the features of a girl.
“We have had issues with such cases and I have operated on a few of them myself. For instance, there is a case that a certain child was brought up as a boy, however, when he grew up later, it became obvious that he was a girl with breasts and all that."
“Now, I had to change the child's genital feature by operating on him to make the genital feature look like a girl’s genital feature and it was a big challenge. She had to relocate and change her name and all that and when we did all that she has acclimatised very well, living a healthy life as a girl,” he explained.
The President of GAUS said members of the association (surgeons) knew of that very well and so did not rush to determine the gender of a child, and that the problem was with society, particularly, parents who took that decision.
“Sometimes due to societal pressure in this country, a child is named immediately after birth, so if they name you Kofi and you grow up and become Ama, it becomes a serious problem. So, society wants the gender to be assigned as quickly as possible,” he said.
Challenge
Prof. Mensah admitted that waiting for a child whose sex was not clear to grow up before performing surgery to determine the gender was a challenge since it would be difficult naming the child.
He, however, suggested that in such a situation, parents could adopt the name that was used by both males and females.
"It is good to use unisex names such Nana, Dela, Konadu, Selassie. We know it is a big challenge, there is no doubt about that. However, we should not rush to take a decision, that is all that we are saying,” he stated.