GENDER, SEXUALITY AND BIOETHICS

The ethics of medicine, biology, and psychology deeply influence our ideas about gender and sexuality and how we establish what is “normal” about our sexed bodies. Even the most basic questions about gender identity, for example, or how we distinguish male from female (or that we distinguish at all), have been shaped by the culture of science and medicine.

In this class, we will examine traditional gender and sex binaries, including how they have been prescribed and enforced throughout American medical history, up to the present day. For example, people have always been born with intersex traits, and yet only in recent times have physicians intervened to manage such births. Before the 1840s, in the U.S. those born with intersex traits lived their lives the best they could, despite their physical differences, largely without medical interference. Since the 19th century, however, physicians have tried to surgically “correct” people (adults) with atypical genitals, even if that surgical management was medically unnecessary and conflicted with the person’s gender identity. Since the 1950s, providers have sought to “fix” those born with intersex conditions in infancy, before their gender identities had a chance to develop. Though physicians thought they were helping their patients live better lives, the principles we now associate with bioethics (autonomy and informed consent, for example) were too often neglected and took a backseat to physicians’ assumptions about what “better lives” might entail.