Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Finalist, 2026 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Studies
When children are born with sex attributes that do not fit expectations about male and female anatomy, it is standard medical practice to make their bodies look as “normal” as possible. Doctors seek to reduce or remove intersex characteristics through early childhood surgery—cutting down clitorises, remaking penises, and even performing sterilizations. For decades, intersex medicine has sparked outrage from patient groups, lawmakers, intergovernmental organizations, and scholars. It has been condemned for causing trauma, scars, nerve damage, and the loss of bodily autonomy. Yet it continues.
Iain Morland, an intersex scholar and advocate—and a former patient—explores why medicalization is so embedded in contemporary society and how to challenge it. He provides breakthrough accounts of the traumatic effects of surgery, the consequences for attachments between children and parents, and the paradoxes of the pursuit of normality. Weaving together theoretical analysis with autobiographical insights, Morland grapples with the complexity of dismantling intersex medicine. Accessibly written and passionately argued, this book exposes the contradictions of the medical management of intersex. With a bold mix of critical theory, psychology, queer theory, and philosophy, it provides fresh insights for scholars of intersex, gender, sexuality, and science, as well as for activists and their allies.
A powerful call for intersex demedicalization from one of the leading voices in critical intersex studies.
— Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution
A smart, lucid, and devastating critique of the medical management of intersex from a major thinker in the field. It should be read by anyone interested in gender, medical ethics, or what it means to live in a body—or to live in a world where some bodies continue to be violated.
— Leah DeVun, author of The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance
Iain Morland develops a powerful and articulate analysis of the destructive force of medical—and especially surgical—interventions into the bodies and self-representations of intersex infants and children and their lingering effects on the adults they become. This book also attests to and affirms the bodily and psychic resistances, excesses, and forms of creativity that intersex bodies pose to their medical "normalization."
— Elizabeth Grosz, author of The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism
In an impressively majoritising gesture [Intersex] makes the subject of medicalisation of intersex a matter for all of us since we all live in the world that potentiates and legitimates it.
Introduction: Deconstructing Intersex Medicine
1. The Injured World
2. Rushing to Trauma
3. Haunted Attachments
4. What Can Queer Theory Do for Intersex?
5. In Search of Medical Power
6. Was Intersex Real?
Afterword: Resisting Medical Necessity
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index