Dang! I turn my back for a few hours and look at this ballyhoo I missed here! I guess that we do not expect explanations of the term "Intersex" to make sense to "everyone." However, we all know that the most of what has been said is factual, not derived from thin air. If you choose to discard it then that is an individual choice that you are making. As long as there is a chance that explaining things and elaborating on the term to allow other's a better insight, then I guess it hasn't wasted time posting. There have been several posts here since I last checked for messages so here goes: Danny, Some of the children born with the other "Intersex" conditions also belong to either one gender or another too JUST like cah girls. The condition that brought about Jude's ambiguous genitalia affected him developing normally as a male should where his genitalai was concerned. It takes the same length of time these days for doctors to do blood tests to determine children born with similar these days. No more or no less than a cah girls diagnosis. So to me that argument to prove cah girls should somehow be set apart is not feasible where I am concerned. CAH girls are no more a special case where ambiguos genitalia are concerned than any other condition where children present with ambiguous genitalia at birth. The parents ALL have the same problem. Finding out asap what the sex of their newborn baby is and also what the underlying condtion is that caused the genitals to develop so in utero. On top of that, ALL parents are devastated (is this making sense now?) not just parents of cah girls. they all need counselling and to be treated with respect and dignity. Their babies are no less important than ours. Before your first child was born with cah, and had your first child been a girl, you would have been just as bewildered as any parent or anxious to know what the condtion was. It could have been ANy of the other ones. It so happened to be cah. The cah diagnosis just tells you that you have a baby girl, but the genitalia remain ambiguous. For this there has been no set protocol for medical staff in handling parents after the birth half the time, though the only sensible one recommended is put out by www.isna.org web site. All I can see is that the protocol for the past 30 to 40 years has been for the most part deceitful. That is to say that they performed surgery on unconsenting babies and then recommend that the child must never find out that they had surgery in the first place. These children then must be brought up in their assigned sex at all costs. In retrospect they grew up confused and alienated and shirked off the stereotypical things that were forced upon them. They then chose to adopt the label Intersexed. Not you or I or anyone else, but they. Sandra, You have the makings of some good ideas about what can be written childrens medical records in the above post. Since parents are often upset anyway and some words seem to offend, then maybe these idea's could be used in any future protocol that may be drawn up. However, nothing is ever gojng to take away the fact that these babies will always be treated differently at birth. There are very few ways to break it to a parent that their child does not appear to look like either a boy or a girl. No matter how they word it, that parent still has to break news to family of the same and cannot celebrate the birth of their boy or girl. It still will come as a tremendous shock. I have to say here Sandra that if you choose to become pregnant in the future, there are tests available to ensure that any daughter that you may have can be unaffected in utero or at least lessen the virilization. These things are not 100% guaranteed, but they do help to lessen the effcte if they do not totally prevent them. If you do become pregnant, you will immediately be given the opportunity to take the dex therapy and numerous tests throughout pregnancy to check the sex of your baby and whether they are cah or not. No doubt the new generation that Wendy-Lee relates to. I have no idea, I have started to type this before I read it. Such is the beauty of pre natal testing now that this is actually an option to prevent masculinization of a baby girl anyway. We could therefore safely say that your likelihood of having a seriously virilized daughter is pretty slim. They would therefore not have to use the term Intersex anyway for such girls. I am not going to say that I hope that you are right Sandra in your beliefs that "it is the way that we "raise" our children that them truly heterosexual." I am sorry but I do not believe that anything we do as parents affects the way that they develop sexually. I'm sure there will be many parents of cah adult women that have come out that will agree with this. If your daughter or anyone's daughter here became a lesbian, then by saying such now, how will they feel in 20 years time if they have those beliefs? Let's say that they have worked painfully to instill everything female into their daughters and even the very atmosphere that they breathed at home was feminine. What happens if it fails? By believing that they could affect things, they would then have a sense that they failed in their role as parents? Would you feel that you had failed? I do not think that you would and neither would anyone else. It's because deep down we know that we have NO bearing whatsoever on where our daughters sexuality is going to end up at in 20 - 30 years time. To imply that we are in control is to imply that when they do end up that way, we are to blame in some way. Let's not go there. Even by going there we are also implying that only parents that fail produce gilrs that turn to lesbianism and no one has the right to impose that mode of thinking upon anyone here. Some parents may never know their daughters true sexual preferences anyway, as some adult children never discuss these issues, so unless you catch them in flagrante delicto (as some would perceive it regarding lesbianism no doubt) then you will always be under the the opposite impression anyhow. Isn't it so that if you bring such children up in a home that is prejudiced against such that children leaning in that direction as adults will feel the need to keep their chosen sexuality secret for fear of rejection from their parents anyhow. To be honest I'd like to think that attitudes in society will lighten up where this is concerned and certainly over the next 20 or so years to such a degree that clandestine meetings with chosen lovers out of the ranges of paleolithic eyes and attitudes would not be necessary for the future generations of any adult girls to be. Let's look at the story of Joan and John and then Jude IF you are still of the belief that what a parent does or says affects how a child develops sexually. I'd have to say here that If Sandra's theory IS correct, then the story of John and Jude,(who where completely fashioned into females by the use of a scalpel and where both biologically male) would have been reading as medical success stories not the opposite. Their parents dressed them in dresses and gave them dolls and encouraged them to be little girls in every possible way that they could. Has anyone read their stories? I'm sure most have as they are the ones most well known and most recently mentioned. They kNEW that they were not little girls no matter what their parents did otherwise. They totally rejected all that their parents foisted upon them and ended up confused as they reached puberty. Don't reproach me here with posts about how CAH girls are not the same as the others. Their stories all sound so similar to me. Surely we ALL know that androgens do not just affect the genitalia of a fetus in utero? They affect ALL the development of the fetus in utero. We all know that it also affects cah girls and how they play or develop too. Are we going to be so jejune that we truly believe that after cutting here and there that we would change how little girls are going to feel as an adult by the environment we raise them in? All we can do is instill some good values and sense of self worth into them! We cannot dictate what they shall be sexually in adulthood. There is clear evidence all around that speaks for itself, that suggests that parenting has nothing to do with a child's choices where sexuality are concerned. Nothing we do as parents will be any different to the parents challenges in the past where this is concerned. To believe that would be completely unwise and leave us wide open for disappointment in the future and unhappiness for our daughters. I know that most of you will walk away with your beliefs and that nothing will have changed for you. I would just ask you to remember 20 or so years from now all of the above. Don't be thinking it was something that you did wrong if your daughters are not all that you hoped that they would be is all that I am saying here. Especially if you do have similar beliefs to Sandra now at this time. For it will not be anything that you did or didn't do in your parenting. Children are individuals and don't do everything we expect of them ANYWAY in any area of life as adults. Well atleast not unless they are so insecure that they need to please their parents for the rest of it to get some sort of recognition. They will be adults as you are now and not beholden to anyone. I think I could say that I speak for all when I say we know we could not change your perception of the word "Intersex" when you are so offended by it. It would be nice to see some of you pen letters to the powers that be and tell us of how you can make changes or of your actions towards making a change in the way that cah girls and their parents are treated at the time of diagnosis or birth. What words you felt were inadequate and why. No one has done this or tried. Maybe it is because it seems such a daunting task to change a word? Maybe it is because you cannot explain why it is so distasteful or insulting to have your child labelled Intersex? Whilst I am here trying to explain the word in the same way that many other's have before me no doubt, it doesn't mean that YOU have to accept the term. As we all know in life, nothing changes unless you make it happen. You have to do something about this and lobby for change where it counts. Just remember though before you pen that letter that it will not enough to say that these words are offensive or insulting. You will need to elaborate unprejudicially the reasons why it IS offensive to have anyone ever empathise. For as long as no one acts, these two medical terms are going to be out there.