Hermaphrodites are people who have both male and female sex parts. Another word for this is intersex. Inter means between, and sex refers to what sex parts a person has, so intersex means between male and female. People who are intersex can look a lot of different ways. They may have a very small penis and no testicles, or a very small and short vagina and a large clitoris that looks like a penis. Sometimes when these people are born, it is hard for the doctor to tell by looking if the baby is a boy or a girl.
If a baby is born intersex, the parents can decide to have the baby get surgery, to make it look more like a boy or more like a girl. Some people think this is not a good idea, because the surgery can make it hard for the person to enjoy sexual intercourse when they are older. But others say that the baby’s life will be too hard if it does not get surgery, because it will be different and other people might be mean to it. According to the Battle of the Hermaphrodites: Science News Online, Sept.
16, 2006, The words “hermaphrodite” and “pseudo-hermaphrodite” are stigmatizing and misleading words. Unfortunately, some medical personnel still use them to refer to people with certain intersex conditions, because they still subscribe to an outdated nomenclature that uses gonadal anatomy as the basis of sex classification. In a paper titled Changing the Nomenclature/Taxonomy for Intersex: A Scientific and Clinical Rationale, five ISNA-associated experts recommend that all terms based on the root “hermaphrodite” be abandoned because they are scientifically specious and clinically problematic.
The terms fail to reflect modern scientific understandings of intersex conditions, confuse clinicians, harm patients, and panic parents. We think it is much better for everyone involved when specific condition names are used in medical research and practice. There are 3 labels of Hermaphrodites: True, Male pseudo and Female Pseudo. All are equally genuine. A person born with both ovary and testicular tissue, this could be 2 seperate gonads ( one of each) or a combination of both in one (an ovotestes). The genitalia can vary from completely male or female, to a combination of both or even ambiguous looking.
The chromosome (karotype) compliment can be XX (female), XY (male), XX/XY (mosiac) or even XO (extremely rare). Those XX with female genitalia are raised female ( some have even given birth). Those XY with male genitalia are raised male ( a few have fathered children). The children born XX/XY or XO (with genitalia male or female are raised in the sex they look most like) ,Those born with ambiguous genitalia have many medical tests for the doctors to determine which sex they should be assigned. Doctors then recommend early surgery to make the child look physically like the sex assigned to them.