birth cirtificates

I guess what still lingers with me is the whole intersex baby thing. I find it so fascinating, and something I hadn't known very much about until I read Fausto-Sterling. The diagram she has in her book, where sex lies on a continuum for a newborn baby has been stuck in my head since I first saw it. And when it is ambiguous at birth, how do you go about deciding? You can check levels of sex hormones in the blood or what the chromosomes say. That won't always answer the question. The stories about those who had a sex change operation at birth, and then became super depressed or angry later on...might just go to show that there's an actual identifiable sex that a person is supposed to live out. Also it shows that a doctor can make a wrong decision regarding the baby's sex. Reversal surgery is potentially more detrimental to the person's emotional state. A lot of talk about holding off on these new-born surgeries is just as controversial, though. Doctors have been saying to wait though, because that way when the child decides for him/herself, at least you haven't damaged anything yet. The problem becomes, what then does a parent put on the birth certificate? In Texas, for example, you aren't allowed to change your birth certificate. So if the parent arbitrarily picks a boy, and then at age 4 the kid decides "I'm a girl", in the eyes of the law she will always be a boy. And she won't ever be able to marry a man. It is that screwed up.