Breaking or Bending Binaries? How Gender Norms Constrain and Enable Parents of Intersex Children and Healthcare Professionals

Intersex healthcare is increasingly becoming politicized. Several UN agencies have called for a moratorium on what are seen as non-consensual and unnecessary medical interventions aimed at ‘normalizing’ intersex bodies, such as genital and gonadal surgeries. Healthcare professionals working in intersex care and parents of intersex children must navigate this contested terrain. Professionals find themselves at the center of human rights critique, while parents have to make decisions about sex-gender assignment and possibly surgeries for their child. Psychosocial research on intersex healthcare misses this structural dimension of norm contestation. It focuses on the sociocultural background, coping strategies, and support network of parents, or on information-provision by professionals. Critical intersex scholars tend to depict healthcare professionals as part of a monolithic bloc. This paper contributes to both literatures by investigating how binary norms about gender and ab/normality structure parent-professional interactions in intersex healthcare, and vice versa. It employs a social constructivist framework and draws on in-depth interviews with eight parents and five healthcare professionals.