Routine infant circumcision is one of the most common surgical procedures performed in the U.S. Despite its broad societal acceptance, the practice is not without controversy. The stories included in this symposium offer rich insight into the diverse set of attitudes, values, and beliefs related to the practice of circumcision. They additionally offer insight into the complex web of personal, interpersonal, and social dynamics that inform the circumcision choices parents make for their children, the reasons parents make them, and how (...) others can influence decisional choices. More broadly, these narratives raise important ethical questions mirrored today in broader contemporary bioethical and public discourse on the scope and limits of parental authority to make decisions for their children, power dynamics in medical decision making, and the ethics of healthcare activism. In this commentary, I discuss three sets of themes related to the ethics of circumcision running through the symposium narratives, comment on the ethical tensions and questions which emerge from each set of themes, gently problematize some of the rhetoric surrounding the ethical permissibility of circumcision, and gesture towards the future of bioethical inquiry on circumcision discourse. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between gender, technology, language, and how infants and children born with disorders of sexual development are shaped into intelligible members of the community. The contemporary medical model maintains that children ought to be both socially and surgically assigned and reared as one particular gender. Gender scholar Suzanne Kessler rejects this position and argues for the acceptance of greater genital variability through the use of language. Using a Heideggerian lens, the main question I seek to answer (...) in this article is: does Kessler’s approach succeed in its aim to better treat individuals born with disorders of sexual development? I argue that Kessler is successful in offering practical solutions for persons with intersexed conditions to exist and flourish as intelligible members of the community, but that her project ultimately relies on power to “challenge forth” greater acceptance of genital variance. Building on the work of Kessler and Heidegger, I argue that a better approach to making intelligible the existence of an infant born with a disorder of sexual development is not to rely on the manipulation of language, but to instead reinvigorate a sense of the sacred in response to having an intersex condition. (shrink)