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September 8, 2008 8:03 AM
By Rituparna Bhowmik
NEW DELHI - Born with both male and female genitalia, a life of uncertainty seemed to await Ali and his family, but changing attitudes means hermaphrodites once-scorned in India are finding their place.
"Every mother waits eagerly for the doctor to announce the sex of the newborn. They tell you if it's a boy or a girl," said Zubeda, Ali's mother, requesting their real names not be used.
"When the doctor is silent, you know something is wrong," she said. "Since there is a social stigma attached in India with people with undetermined sex, I was apprehensive."
Even a decade ago, the secrecy surrounding such cases made
it impossible for mixed-gender children to choose their
identities and find doctors able to start timely treatment, she
said.
Perceived as eunuchs, children with ambiguous genitalia
would be forcibly taken away from parents by 'hijras' or
eunuchs, to be brought up in secluded communities of their own.
Shunned by a society that cringes at variants, they make a
living by singing and dancing. They are often poor and
ridiculed.
For Ali, originally raised as a girl, two surgeries and a
radical lifestyle change have allowed the 12-year old to live
as he wants, as a normal boy.
"As soon as he could walk and talk, he knew that he wanted
to be a boy, and look how happy he is today," his mother said.
GOING UNDER THE KNIFE
Doctors say more parents, even from poor, remote areas, are
bringing their offspring for treatment, resisting social
pressures to hand their children over to eunuch communities or
mistakenly raise them as the wrong gender.
But despite improved care, only a fraction of the between
500,000 and 1.2 million hijras in India get treatment.
"I don't think we diagnose more than 1 percent of these
patients in time, and then offer them good treatment," said Dr
Y.K. Sarin of the Maulana Azad Medical College.
"Many of them languish in communities undiagnosed or picked
up by the hijra community and taken along with them."
And India's age-old cultural preference for sons mean
doctors are flooded with requests to turn mixed-gender children
into boys, even if that is not always appropriate.
Some propose creating a special category to help
hermaphrodites fit in as they are, as in southern Tamil Nadu
state, which recently granted transsexuals and transgendered
people a "third gender" status with certain privileges.
"They should be given some disability status or special
privileges," Sarin said.
"Their genitalia exclude them from all the rights of the
society, otherwise they are absolutely normal."
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