File this somewhere under Deep, Deep Background! Some of it might be useful to authors of TG fiction, but mostly I think it will be of interest to those who have intersex conditions.

I tripped over this while looking for something else (Natch!), but ended up spending a couple hours poring over it. Still, I should clearly note, without having half a clue of what I'm looking at! It is extremely technical, and I wouldn't bet that even a handful of pediatricians have this stuff down pat. For lay persons such as myself, 99% of it is going to remain incomprehensible no matter how long we look at it.

Ah, but that 1%...

This is the parent page of what I found: http://www.endotext.org/pediatrics/

As you can see, it's a scientific text of pediatric endocrinology, and the topics excel at queasy-making. However, if you'd like some extensive background, and fairly recent scientific discoveries on the subject of intersex and other disorders of sexual development, there are several chapters of interest.

Here's a tip for using the website. Each chapter/article you click on will open in a frame, with a table of contents on the left, and footnotes below. The text is broken up into pages and you have to either navigate with the ToC, or click the rather unprominent red "Next" at the lower-right corner of each page in the frame. If you would like to view the entire chapter at once, without the frames, you can. So far, the only way I've found to do this is to manually edit the URL of the chapter, carefully removing the word "frame" from it. Probably there's a link somewhere on the page that does this, but I haven't found it yet. There IS a link that purports to offer you each chapter in .pdf or .doc format, but those cost money.

So, to view "46,XY Disorders of Sexual Development", just click on the chapter heading on the main page, and that will bring you to http://www.endotext.org/pediatrics/pediatrics11/pediatricsfr... AND, if you want to see the one-page frameless version, just edit the URL to read http://www.endotext.org/pediatrics/pediatrics11/pediatrics11...

Other chapters of interest on the subject of sexual development include at least 7, 8a, 10, and 13. Those are the chapter numbers in the URLs, btw, and in the frameless versions. You will note that the frame version of most chapters has a title/intro page with a DIFFERENT chapter number in the text (although not in the URL). Blame it on re-editing of the online journal.

You will find recommendations for choosing sex of rearing of infants with sexual development disorders. These are not always in line with those of ISNA.ORG and represent the opinions of the authors. Not all of the chapters/articles are written by the same authors, so you may find different opinions or recommendations, or different willingness to even make recommendations. However, I do find it interesting that some authors are starting to feel that they've collected enough real-life experience of individuals to predict outcomes in certain types of developmental situations at a better than 50% rate, and that their recommendations are starting to sound a lot more fact-based than they were a generation ago. Still, I'm betting we're nowhere near 90% yet.

Anyway, feel free to ignore the opinions, but I find the science fascinating, even if I don't understand 2% of it!