Guest post by Morgan Carpenter, bioethicist; co-founder and executive director, Intersex Human Rights Australia; Magda Rakita co-founder and executive ...
When used as a slur, we argue, the phrase “small dick” belongs to a problematic class of body-shaming retorts. Notions about shame and future risks of stigmatization in locker rooms are some of the main rationales cited by medical doctors to justify surgeries on people with genitals considered “inadequate” for their assigned/assumed sex. For decades now, the “standard of care” for these babies, if their phallus is deemed “too small” for a boy, has been to surgically assign them to the female sex — notwithstanding XY chromosomes or testicles. Assigned female at birth, the child had been subjected to surgery to supposedly “enhance the appearance of her female genitalia.” That is why we have been active, on three different continents, in the intersex movement that has worked now for [three decades](http://www.isna.org/articles/chase1995a) to end these devastating practices. Such words hurt people who are not even part of the discussion. And it contributes to shame that makes it hard for those who have been harmed to speak out. “You’re not the stud you think you are,” is, as we are fully aware, the gist of the message Thunberg meant to convey. To reiterate: such children can face the literal removal of their penises and testes. Well, since you asked, we aren’t actually sure that “an eye for an eye” is the most promising ethical framework for this situation, or really any situation. Every year, babies are born with innate differences in their sex characteristics that have been medicalised, prompting doctors to (try to) reshape their bodies to fit with dominant gender norms. This particular choice of words was not, in our view, the self-evidently praiseworthy retort that many progressive commentators took it to be.