The Intersex Society of North America explains that the "corrective" surgeries often performed on young children born with ambiguous genitalia can be much more traumatizing than they are helpful. In, studies done on intersex people who were allowed to keep their bodies as they were at birth were well-adjusted and had "lower rates of psychopathology than the general population". On the other hand, forcing infants to physically conform to societal ideas of what constitutes a male or female body can be damaging in the long run, especially as the surgeries involved often are irreversible. This means if the child does not identify as the gender which their body was modified to reflect, they have more difficulty transitioning. (It is also known that intersex people have higher rates of gender transition than the average population.)
However, the ISNA does not advocate raising an intersex child as a third gender. Instead, they advocate assigning a male or female gender to an intersex child at birth (without doing surgeries). Why? Because gender does not have to equal a specific kind of body and genitals. Many intersex advocates are comfortable with binary gender, and say that the discomfort they faced was more due to the shame surrounding surgeries and less with their assigned or chosen (binary) gender. Of course, some intersex people also have a non-binary gender. Like the general population, most intersex people will fall easily into male/female categorization. It comes down to the parents and doctors to take an educated guess so as to the child's future gender (for example, children with complete androgen (male hormone) insensitivity will grow up to identify as female) and socialize the child into that gender. If needed, that child can later transition to another gender, without the added trouble of having undergone irreversible surgeries early in life. Additionally, raising a child as a third gender from birth could be traumatizing, as our society has yet little concept of what this would entail.
While many people would expect ISNA to want to eradicate gender, things are not that simple. What is important for intersex people, like all people, is to have their points of view heard and respected:
"We hope that scholars, particularly those invested in helping members of marginalized groups gain a voice in conversations about themselves, will take seriously the concerns about surgery, secrecy and shame raised by intersex people and understand that ISNA and the majority of its constituency don't necessarily share the goal of eradicating the very concept of gender".
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