if you had a hermaphroditic child ...

Sorry it's been forever since I last posted. Been busy with two internships: one at a church, one at a pediatric hospital.

Anyway, I was thinking the other day, "If you had a hermaphroditic child, would it be better to choose one gender and treat him/her as that, or to raise her/him as an androgynoid?" It seems like it would be better to raise him/her as an androgynoid, since that would be true the child's anatomy. If you just chose one gender arbitrarily, it would be like denying and rejecting a basic part of who your child was.

I can understand that people think it will make their child's life easier to think of her/himself as only one gender or the other, since that's what society expects. But if, by virtue of your physical makeup, you simply do not conform to the expectations of society, and if (short of having doctors mutilate your body) there is no way to change that, surely it is better to be honest about the disconnect rather than to deny it and pretend to be "normal."