Alice Dreger, formerly of ISNA – the intersex society that then morphed into the doctors’ organisation Accord Alliance – has promoted the concept of Disorder of Sex Development (DSD) as coming from the ‘intersex grassroots,’ as being the newly-coined term that we must all now use instead of intersex. That was certainly news to the actual intersex grassroots, which continues to strongly resist the use of DSD in describing ourselves.
From Disciplining Sex: Economies Etched in Intersexed Flesh by Jessica Cadwallader, PhD:
Some intersex advocates have recently adopted the term ‘DSD’ or ‘Disorders of Sexual Development’ as a better term than intersex (see www.isna.org). I resist this for a number of reasons, which I hope will become clear as the discussion progresses; but briefly: the adoption of medical language in this case works to reinforce that there is a proper order of sexual development, an order which intersex bodies fail to follow properly. This minimises the challenge that intersex poses to our assumptions about sexual dimorphism, as we shall see.
James Pate, MD has provided us with the following:
The first mention of “disorder of sex development” I could find was by CE Ford in 1961 (Ford CE. The cytogenetic analysis of some disorder of sex development. American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology. 82:1154-61, 1961 Nov.) Other historical terminology I found was:
- Disorder of sex development – Ford CE, 1961
- Sex disorders – Burgio GR, 1963
- Sex chromosome anomalies – Miller OJ, 1964
- Developmental sexual abnormalities – Klempman S, 1964
- Sex chromosome aberrations – Kiss P, 1972
- Disorder of sex differentiation – Zhukovskii MA, 1974
- Abnormal sexual differentiation – Wachtel SS, 1979
- Sex chromosome disorder – Veropotvelian PN, 1979
- Sex differentiation disorders – Knorr D, 1979
- Sex chromosome abnormalities – Nielsen J, 1990
It appears that Paul McHugh, the Vatican’s sex advisor and the Catholic psychiatrist who shut down Johns Hopkins clinic for people with transsexualism, began using the term DSD around 1990. John Money was also at Johns Hopkins.
