The experience of intersexed people has been explored in only a handful of psychoanalytic reports, none of which examine the effects of the medical treatment that is central to their early history. This article presents the case of a woman who feared she was intersexed. The dynamics, transference, and countertransference configurations reenact the empathic failure implicit in her medical treatment and her family life, namely a caretaker's preoccupation with the patient's unusual anatomy, rather than her trauma.Intersex conditions-the term refers to a range of anomalies of the reproductive system-are not especially rare; estimates are that 1 in 100 babies are born with genitals, genetics, or hormones that differ from standard male or female anatomy (Blackless et al., 2000;Dreger, 1998). Physicians and parents faced with the birth of such a child must choose a treatment strategy that promises the best outcome given the current understanding of the complex genetic, hormonal, psychological, and social factors that form an individual's sense of gender identity (Reiner, 1996).Although this seems an inarguably sensible approach, a consider-
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