Mark D. White

The Week (courtesy of Brain Pickings) is reporting that young Indian girls are being given coerced genitoplasty (forming the female sex organs into their male counterparts) and hormone treatments in order to be the boys the parents want. This takes gender-based selective abortion (as detailed in Mara Hvistendahl's recent book Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men) to an entirely new level; forcing a physical sex change on a child before she has a chance to realize her own gender is, to point out the obvious, inhumane. (There are, of course, links to female genital mutilation as well.)