From Gordon Hewitt
In an otherwise excellent account of new robots
(“Booting up baby”, 22 May, p 42),
Duncan Graham-Rowe finishes by suggesting that the research team has made a
mistake by keeping their robots sexless. He expects that people will feel
uncomfortable with sexless robots since “we humans…are either one thing or the
other”.
As a counsellor and psychotherapist who has had contact with intersex people,
I challenge this statement. A small but significant number of people are born
with genitals that are ambiguous and are therefore truly intersex. Public
ignorance of this issue causes great distress to them and their parents. One
outcome of this ignorance, and the discomfort it produces, is that such babies
are often prematurely assigned a gender by surgery, without other options being
considered.
I suggest that an improved understanding of gender issues is a better option
than assigning an arbitrary gender to robots.
Wellington, New Zealand
