Sneak Preview for ISNA Supporters

We’re excited to show you how the new Clinical Guidelines and Handbook for Parents are shaping up!

But first, you are probably here because you received our letter asking for your financial support. Did you know that by making your gift online, you can cut down ISNA’s office work, so that we will have more time to support maintenance and distribution of these ground-breaking documents?

Before we send you to the handbooks, here’s a little of their history:

Social workers Sallie Foley and Christine Feick produced the original drafts of these for ISNA. In 2005, under funding from the Arcus Foundation and The California Endowment, ISNA’s Director of Medical Education Alice Dreger reworked the drafts and sent them for review to clinicians, adults with intersex, and parents of children with intersex.

One of the revisions involved creating a new entity, the Consortium on the Management of Disorders of Sex Development, to reflect the broad base of help from people not historically aligned with ISNA. (The DSD Consortium is simply the amalgam of people who have helped with this project.) The term “disorders of sex development” has helped to bring people together in a way the term “intersex” could not, especially because some contributors (representing key audiences) found the term “intersex” confusing and stigmatizing.

Although many reviewers were offered payment for their services, most declined, saying they wanted to help pro bono. So we kept sending out the documents to more and more reviewers, seeing how far we could garner support. Alice reworked the drafts using the reviewers’ feedback, checking back frequently with the contributors. And on and on the project went, getting better and better, and getting amazingly broad support! By late summer of 2005, it was clear that what we had arrived at was something fabulous and unexpected: two novel rubber-meets-the-road guidebooks representing a true consensus among the three stake-holder groups: people with intersex, parents, and clinicians.

Contributors agreed universally that, to get these handbooks to the people who need them, they should be easily available online. Our Executive Director Cheryl Chase has been providing her substantial tech skills to make possible the highly accessible DSD Consortium website. Cheryl’s cutting-edge work will also make it possible to frequently publish new editions in response to feedback received from handbook users.

And that’s where we are now! We are so proud to have been the leading organization in this project, and to be the organization that continues to provide financial support for maintenance and distribution of these two handbooks.

To see the handbooks now, go to www.dsdguidelines.org.

To help ISNA keep providing leadership, technological support, and distribution of the handbooks, please make a donation right now.