Consequences (Update)

By Sophia Siedlberg

In the article "Consequences" I took one Jack Drescher to task about his comments on intersex people. Within 24 hours of "Consequences" appearing a press release appeared entitled:

"US - Jack Drescher, MD, is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.."

What followed was a considerable list of academic achievements and qualifying remarks about how Jack Drescher is of some influence and importance.

"Dr. Drescher is a leader in his field. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, Chair of APA's Committee on GLB Issues and a Past President of APA's New York County Branch. He is a Trustee of the Accreditation Council for Psychoanalytic Education and a Past Trustee of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry. He is a member of several distinguished psychiatric, medical and scientific organizations, including The American College of Psychiatrists, the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry and the New York Academy of Medicine."

I have read enough.  Here's the paradoxical shocker.  He dug himself into a deeper hole. It is called "Hanging yourself in public", considering that most intersex people have had to contend with medical professionals, usually proclaiming their eminence in response to any objection to any question from an intersex person.

To someone like myself  "Psychoanalyst" and "Psychiatrist" are synonymous with "Liars who try to brainwash you into believing that shame and secrecy are a valid approach when you are an intersexed child".  The same two titles are synonymous with people like Dr. John Money. It is not that I have an issue with the profession of psychiatry or the discipline of psychoanalysis. Far from it. It is that my experience of people within this profession talking as Drescher has done has often been a very negative one.

Secondly, psychiatrists are not trained in the area of genetics. Simplistic statements like "XX = Girl and XY = Boy" are false. They have proven to be false by the very virtue of the fact that people do not uniformly become male or female according to the way these chromosomes appear. As I stated in the article, chromosomes are basically the packaging within which the genes are contained, and because dilpoidic systems work in a polygenic manner it does not automatically follow that the chromosome pairings (23rd in the case of humans) associated with sex differentiation mean that the end result is  the expected sex. Unless of course people who do not fit this rather tight definition of biology are "disordered". and even if that view does hold sway,  stating that having been born with an anatomy that is different from the "expected" anatomy, does not constitute any delusional state about the sex they physically happen to be. To say that someone "thinks" they are a woman when they were born female (Read Swyers for example) raised as female and matured more or less as female, is absurd.

Is this transferring of a physical condition, a physical state of being, from birth, into some sort of  delusional "XY chromosomes - as in " thinks she is a woman because of environment", simply the act of simplifying the situation so certain people can "Comprehend" it? I mean reducing a person to a chromosome pairing , is that ethical? And is doing this while proclaiming that one has a vast array of qualifications any more valid? I think not.

That is the process of "heteronormative normalization" and it is not nice. It does not in any way shape or form contribute to the debate over the appalling way some religious people treat those in the gay community. It just gives the more extreme of religious opinion more people to pick on. It does not and never will change the attitudes that really need confronting.

This is about confronting prejudice. And claiming that a woman with AIS is "A male who thinks she is female" or (Despite being presented as an opposite argument) "Is a homosexual male because they have XY chromosomes" is in both instances plainly prejudiced.    

If Jack Drescher does not like the religious right giving his community a hard time then he should comment on the religious right and their bad behaviour, not on people who have little or nothing to do with this debate. If Jack Drescher had done that, I would more probably have supported his position as the mistreatment of people in the LG-GL-BT community by the religious right appals me.  

If Jack Drescher does not like intersex people such as myself objecting to his carefully spun misinformation about us, and responds with press statements about how qualified he is academically, I will simply point out that this actually is the very problem intersex people have had to deal with.  Eminent experts making our lives both difficult and in some cases intolerable by means of shame, stigma, secrecy, unwanted surgery, false generalizations  and ill informed opinion.