Ashkelon’s Revenge

Sophia Siedlberg

In the Daily Mail, a UK newspaper on the 21st of November 2006 Lord Robert Winston publicly stated his support for parents being able to select the sex of their future children.

There are inevitably arguments against the view he supports and as he rightly points out, few of these arguments go beyond discussing ethics in a religious or social context.

At one point in his argument where he acknowledges some of the issues he states. "Sex selection isn’t a new aspiration, there is evidence that the ancient Egyptians and Greeks tried to influence a pregnancy so that it would result in the birth of a boy and infanticide of girls was common in the Roman Empire".

And yes this is slightly veering towards the ethical points against his argument, but I would firstly like to point out that there is a slight mistake in terms of the history here that should be mentioned, why? Well the real dangers of sex selection, do not lie in the technology but in the society that uses the technology.

While Robert Winston could well describe the female infanticide in China and India today, it only tells half the story. The other half of the story, the historical reference forming the title of this article, tells a very grim tale of what can happen if society places too much emphasis of retaining one sex at the expense of the other.

Ashkelon was in the times of the Roman Empire a city on the east  Mediterranean coast, It was famed for a number of things but one was the male infanticide. Some argue that given the Herod dynasty of the second temple era Judea being famed for male infanticide had something to do with the fact that they originated in Ashkelon. A term I often use "The Herod Principle" when commenting on modern day horrors like Srebrenica is derived from this specific history. One which Sir Robert Winston will know very well.

The problem I have with his argument is not so much "social" and "ethical" but personal and to some extent historical and cultural, that is historical cultural in a sense he is all too familiar with if his "History of faith" documentaries were anything to go by. Lets delve back into ancient history for a moment. Askhelon was hated by the religious sects in and around the Golan heights and Galilee of the time. Modern day Christianity has something of a hangover of this hatred (Look at the portrayal of Herod the "Great" and his son Herod Antipas). What did Ashkelon represent to these people? Well Ashkelon was notorious for prostitution and the slave trade. And when someone gave birth to a girl, she would grow up to be a sellable commodity (A prostitute) if they gave birth to a boy, well this was not so marketable, so the baby was basically abandoned in the sewers.

I think it is fair to say that the historical root of the argument about children being made into commodities would have this story forming part of it. For me this is both very personal and a part of my own cultural history, I was raised in a somewhat obscure Jewish tradition that originated in the same area. And while Orthodox Judaism now prevails, the smaller sects of

Judaism dating back to the second temple era still survive, and the one I belonged to, has Ashkelon right in the middle of the narratives about the corrupt Herod dynasty and the Roman Invaders. OK that is the cultural frame of reference, the personal frame of reference however is far more unsettling and does inform my view of Sir Robert Winston’s argument. I am "intersexed! myself I was born with 5 alpha reductase deficiency, had ambiguous genitalia, and I was surgically "assigned" to a sex (Male, yes this practice did and does exist) and grew up hating it.

Again Sir Robert Winston would be well informed about what I have just described, as this does appear to have come under his remit (Given a debate in the house of Lords some years ago, where he discussed issues like this in very lucid detail)

This is where my problem with his argument starts to take on some very deep meaning and causes a lot of problems for me. Sir Robert Winston has quite a large amount of knowledge of Jewish/Middle East history it is also part of his own cultural background and he seem very proud of it. (As am I) He is also a very eminent in the area of reproductive medicine. In fact if I ever met him and discussed my history and how it informs my views on life, he would I suspect be one of the few people who would know what I was talking about. I doubt however he would understand. Because one thing he is not, is someone who had their life decreed by human intervention during the initial stages of life.

So what does sir Robert Winston miss in his argument, what criticism of his argument will stand when presented to him?

Well let’s begin with the cultural argument. No culture values the two sexes equally, at the same time there are female biased cultures and male biased cultures.

The promotion of one sex to the detriment of the other will always happen, and in some cases it will become so brutal in it’s motivation that historical examples like Ashkelon are going to be repeated at some point. As he correctly points out, society needs to construct a working ethical framework, but unlike Sir Robert Winston I happen to be a bit more pessimistic, this may be the difference between a European Kanai world view and an Orthodox Jewish world view. Then again it may not.

There is the other somewhat large gulf of experience that informs my view on life, the bit about the intervention when I was a child. Again it has been common with children who were born with ambiguous genitalia to force them to be assigned one sex or the other, and the choice of sex has been socially dictated. In the US during the 1960’s surgical feminization was a common practice because "they would not grow up to be comfortable as men, as surgery cannot fashion a penis" according to the received "wisdom" of the day. In the UK it was a little different, being a boy was the best thing to be, you get all the social benefits, (Like being made to die on a sinking ship or being shot in a place like Srebrenica for example) what does this illustrate? Well the sex someone is assigned is usually down to how society views the preferred sex just as much as society views the unwanted sex.

It is perhaps evident from my slight sarcasm that the "sex" I was "assigned" to was something I grew to despise with a passion. In later years I have come to suspect that had I actually been born physiologically male, only this was down to some sort of intervention not unlike the methods he is proposing now, I would have ended up being angry and vengeful still. You see when people talk about doctors playing G-d, it is not always some knee-jerk reaction, for me it is a lifetime of horrible experiences and a childhood of being experimented on while being told ancient horror stories, transmitted by tradition, by my Jewish grandmother. (Such as the tales of the evil Romans and the Sodom like city of Ashkelon).

What this tells me is that sir Robert Winston (who would undoubtedly be aware of those ancient horror stories, and how someone like me would have perceived them) is missing the point, no selecting the sex of a child is not going to undermine the moral fabric of society, but it is going to give a society which can be morally bankrupt more ammunition to exert a very pernicious form of control over the individual.

The problem I have, admitted as an individual is that I know what it feels like to be the product of human intervention of this sort, and I do not like it. And when my beloved grandmother told me tales of Kanai derring do during the Jewish revolt of the second temple era, I would listen to "The Romans rounded up the men and boys and killed them" and "In Ashkelon you would survive if you were female and were good for sale" and think two things.

1: The two sex system is pathologically insane.

2: The surgeons did what they did in order to make my life a living hell.

OK we are not living in ancient Judea and the technology we are using was unheard of at that time.

But human nature during rutting season has never changed, all it has done is adopt varying degrees of brutality. Invented things like eugenics and concentration camps a. (That was the bit my older relatives never mentioned they were too traumatized) and later on, in the 1960’s various "Medical fixes" to "social problems" (Which I had the misfortune to

"benefit" from).

I think that Sir Robert Winston, while being completely reasonable in proposing his argument, is missing some profound points that only those who "benefit" from this in terms of their own existence will see. There is more too this than mere "moral panic" this is a human society not a nest of ants, and as such humans are individuals some gain things in life because of a medical intervention and some like myself simply lose out or suffer.

I am the first to admit how it is impossible to predict any outcome, which is why blanket bans on things like sex selection are not a good idea, but a blanket policy of choosing the sex of a child is not either. I think Robert Winston would do well to talk to the casualties of earlier "sex selection" technologies instead of just talking to parents alone. And he needs to talk to these casualties and ask how their lives were further undermined by their cultural surrounding, the society in which they were raised and then ask himself the questions his critics often put to him so badly.

Sophia Siedlberg