Sophie Siedlberg is a bioinformatics/genetic analysis software developer writing open source software. She is trained in genetics and currently uses her knowledge to question the numerous ideas and theories that seek to "normalize" the biology of sex differentiation. She herself has 5 alpha reductase deficiency and during childhood was treated badly by the medical profession.

She also spends her time trying to reconstruct the history of the religious tradition she was raised in, an essentially Jewish tradition, which was almost destroyed in the last century.

She has been involved with numerous intersex support groups, trying to raise awareness of the problems caused by infant genital surgery, the stigma, shame and secrecy often imposed on people with conditions of sexual differentiation.

For a more complete list of articles by Sophia Siedlberg: Click here

The Games People Play

by Sophia Siedlberg
Spokeswoman for the United Kingdom


You have probably stumbled on this page looking for some references to a number of medical conditions where someone is born with either ambiguous genitalia, or in other cases where the doctors are saying a child has some question mark over their sex. Then you have perhaps looked around the internet and found a lot of "What makes a boy or a girl" articles, and lengthy discussions about how fluid biology really is when it comes to what is known as "Sexual Dimorphism" (Which describes basically the notion of their being two sexes).

Well "intersex" condition are a natural variation and sadly a lot of people fail to understand what one of these conditions seems to mean. I am not talking about the layperson either, or the worried parent getting mixed messages from doctors. In many ways your average person has some common understanding that may not be informed by a PhD in Genetics or a PhD in Endocrinology. A child with a problem is a child with a problem.

Unfortunately one of the medical approaches on offer is, as you may have gathered while looking, surrounded by a lot of controversy. And people who should know better are actually making the controversy more difficult for the every day person to understand. Looking at it in the most basic terms, Medical professionals follow numerous sets of guidelines, which in some cases still advocate genital surgery. There are problems with this approach, and I believe they need to be understood for what they are. Firstly surgery on a child carries the risk of complications, as developing tissue, after surgical intervention can be rather unpredictable. These complications are not straight foreword either. They can in some cases lead to repeat visits to the surgeon for continual "patching up". This is where the controversy should start, but apparently not. Don’t forget that in the majority of cases (But not all) surgical intervention is in essence cosmetic. To make the child "look normal". I have no problem with that being proposed when a child is older and can make some decision as to what can or cannot be done. But with infantile tissue development I am not so convinced that surgery is a good idea, certainly not in terms of "looking normal". And without the child's consent being involved there are clearly ethical issues that need to be considered. And it is as simple as that.

The controversy starts when we are talking about what sex the surgeons decide to assign a child. I believe this ignores totally the reality of what these surgical procedures entail. For example "Clitoral reduction" and "Mild Hypospadias repair" are two examples of surgery where the intention is entirely "normalization" and in both cases the end result is not pleasant, Clitoral reduction often involves the surgical removal of a portion of the clitoris, where the clitoris is "Too Large". Anyone opposing female circumcision will tell you that similar procedures are involved in female circumcision. And likewise the motivation is cultural. Mild Hypospadias Repair
Involves moving the urethra to the tip of the penis from somewhere further down the penis. This is not life threatening, and as such a child should have some time to grow in order to decide what is best. (Often the diagnosis of the underlying causes of these variations in development is unclear even today, so acting with surgery is not well advised). In such cases we are told sex seems relatively clear, well no it could be more complicated than that. And in cases where the ambiguity is more marked, but again still not life threatening. The controversy is still rather muted. It is only when the now infamous "Phalometer Test" is applied (Measuring the clitoris/penis with a ruler to decide which way to go, yes it is as rudimentary as that) we start seeing the controversy, and Quite frankly that controversy is skewed.

Take a look at this statement:

"If it (Penis/Clitoris) is shorter than a specified length, then they cut it all of, if it is longer, you are lucky you get to keep it"

The problem with the statement is that it illustrates quite well the mind set of the surgeon, and not people who should know better. Because most surgeons will attempt to "Correct" the "Deformity" in the "Penis" when it is "Too Long to be a clitoris" And this is not without complications. What does this statement mean then? Well it is obvious to me that it is not about the clinical risks of genital surgery, It seems to be about the somewhat arbitrary and primitive approach to diagnosis. A ruler is not going to inform anyone about any underlying genetic or endocrinal condition or provide any clues to a prognosis after the surgery has been carried out. so the statement is correct in addressing the absurdity of the "Phalometer test".
However the implication of the statment is that "surgical feminisation is bad, surgical masculinisation is OK". the obvious problem with that is in both cases the surgeon intervenes in some way, to either re-enforce a female morphology or male morphology. In both instances surgery is involved. so it would seem somewhat ridiculous to be questioning infant genital surgery if it was just a case of questioning one course of action and not the other. Surgery at such a young age, whatever form it takes, will result in complications.

It seems to be about what sex to assign the child, And this is where toe controversy truly seems to begin. A controversy that seems utterly devoid of any priorities and seems to regard the child as a "problem" from the standpoint of what sex to they are assigned. And we are talking advocates of the child’s rights in some cases adopting this "what sex to assign" model as opposed to "What problems do any of these surgical procedures cause".

But then are some of these advocates really speaking for society and not the child.  It seems obvious to me that the emphasis is on avoiding surgical feminisation and backhandedly promoting surgical masculinisation. You would probably by now be thinking "ah yes, but it is a male dominated medical profession, who would veer towards male assignation" Actually this is not quite the case. Feminisation was more common after Dr John Money proposed the idea that "Gender identity" (Whatever that is) can be socially moulded. And While surgeons adopted the (Easier) path of feminisation Dr John Money was proven wrong by one of his patients, David Reimer with the Help of Professor Milton Diamond, and the whole process of surgical feminisation across the board was brought into question.

What you are never told, is that during this time, in the 1960's and 1970's masculinising surgery was still going on, and Before Money masculinising procedures were more common. Money introduced a slight bias in terms of what sex children are assigned, it didn’t work, and this is the actual reason why surgical feminisation is brought into question.

So you may be thinking "well do they prefer to assign these children as boys" The answer to that question would probably be yes, and the Reimer v Money case is often used to explain why to the casual enquirer. Again what you are not told about are the real reasons why we find this bias drifting towards male assignation. And the problem with any assignation, male or female remember is that surgery can involve complications. You would think that the backlash against Money's approach would explain the now increasing male bias, but you would be wrong. Remember that point about "Ah it is a male dominated medical profession of course they will veer towards male assignation" Well before Money that was probably true, The results from those times were often messy, to a large degree the procedures were experimental and patients who endured that were left with some very unpleasant injuries to deal with throughout life.

So it would of course seem rather foolhardy for today's medical profession to replace the mistakes of Dr John Money by adopting earlier mistakes. and you would be right to think that. And yes there are some medical professionals who advocate phaloplasty in some cases because "It would be better to be a boy". A very male dominated attitude. Only they are not the sole reason the Bias seems to be gaining a momentum. Paradoxically it is some forms of feminism that are involved as well. The statement from them being "Assigning them male will give them male privilege" It is strange to be seeing feminists and patriarchal doctors actually agreeing on something, but there it is. And it raises a very unsettling question. Because some advocates for the children are such feminists, and some of these advocates use the male privilege argument when promoting masculinising surgery. Any reasonable human being would say "Hang on that is conducting risky surgery for social reasons on a child that cannot give consent".

Exactly.

My argument is a common sense one, that surgery itself is the real issue, it is not as good as it is claimed to be, it is risky when conducted on developing tissue and really should be avoided until two criteria are met.

1: The child is old enough to comprehend what is happening and be able to indicate what they feel is best.
2: That the tissue is sufficiently developed to be workable.

This can be pre puberty but most certainly not between the ages of 1 and 9.

The problem of course is the somewhat secretive attitude of the medical profession over matters like this. so giving the child sufficient information about their condition, is seldom something that happens, practically speaking a policy of openness needs to be put into place. so the child can make some informed choices. surgically altering a toddler and then keeping quiet about it does not work, As has often been demonstrated.

My argument is one of common sense, you can raise a child in whatever "role" you feel best indicated, but ultimately they need to know what is going on, and be given the freedom to decide what if any surgical intervention they feel best. As it is the child who will be facing the rest of their life with the consequences, it should be up to the child to have some say in the matter. surgery is better undertaken when tissue is reasonably well developed, or at least to a point where the outcome of any surgery is predictable. If they choose not to live according to a given "Gender role" then allow for that. and that is that. It is simplistic but experience tells me that would avoid a lot of pain.

So why has this not come to pass. Well it has been suggested, by one Professor Milton Diamond. who drew up a set of guidelines that proposed this model. I have even questioned him on some aspects of it, but his explanations made sense. So I ask myself, why have Milton Diamond's guidelines not been adopted universally. Well we are back in the realms of Man versus Woman using the child as a battleground. Remember I said that it was a certain school of feminism that was talking about "Assign them male they will get male privilege" It is the self same school of feminism that talks about female "purity" basically the school of feminism that argues a woman with AIS (Androgen insensitivity syndrome) has "XY chromosomes" and is thus a "male". So women with AIS are men, and in the case of CAIS they are men even though testosterone has no effect on them other than making them more feminine through aromatisation. And with CAIS surgery is seldom involved incidentally, they are born outwardly female.  This is where the politics (Culture) Justifying certain models (Non consented to surgery done in haste regardless of the consequences) gets weird.


Oh yes this particular school of feminism argues that "the gender binary" is a "social construct" and should be "deconstructed", well if they were deconstructing this "Gender binary" they would not be talking in terms of assigning children male so they would get "male privilege" would they? Surely the whole exercise of feminism in the true sense was to get rid of sexism as in "Male privilege". You know the "Male privilege" that gets men and boys shot in Sebrenica for example. Or made to drown on a sinking ship for example. (Perhaps there is a process of elimination going on between the two sexes, we wonder in the light of that)

The only was to reconcile the very inconsistent arguments like the paradox thrown up by some schools of thought like this brand of feminism, and medical patriarchy is to find some very unsettling ideas beneath the surface, and in the absence of any explanation from those peddling these arguments, the accusations of some very nasty motivations logically seems to stand. Either way none of the debate convinces me that the interests of a child born with a condition that renders their sex open to question are at the center of this debate. Rather I see the nastiest forms of sexism that goes on between men and women, dictating medical policy.

I mean if "Male privilege" is a good thing, and leads to "honors" like dying on sinking ships or being shot in Sebrenica. the name "Valerie Solanas" springs to mind. So that is the female self interest exposed for what it is then. Oh and the male self interest does not go unchallenged either. I notice how in some countries where giving birth to girls is not considered good because of numerous dowry systems in the culture (There is the "Culture" word again), It seems some are saying "well make them male" From using  testosterone injections to some very scary surgery soon after birth, to prop up the hyper misogynistic culture of some places. I seem to be witnessing the same crap in a different package here. some Men (As in Phalocrats)  and some women (As in Radfems)  really need to get their house in order and leave these children alone. and not use a child's body for their petty and nasty arguments.

If you have read this and concluded that it all ends rather strangely, consider this, a child with a condition like this is up against some very nasty cultural "norms" and needs to be protected from, but aware of these "Cultural norms" and needs to be given time to work out how to survive in all this. Surgery, secrecy and silence are not the answers. I think it is time society faced up to the facts and the somewhat nasty sides of human nature it has yet to admit to, and do something about it.



My Identity is My Identity
by Sophia Siedlberg

I have seen it, all over the place "Intersexuals join the LGBT movement", and "The GLBT organizations include Intersexual" (Funny how the G and the L keep swapping for first in the list, Men and women arguing again I suppose). Well I don’t see myself as an "intersexual". I mean my being born with 5 alpha reductase deficiency is not a sexual orientation. And quite frankly the thought of a bunch of Falwell Fundies pouncing on me calling me a lot of bizarre things when in religious terms I am a Qumran Ascete is perhaps too cruel an irony. I mean yes, while there are common issues, (Society wants people to live in a place called Stepford, seems pretty simple really), but I have a few problems with being defined by others, as others.

I mean when you look at it, it gets a bit contradictory.  The alphabet soup is a nice idea but it does not "Deconstruct gender binaries" (Or whatever the actual ideal is supposed to be these days). If anything is constructs the "Gender binary" I think "Gender binary" is the observation that there are sort of two forms loosely called male and female, over-emphasized to mean man and woman, Ah "Gender Binary" means "Bickering opposites", hence GL or LG then GL and LG. You see "L" means "Lesbian" and "G" means "Gay" in most literature this means "L" means a woman who is attracted to other women and "G" means a man attracted to other men. So we have, errm yes, Woman(W) and Man(M). "B" means "Bisexual” meaning someone attracted to either men or women, note the medical term ending in "sexual", whereas "Gay" and "Lesbian" are references to happy and sunny Mediterranean islands. While someone who is "uncertain" is a medical term.  "T" is "Transgender" a term invented a long time ago by one Virginia Prince who was a cross dresser and quite openly proud of it from what I have read. And Prince was pretty clear that this is what "Transgender" meant. Well these days the term is applied to Transsexual folk, Intersex Folk, in fact many folks who just don’t like being called "Like Virginia Prince". why? Well Prince did sort of emphasize quite strongly that "Transgender" meant "a man acting as a woman"  So someone who has had surgery to be a different sex, or someone else who was born with some medical condition that makes sex unclear is hardly "Transgendered" by Prince's own definition surely. What you may probably have noticed by now is there is a lot revealed by these terms. How they have this little hierarchy of sexual constructs being applied to people.

Of course this hierarchy is as rigid as the Stepford Wives fantasies of the Falwell Fundies. It is all done with the best intentions, I have no issue with that, it is just that we find the unsettling "Norms" creeping in. I mean you cannot get more biologically essentialist than saying:

"Man with male anatomy attracted to men with male anatomies, Woman with female anatomy attracted to women with female anatomies. Man with male anatomy or woman with female anatomy attracted to either anatomy and Man with male anatomy or woman with female anatomy interacting with the world as the opposite in clothing only"

(This is what LG-GL-BT means after all). Suddenly the rainbow flag turns monochrome. Oh dear, that was not supposed to happen was it? If anything the most glaring is the swapping of "GL" and "LG" in the literature. You see here it becomes evident that we are really talking squabbling men and women again. I mean come on, doesn’t this seem a bit petty? Which letter comes first? It is fair to say I do not see myself as being part of any of this, not because of any noble ideals the LG-GL-BT movement stands for being something I may not agree with, but because I sort of get this color blindness when I look closer at the multicolored magnetic letters on the fridge spelling out "LG-GL-BT" At best the letters become pink and blue at worst just monochrome.

I do not see "intersexual" as my identity, OK I have a biological condition that renders my "Biological sex" into the meaningless concept it actually is. But I am "Asexual" (They have to end everything with "Sexual" unless they are "normal", as in happy and living on Mediterranean islands, Gaily living on Lesbos). I know I am an "Idarean" I live on a wonderful mountain called Ida with a lake called "Salmacis" in the foot hills. Ah no, the likes of me don't get exotic geographical names or happy states of mind as identities, just a medical term ending in "sexual".

By behavior I am an "Asexual" by biology I am an "Intersexual" and I am now it seems a "Disorder of Sexual Differentiation". I see so no exotic locations then, it's a pity that, Well I cannot complain, there are the Falwell Fundies who would brand me an "Abomination" (A king James word that was put in place of about twenty classical Hebrew words because King James could not read Hebrew). Of course that makes G-d an "abomination", (Such are the vagaries of Hellenic translation of Hebrew) Yes the bereshyth does say that G-d made men and women in G-ds own image. Ooops! G-d also does not do lots of sex either, Oops!  And G-d is not all that keen in being split into three little bits, plated in gold and sold at MacDonald’s as veal burgers either, certainly when the gold plating was procured by one Aaron the gold bullion dealer and the disowned brother Of Moshe who told Aaron that gold and veal are not a good idea, Oops, I think the Falwel fundies have been labeling G-d a bit too much.

Labeling, that is the problem really. I genuinely do not know what it is like to be any of the following.

"Man with male anatomy attracted to men with male anatomies, Woman with female anatomy attracted to women with female anatomies. Man with male anatomy or woman with female anatomy attracted to either anatomy and Man with male anatomy or woman with female anatomy interacting with the world as the opposite in clothing only"

And quite frankly no human being fully fits any of the definitions offered by "LG-GL-BT". I mean people are people, How can someone identify with a limiting and arbitrary label?  That is what this is really, labeling, the very thing the whole edifice was built to prevent surely? We have "Pansexual, Spammersexual, Greek Islander, Happy, (Notice who gets the nice labels, and who gets the not so nice libels) Asexual, Glibsexual, Meterosexual, Googlesexual, errm Polysexual, Sexualsexual, Spacedoutsexual" the list is ever growing. I suspect there is a bit of Freudian navel gazing going on.

Why can we simply not use the term "human" and think in terms of our "humanity". why does it have to be references reducing people to bits of meat, I mean this "Rainbow of diversity" seems to be broken into little bits, Like the real thing is broken into wavelengths. OK it may serve a purpose but people are not robots. To identify as a set of mechanical acts or rigid states of being is to go right against the whole point of the exercise in the first place. and yes the color is drained from this rainbow when we get identity politics, every human being is an individual, And the problem with the rainbow as a symbol is you end up with people pointing to specific bands and saying "This is me". Well no I am not a color on a symbol or a wavelength of light, I am me.

Well where do we go from here? I suppose we stop looking at our differences and stop trying to shoehorn those differences into rigid categories. I suspect the most destructive is defining everything in terms of sexuality and then linking sexuality to identity, because all this does is define people as bits of meat, nothing more. It is also very unhelpful for people to be saying "This is my experience all are the same as me" because all that does is exclude people after defining them as bits of meat. In terms of my own experiences as someone born with 5 alpha, I am not the same as someone else born with 5 alpha, And I am not a "Disorder" (Sexually differentiating or otherwise) In fairness to ISNA I can see why they took that approach, it is the term "Disorder" I am uncomfortable with. The argument is that this allies people with people who have disabilities. Well read Thomas Shakespeare, and you will find that "Disorder" is not a popular term among other communities either. I would suggest Conditions of Sex Differentiation, personally,  and leave it at that. I mean the real message that should be put across is that sex dimorphism is not as rigid as people claim it to be, and the "in-between" is not broken up into little bands either. because the "in between" is also far from rigid. To use the term "Disorder" is to evoke the notion of "un-fitting, non conforming, outside the order" The problem is the "order" is not totally dimorphic. How can variations in sex differentiation be "Disorders" when in truth they are part of the "order" in the first place? (Do we need a lecture in evolutionary biology to prove this?)

If people are going to use a rainbow to describe variation as a metaphor,  think of it like this. The range of colors between Ultra violet and infra red is 3000 angstroms to 7000 angstroms (300 nanometers to 700 nanometers). that is superficially 400 and more in depth 4000 different wavelengths. Actually you could divide the scale of the wavelengths to a factor of infinity. So consider how it will look in 20 years time in the days of custom medicines, and the ever more complex picture of biology that gets revealed, The rainbow would be a good analogy if described accurately and not as six bands of demarked color. (Incidentally such demarcation does not appear in a true rainbow, we get hues).

No two people are the same, not even monozygotic twins. and even the most rigid of Falwell fundies would have to admit that, to do otherwise would in truth bring the wrath of their biblical G-d, as symbolically the their holy spirit is all (Shekinah El-Shaddai), would they break the holy spirit down into bits? I doubt it.

By this I mean come on, open your eyes. Especially the Falwell fundies and the LG-GL-BT movement. We are human beings and we exist, we are all different, no two of us are identical, and if you like, yes that is how G-d seems to have intended it. Or how Nature seems to manifest it (Whichever belief you have).

Consider it




A Cigar is only a Cigar?

by Sophia Siedlberg


Once Sigmund Freud was asked when smoking, "Isn't a cigar a phallic symbol?" Freud replied, "Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar". But there is a curious "Freudian slip" in this discourse that few will have spotted. The enquirer we are led to believe did not approve of smoking so in effect decided to "normalise" Freud’s actions by using Freud's own methods. To sexualise his actions.

However there is a sort of opportunistic psychology going on here, "If it can be associated with sexuality, then associate it". It seems even Freud had his limits on this idea. It is a pity many of his backhanded advocates do not take counsel from this anecdote. Take a child born with either ambiguous genitalia, or some medical condition that makes their "biological sex" not so easy to define and what do we hear. "Intersexual" and "Sexuality" and "Sexual Minority" and "Sexual Orientation". Well sometimes (Invariably as it happens) a child is a child. And while in adulthood having such a condition may have some bearing on sexuality.  The condition does not actually define sexuality.

This is a process known as normalisation, if you are uneasy about something demean it, the best way to demean it is to sexualise it, sexualisation is (Radical thinking caps on folks) normalisation. If that sounds like some quantum leap in logic, well calling a new born child "A sexual being" is far more bizarre. So let us look at it again, what defines a child with an intersex condition? That they are a lesbian? Or they are gay? Or they are Meterospammerpatho-sexual (Let us not forget the hy-phen). Well no they are a child with a condition that makes "biological sex" uncertain. (As if there are reliable absolutes for defining "biological sex" in the first place). I mean does this extend further into the surreal and strange? Do people claim a child with a missing leg is suffering from apotemnophilia? A desire to not have said leg in the first place? Errm no! Is being born with a missing leg bourn of some motivation to be born sans leg? Or even some sexual desire as some would claim to be born minus the missing limb? I think not somehow.
But believe it or not some people do normalise those with disabilities by claiming the person minus the leg is somehow responsible for it. Look at how absurd it really is. It gets even more absurd when people start sexualising missing limbs.

So what chance has someone who has an intersex condition got? To be able to avoid people who would call a man smoking a cigar a penilecigar-sexual (or whatever) or to avoid people who would claim that having a disability is somehow their fault? Well a child with a condition that involved sex differentiation obviously stands very little chance of avoiding this silliness.

You see this process of "normalisation" is a sort of sanitisation of an individual into some state of "otherness". And as can be clearly demonstrated this is not only irrational, but in many ways at the root of prejudice. So why then do we find children born with intersex conditions somehow singled out by society as "A sociomedical emergency" in the first place, and while facing the prospect of "Alteration" (Vivisection) or "Psychosexual adjustment" (Secrecy and shame usually) they are made to feel as if they have no right to exist, unless of course it is in some "Gender dustbin" which usually takes the form of a ghetto like existence.

There was a time when many textbooks described intersex children as "Imbeciles with severe mental retardation". Well that was another process of "normalisation" which "Blamed the individual for existing" Well when that nasty little libel was got rid of it was replaced by sexuality.  

Often these little slurs and pathologisations say more about those saying these stupid things rather than those with any given condition. I mean most medical professionals realised that it took a somewhat limited intellect to say that all children with intersex conditions grew up to be "Imbeciles with mental retardation".
I mean when an intersexed child says something like "Well when you define Einstein’s theory of relativity in pure math by employing Hausdorrf space, you see some interesting sides to Einstein’s model" Or "Oh Doctor Fiscal, Did you know that because of the pliatropic and polygenic way DNA works, your notion of chromosomes defining sex is dumb!, how about a simple lesson in synthesising multiple peptides from the information on a single coding region of DNA?". Do you honestly think the Doctor is going to get away with "Imbecile with mental retardation" when referring to such a child? I am not claiming that all intesex children are piano playing, nuclear reactor building, chess experts who would give Kasparov a run for his money, while translating Einstein’s theory of relativity into pure math and explaining the human genome to a PhD in genetics. But I am saying that the shape of someone's reproductive tract does not actually define their intelligence. The slur about intersex children being "Retarded" is well and truly disproven, they often have the same intelligence as anyone else.

It is funny how today’s army of normalisers would claim to agree with me when saying that reproductive organs do not define intelligence. While, paradoxically,  they constantly seem to be making intersex people feel like they are the lowest of the low because their reproductive tract somehow defines them, only in some other way. We have moved on it would seem. These days normalisers hide behind the new pathology of sex. It gets so absurd that even the "Surgery" (vivisection) you may have endured as a child defines who you are to these people and it is "all your fault".

It sort of goes like this. If you were "normalised" as "male" by society or in any way defined as "male" by society (Having "Male chormosomes" etc, while a obviously not being male) then you are sexually deranged in some way, for not being the "Perfect male" who incidentally is also defined as an "Axe wielding psychopathic rapist who eats babies for breakfast while talking genocide with Satan" by the normalisers. If you were normalised by society as "female" then you are either some "stupid female who has no brain" (Hence the female assignation I assume) Or are a victim who has to be placed on a martyrdom pedestal, or a very dangerous woman.

Considering that these normalisers call themselves politically correct, I wonder how on this planet they managed to get away with such revolting and rampant sexism? Well they re-interpret it. Look at the endless volumes of "Male brain, female brain" studies that get published these days "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" theories are all over the place and guaranteed to get funding, well I am from planet Earth deal with it!

Scratch beneath the surface and you do not tend to find any real science, You will tend to find pompous "experts" extolling the idea that women are good at housework and baby making (Multitasking) and men are good at reading maps  (navigating battlefields and Indulging in a few wars). And these "experts" are often presented as "Liberalists" with "A politically correct outlook on life" who "Agree with equality".
Oh and notice how strange things happen when the idea of "Brain sex" does not play the game according to the rules. Let's look at another group of people for a moment, transsexual folk, now when someone publishes any paper that states their brain may be one sex, their genitals another, Oh the Venus and Mars brigade are so offended. There are flurries of papers published denouncing the idea, and armies of hectors and harpies in the press going on endlessly about "the nat-ural or-dah" (Don't forget the hyphen). and how the idea of "Brain sex" is inherently sexist? (Yes they say that, honest) But when the Venus and mars brigade peddle their sexist claptrap it's "Oh well we knew this all along, it is official now". Oh right, "brain sex" is no longer sexist then, I see. Men are men and women are women and they have defined roles, to make babies or die in a war. That is not sexism we are told. It's official.

It is confusing, isn't it?

Normalisation is basically the process of propping up a delusion, to the point where contradiction is not an issue anymore. See how conveniently mutually opposite ideas both magically agree, Brain sex is sexism when it says that brain sex can contradict the body, but not sexism when it does not contradict the body and puts people into clearly defined, and sometimes demeaning "Gender roles".

Funny how conducting surgery on a non consenting child is considered "OK" by society and at the same time a consenting adult seeking surgery for themselves is considered "Sexist". And it is a real hoot when you read that being feminised as a child is sexist, while being masculinised is not, because it confers "male privilege". wherever you look these glaring contradictions appear. As I have explained in another article, the LG-GL-BT alphabet soup works on very tight definition of what male and female is, with regards the anatomy of the person and the anatomy of who they fancy or what is considered suitable in terms of clothing and anatomy (As in "T"). And yet they say "We are deconstructing gender binaries" So when a someone says "GG means Genetic Girl"  that is deconstructing a gender binary, is it?

Well it is all a bit confusing I must say. Or is it? Well no, because the one thing that is very, very consistent is that despite the spin, the sexism is very much the core delusion, usually summed up in the deliberately self contradicting statement. "Men and women are equal but different".

So given this you would think a child born with an intersex condition, or "Disorder of Sexual Differentiation" has no chance whatsoever in this world of spin and corporate style pseudo-psycho-babble. (forgive the hyphens). Well you would be right.

Well if you have some intersex condition, you will by now have noticed how society almost blames you because you were born somehow to "Biologically give out mixed messages in terms of sex and gender". Well I put it that this is in truth the other way round. All you would have done is be born outside some collective delusion, the collective delusion that nature, as in biology, obeys certain rules when they evidently do not. But the collective delusion itself is so challenged by all this that the delusion goes into flat out contradiction, to the point that those who claim they are not deluded prove to be the most deluded of them all.

Which brings us back to one Sigmund Freud smoking a cigar and saying "A cigar is just a cigar". How Ironic that the man who gave the world the more recent language by which the collective delusion is propped up protested when his language was used to tick him off for smoking. How Ironic that it was him who said "Anatomy is destiny" and all those who objecting to that with their Venus and Mars science are in fact propping up the very idea that "Anatomy is destiny".

Sex not only sells, it is now a tool of normalisation. But is it the sex that is now the commodity or the normalisation? Notice how big the grants seem to get for the Venus and Mars graduates looking to get funding, and how small the grants for those that ask other questions seem to get these days. Sexism sells. And those who shout about it the loudest, like the sexology-sociology academics, political radicals, media hectors and harpies are protesting too much. Sigmund said that too.





Consequences!
by Sophia Siedlberg.


Recently a newspaper in Virginia, US called "The Daily Press" carried an article by someone called Jack Drescher, asking about the scientific understanding of homosexuality. A somewhat interesting example of objectivity where Drescher is obviously trying to balance evidence against claim. The core of the debate, as it always seems to be in the US is this idea that Gay and Lesbian people are "Choosing a lifestyle" versus the idea that Gay and Lesbian people are gay and lesbian because of certain biological factors, and correctly Drescher points out that in truth the jury is out on this debate.

But, Drescher does make a few errors in assessing who can be defined as Gay or Lesbian, and of great interest to me, as a commentator in this area myself, who is not from the US. I can see a few things that actually prove my point about the way normalization seems to be working.

Take this paragraph:
"In intersex (hermaphroditic) conditions, a child's sex at birth is not clearly male or female. For example, girls with
Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, exposed to unusual amounts of male hormones before birth, may be born with
clitorises resembling penises. Studies of adults with CAH indicate a higher rate of female homosexuality than
that found in the general population. This suggests that hormonal "masculinization" or "feminization" may
contribute, in some cases, to human homosexuality."

Aside from being a somewhat large jump from one subject (The basis of being gay or lesbian) to another (An intersex condition). It is very interesting that "Intersex (hermaphroditic)" suddenly becomes "girls" who when exposed to higher levels of androgens are "female homosexuals". It is a very interesting chain of statements really how "Intersex (Hermaphroditic)" is a problem that has to be "defined" in "normalized terms" thus "girl" (Not woman you will notice if you are a feminist) and this moves on to "because of too much testosterone" we move on to a definition of "homosexual female". If that is not a chain of pathological logic, I do not know what is.

I am not arguing that people with CAH are of no given sex or are. I am not arguing that some who are Lesbian are "justified" or "not justified" as Lesbians with regard to the debate. (Do they see themselves as Lesbians, Has Drescher ever asked anyone? They could be identifying as male and heterosexual, has Drescher ever considered that possibility) That "make em fit our ideas" silliness, quite frankly, is for the Falwell fundies and the LG-GL-BT people to squabble pointlessly about in the US as they always do.
No I am arguing that this is a chain of reasoning that gives an individual with CAH a poor chance of saying anything for themselves, about who they are, what they experience as human beings and their rights, as people with an intersex condition. (This is the important part) I repeat this, their rights as people with an intersex condition. They may identify as female and be attracted to men, they may identify as female and be attracted to women, they may identify as male and be attracted to men, or may again be male and attracted to women. But commenting on sexual attraction is missing the point when you consider some of the very unpleasant surgery those with CAH are subjected to as children. And some of the often ignored health problems people with CAH suffer.
Dresscher also forgets to mention the full range of CAH, and illustrates the point by discussing Androgen Insensitivity syndrome in the next paragraph. Even more clumsily.

So some clarification is needed.

Let’s start with chromosomes. (Ah yes the stick with which eugenically challenged normalizers beat us all with). In most cases XX chromosome parings (23rd pair) result in the reproductive tract differentiating in a female direction. In most cases XY pairings result in male differentiation.  That is because the Y chromosome has a few "MSR’s" (Male Specific Regions, like SRY) on it that causes gonads to differentiate into testis.

However.
From there the process depends on other factors to produce male reproductive organs, An MSR on the X chromosome for example (Xq 12) is needed to make all the tissue sensitive to androgens, without that you get AIS (Androgen insensitivity syndrome) which results in a external female genitalia and a body that would only feminize further if exposed to androgens because the androgens are converted to estrogen.
In CAH it is different, basically you get either the XX initially moving towards female, but due to problems with hormone synthesis, you find higher levels of androgens involved. Hence someone who is more "masculine". In the case of CAH where the person has XY chromosomes they have male differentiation (Testis) but then become "hypervirilized" by the increased amounts of androgens from their adrenal glands.
Quite simply, chromosomes do not have the last word in defining sex. But the way Drescher talks you would think that Chromosomes were the last word. So if an XY pairing with the MSRs in the Y chromosome not working results in a woman with a uterus and streak ovaries. (Like Swyers for example) Some idiots would even then define such a woman as a man. Others have perfectly "healthy" XY chromosome pairings but do not end up as the demanded sex (Demanded by eugenically challenged normalizers) because other genes in the autosomes are also critical for sex differentiation. (It is called the polygenic model, in case you are wondering).

Why did Drescher not mention CAH when manifested on someone who has XY chromosomes I wonder? Ignorance, or pathological trains of thought? In fairness this does not quite get the same airing because we get male differentiation driven to the extreme, manifesting as an early male puberty (At around the age of 6)
I suppose to Normalizers that is not so much of a "Problem" (Which says a lot.)

Well let’s look at Drescher on AIS:

"An environmental role is further suggested in Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. Although AIS children
have male XY chromosomes, they are born looking like girls. They are usually raised as girls and most
develop adult relationships with men.  Are people with AIS heterosexual because they think they are
women and choose male partners? Or homosexual because they and their partners both have XY
chromosomes? Either interpretation may be correct, depending on one's point of view: an individual's
subjectivity vs. chromosomes. Obviously, there are limits to the questions that biology can answer."

Well there are many questions biology cannot answer, but I would argue that dragging chromosomes into it is missing the point. Lets look at this again, what about a woman with Swyers, who would have a uterus, who could technically carry a child to full term. (But cannot conceive). Would any sane biologist call woman who could carry a child to full term a man then? Personally I think that the application of "XY = Male" across the board, with Swyers or AIS is absurd basically. But Drescher slips up when being "Objective" on this, let’s re-examine the statement.
"Are people with AIS heterosexual because they think they are women and choose male partners?"

Note the word "think" - note the slip of Money’s ideas about environment being used to re-enforce the idea of environment. "They are born (Or assigned as in PAIS sometimes) outwardly female, are raised as female therefore they are conditioned to be female, so they "Think they are female". Problem is Money was proven wrong in the Reimer Case, but still you find most women with AIS identifying as women. So the environmental argument explaining a woman with AIS identifying as a woman does not stand up to scrutiny does it. Or is Drescher informed by those American "medical dramas" like House where anything that does not fit is derided and hammered? Seems Drescher’s understanding of intersex conditions is skin deep.

I mean let’s face it, does being born visibly female at birth, being raised as female, having most of your body differentiate into female except the uterus (In the case of AIS) or with a uterus (In the case of Swyers) constitute some "Delusion" or "lifestyle choice" if you say "I am a woman". I think not.

I am not going to condemn Dresher’s ideas to some sin bin of bad journalism, because there was a serious attempt at being objective, about a debate that actually is about sexual orientation, not sex differentiation. But this is the consequence of mixing orientation with intersex issues. Drescher’s mistake was a common one, to make chains of assumptions about people. Chains of assumptions that did not involve Drescher actually talking to anyone with any of these conditions, chains of assumptions that were misleading and chains of assumptions that evidently went off into trying to define humanity as consisting of two sexes in some absolute sense, despite all the "PR and Rhetoric" type remarks to the contrary, claiming that biology does not have the answer. It is not biology that is at fault here, a true biologist would not be calling people things they are not on the basis of arbitrary definitions of chromosomes. Biology does not judge a book by it’s cover. If a gene is a chapter in a book then the chromosome is the binding, the cover. Would someone look at a book and judge it by it’s cover. Does a Buccal Smear test look at anything more than the cover?

If Drescher is going to talk about Biology, I would suggest that Dresher and other journalists take the time to actually open a textbook and read the contents. Look up "Polygenic" and "Pliatropic" while they are at it.
Chromosomes do not determine sex, genes do, and the genes involved are not all on the X and Y chromosomes.

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.





Glass  House
by Sophia Siedlberg

“You're pure estrogen, which is why you get heightened female characteristics; clear skin, great breasts. The ultimate woman is a man. Nature's cruel, huh?"

The fictional Dr House discussing a teenager with CAIS

"So my thumping you is not ladylike eh?  Make your mind up, you want me to be a man don’t you?  Oh sorry I hit you!  And sorry to confuse you like that"

My response once to a doctor like that in real life.

House, Or "The Cure for the Common Medical Drama". A TV show that managed in 5 minutes of plot to alienate most of the intersex community and in particular women with CAIS (Complete Androgen Insensitivity  Syndrome). Well I assume the joke was on women with CAIS, well no a joke would be a depiction of an opiate addicted quack that knows practically nothing of genetics, as being the heroic and brilliant "Maverick Genius".

You only have to utter the words "Fox Network" suddenly all becomes very easily explained. Of course most of the responses to House seemed to be about the incorrect talk of women with CAIS by the media, the misrepresentation and stereotyping of women with CAIS, sometimes comments about the unreliability of using XX and XY chromosome pairings as sex markers. Yes the usual, but of course most of the objections didn’t actually get anywhere with the Fox Network, hardly surprising really, considering how the Fox Network thrives on inaccuracy and misrepresentation.

But someone slipped up. I mean if a certain media empire are going to humiliate a group of people, Portraying these people as victims of child abuse and then making a joke of it is going to backfire. And then to justify the "joke" by claiming the person who was a victim of sexual abuse is the opposite sex, with daft explanations of genetics. is, well going to backfire even more. And here we go, the backfiring starts.

Lets look first at what the "Maverick Genius" (An ill informed script writer) said on the genetics, lets warm up a bit.

"His DNA says you're wrong. Frogs and snails and puppy dog tails. You've got male pseudohermaphroditism. See we all start out as girls and then we're differentiated based on our genes. The ovaries develop into testes and drop. But in about 1 in 150,000 pregnancies a fetus with an XY chromosome, a boy, develops into something else. Like you. Your testes never descended because you're immune to testosterone. You're pure estrogen, which is why you get heightened female characteristics; clear skin, great breasts. The ultimate woman is a man. Nature's cruel, huh?"

I wonder, what an XY chromosome is, I have heard this one before, It is a cracker of a joke, Some "Expert" in the UK's Guardian Newspaper in the 1990's called Dr. Emily Hanckock Said:

(Referring to the Reimer case)

"John's (David's) case suggests irrefutably that boys are created in the womb. Playing with Barbie and wearing pink dresses can never, undo the power of the XY chromosome"

Well that is a bit misleading, I suspect for a reason, This bit about an "XY chromosome" often seems to appear when trying to assert the idea of "XY = Male". It is hilarious because the use of "XY Chromosome" to assert maleness is commonplace. It is a bit of a cliché really.

OK I will be fair I am playing semantics, the two separate parts of a chromosome pairing are "Chromatids", And sometimes a chromosome is a reference to as the pairing itself. but when looking at it the way I need to (In terms of genes on the chromosomes and expression in the Mendelian sense) The notation of a singular chromosome tends not to be all that helpful. I always say "Chromosome Pairing" This is why in some documents you read of "X and Y chromosomes"  (Plural). Rather than "XY Chromosome" (Singular). I stress this for a reason, because when you regard the X and the Y chromosomes as a singular you end up with less clarity about genes. OK, its like this, unlike other chromosome pairings (Where both parts consist of paired genes), the so called sex chromosomes don’t get paired genes all the time, It is why you get "X Linked" genetic conditions which can include colour blindness for example, because there is only one copy of the genes on the X chromosome when paired to a Y chromosome, Whereas a pair of X chromosomes have both sets of genes. (See how it works). It is easier to treat the X and Y chromosomes as separate entities. And while in both XX and XY pairings, it is one gene that is used from the pair, in the case of XY pairings there is no "Backup" gene just one copy on the one X chromosome.

So there is a reason why I would use X and Y chromosomes, as opposed to "XY chromosome" as you may be gathering by now. If we stick to this idea, of an X and a Y chromosome, for now, it will begin to make sense. And the "Housian" school of genetics will make even less sense.

So lets read the "Housian" explanation again.

"See we all start out as girls and then we're differentiated based on our genes."

OK on the Y chromosome there is a gene that codes for a protein that causes "proto gonads" (Which would usually develop into ovaries) to turn into testis. This is what the Housian explanation means by "differentiation". However there is a small problem with this very simplistic description. Yes SRY makes testes, but we are not talking sperm manufacturing, super testes, we are talking well, undeveloped testes really. Now lets get back to a nice little scriptwriter talking a lot of testes.

"Your testes never descended because you're immune to testosterone."

Well the "immunity" is down to the gene that makes the androgen receptor not working. Basically this is the real bloke gene not working, on the X chromosome, yes I said X chromosome. And its the only gene available remember in the XY pairing remember, you only get one copy of genes on the X chromosome in an XY pairing. you see for testes to fully develop as testes, and descend, you not only need the product of a gene on the Y chromosome, it is a gene on the X chromosome that has to work, as well, have the last word so to speak. And yes AIS is an X linked condition. Interesting really, if the "woman chromosome" says "this is not a man" after all, I wonder why the Housian  explanation says otherwise, Ah well it is called going back to the idea of an "XY chrisom" which conveniently obscures the little problem with a gene on the X chromosome having the last word. the ultimate doctor is a phallocratic prick, House is cruel huh?

In the script the talking total testis continues:

"You're pure estrogen, which is why you get heightened female characteristics; clear skin, great breasts the ultimate woman is a man"

Yes, well errm lets quote bit of strange terminology from thin air. "CYP19"  That was fun. It is a gene, not on the sex chromosomes but Chromosome (Pairing) 15. and it codes for an enzyme called aromatase. Now lets make this fun for Housey halfwits. remember this is chromosome 15 right, not X or Y. Nothing to do with sex in the Housian parallel universe. Aromatase converts testosterone to estrogen, you can have a woman with XX chromosomes and she would be a bit manly were it not for chromosome 15's CYP19, We are talking about steroid synthesis, Its getting a bit complex isn’t it.

Well in the case of CAIS, CYP19 working as it should is also a "problem" because a woman with CAIS would be "All Estrogen" because of her body's ability to convert Testosterone to Estrogen. but of course, we don’t mention this because the gene  is not in the X or Y chromosomes. but what makes CYP19 interesting is that in the case of it working properly, it actually makes a woman with CAIS (Who is supposed to be a he according to House) even more feminine. what you don’t get to hear is that this is not to do with sex chromosomes.

Now, don’t tell anyone, I have a big secret, notice how a gene or two on other than those on the Y chromosome having the last word seems a little, well awkward. Actually there are lots of "Last word" genes, that kind of make life awkward for "Maverick Geniuses" (Like House, Mengele etc). and Scriptwriters don’t know this big secret., it is called "Polygenic expression" what it tells us is that you cannot rely on a gene on the Y chromosome to produce a male phenotype by itself. The development of sex is in truth rather complicated, it involves lots of genes, I wont list them here, it is not the point, but most conditions of sex differentiation tend to occur because of a number of genes working in a certain way.

So to simplify the Housian definition of all this down to its pure absurdity. Our fictional "Maverick Genius" seems to think with a logic that can be illustrated like this.

If you have a car with a big petrol tank it is a truck. If the petrol tank only fills to the capacity of a car's petrol tank it is still a truck, If petrol doesn’t actually burn because the spark plugs don’t work, it is a truck that can shift a huge load. And I suppose if there were lots of bits in the car not working, rather than just the spark plugs and petrol tank, it is a juggernaut. "Right yes fine, back to the class and tell me what are you taking. Ah yes the sore leg, I get it".

I bet you producers of House out there were smirking while reading this and thinking "Oh she/he whatever has veered from the sexual abuse topic" errm wrong!

I suspect that is the real but not often covered issue has been missed when people were arguing about the scientific inaccuracies of the episode of House, and that is the sight of a doctor making a joke out of a teenage girl who has suffered parental sexual abuse. I mean forgive me but.:

"Good news is, I don't think dad's going to be sleeping with him/her again. See, now it's gross".

       and

“No, a joke would be me calling you a homo. See the difference? I'll schedule him for surgery.”

Is what exactly? funny? Oh so a medical diagnosis of CAIS makes the abuse different now does it? there is the backhanded comment like if she were being abused by her father and diagnosed as not having CAIS, it would be different would it, More serious, like get the cops in, but as the woman is a "male pseudohermaphrodite" It is not a problem for the police, a quick comment about the abuser being a "homo" would do. Like run that by me again? Like what sort of sicko wrote a script like that?

You see this is where we turn the heat up a bit on certain scriptwriters who think child abuse is funny. (15 is under the legal age right? Incest is illegal yes?) Oh sorry, I cant state the obvious can I, lets be fair to the House Scriptwriter, the house scriptwriter has already assumed that XY chromosomes in a woman equates with sub human. I think we have got the message from the very simplistic and absurd "scientific" explanation so cleverly delivered by a "Maverick Genius" that she somehow "deserved" to be abused because she was not some pure example of biological womanhood., but an "XY chromosome" parading as a woman. Lets do the House on House then shall we, Lets talk like a "Maverick genius" does this logic apply to all "deformity" or "imperfection" that they being abused is something that can be  jokes about. What next, a kid with downs being abused and the scriptwriters joking about it via the script for Dr. House?

So what then?  it is deliciously politically incorrect inst it? Like hey lets have another medical drama and call it "Mengele" where does it end, that slippery slope as the media loves to spout. funny that, how slippery slopes seem a real problem in society but in the land of twisted scriptwriting ah it is just a bit of fiction. Well how many of the 1 in 150,000 were watching this "cure for medical dramas"  and feeling a bit insulted, if not threatened by it. Well they don’t matter really do they, they are there for the amusement of the audience. And then there is another sticky little question, I mean these days most parents seem to know that their child has CAIS, and does this mean that the writers of House think parents of CAIS children abuse their kids or something?

I find Dr.House as a TV show to be offensive, but deliberately so. I do not consider it "Irony" either for the simple reason that the rather insulting description of CAIS or AIS in general is a list of half truths that were designed to convince the layperson that CAIS describes a male. "Parading as a woman" .Well no, House is a misleading and false television parading as serious drama, more like






Doctor Doctor
by Sophia Siedlberg


It is interesting how when I write anything about some of the ideas of medical professionals commenting on intersex conditions, the usual responses from their supporters appear.  So I have decided to answer one of them

A physician recently commented on an article I wrote as follows:
“Do you not think that it is wrong to classify someone who sees their intersex condition as an illness as an intersex person, surely they are the gender they present themselves to be with an illness”

My answer to this is that I would never presume to impose the identity of “intersex” on anyone, actually I dislike the term, and I have always said this openly.  However I dislike even more terms like “intersexual”, “disorder” and “illness”.   What I do object to is how the above statement implies that fragmentation of the self is legitimized when there is an “intersex” condition diagnosed.

I will give an example: I have 5 alpha reductase deficiency - “I have a female gender identity”.  Not quite,  I am basically female. I ended up female. But I hear, “Ah yes, but you are a man (XY chromosomes) who has an illness and you have a female Gender identity which seems to be a consequence of having 5 alpha". Meaning I as a woman am an illness.  As a Man I would be a man with an illness, rather than a woman that is an illness. The same reasoning seems to apply to CAH.  I mean if someone with CAH identifies as male, (and has XX chromosomes) they are seen as an illness, if they identify as female then they are women with an illness. Why?  XX chromosomes?

That is the real problem. What the doctor says. It is the notion of fragmented self. It seems that the medical profession has this checklist of sex markers, “Gender identity”, “Chromosomes”, “Genital morphology” and “Hormonal bias” and “normal”.  Seems to be if all these boxes are ticked in one direction or the other, Like “Female gender identity”, “XX”, “Vagina, uterus and ovaries” and “Estrogen” equals female. Or “Male gender identity”, “XY”, “Penis, Testis” and “Androgens” equals male.

The problem occurs when we get “Female gender identity”, “XY”, “Vagina, uterus, no ovaries”, “Estrogens”   (Swyers) or “Male gender identity”, “XX”, “Uterus, Vagina etc” and “Androgens” (Some forms of CAH, not all)

You see this is untidy. In the “Male gender identity” and “XX”  there is a contradiction. Well “Chromosomes are essentialist markers, Identity is a social construct, so Identity is an illness”, they will say. I mean yes this reductionism may serve as some sort of diagnostic model, but there is a tinge of  the stereotypical about it all, a taint of normalization. I mean it is hardly reasonable to be breaking a person down into a lot of bits and then judge them on the basis of whether all the bits line up or not. 

In fact the fragmentation model is illustrated with AIS, or CAIS being discussed in a certain silly “Drama” called “House”. Lets look at the checklist. “Female gender identity”, “XY”, “A Vagina but no uterus no ovaries” and “estrogens”. We are led to believe that this is a man, who “Believes she is a woman but is a man”. Obviously she is not a man, so what went wrong? Arbitrary checklists are what went wrong.
The problem is that the medical profession may give people some sort of “Place” if they have an uncertain checklist, but they get very upset is someone does not accept the checklist they are “given”.

I mean, I do not buy the idea that if I, with 5 alpha, identify as male my identity is “valid” and if I identify as female it is “non valid”, because the rest of my checklist does not add up to some clinical expectation. It is Rubik’s cube medicine basically. “If the colours don’t match on all faces, it is wrong”.  The worst part of it is the “Genderizing” I think. I will explain this. “Genderizing” is the practice of trying to pretend that the markers, when not tidy, are the person’s fault. Basically if most of the markers equal one sex, and “Gender identity” the opposite, then there are problems. So this has to be “Genderized” as in “Gender identity”. A woman with CAIS for example is a woman, who would feminize further if exposed to high doses of androgens. Hardly a choice or lifestyle, and hardly a Money-ish socially constructed delusion built around female socializing. It is a simple fact, CAIS means testosterone does not work, you don’t get a guy. All the XY chromosomes on this planet and all the missing ovaries and underdeveloped testis, are not going to produce Mr. Universe. It does not happen, so I would hardly think that clinical model about  “A socially constructed Gender identity” is going to say anything much, is it?

It is much easier to say “She” and leave it at that rather than start nit-picking over chromosomes and hormones. But no, Genderizing says “She” but a “he” really, so she he is an illness if identifying as female and a man having a problem if identifying as male”. Suddenly we go away from the person and on to this checklist.

My problem is that I will be accused of pandering to the two sex system by saying what I have said, but no, I am not the one constantly putting people who don’t have straight “M” or straight “F” checklists on the spot and reclassifying them as “other than” or “something-other-sexual”.  What people do not understand is the way genderiszing works. My own experience of the ambulance where my health was seriously compromised thanks to kidney infections as a child, I heard “Will they want to be a boy or a girl, what toys do we give them now?  I thought the surgeons made it a boy”. Genderizing ignores the person and thinks of otherness.

Many of the terms and concepts we encounter in the medical profession do not stand up to scrutiny. I am a “Male pseudo-hermaphrodite” according to the text books having 5 alpha, I am “Expected” to “identify as male”. Well I ask “Why” and it’s “Others with 5 alpha identify as male” (Some do, not all) I don’t buy that, I say “I don’t identify as male, I am an individual, no two people with any condition are identical.” then the truth comes out. “But it would make you more male in the checklist, obey the checklist or be called transgender”. We are talking classifications of the two sex system.

I am not “Transgendered” I am just someone who is predominantly female, What’s the problem? Well idealization is the problem, hyper conformity is the problem. Well there is something very insidious about that.

I argue as a geneticist that chromosomes are unreliable sex markers, while the majority of the time we find XX = female and XY = male, To claim that someone who has XX chromosomes but is male, is someone “undermining others” or to claim someone who has XY chromosomes who is female is also “undermining others” is irrational.  I say this because chromosomes seem to be the real sticking point for some reason,

What is it when there is evidence to contradict the notion that chromosomes are the major determinants of sex and someone insists despite the evidence that they are? Well it isn’t science. A lot of medical text books would say it was a delusion. Which is interesting, because when someone is born female (CAIS in this example) and cannot undergo any form of virilisation through hormonal activity, even induced hormonal activity, Then how does their “having a female gender identity” make them a man masquerading as a woman or a man thinking he is a woman?

Well the evidence does not suggest this. The evidence suggests that an individual with CAIS cannot utilize androgens, and as such is not male. I know this would go round in circles and end up as a debate about semantics, but the point I am actually making is that arbitrary definitions (Checklists) and  Identifiers by proxy “They do, so you must. If you do not, you are the problem” are not an entirely constructive approach.





The Gender Genital Gene Genie
by Sophie Siedlberg
As someone who is intersex, the worst career move I ever made, in terms of my self esteem, was to become a "Bio-informatics" developer. The relationship between this strangely named profession and my condition would at first appear tenuous, until, that is, you realise who it is I sell or distribute "Bio-informatics" to.

Bio-informatics is a branch of software development that specialises in things like sequencing DNA, macromolecular modelling, protein/peptide analysis, and so on. So having established this you can guess who some of the users would be. Those strange and mildly confused individuals we all know as geneticists.

Geneticists tend to fit a stereotype, they make proclamations about a "Gene for this" and a "Gene for that" and often appear in the media discussing "The Human Genome Project" where they initially thought they could categorise every human being on the planet according to a set of simplistic criteria. Problem is there is a paradox here, you need a very very large genome of some 100,000 genes all expressing singularly for a specific purpose, to set up such a simplistic model of the given gene pool. In plain language, you need to have each and every gene doing one single thing. For example when you need to have a gene for "Gayness" you say "Ah we have a single gene that makes someone gay". This sparkling example of single gene paradigm was espoused a few years ago by one Professor Dean Hamer, who, by a slight of Mendel's Astrology and a blob somewhere in lane in his electrophoresis box (migrated fragment of chromosome X) that seemed to appear every time the owners of said gene on chromosome X said they were gay. Well in the great scheme of things, this gene was given the name of "Xq 28". Now anyone who knows their genetics will tell you that this gene has yet to be named. Because "Xq"only defines the location of this gene. Not any official name referring to its purpose, function, resulting proteins from the coding exons etc etc.

This is where single genes cease to become "paradigm" (That is an "established model" to us lesser mortals) . What does this gene actually do, what peptides, proteins, enzymes etc does it code for? And what function do these coded proteins etc actually do to make someone gay? The reality is of course far more complex, Whatever the gene codes for will interact with something else, sometimes whatever another gene's exons code for. This is a type of polygenic expression, as opposed to the single gene concept of "monogenic" expression. The smaller the number of genes found in a genome would indicate the higher probability of genes interacting with each other rather than them simply expressing directly as a single gene. So when the human genome project announced (with some disappointment) that there was only 33,000 genes. You can imagine the bewilderment. "It is more complex than we thought!"

And this is where I get myself all in a hysterical fit of laughter. You see geneticists love to say the following: "XX equals a girl, whatever you say, even if "she" is born with a penis, has a six pack, looks like Arnold Schwartzenegger, and says that "she" is a regular guy.

Those XX chromosomes say that really, deep down she is a woman." Or "XY equals a boy, whatever you say even if "he" is born with a vagina, looks like a supermodel, has all the attributes of a woman she is secretly a man".

Of course they counter this with "Oh but that is gender identity" (Yeah right). So if a man who looks like a man, acts like a man, identifies himself as a man ands does guy things, This is a "psychiatric disorder because he has XX chromosomes."

Oh yes and if a woman looks female, has all the attributes of a supermodel,  etc. She is of course a "deluded male" if she has XY chromosomes. I mean you have to admit that this is the ultimate expression of spindoctoring, claiming that a real life human being is deluded because they have a body that does not fit the chromosomes, and this spindoctoring is even funnier when you look at "Gender identity" which is little more than the misuse of linguistic conventionsto define (Stigmatise) people. 

The sordid term they really use (To define people as chromosomes)  is "true gender" or "genetic sex" Now this is all built around two observations, First that most people born with XX are "female" and most people born with XY are "male" . But as anyone with a brain will tell you this is not always so. Secondly we are given a single gene justification for all this, in the form of "SRY". A gene on the Y chromosome. Now yes it does produce a protein that differentiates gonadal tissue into testicular tissue. (Called TDF). But with a mere 33,000 genes, and the demonstrable complexity of "sex determination", the monogenic SRY concept does not add up.

This is where many of the more unimaginative geneticists come to a dead end. They are so stuck with "XX/XY and Girls don't SRY!" that when the obvious, "Polygenic expression" slaps them in their faces, they go "DOH!" and then run to the protein scientists, who themselves tend to say "Well it is far more complex than that"

The reality is more complex, with AIS alone, there are numerous categories, and they can be as a result of many different AR (androgen receptor) mutations. These can be deletions, frame shifts, substitutions, missense mutations and so on. It can happen in one gene, and cause a very profound effect. But. you can have something like 40 or so types of mutation resulting in the same phenotype (Body type). But at the same time you could have one type of mutation resulting in many different phenotypes. This is because while you can pinpoint a single gene, the expression of that gene causes a cascade of consequences rather than just 1 particular mutation equals 1 particular phenotype. Because other genes interact or by expression vary the outcome in many different ways. The more alleles there are of a given gene the more complex it gets within the gene pool. In plain terms we are all individuals!

But given that I can start quoting examples of genes that are not in X or Y but the autosomes, that contain AR coding exons. The whole edifice of "XX/XY/and Girls dontSRY" starts to crumble. In sheer panic the geneticists, (Known as Genies) run around collecting blood samples from any hapless intersex person they can get their hands on and then run to the lab, And after a little spin of the centrifuge, you will find them with their Li-cor machines, Electrophoresis boxes, or micro-arrays. (micro array, hmm!). Desperately trying to simplify the picture into "Boy or Girl" And then you will find them pouring over their inheritance charts, with that Boolean arrogance (Mendels theory) trying to determine who is to blame for transmitting these "Bad genes"

They get to find the exons in the offending genes, and the mutation and then there is the challenge of the resulting peptides. Mention Chou Fasman equations and watch them puff up and say "This determines the shape of a peptide, by assigning specific values to the amino acid residues" And when you say something really awful like "Lets think of Prions, you know CJD, Mad Cow disease, or Mad scientist, how come you can get the same sequence but one becomes Beta sheets and the other becomes Alpha helices" And we are into proteomics, when pointing out that Chou Fasman equations have limits. OK Prions (The cause of mad scientist disease) are a different matter, but a good illustration. The proteins behave in many strange ways, take many strange shapes, and as such interact in many strange ways. And there are many reasons for that.

And it takes a protein scientist to look at this with an intuitive eye, good protocol, as well as some damn good lab facilities. They need to crystallise these proteins, throw X-rays at them, and use specialised software (Plug) to assess the results. The genies run into the wild blue yonder trying to figure out what to do next.

The bottom line, is this. There is no such thing as an absolutely "Genetic" male or "Genetic" female in much the same way as there is no absolute "Male" or "Female" gender identity. Just a spectrum of expressions. There is no such thing as a "true gender" just a bias. The whole edifice of trying to make an intersex child "fit" into some more absolute image of one or the other sex is rank stupidity. This is why I find my self-esteem undermined when some genie hits me with "Oh I need to find a way of using computer models to prove you dont exist." But then if I dont exist, because of my intersex birthright, how can I have a brain to comprehend what the genie has in terms of specification, A brain to code the software, a brain and hands to actually type the code for the software, and arms and legs in order to physically give this work to the genie. Suffice to say I am fussy about who I distribute software to these days.

I am left wondering when a Genie pops up in my "In-box" what they are about to come out with. And perhaps one day, when they get their heads round the concept of consciousness, self awareness and become a little introspective. Will they discover a gene for arrogant quacks. "AQ-PrP1" I still hope for that day as the status bar says "Receiving messages" and the inbox folder becomes highlighted. The only geneticist I would trust would be the geneticist who can discuss proteins with equal understanding. The example of WNT-4 is a prime example of just how divorced from biological as well as social reality, some geneticists can be.

There is a maxim that often holds true, it goes like this: The more complex a system, the less predictably it will behave. For example many people who buy a new computer, tend to think that there is a set way to deal with problems that may arise. So what sometimes happens is that they will buy a patch or a utility and install it, only to find that the computer does not do as it is supposed to after the installation. Often to the despair of the owner.

Quite often there is a simpler solution, if it works, why potentially make it worse. Another example would be to dismantle a washing machine in order to put the clothes into it. Just because someone says you cannot use the door. And then expect the washing machine to work once you have re-assembled it with the clothes in situ. Well recently a gene on chromosome one, the, aptly named "WNT-4". has become a potential symbol of this kind of systemic "fix it at your peril" paradox. Consider the following account from theScientific American(1):

Gene Duplicate Causes Sexual Ambiguity
In one out of every 3,000 births, the physician cannot tell the new parents what some have waited to hear But the results of a study described in the Journal of Human Genetics may offer new hope to parents whose infants are born sexually ambiguous. According to the report, researchers have determined that a second copy of a sex determination gene known as WNT-4 can change an embryo from male to female, which often results in ambiguous genitalia. The finding could help doctors more accurately and quickly identify an externally ambiguous baby's gender.(sic)

Geneticist Eric Vilain of the University of California at Los Angeles and his colleagues identified WNT-4 as one of several genes that determine sex. Whereas most genetic defects stem from the absence or mutation of a gene, genital defects arise when WNT-4 appears twice on the chromosome. WNT-4, it seems, "influences the sex determination pathway at each step of the way," Vilain notes. "We discovered that when the amount of the gene fluctuates even slightly at any stage in the genetic blueprint, it changes the embryo from male to female."

The WNT-4 study results will enable researchers to use genetic testing to help identify the causes of genital ambiguity. Moreover, scientists might one day even be able to treat a defective embryo in utero. "Our findings suggest that clinicians could identify the WNT-4 duplication prenatally," Vilain remarks. "If this proves true, in the future we may be able to correct the defect in the womb and restore the embryo to its original male status. This may repair the genital malformations before the child is born."

Notice how the emphasis is made about parents"may offer new hope to parents whose infants are born sexually ambiguous."As if stating that the parents are the ones who are afflicted, the child is the passive bystander, or property that causes embarrassment. What I am saying is really simple, such theorising about future medical approaches is both deeply questionable from an ethical standpoint as well as indicative of that persistent near genocidal hatred of intersex people.

Biologically there are a number of questions I have. It has become obvious from the findings of Professor Vilain that we are looking at polygenic expression here. The question is why does it seem so important to say that even in recognising polygenic components to sex determination, that run through the autosomes. "If the fetus has a "Y" chromosome in the 23rd pair it must be made into a boy, or it is established as being male." This is a contradiction. There is a pathway of autosomal entities involved, the complexity of which is not understood, and to satisfy the need to say "Y=BOY" or "X=GIRL" the solution is to risk altering numerous coding exons to "Fit" the fact that chromosome Y or X is present. No regard to the potential health risks that may be involved. The possibility of compromising the individuals health is far greater by taking the "Autosomes will obey the sex determinants" approach, rather than just accepting the fact that "Y does not always =Boy" and "X does not always =Girl".

The main reason for objections to a notion of "designer babies" has more to do with the not so clear model of polygenic expression. You can re-engineer a gene in some area but what that will mean in terms of other genes interacting with it will for the most part remain unclear. This study has demonstrated this quite starkly. Current attempts at using somatic gene therapy have shown this to be the case to some extent, with numerous examples of the end result not being what was expected. There is little or no concept of risk management in this suggestion that a pre natal treatment for intersexed conditions can be implemented. And like earlier methods of "treating" intersex conditions, there is a danger that such intervention will do more harm than good.

Dr Money for example claimed that "gender identity" was psychological, and a product of upbringing, this was proven to be wrong. The reason is most likely because the people in his care were not even consulted. The risk of course is that of having been forced to live as someone else. In the case of surgical intervention, to also face the risks of later complications. The problem with the cause and effect model of treating intersex people does not account for the fact that there are so many genes containing coding exons that can alter the "sex" of the fetus. This in itself should be a reason to stop and think before trying to dictate who is what and who will be what.

So in brief the very suggestion shows an obvious lack of understanding about the dynamics of polygenic expression. There is discussion here not about a "single gene" disorder, but "Polygenic gene" correction. It is difficult simply trying to treat a single gene with a single outcome, let alone forcing a gene to interact in context with other genes. In this case, more frighteningly, to remove a second copy of the gene in question altogether. So this brings me back to my little pun about the name of this gene. WNT-4. The irony here is that the name of this gene reminds me of a certain computer operating system that behaves just like a polygenic contextualisation, as a complex system. See the not so useful patch or utility as the "chromosomal material" and see the host operating system as being the polygenic array. Q.E.D.

On an ethical level, if intersex people are regarded so poorly by society that society would sanction such uncertain uses of genetic manipulation, when somatic gene therapy on single gene conditions has yet to become viable, I really wonder about society itself and its attitude towards those it considers unable to fit the two sex system, when discussing a very theoretical assumption that you could patch up the genome at such a complex point.

The reality here is simple XX does not equal a girl and XY does not equal a boy. The genes involved in the sex determinants evidently are part of a broader picture. And to try to make the picture fit in such a limited way is no different from the surgical mutilation of intersex children, based on the flawed assumptions laid down by society and not genuine science.

And then I have to ask myself what this means: "The finding could help doctors more accurately and quickly identify an externally ambiguous baby's gender." If by "gender" they mean "how they themselves will identify" then they are on Planet funny farm. I mean they can't even get to grips with the most basic aspects of human behaviour with respect to genetic causality, yet alone self identity. And if they don't mean "self identity" when saying "gender" then they really need to qualify the remark, because it is very vague and meaningless in that context.

Footnotes:

1: Eric Vilain:
In 2005 Professor Eric Vilain distanced himself from the quotes in the press about his research, stating that he felt somewhat pressured by some people to include numerous statements to the effect that his research can lead to the sort of "Medical Practices" that were being proposed.
Interestingly enough he later came out with another paper (That was quite insightful with respect to the polygenic model) But again it seems that he was "asked" to procure an "application" which consisted of a "test" to determine the "brain sex" on an intersex child, so surgeons can mutilate accordingly. It was when he was confronted over that research that he finally distanced himself from those advocating these somewhat draconian medical "practices".

2: The Trend:
Unfortunately, despite Professor Vilain distancing himself from all this, it has become evident that others have take up the "Cause" with respect to enforcing what will clearly be unethical "medical practices" (Dr. White of the Texas University would be one example (2)).  The bottom line of this discussion and the above amended article is a simple one. People diagnosed with intersexed conditions are fed up with the secrecy, lies, shame and such levels of disrespect that sink so low, that  people with intersex conditions even considered "sub human" the point where they regularly face medical professionals suggesting "treatments" that are akin to the sort of  malpractice and vivisection that was synonymous with the Nazi T4 project. Let's not try to spindoctor these ideas into something else, pre-natal modification of a fetus, by use of somatic gene therapy (Suggested by Vilain) or hormonal intervention (Suggested by White), in order to make them "fit" with what society expects is procuring designer babies.

3: The ethical questions, (Technically speaking}.
When most people think of "Designer Babies" current medical techniques actually do not produce such. Most often we read of this idea being associated with "Pre implantation Screening" (Where an embryo will be selected from a batch and implanted during fertility treatment, if that embryo is known to be free of certain genetic conditions) This does not involve any human intervention to actually modify the resulting child, rather these techniques are used to "ensure" that the child that is born has the "Best chances". Rightly people raise questions about how this is eugenics by the back door. as this is a very precise new twist on selective breeding. 
However this process is not actual modification of the fundamental biology of the embryo, we are talking selective screening, not designer babies. However the use of genetic modification and hormonal modification are. What never ceases to amaze me is how those people I know to be backing this modifying approach are often of a religious school of thought and are openly opposed to pre implantation screening claiming that to be "Procuring Designer Babies". It seems very strange that modifying the genetic or hormonal make up of an unborn individual is considered ethical, this is remarkably inconsistent.

4: Conclusion:
The impression I get from this whole sordid affair is that society would be prepared to suspend any notion of ethics or even morality when it comes to the treatment of people diagnosed with intersex conditions. Even those who originally partook in this distanced themselves from it (Vilain) and yet there are still those (White) who "Strain on a gnat and swallow a camel" (To borrow a biblical text), who would appear to be very upset about pre-implantation techniques, during fertility treatment, using terminology like "Designer babies". and yet they appear to advocate that which would truly be creating babies to order in order to satisfy social norms, by pre natal modification. 

References:

1: Scientific American: News In Brief. Wednesday, May 02, 2001.v     http://www.sciam .com/news/0502 01/2.html
2: Ontogeny of adrenal steroid biosynthesis: why girls will be girls Perrin C. White
Department of Pediatrics, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, Texas, USA.
http://www.jci.org/cgi/content/full/116/4/872





Disorder Sex, Sex Disorder, Dissed?
by Sophia Siedlberg.

In a bid to get away from stigmatizing labels and not upset people, The Intersex Society of North America came up with an interesting definition. “Disorders of  Sex Differentiation” or “DSD” (Rhymes with BSE and DSV if you need to remember it). I think it is fair to say that my initial reaction was “Dissed” and this is not pathologizing we are led to believe. However, some interesting elements from the debate that led to this are worthy of discussion. Emi Koyama gave a talk supporting this idea and later published the transcript. Her reasoning did make sense to me..

I quote:

“Parents of intersex children tended to be even more hostile to the notion that their baby is neither male nor female: many of them would absolutely refuse the label "intersex," only accepting specific condition names such as congenital adrenal hyperplasia or androgen insensitivity syndrome. In fact, I fear that hearing the word "intersex" would make them more likely to pursue drastic measures to eliminate that factor, be it surgery or complete secrecy.”

This I can understand not as a parent of course,  but as an individual affected by such a condition. While I have ended up using the term “intersex” myself, I have often expressed my dissatisfaction with it, especially when the media and others turned it into “intersexual”. But this does leave the tiny issue of the words “Sex” and “Disorder” in the same phrase, with a rather technical sounding “Differentiation” thrown in.  As a medical identifier, or part of medical nomenclature, I would say that it is pretty dire. But the reasoning behind it seems not to be. If I were given the opportunity I would simply change one word, that is “Disorder” and substitute it with “Condition”. In one simple stroke you are rid of that awful “Disorder” baggage and further distanced from “sex disorder”. The word “sex” will inevitably remain, and technically is preferable to terms like “Gender”  (As gender implies a social rather than biological issue).

You see the problem with adding “Sex” and “Disorder” in any term or phrase is that we end up with things like “condoms”, “coils”, “lubricants”, “Viagra” and  “Falwell fundies beating up gays” as keywords or phrases. Type in words like “sex” and Disorder” into a search engine, and the best thing you can do is shut your eyes if you are of a moralistic or nervous disposition. Type in “Sex” and Condition” and it wont be half as lurid. there is a very practical reason for my saying this. As Emi points out, parents are the ones who seem to be left with issues over definitions.  Parents are often also the ones who start looking for information in places like libraries and the internet. Immediately the use of “Condition” rather than “Disorder” becomes very practical indeed. You see a modern term needs to be put in context with modern communication. Type “Sex” and Disorder” into an email and the recipient’s  ISP will call it spam. Not so with “Condition”.  This in itself would be a good reason to reconsider the term “Condition” as opposed to “Disorder”.

The other more obvious problem is the baggage associated with “Disorder”. The truth of the matter is different when we are talking short term health issues. A common cold is a “Disorder”. Called a “Cold”. I don’t hear “Coronoviral infection with secondary bacterial infection of the respiratory tract”. A tummy bug does not get called “Noroviral infection causing severe vomiting”. Short term disorders are called disorders, and never actually refer to the patient who has them. With long term health issues you tend to find the discoverer’s name used. “Swyers Syndrome”. We all say “Swyers”. It is considered impolite to say someone with “Swyers” has a “Disorder” simply because this condition is a life long condition and does affect how the medical profession sees them. Basically the term “Disorder” is simply not appropriate in long term conditions. For example you often hear “long term condition” and seldom “long term disorder”.

And to be realistic people are going to create variations of any acronym, term or name. DSD will become “Dissed” (Which is ironic and how I feel). They will invent alternative acronyms with the same letters. “Deranged  Strange Deviant” has already appeared from a troll on a website responding to the announcement from ISNA. Bluntly “DSD” will not work.

Look at my own condition. It is “5-alpha reductase-2 deficiency”. If that is not a mouth full of swallowed dictionary, I really have no idea what is. Two terms came from it “5 ard” and “5 Alpha”. The first one has masculine connotations in slang the second sounds like some Falwell fundie brainwashing course.  You see it gets very complex - this word business and it gets heavy going when trying to suggest words in the first place. I imagine that the acronym that gives us “Dissed” will become the pejorative “Disser”. You cannot get away from some smart Alec trying to turn a phrase bad. I tend to think that language invariably carries multiple meanings. Type “Disorder of sexual differentiation” into a search engine and it conveys a lot of strange meanings. So it has multiple meanings.

I can only conclude by saying it would be better to use “condition”, in the term. Or at least something that implies long term health issues but not pathology. I suspect using a name of someone would also be useful. “They have a condition belonging to the family of  <insert name> syndromes”.  It would of course then be a case of finding a person who has contributed to the medical well being of people with intersex conditions. Personally I would vote for “Diamond” as in Milton Diamond,  but opinion would evidently differ.

All I am saying is that while Emi Koyama rightly explains the rationale of “DSD”, and her argument resonates with me quite well. The actual term used is not satisfactory. People are objecting to it. And that is unfortunate because the basic idea is a reasonable idea. It is the mixing of “Sex” and “Disorder” that to many is problematic, if not difficult to understand. 

References:

From "Intersex" to "DSD": Toward a Queer Disability Politics of Gender
Emi Koyama, Intersex Initiative, presented at Translating Identity conference
held at University of Vermont Feb  2006.





Insidious Tones
by Sophia Siedlberg

In the “DSD” debate I came across some statements from some “Consortium of Disorders of sex differentiation” (or words to that effect) and a paper by none other than Professor I. A. Hughes.  I say “none other” because I seem to remember Hughes getting a lot of women with AIS very annoyed when calling them “men”.  And even describing them as “Those uncles in the family”.  He is a rather interesting character, more the dotty professor than a Mengele. However it is interesting that someone with his track record takes center stage with a somewhat “norm born” talking set of “representatives” saying “We do not do intersex” (fine no problem so far) “We do sex disorder” (What!).

Let’s deal with the first point I found came from this – a statement by ISNA saying that “Those who reject their sex assignment as children are not representative of intersex (latterly known as “Differentiation of  Sex Disorder” or whatever). Well I would agree that such circumstances do not in general represent the whole range of experiences suffered by many people with these conditions. What I find odd is the somewhat strong emphasis on this. That set of circumstances is one of a range of circumstances some can find themselves in.

This emphasis leaves a question in my mind. Would it be because the media took intersex to describe circumstances where the surgeons got it wrong ? I can see that argument to some extent given the way the media likes to “Spin a good yarn that sells”. But it does not alter the fact that these situations happen.

But certain people have a bit of a history with this debate and I think it worth looking into. I mean, to begin with, there was that time when they argued, quite openly, that those who had endured feminizing surgery as children had a legitimate case, but those who were surgically masculinized had “privilege” and should accept this “privilege”. Well, many seemed to accept their “assigned gender role” after being masculinized as children, the primary complaint in such cases was about the surgery itself. This was far from viable and in some cases paradoxically ruined any chance of later surgery to provide more viable forms of phaloplasty. So what was that gender bias and focus on “gender roles” all about?

The statement “They are transsexuals seeking legitimacy” sticks in my memory.  Yes but transsexual folk on the whole are not people who had surgery conducted on them as children. They have some sort of neurological condition that means their bodies do not match what the sex their brain expects. Aside from being a somewhat meaningless comparison, it is also a bit insulting to transsexual folk, who really do not deserve to be used as “bogeyman” comparisons “seeking legitimacy”. From this I would conclude that certain people don’t see another often mistreated minority as being “legitimate” Which is a bit like “Kick the cat” really. Is there some sort of pecking order here? Errm, this is called “prejudice” in case anyone failed to notice.

This aside, we are discussing people who were subjected to surgery as children and who rejected what was done to them. Not transsexual people. They have their own issues to deal with (Like being cynically used and abused by certain people in a debate like this for example). So what is the problem. I will not and cannot accept the “they are like transsexuals” argument because I think that to be a prejudiced comparison, against both transsexual folks and people who objected to unwanted infant surgery. That is not worthy of further debate.

The next argument against people who object to the “Gender role” that was given them via non consented to infant surgery is “They were raised as that sex, they should stay that sex because this is what they are”. So the fact that one Dr. John Money who asserted this idea in the first place was spectacularly proven utterly wrong is something people seem to have forgotten then? I consider this a little chilling. Because what Money represented (In case anyone forgets) is the intent behind these surgical interventions on non consenting children. I (unlike some) always insisted on using “infant genital mutilation” as opposed to “intersex genital mutilation” because of the Reimer case, and what Money really stood for.  David Reimer was simply a boy, and he suffered a botched circumcision. Along comes Money and uses him as a Guinea pig. “If we can get this boy, make him a girl, and he grows up accepting it, then we can go ahead on intersex patients without fear of recrimination or them disagreeing with the gender role.”

It didn’t work, suffice to say. In fact David went through the media explaining all that had been done to him (Which was unpleasant) and at the time when most people believed he had finally found piece of mind, he killed himself. While he didn’t have a “Disorder”, surely his story should have been a warning. I seem to remember back in the days when “Those assigned female have a case” and certain people were very happy to take his story on board, until it became politically awkward. Is anyone ever going to discuss the warning Money’s tinkering really represented?

Simply put, the argument “They were raised as that sex, they should stay that sex because this is what they are” does not wash, not one bit. So, as far as I am concerned, I have demolished two of the most popular “arguments” used against those unfortunate enough to be in the circumstances where they do not agree in entirety with what surgeons did to them as children. The first argument being prejudice against another minority, the second being trying to assert that which has proven to be wrong.

We are left with the question: Why are we hearing an objection to those who did not accept the surgery conducted on them as children in its entirety - that is they also reject the surgeon’s primary intention – to assign a sex.

This is where I find the Paper by Hughes so interesting. Well under the heading of “nomenclature and definitions” we read the following

“Psychosexual development is traditionally conceptualised as three components. Gender identity refers to a person’s self representation as male or female (with the caveat that some individuals may not identify exclusively with either). Gender role (sex-typical behaviours) describes the psychological characteristics that are sexually dimorphic within the general population, such as toy preferences and physical aggression. Sexual orientation refers to the direction(s) of erotic interest (heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual) and includes behaviour, fantasies, and attractions. Psychosexual development is influenced by multiple factors such as exposure to androgens, sex chromosome genes, and brain structure, as well as social circumstance and family dynamics. Gender dissatisfaction denotes unhappiness with assigned sex. Causes of gender dissatisfaction are poorly understood, even among individuals without DSD. Gender dissatisfaction occurs more frequently in individuals with DSD than in the general population, but is difficult to predict from karyotype, prenatal androgen exposure, degree of genital virilisation, or assigned gender.”

This as a fragmentary description, and while it does clearly contradict the statements of ISNA which once stated that gender dissatisfaction among the intersexed was no different from the general population, Hughes evidently thinks differently. Hughes is using the fragmentary view I described in the article about Dr. White. Though he does try (unusually for him) to clarify this model in a context of giving all fragmentary factors, and equal emphasis. But there is a later statement that changes this somewhat.

“Evidence supports the current recommendation to raise markedly virilised 46,XX infants with CAH as female. Approximately 60% of 5a-reductase (5aRD2) deficient patients assigned female in infancy and virilising at puberty (and all assigned male) live as males.”

I fit the category of 5aRD2, assigned as male, and rather than “live as male” I openly resent it. In fact I regarded the assignation of male as an act of pure malice. And “Social adjustment” resulted in my nearly going to prison for the violence that ensued in my rejection of the “male role”. Suffice to say that people who saw me as having “Gender issues” or “A man wanting to be a woman” and thus “A bogeyman seeking legitimacy” ended up in hospital, and Doctors saying “That isn’t ladylike” ended up being told “Well you reap what you sow”.

Despite Hughes’ attempts at making it clear that “Gender dissatisfaction” (Personally I would prefer other terms) is “unpredictable” there is still this tendency to assign a sex to a condition, and in my case to assign a sex “role” I despised with a passion. and yet this authoritative “statement” from someone whom I have met and actually does know something of my history.

It seems to me that we are talking still in terms of “male and female and nothing else” we are still talking “if born ambiguous we have a sociomedical emergency” and however much “Consensus” has been reached, I feel like I have been sold down the river.  It is very hard for me to keep my personal feelings out of this article, such as my attitude to the enforced male “role” you may as well read what I really think, it goes like this.

“Sebrenica! innocent women, guilty men, titanic glug glug, you wanted me dead! act of malice!”

That would be one example of the sort of comment I came out with.  Not even Thomas Harris could match the fury of it in his books. And that is appropriate social adjustment, is it? Trying to turn someone into Buffalo Bill out of silence of the lambs? Oh yes, we never hear this side of it do we?

It cuts both ways as well. There are people whose condition is defined as “they are always female” and “will be female” and invariably there is a huge path of extreme anger over what was done. (Is this not the danger Money really represented?). I have seen one or two good friends of mine having had to recover from a nightmarish existence after being forcibly feminized as children. I think you may find that “gender dissatisfaction” in cases where infant surgery is involved is a bit more painful than people realize, and is incredibly destructive. In fact I would say this rare but horrible situation should never be called “Gender dissatisfaction” more “Anger at society committing the ultimate in child sex abuse, assigning a child the wrong sex surgically”. Dr. Hughes is correct about unpredictability, and is very wise to say in the first quoted paragraph that there are no certainties. However there is one certainty, when it goes wrong, it really goes wrong. To simply dismiss people who have faced this horror is basically to collude with the worst facets of society, comparing people in these circumstances to transsexual folk in order to demean them is the height of cruelty to these people and is also extremely prejudiced against transsexual people. Both groups of people are human beings and deserve more respect than this.

I would like also people to consider in my concluding this article the use of what I describe as the “consensus guilt induction”. It works like this. “What upsets you is irrelevant. These doctors know best. They are saving lives and we are working tirelessly with them to provide you with a better future”. (In this case the better future for a minority of people is to be dehumanized, depersonalized, made into some gender robot, and mentally murdered. Sort of like an “Ultimate Upgrade” in a recent TV series I saw. "This body is cold, very cold, I cannot feel..." and in my case that was almost the result.)

And on that I think people need to read the works of Mary Shelley. It is very, very cold! Very, very cold.

References:

Consensus statement on management of intersex disorders
I A Hughes, C Houk, S F Ahmed, P A Lee, LWPES/ESPE Consensus Group


BACK



Lebensborn will be lebensborn
by Sophia Siedlberg

It is very depressing when every day you wake up to the usual round of news reports and commentaries about some middle eastern norm born religious leader who wants you killed for being born because it is to “Keep society clean”. Or to find some quasi radfem normborn media harpy going on about how you are “Genetically impure”. You won’t believe the depressing tirade that some of these people come out with. And guess what, I must not answer back, oh no, I am evil and should be grateful for being hated because it is the will of G-d or the natural order of things. and it is my duty to accept punishment for being born “abnormal”. Actually no, I wont, “deal with it.” Start on me and I will start back! I think 

See I am angry! It is 11:30 am and I am already spitting venom at these “tormentors” (I must be polite with them now).

1.2.3.4....

So it is with this persistent backdrop of getting the message that I am hated and I must be grateful for this “Privilege” I encounter something very surreal. Among all the screaming, jabbering, arrogant, nasty and words of hate. I find this rather fascinatingly ugly scientific paper which sums it all up when it comes to the grotesque imaginings of some people.

The target, well in this case they were picking on CAH, with the chilling title of “Ontogeny of adrenal steroid biosynthesis: why girls will be girls”, by Perrin White, at the Department of Pediatrics, University of Texas.

It starts with some very technical description of CAH, (Which I can pick holes in very easily and will in a moment) and then reads thus:

“Early in gestation, the external genitalia are anatomically identical in both sexes. Female external genitalia represent the default state with male differentiation occurring if high levels of testosterone (as secreted by fetal testes) induce steroid 5-reductase type 2 (SRD5A2) and are then converted to dihydrotestosterone in genital skin. The critical period for such differentiation is 8–12 weeks post conception (wpc). Later exposure to testosterone increases growth of the penis or clitoris, but does not induce fusion of labia majora and minora into scrotum and penile urethra, respectively. Differentiation of the genitalia can also be influenced by adrenal steroid biosynthesis.”

What is wrong with this description of steroidally influenced tissue differentiation, well that little bit that says “steroid 5-reductase type 2 (SRD5A2)”. In one sense it is “Oh no here we go again, It is my turn as usual”. But then if someone cannot tell the difference between a region of DNA and the enzyme it codes for, then I can see my usual commentary is not going to work. and what has 5 alpha reductase got to do with this, I know 5 alpha deficient people like me are next I suppose.

I can see it now, 1150 am and not only are there hordes of rabid extremists from the east and media harpies out to get me, it will now include a bunch of rednecks with burning crosses. Well this is the university of Texas, “Why gals will be gals and guys will be guys yeeeeehaaaa, itsa hangin and chicken run. with a lynchin freeueak”.  The words “I am sharpening the Ya’ir sichar to retaliate” spring to my mind. Sorry that is all the gabber, from the media, it is distracting.

This is the problem with this paper, I usually read scientific papers as a sort of refuge, But this one has that gabber jumping out at you, rather like some demented emoticon in some flame war email. The “Girls vill be gilz and zey vill obey ze natural ordah” title and then then “steroid 5-reductase type 2 (SRD5A2)”.

There are a few in the following passage. (See if you can spot them before reading beyond this quotation):

“Placental aromatase prevents female fetuses (as well as their mothers) from virilization by the large amounts of DHEAS secreted by the fetal adrenal cortex. Conditions under which placental aromatase activity is decreased (including congenital deficiencies of aromatase or its accessory enzyme, P450 oxidoreductase; ref. 6), are associated with fetal and maternal virilization. Placental aromatase can also protect female fetuses from virilization when the mothers themselves have high circulating testosterone levels resulting from poorly controlled congenital adrenal hyperplasia due to CYP21 deficiency (7). This observation implies that high placental aromatase expression too early in pregnancy might interfere with normal male differentiation, but then how is the female fetus protected from virilization before placental aromatase expression has reached high levels?”

OK well “Placental aromatase” is an enzyme that turns testosterone to eostrogen, thus preventing “Virilisation” Perfectly accurate, perfectly reasonable. I keep reading “DHEAS” that’s Dehydroepiadrosterone, a 3-oxy-cyclopentano perhydrophenanthrene (Steroid) which carries oxygen reasonably well and erm “Virilizes”. so far so good. Then towards the end it happens.

“This observation implies that high placental aromatase expression too early in pregnancy might interfere with normal male differentiation, but then how is the female fetus protected from virilization before placental aromatase expression has reached high levels?”

We are talking about the sex of a fetus. and “What can go wrong” and how the fetus and mother (Society) must be protected from virilisation of “Female fetuses” and “Implying” protection of mother and fetus (Society) from the feminization of “Male fetuses”.  You see now why the title is so chilling. “Gabber-Pounce!”

Why does this “Sex of the fetus” bother me so much? well CAH  is a condition that can have some very nasty symptoms. “Virilization” is one of them or is not depending on your viewpoint. Yes a lot of  people with CAH who would be defined as female by the doctors identify as female, so virilization is a symptom, but there are some with CAH who have no truck with being defined as female, what about them? Would they regard it as a symptom? And what about all the other stuff like the salt wasting? What about that? You see this is where “Gabber” jumps. This article is not about medical concerns but making people into meat and making that meat conform. You think not? but this article has one nice little “gabber” that jumps from the endless jargon.

“Prenatal treatment of congenital adrenal hyperplasia.”

Erm well that basically means fiddling with the biochemistry of the developing fetus to be sure that the fetus conforms to the “Standard” of “Female”.  I assume it is more “Humane” that the surgery that people with CAH have endured before now, well no actually, because do we have any information of any side effects of this “Prenatal treatment”. You see the Jargon continues but never says it in plain English. We are talking administering drugs to make sure baby fits when baby arrives. Which is fascinating when you consider that this is Texas university,  I mean Texas, the sort of place where Falwell fundies go bumping off abortionists. and screaming about how evil interfering with “G-d’s design” is.  Or does the fiddling  Steroid/Enzyme pathways in an unborn child somehow get conveniently forgotten when it comes to manufacturing Stepford wives?

Have I missed something here?

I am not opposed to any treatment that actually may make life easier, but the “Jumping gabbers”  seem to bother me, Prenatal treatments are let’s face it a bit iffy. Ethically well there is that “Designer babies” debate. (I mean if the writer of the article cannot differentiate between and enzyme and the gene that codes for it we are talking a mindset serious fiddling here). Then there is the way the article starts with:

“Male and female external genitalia appear identical early in gestation. Testosterone exposure at 8–12 weeks’ gestation causes male differentiation..”

So before the mileu of steroidal tranformations take place due to the presence or lack of these enzymes, we have what, a boy fetus or a girl fetus? oh please don’t tell me, XX and XY? I see and I assume that the autosomal (Genes not in the 23rd pair) genes producing these enzymes are considered “disobedient” if they don’t play ball with the 23 pairing. What next? leeches to drive out Satan? You see I am having big issues with how this reads, or the thinking behind it. I can think of one or two instances where “Pre natal” approaches to intersex conditions have been touted. I myself raised my concerns when One Professor Eric Vilain was talking Somatic gene therapy on a fetus with a “Disobedient gene”. OK that was about genetic fiddling rather than tweaking steroid biosynthesis. I need to be convinced that all this pre natal fiddling is going to have any real benefit. In fact I am bit skeptical from a scientific side of the debate. (Is jumping in during the complex process of tissue differentiation a really good idea?) . And ethically I find the whole thing stinks quite frankly. I mean if we are talking a US state that has “issues” with “gender ambiguity” which is prepared to resort to measures they themselves also have “issue with” (Playing G-d via pre natal fiddling). I sort of get the impression that the true message of this article is “People will conform or else and we will be prepared to go against our own stated ethics to be sure that people obey and nature obeys”.

Nether G-d nor science (Even when they are not squabbling, like now) do not enter the equation, what enters the equation is illustrated by an ant nest, and a caterpillar (And the only example never mentioned by creationists, interestingly enough when using these “Ant” examples to debunk evolution) . Caterpillar secretes a hormone that it smears on scouting ants, the scouting ants go back to the nest and the other ants kill them. Why well because the other scouting ants don’t “Seem right” after smelling wrong.

Could this hatred of the non conforming which is displayed in certain humans be the reason why we don’t find that mentioned on the creationist websites?

And could the same actually be the motivation behind advocating “treatments” that involve pre natal fiddling? is the perfect boy fetus and perfect girl fetus with all those sex markers lined up properly considered human enough to be “protected” from treatments that the religious “do not approve of” but if they are not the “perfect boy or girl fetus” then anything goes eh?

Gabber! Disguised as ethics and science, but Gabber all the same. Along with the rest of it. Most irritating is how the article ends with:

"Conflict of interest: The author has declared that no conflict of interest exists." Yes whatever, I am an idiot and I cannot read. I have just pointed out the conflict of interest, So I must be illiterate.




Fear…And Loathing
by Sophia Siedlberg


Andrea James, some activist for transsexual folk who had a huge row with a doctor called J Michael Bailey a few years back. She upset a lot of people by involving J. Michael Bailey’s children in the argument at some point.

My own assessment of this was that what Andrea James did was pretty bad, and not justified. But having read a recent Blog by Alice Dreger, which seems to be a one sided telling of this story. Like Alice Dreger I was upset by Andrea James’ methods. But what’s with the silence about Bailey dirty tricks?

Is it my imagination or is it the old gender politics club banding together or something? Those of us on the outside of this debate tend to look at Bailey with a little bit unease as well. I mean what Bothers me is when Dreger says “she decided to go after Bailey’s children to exact revenge”. Ok then errm revenge for what exactly? “Offending transgender women” seems to be the only real indicator of what caused all this revenge.

So what did cause it?

An impartial observer would be asking why a doctor can be publishing confidential patient information in what turned out to be a somewhat sensationalist book about transsexual folks. I think if I had pulled a stunt like that I would be found ducking and diving every time a transsexual woman walked round the corner. I also understand that Bailey was mocking a child with some “Gender identity” issue. (This being the catalyst for Andrea James doing what she did if I remember the discussions flying around at the time correctly).

Do Andrea James’ somewhat unpleasant tactics somehow give Bailey the moral high ground? Hardly. Myself I see it as six of one half dozen of the other. Just because one of the protagonists is a PhD it does not make them any better than the other. It is curious to sit back and watch, and even more surreal to have this ringside seat and  still watch while the two evidently still battle on, I think it is Round 127 now.

From what I can see we have in the blue corner Andrea James, “transsexual urban terrorist with a battery of scary tactics”, and in the red corner we have J Michael Bailey, “King of the Der Eigene school of hatemongering and slander”. Which is pretty much how everyone else; certainly the internet bloggers of the time saw it.

My problem with Dreger’s blog is the timing and sort of egging on a three year old feud?
You see my problem is I cannot help but wonder if all this display of terror and dread, with the implication that Andrea James is procuring an atom bomb with bits from a hardware store and some uranium nicked off the Russians or something, and the Northwestern university campus is being provided with a nice big concerete bunker from survivalist militia incorporated. Has another purpose.

OK why? Well how about adding to the X-Files storyline eh. You see ISNA supported a lot of ideas and guidelines involving terms like “Disorder”, which actually a lot of groups and organizations do not like. And naturally they have voiced their objections.
And predictably perhaps we have Andrea James very conveniently wheeled out appearing to fill those “Bogeyman shoes”. With (I imagine) The old tactic of scaring people into either siding with the Academics (And by default ISNA) or being branded as really some subversive element that dares to sympathise with Andrea James.

Well sorry to disappoint just take a look in my recent articles and I have described this tactic already. It is this paranoia; it must be very catching. I have this horrible image of Gender Academia (and by default ISNA), doing a George Bush? Scare everyone half to death, Cite some atrocious behavior, and some nasty incident (Which this was), and then keep everyone in line with fear.

No I do not buy it. Yes Andrea James is evidently capable of getting nasty,  and no J. Michael Bailey is not the innocent party in this, far from it actually. But the real victims of this are the children who have been used, very cynically as it happens in all this. The Kids that Bailey had a hearty laugh at in his lectures. Mocking them like they were “Little freaks”, and his own children being got at by Andrea James. Mocking them as if, they had been sexually abused by their father. That libel involved Bailey’s children, not good, not good at all.

How do those children feel now? All of those children?

And errm what about the idea that any radical activist now probably feels a bit more comfortable with dragging their target’s children into it, Or the idea that some doctor with a strange sense of ethics can make jokes about children with problems in a lecture theater? (This including video footage I seem to remember).

You see at the back of my mind, and many others, that this sudden display of fear and dread, involving a transsexual woman (predictably) and some doctor who is unethical being painted as a saint (predictably), seems just a little out of the blue. OK I accept that Alice Dreger is doing an internet blog and this usually involves a lot of retrospective discussion. But last week I commented on Dreger, feeling just a little uneasy about some of the things she says, and somewhere mentioning the “transsexual fear tactic”. And low and behold, I find this?

What am I supposed to be thinking?

So I will say what I think now. I didn’t like one bit the vicious and unpleasant events of 2003. I would agree with the comment that Andrea James did indeed lose a lot of natural allies. But were any leaders of ISNA and any prominent figures in the transsexual community natural allies. Hardly, I remember seeing them tear each other apart at this time. I seem to remember ISNA coming out with all this “Transsexuals claim to be intersex to gain legitimacy” and various Transsexual groups accusing ISNA of all manner of things. They were hardly “natural allies”.

But in the wider community Andrea James did lose allies, and sympathy for her cause. But hang on it does not make Bailey mister squeaky clean. And what are ISNA doing getting involved in this debate now, when at the time; like the rest of us, they were mere onlookers.

I am not in the slightest bit bothered if Andrea James gets angry because I have written this; I am not exactly worried or even slightly perturbed if Bailey get upset either. I just see the whole ugly affair as everyone else saw it, two people really getting nasty with each other. Yes I think Bailey started it. Anyone who writes a book that reads like a tabloid newspaper and expects it to gain academic credibility is living in cloud cuckoo land. And I would say they were even more divorced from reality if the book in question involved slandering an already angry minority. Like how to win friends and influence people, yeah right!

And Yes I think Andrea James overstepped the mark. There are many ways people can get their voices hears without resorting to bringing someone’s children into it. Or sinking to Bailey’s level. 

And if disagreement over an unrelated issue is going to sink into the self same sewer that those two did, Just in case this is where this is leading, just in case I am being a little paranoid, please count us all out of the debate.

I think there are more pressing issues to be dealing with, and that is the little question of describing people as “Disordered” for example? 

Update:

I had been wondering this morning why the whole “Disorders of sexual differentiation” affair was at Bailey’s university. I am wondering, with an equal sense of unease about the prospect of Bailey becoming involved in the DSD road-show.




Oooops! Call Mulder and Scully!
by Sophia Siedlberg

Often people who are in authority, and who annoy people breed accusational theories. Sometimes, just occasionally the theory turns out to be true. When this happens it becomes a scandal. When the theory is unsubstantiated people tend to continue asking questions, and often everyone is left not knowing, but they say "No smoke without fire".

This is one of those situations, and one that the people being accused really need to clarify. Remember J. Michael Bailey, I mentioned him in the article about Alice Dreger’s dispute with the transsexual activist, Andrea James. Well I seem to remember some people accusing Bailey being involved with the eugenics movement. Was this just a mud-slinging match? I do not know, but what I do find curious is the sort of things Bailey seems to be getting involved with.

In the university that gives us Kenneth Zucker, Alice Dreger, J.Larry Jameison and of course J. Michael Bailey himself (Names I seem to encounter a little too often), we find Bailey doing a very interesting study in the genetics of homosexuality. That is homosexuality and involving twins.

The paper in question is called Genetic and Environmental Influences on Sexual Orientation and its correlates in an Australian Twin Sample.

Bailey, Dunne, Martin.

What struck me about this paper upon a superficial reading what the heavy emphasis on Mendellian genetics. And “Gender identity”. With a very heavy does of implied results based on statistical studies after a survey but no laboratory work. You see when I look at a paper like this I immediately make a beeline for what I will know. That will be the lab results and conclusions from them. No it is all “Kinsey scales” and “Statistical correlates”, with the somewhat imprecise use of Mendel’s model of inheritance, and that is that basically. Nothing wrong with that really, except for the fact that in a peer review, someone may ask for more information.

What bothers me is the fact that when I stand back and look at the structure of this study, it looks a bit familiar to me. In a name Josef Mengele. And that is not a name being dropped to play on fears about Nazism. At this point it is due to the fact that I have spent a lot of time studying people like Mengele for unrelated reasons. But if someone has a good eye for seeing the structure of research, then yes the comparison will inevitably occur.

So what is this “Structure”, well Gregor Mendel’s model of inheritance is the backbone of modern genetics, but it has been built upon. When Watson, Crick, Franklyn and Wilkins between them had figured out the structure of DNA, 90 years and numerous eugenics programs had taken place since Gregor Mendel studied Peas in the 1860’s.

What the discovery of the structure of DNA did was start a debate about how complex inheritance really is. In 1983 Barbara Mc Clintock produced an even more complex picture by talking of how genes change their position in chromosomes. Add to this the Plieotropic and Polygenic model of the genome and how genes behave, provided by the Human Genome Project and you could argue that genetics went through a paradigm shift in the late 20th century that was not unlike the shift from Newtonian physics to things like Quantum Mechanics and Relativity at the beginning of the 20th century.

Bailey’s paper is basically “Newtonian” but the style is clearly of Josef Mengele. I find that a bit peculiar, I have to admit having seen a number of papers in a similar "sex pathology" vein, talking of genetics but in the old Mendelian sense.

The big problem with “Behavioural Genetics” is that behaviour is really complex and it is inevitable that any genetic factors will be polygenic. Why Mendelian genetics then?

We are talking Haymer’s “Gay Gene” (Actually a region known as Xq 28 on the X Chromosome) Yes I can swallow that, except for the fact that Haymer stated that this was part of a larger polygenic model. We don’t really see that in Bailey’s paper.

What I find unsettling is the basic premise of much of Bailey’s work that is very arbitrary in nature, and very heavily couched in pathological language. We are talking a man who has scant regard for patient confidentiality, and conducts himself in a way not that dissimilar to the less than ethical people I can mention.

Let’s add a few more names to this equation. J Larry Jameison and Kenneth Zucker. Again from Northwestern University. These two have form. Zucker is a bit of a “Fix it quick” advocate, always enthused by things like surgery on intersex children or using the sort of research Bailey is doing to develop a pre natal screening and abortion protocol.

Jamieson is the man responsible for the AAP Guidelines for “Newborns with ambiguous genitalia” Which were garbled and again into quick fixes involving lots of surgery and vague approaches to underlying diagnosis. For me the problem is that the Northwestern reads like a rogues gallery of doctors with attitudes people are not entirely keen on. In some cases worried about.

Guess where the Consortium on Disorders of Sexual Differentiation is based. (Wait for melodramatic music) Northwestern University. Curious that.

All the people I have mentioned so far, with the exception of Dreger, have some very intriguing, let’s say T4 flavoured approaches to medicine. I can see why some people are shouting “Nazis” from the rooftops. Add some of the other things that I have been watching, Like Dr. White with his in-utero therapies, and Vilain with his half whistle blowing over some of the suggested “applications” of his work. A picture emerges of an American health system indeed drifting into eugenics or at least a medicalized form of "Social cleansing" at the very least.

What I find most disturbing is the fact that smack in the middle of this, trying to sell the idea of this consortium to the public, is Alice Dreger.

So I am going to ask a few direct questions to Alice Dreger, in this article, because I really want a quiet life, and do not want to be living in fear myself of the sort of “ethics” that some of my forebears faced the wrath of, and we all know where.

These are the questions I would like Dreger to answer.

1: Is there or has there been any suggestion of pre natal screening, with the objective or aim of either offering abortion of a foetus deemed to have a “Disorder of Sexual Differentiation” or pre natal therapies with the aim of “normalizing” the foetus. If so do you or do you not support it?

2: Is there or has there been any suggestion that the “Assignation” of sex or gender role attributed to a specific condition is going to be arbitrarily enforced rather than suggested, and does this involve the sort of theory peddled by people like Bailey and Zucker? And do you or do you not support it?

3: Is there or has there been any suggestion of “Removing from the germline” specific alleles that are associated with “Disorders of sexual differentiation”. Do you or do you not support it?

4: If there is a suggestion of removing specific alleles from the germline, what form does this take? And do you or do you not support it?

5: If you do or ISNA does support any of the above, even in the context of “Fellow Travellers” (This is not openly supporting it but knowingly turning a blind eye). Would you like to explain why?

There are a lot of people out here suggesting that this is so. I myself feel that there certainly is a considerable body of circumstantial evidence. Add this to the broader picture of people like Dr White in Texas clearly stating that he wants to be doing pre natal therapy. I think the above questions need to be answered.

The exclusion of a lot of people who would without any question be affected by the above, from the debate is only going to foster more suspicion and more rumour. I think the actual concerns of a lot of people should be addressed.