[ALEXplores LA] When "Science" Has an Agenda

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Al

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Jul 1, 2010, 1:36:37 PM7/1/10

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So Angry.

A Florida doctor is dosing pregnant women with an experimental (and non-FDA approved) hormone to prevent their daughters from becoming lesbians and--BONUS!--make sure they grow up into wives and mothers. You know, proper ladies who want to cook and clean and wait for their man to bring home the bacon. Because being a wife and a mother is the ultimate goal of every woman in the world. If you chose NOT to be a wife or mother, there is obviously something wrong with you. Also, lesbianism is bad. So we can blame childless lesbian spinsters on their parents because mom obviously didn't love her child enough to dose herself up with Dex in utero.

On the heels of the fuckery that is the doctor who is shortening CAH women's clits and then stimulating them with a vibrator to make sure they still work comes this, which is also an attempt to prevent ambiguous genitalia in girls with CAH (Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia which is a condition that lowers the tolerance to estrogen and results in a 'masculinizing' of the genitals). So this doctor wants to do her patients a solid and make sure all baby girls grow up to be appropriately 'girly' and well as making sure kids with CAH are girly outside and in. We're just going to ignore the fact that masculinity and femininity are both culturally dictated binaries and that people are different, not to mention what qualifies as a masculine or feminine activity changes. Like in the 1800s when a man proved his masculinity by decorating a house. As one commenter put it:

"It is enormously frustrating when scientists treat natural variation as a problem to be solved, and necessarily deny humans' capacity for ideological adaptation in order to sustain that pretense."

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This is all such bullshit science, and not just because Dex isn't FDA approved.

“The challenge here is... to see what could be done to restore this baby to the normal female appearance which would be compatible with her parents presenting her as a girl, with her eventually becoming somebody’s wife, and having normal sexual development, and becoming a mother. And she has all the machinery for motherhood, and therefore nothing should stop that, if we can repair her surgically and help her psychologically to continue to grow and develop as a girl.”

Naturally, we're just assuming that the child in questions wants to be a girl or even wants a binary gender at all. We also seem to be avoiding the term 'intersex' in the articles I've read so far, which is a lovely way to continue making an invisible group of people more invisible. Props, media outlets.

The Readings:

The Announcement
What Causes Low Rates of Child-Bearing in Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia? by H. F. L. Meyer-Bahlburg [the paper]

“CAH women as a group have a lower interest than controls in getting married and performing the traditional child-care/housewife role. As children, they show an unusually low interest in engaging in maternal play with baby dolls, and their interest in caring for infants, the frequency of daydreams or fantasies of pregnancy and motherhood, or the expressed wish of experiencing pregnancy and having children of their own appear to be relatively low in all age groups.”
Doctor Treating Pregnant Women With Experimental Drug To Prevent Lesbianism [Slog]
Preventing Homosexuality (and Uppity Women) in the Womb? [Bioethics Forum]
Pregnant Women Being Given Experimental Drug to Breed Girly Girls [Strollerderby]
Awful Doc Drugs Pregnant Women To Make Their Babies More Girly [Jezebel]
A Prenatal Treatment Raises Questions of Medical Ethics [Time]
Clinical Practice Guideline on CAH Approved by the Society [Endo-Society]