Not so much, no.

23 thoughts on Not so much, no.

1. I’d like to know, once and for all, a compelling argument stating that there’s a biological basis for being queer to any degree. My desire to have it put plainly is not necessarily to justify who I am, since I don’t need to have who I am validated by science, but rather for the skeptics and the people who see homosexuality as some sort of genetic abnormality that must be stamped out at all cost.

2. “It is not as though being ill is the worst thing in all existence, either, as though people with affected heart function deserve to not exist, to be altered in order to prevent illness. Wanting to disappear people with medical conditions is an attitude I find nauseating.”

   Wanting people to have life-threatening medical conditions in order to conform to your irrational and inequal sense of equality is an attitude *I* find nauseating.

   Here’s an experiment for you: Approach a sample of individuals with affected heart function, and ask them if they would prefer to have ill hearts or healthy ones. I predict the latter will massively outweigh the former. I doubt many people healed of heart defects (yes, they *are* defects) would feel they have been “disappeared.”

   You probably think you’re a very tolerant, accepting person, but you clearly have a very poor sense of empathy. Intellectual posturing such as this is self-indulgent.

3. Honestly, I don’t know that calling an infant with serious heart problems or whatever “critically ill” is a form of ableism. I think that preventing problems that could kill someone is a good thing. Trying to ensure that you have healthy children makes perfect sense to me. Using the pills specified in the article doesn’t sound like a very good idea, though. It has a lot of side effects and, according to the article, 7 fetuses are treated for every 1 that “needs” to be treated. Preventing severe health problems is definitely a priority, but I don’t think these pills is the way to go.

   That being said, trying to ensure that you have heterosexual and non-intersexed and girly-girl children is something else entirely. The article says that girls who are treated with said pill in utero were more “girlish” and “shy,” while those that were not treated were more “aggressive.” I think it’s sad and disgusting that someone would take drugs to make sure their daughter turned out a certain socially accepted way.

   And, the last line of the article says, “the focus [of the drug] is to make surgery unnecessary.” It is my understanding that surgery on a child’s genitalia is generally unnecessary anyway.

4. Comrade Kevin: I’d like to know, once and for all, a compelling argument stating that there’s a biological basis for being queer to any degree. My desire to have it put plainly is not necessarily to justify who I am, since I don’t need to have who I am validated by science, but rather for the skeptics and the people who see homosexuality as some sort of genetic abnormality that must be stamped out at all cost. Comrade Kevin

   “Anatomy is destiny” and human anatomy leads us all to be polymorphously perverse. The thing people forget about Freud is that, taken to it’s logical conclusion, his theories lead to the sneaking suspicion that everyone is pansexual and gender is little more than a reflection of social demands and valuation.

   chahuggafugga: Wanting people to have life-threatening medical conditions in order to conform to your irrational and inequal sense of equality is an attitude *I* find nauseating.Here’s an experiment for you: Approach a sample of individuals with affected heart function, and ask them if they would prefer to have ill hearts or healthy ones. I predict the latter will massively outweigh the former. I doubt many people healed of heart defects (yes, they *are* defects) would feel they have been “disappeared.”You probably think you’re a very tolerant, accepting person, but you clearly have a very poor sense of empathy. Intellectual posturing such as this is self-indulgent.  

   Of course treating CAH (and even preventing it) shouldn’t be controversial and we should be looking for ways to save lives. The rub, of course, is that the treatment of CAH doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Not all CAH is life threatening and the treatment of CAH has historically been focused around genital deviance (which doesn’t actually cause a problem) rather than around the enzymatic mutations that are actually dangerous.

   If the treatment we were talking about merely treated or prevented CAH we might be having a different discussion, but you must find it telling that one of the things they tracked from the beginning here was homosexuality and “abnormal” genitals. The problem is that CAH causes a lot of things to happen with a body and all of those things are defined as pathological, not just the ones that actually cause harm. People are already asking “can we use this to fix other intersex people?” and “can this finally get rid of homosexuality?”

5. Well that’s a marked improvement on being killed or lobotomised for not fitting into a power bases’s schemes for breeding ..
   That’s sarcasm there but as we can see, there actually are people who’ll believe that and honestly think this type of shit is helping.
   No. It really isn’t.
   Well Comrade Kevin, good luck finding that biological basis.
   Best one of those I’ve heard in a while was this little beauty..

   http://www.nerc.ac.uk/press/releases/2007/22-deer.asp

   ..about rampant stags and their genetically inferior daughters building a stronger gene pool all round but I suspect you don’t need me to tell you that you aren’t a deer (Chimp, Bonobo or whatever else the evo-psychotic posse try to ground their assumptions on this week).

   Plus; Are the Dexamethasone girls actually more shy or have their well meaning parents just raised them to believe they’re fragile, sickly little flowers who can’t rough it – in case the pills don’t work as well as the doctors told them and their beloved kid’s heart implodes?
   Nature vs nurture etc…

6. There are not a lot of things in this world that keep me awake at night. One of them is being told people should not be allowed to exist, would be better off not existing, should be something else, because some part of their body or who they are is defective. It is not as though being ill is the worst thing in all existence, either, as though people with affected heart function deserve to not exist, to be altered in order to prevent illness. Wanting to disappear people with medical conditions is an attitude I find nauseating.

   I was really kind of with you until this paragraph, at which point you fell off the slippery slope event horizon.

   A fetus is plenipotential. It is not anything yet but potential. Anything you do to a fetus that prevents it from developing a trait — whether that trait is a serious health issue like a bad heart, a disability like bad hearing or weak muscle control, or a neutral trait that society insists on turning into a big horrible thing like intersexuality or transsexualty — is NOT THE SAME THING as erasing that person. They will still be a person, just with a different constellation of traits. Saying “giving a person a medical treatment in utero that prevents them from having a bad heart is equivalent to disappearing people with bad hearts” comes from the same place that saying fetuses with disabilities should be aborted, just the opposite moral valence. It’s saying that you, your life, your essence, everything you are, is defined by one single trait — your disabled/abled status, your cis/transsexuality, whatever — and if you do not have that trait you are functionally equivalent to dead. Well, if “not disabled = dead”, then similarly “dead = not disabled” and we have an argument for aborting disabled fetuses! It’s just like curing them!

   The way to solve that is *not* to emphasize that yes, people really are their disability, but disability is cool and we shouldn’t get rid of it! It’s to say that people with disabilities are people, and if they didn’t have the disabilities, they’d still be people, because disability does not define a person.

   My mother has diabetes. She suffers greatly because she has diabetes. If she had been altered in utero so that she would not grow up to be a diabetic, AND NOTHING ELSE CHANGED, then she would still have been the woman she is, she still would have been a living person, she still would have had all the same basic traits… just no diabetes. This is nothing but a good thing, and pretending it’s some kind of slippery slope that leads to erasing humans from existence is actually disrespectful to people with medical conditions that can kill them, most of whom, I’m sure, would love to be the exact same person they are except without the medical condition.

   The pill you’re talking about is not an abortion pill. It doesn’t prevent fetuses with CAH from being born. It prevents them from developing some of the side effects of CAH. Now, when the “side effects” parents are going “oh noes!” about and drugging their unborn babies to prevent are lesbianism, intersexuality and transsexuality, I’m totally with you. The suffering caused by those traits is damn near entirely inflicted by society. Maybe there might be *some* suffering caused by being infertile/not fertile with the person you love, but since lots of people don’t even want kids and lots of people are okay with adoption and lots of transsexuals and intersexuals and the vast majority of lesbians *are* fertile if they choose to be, this is not a suffering that should dictate parents’ decisions to dump medication that hasn’t been tested for multiple generations onto unborn fetuses. God only knows what they may be doing to grandchildren who won’t exist for 30 years, let alone the children themselves.

   But if we’re talking about preventing a fetus from developing a heart condition — not *killing* a fetus with a heart condition, not preventing its birth, but the same fetus develops and is born as a baby, except they don’t have a heart condition — then I’m sorry, the vast majority of thinking, rational, progressive people are not going to agree that this is a bad thing! Dead babies make us sad! Sick children who can’t get enough air to run and play are not happy being sick! Adults who know they’re probably going to die in their 30’s are not going to be pleased with logic that says that “oh, we could have fixed your heart in utero, but that would have been erasing your identity as a sick person!”

   You are not defined by your disability/ability. You are not defined by your health. You’re the same you if you were born a sick you or a well you. Making the exact same child grow as a well child instead of a sick child is a *good* thing… if it doesn’t affect anything else, or if the side effects are not as profound as the thing you’re trying to cure.

   And that’s where the real issue is. What is the thing you’re trying to cure? Pretty much everyone’s going to agree: good heart is better than bad heart. What about hearing? Deaf parents don’t always agree that giving a baby surgery to give them hearing would be a good idea. What about neurotypicality? There are *many* autistic people who feel that they wouldn’t have been *them* if they hadn’t been autistic. What about cis/transsexuality? Okay, now you’re talking about parents who are assholes, if they’re trying to “fix” *that* in utero.

   And what are the side effects? If a treatment makes you infertile but it fixes your heart, well, good! You probably wouldn’t have been safe having kids with a bad heart anyway. Better to live and be infertile than to be fertile but die before you could ever have kids. If a treatment gives you cancer but it fixes your heart… well, hmm, depends on whether you were likely to get cancer young or old, and the quality of your life either way. That’d be really iffy. If a treatment gives you cancer but it makes you heterosexual, whereas you would have been a cancer-free lesbian, then the doctors who signed off on this treatment should be disbarred and your parents who agreed to it should be shot.

   You cannot say that the concept of correcting problems children might have, in utero, by actually fixing the problems (instead of “fixing” the problem of a disabled child by aborting the fetus who would have been disabled so you can grow an abled fetus instead), is a bad thing. You *can’t*. You can’t say it erases people (well, you can, but only if you define people by whether they are healthy or sick, and a sick person has a sick person identity and curing them would be “killing” their sick person identity, and good luck finding chronically ill people to agree with you on that). What you can say is that you need to carefully weigh the expected benefit against the potential side effects, and if you don’t know the potential side effects, you better assume they’re cancer, because they usually are.

   If the treatment will give a person a longer life, of a higher quality, and the higher quality derives from them suffering less physical pain, it is probably a good idea.

   If the treatment is intended to prevent them from developing a trait that has no impact on their lifespan at all, but is a socially negative trait that other human beings may look down on them for having… you are probably an asshole for even *wanting* to “treat” your unborn kid to prevent it.

   Cases in between need to be looked at carefully and studied by ethicists, especially people who live with disabilities and have carefully considered the ramifications of life with disabilities versus the unknown potential for side effects.

   So yes, giving pregnant women drugs to prevent fetuses from developing CAH in order to prevent lesbianism, intersexuality, transsexuality, and “masculine” behavior, is damned stupid and people should get disbarred over it. Giving pregnant women drugs to prevent fetuses from developing badly weakened hearts is probably a good idea. But it’s really important to tell the difference between the two and not just treat all the babies, because you don’t know the generational or future side effects, and if you’re causing cancer or even infertility, I think you damn well better be restricting the treatment to the babies who were otherwise highly likely to get the heart condition!

7. Comrade Kevin: I don’t know what you mean by basis. Cause is hard to prove; correlation is easier. But since my background is brain oriented, I’ve got to point you at the sexually dimorphic nucleus which is, you guessed it, sexually dimorphic. It’s significantly larger in straight males than females. In gay males, it is more or less the same size as it is with straight females. It’s in the hypothalamus, not the cortex. A general rule of thumb is that higher level functions (cortex) are more likely to be learned than lower level functions, so I’d be inclined to think that since it’s not the cortex, it’s more ingrained and less learnable.

   I’m with chahuggafugga on this one. I sometimes feel like there is a backlash from the disabled community when cures are found for diseases. There’s a difference between threatening the very existence of people with a disease and treating it, even if it means fewer people struggling with the disease in the future. I, for one, am very glad that I exist. But if I could wave my magic wand and not have to deal with being disabled, I’d go for it. And if I wanted kids, I’d want them to be healthy. And saving them a lifetime of popping pills with a few months of popping pills on my end isn’t something I’d see as an unreasonable trade.

   What I’m most disturbed about, and it looks like it’s what disturbs everyone else, is the assumption in this article that that is not what this treatment is about. It’s not about the actual health problems that go with CAH. “The focus is to make surgery unnecessary.” Really? When Africans perform clitoridectomies, it’s wrong. But in the good ol’ U S of A, it’s necessary surgery. I don’t think so. In fact, wouldn’t you think it’s more wrong if your culture purports to ‘know better?’

   I think it’s odd that this article fixated on the side effect of limiting homosexuality. That’s only potentially true about lesbians. They are curiously silent on the effect of this treatment on males, which would be half of the treated babies. (Since the prospective mother has to start treatment before its possible to determine the baby’s sex.)

8. Comrade Kevin: I’d like to know, once and for all, a compelling argument stating that there’s a biological basis for being queer to any degree.My desire to have it put plainly is not necessarily to justify who I am, since I don’t need to have who I am validated by science, but rather for the skeptics and the people who see homosexuality as some sort of genetic abnormality that must be stamped out at all cost.  

   I want to say up front that I agree that science is not the ultimate benchmark of validity, and that the value of its findings and theories is heavily subjective, which is not problematic in my view – no one should be obligated to care about what a scientific paradigm says about their existence.

   That being said, the issue is not so much that genetics and biological paradigms of sexuality innately demean their subject matter so much as that they are frequently (mis)used in this fashion, often, in my opinion, with a gross misunderstanding and misrepresentation of what genetics and biological theories actually mean. Which is to say that sexuality can be genetic without being a genetic abnormality, biological without denying agency or lived experiences, and scientific without being oppressive or reductionist. For one example, Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People does a pretty awesome job of demonstrating how queerness as well as gender and sex variance fit within a non-pathologizing or abnormality-driven model of evolution and biology.

   More generally to the original article referenced in the post, I am so sick of the overwhelming focus on the selection aspects of human genetics, and the willful ignorance of the complementary process of diversity. I am sick of these arguments revolving exclusively around “defects” and “abnormality”. It’s perverse and derailing.

9. I am sick of these arguments revolving exclusively around “defects” and “abnormality”. It’s perverse and derailing.

   Sadly, thats what logical positivism gets you when it exists in the context of a hierarchical society. We aren’t at a point yet where we can observe without comparing and judging in the same act. As a result, when we apply science to people we get a discussion of “abormality” and “defects” which necessarily leads to a discussion of how to fix what we have observed as wrong.

10. What is most telling about this discussion is the fact that the article does not mention the life threatening implication of CAH until about halfway down. Until then it is solely about genitals and sexual orientation. The heart conditions are the afterthought, the juicy story is the freakshow. Not surprising but disturbing none the less. Even after the heart conditions and other life threatening conditions are addressed the focus shifts back to genital “abnormalities.”

    "The excess presence of the male hormone testosterone in the womb has little effect on a male fetus' genitalia. Even in females, the anatomical defect may be mild, involving nothing more obvious than a slightly enlarged clitoris. However, in severe cases, girls are born with male-like sexual organs although they usually have ovaries and a uterus."

    So even a slightly enlarged clitoris is a defect and should be under the purview of the medical establishment to regulate, let alone any more “severe” cases that fall way outside many people’s expectations and must be dealt with on the spot to protect the binary. Sure they mention people who advocate for the rights of intersexed individuals and actual informed consent of those affected.

    "The treatment of such disorders has long been the subject of debate. Early surgery to assign a child's gender is controversial, but prenatal treatment for congenital adrenal hyperplasia is even more alarming, said Anne Tamar-Mattis, executive director of Advocates for Informed Choice. She adds that the complicated surgery carries risks, including infection and nerve damage, and that parents may not be adequately counseled beforehand. The group favors allowing children born with intersex conditions to participate in decisions about their gender identity, including delaying a decision until adolescence." (I’ll ignore the fail of the phrase “surgery to assign a child’s gender.”)

    And they do go into the risks of the treatment itself aside from the ethical issues. However, in the end, treating genital “abnormalities” is seen as an end in itself.

    "Any treatment can be misused. That could happen here. But this is not the focus of the treatment. The focus is to make surgery unnecessary."

    Surgery for what? Heart conditions or to “fix” genitals? It is the focus of this treatment this is disturbing, not curing kids who may have a deadly heart condition (if thats all we were talking about that would be a different story). The fact that the focus is on genitals clearly shows the obsession with sexual and gender binaries and the conflation involved. This is especially evident since the controversy almost completely centers around sexual orientation not genital variance. Altering (or potentially I won’t get into that) a child’s sexual orientation is seen (rightfully so) as controversial, but “fixing” intersexed people is taken as obvious. Even the one paragraph that talks about the controversy of early genital surgery focuses on the complications that can occur, and require consent, not the ethics of altering “abnormal” genitalia at all without consent. That quote, which I’m sure was cherry picked and taken out of context, is telling of what is not part of the ethical debate here.

    A side note: There is a decent book on the subject of intersexuality, Between XX and XY: Intersexuality and the Myth of Two Sexes. It has problems to be sure; it was written by an immunologist/pathologist, so language and terminology is often problematic when referring to sexual or gender variant individuals. Aside from that it is a nice overview of how the medical establishment defines (or attempts to) sex and the book make the conclusion that because of the sheer variety of, and sometimes contradictory, ways in which sex is codified belies the notion of two sexes from a biological standpoint and further concludes that everyone is functionally intersxed, that male and female are theoretical extremes. The book also cites studies of intersexed people who never underwent any surgery and were still able to live perfectly happy lives, going against the notion that genital conformity is needed to be happy. Viewing intersexuality this way redefines the debate in ways that address the complexity of this issue and highlights the care that should be taken to avoid norming and othering.

11. I was going to be all, “Wait, what?” about the end of the post but I see some other people have beat me there. …unless we’re all misunderstanding what Chally meant by that last bit?

12. ‘Wanting people to have life-threatening medical conditions in order to conform to your irrational and inequal sense of equality is an attitude *I* find nauseating.’

    It’s not that I want people to have medical conditions or not, it’s that I am thinking the attitude shown is one that says people who have them are better off not existing. That is the attitude informing things here, regardless of how it plays out in this particular instance. It’s really not about how it actually works out, but, as I emphasised throughout, about the cultural narratives going on here. What’s going on here is that heart conditions and such are being seen as inherently bad, and, hang on, disability as inherently bad, bunch of people assuming in advance what it can mean in a particular instance, how someone will themselves feel about it, yep, ableism. I’m sure we can all agree this attitude is a bad idea. Also I’m pretty sure you do not know how every single person with a heart condition feels about their condition, either.

    I have to attend to a number of sick people today, so I will not be around moderating much.

    What would also be good would be if we could focus a bit more on intersex people considering that part about intersex people getting sidelined! 🙂

13. Um wow, really? Because we think it’s better to correct heart conditions in infants if possible, we don’t want those infants to exist? Wow, you really are saying that. That’s… really messed up.

    For the record, I also think it’s messed up when parents subject their infants to unnecessary genital surgery or drug fetuses to prevent them from coming out gay.

    But… wow. Should we just withhold all medical treatment from children until they are adults? If they make it to adulthood?

14. That is not what I said. If you can’t engage with what I actually said, don’t engage.

15. “It is not as though being ill is the worst thing in all existence”

    Sorry, but how is that not completely ableist? You’re dismissing the suffering of millions of people with debilitating illnesses.

    “What’s going on here is that heart conditions and such are being seen as inherently bad, and, hang on, disability as inherently bad, bunch of people assuming in advance what it can mean in a particular instance, how someone will themselves feel about it, yep, ableism”

    Uh yeah but heart conditions ARE inherently bad because they cause DEATH. We’re not talking about deafness or autism or cerebral palsy, we’re talking about something that can be cured and will raise the quality of life for the afflicted if cured. Do you think people with holes in their heart or diaphragm or people with epilepsy want to be accepted as they are, or cured?

16. As far as I’m aware, being anti-ableist includes being understanding and compassionate towards the suffering of people with disabilities and trying to mitigate that suffering – whether that takes the form of putting wheelchair ramps in public buildings, or offering extra tutoring for dyslexic students, or affordable medical intervention. Saying that disabled or ill people shouldn’t be given medical recourse to help them cope or be cured isn’t terribly compassionate.

17. I have two debilitating illnesses, and I’m not dismissing the suffering of people who do suffer with illnesses, I am saying that presuming illnesses are the worst thing ever is… ableist. As is assuming that everyone with heart conditions feels the exact same way about them. And I’m pretty sure a lot of people don’t want to choose between being accepted and cured: acceptance should come in any case. I am not saying that people shouldn’t be given medical treatments.

    I’m giving this conversation until the half hour mark to get back to intersex issues and stop mischaracterising what I was saying, and to stop acting like aaaaaall disabled people think the same way, otherwise I’m shutting this down.

18. What I think many of the above commenters are missing is that ability to extrapolate from Chally’s post the ableist tones. To me it seems like just another way for the article to say “And just in case you are okay with having ‘aggressive’ baby girls, chew on this…they might not have an idealized able body!”

    There IS a lot to unpack in the article in question, but everyone seems to be more interested in getting defensive and knee-jerky about the post.

19. Yes, it is. And don’t say that. That is NOT the attitude being shown in the words you have quoted. AT ALL.

    I have to agree with Alara, human and others here, it’s all been said really, even though you have dismissed it as ‘not engaging’.

20. I’m pretty sure I know what I’m saying regarding whether people should be given medical treatments or not? Which is, nothing. People are engaging, just not all of them with what I actually said.

    Four minutes to go, folks.

21. Isn’t this the second drug that’s been introduced that’s designed to do one thing but instead could be misused to address so-called deviancy in the gender paradigm? It’s possible the other one just addressed sexual orientation. I remember reading about it on feministing earlier this summer (or, winter for Chally).

    It’s kind of a terrifying trend.

22. Heart-conditions are inherently bad. People who have heart-conditions, of course, are full and worthwhile human beings who deserve to lead full and complete lives with the egalitarian respect and support of society, just like people without heart conditions.

    Do you think that pregnant (or trying to be pregnant) women taking folic acid supplements are practicing ableism against people with spina bifida?

23. Well, it’s been lovely, folks. I can see how I might not have been clear to everyone in the original post, but the whole ‘but I actually meant that there is a particular social attitude, that lives with illness are less worth living, that is premi-‘ ‘YOU WANT PEOPLE TO SUFFER AND YOU THINK MEDICAL TREATMENTS SHOULD BE DENIED AND DON’T YOU KNOW DISABILITY IS INHERENTLY BAD?!’ thing wasn’t really so fun as one might have thought. Also it’s not so fun how intersex people were sidelined in a thread that ought to have largely been about intersex people being sidelined! Until next time.

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