one inch

[rm]

I was going to chuck this into sundries, but then some of you might miss it, and it needs to be talked about.

Over at Cornell we have a case of gender and body policing, unnecessary surgery, and stimulating 6-year-old girls with vibrators in the name of dodgy science.

Really helps to confirm my suspicion that the only good girl is one who knows how to disappear, doesn't it? And if she can't figure out the skill of it, don't worry, someone will hold her down and do it for her.

I won't ask you what this fear of big clits is, since we can all figure it out, but did you know that women with larger clitorises are also more likely to identify as gay?

Yup, that's right, one of the many HORRIFYING implications here is all about trying to erase queerness, erase the existence of people like me (and let's note the particularities of this particular act of hate, since there is also a correlation between larger penises and men being gay, but no one is cutting into these suspect little boys).

Things that will never make any queer woman less queer: hair removal, makeup, self-hatred, dresses, boyfriends, surgery, "therapy." My mother used to buy me electric razors, over and over.

All of this speaks with terrible eloquence to the suspicion I often harbour that the most inherently queer thing about me is my unwillingness to disappear.

If you don't get how all of this connects, you should probably go read Valerie's Letter again and again and again until you do.

An inch.

One inch.

Get it?

Comments

[melebeth]

Mentioned on twitter, but my (professional) feelings about why focusing on the vibrator part of this is a problem are here.

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

Very good point indeed.

[browneyedgirl65.livejournal.com]

That's exactly what was bugging me once I started reading through the comments. The starting point (defining what is normal and what is not) is the real source of the problem. Too many of the people responding at that link sound like they'd be OK with it if he hadn't tried to assess clitoral response after the procedure.

Fundamentally, we don't give children autonomy over their bodies and we enforce what we consider norms onto them. And for female children in many respects, we as a society never cede autonomy after maturity.

Bleh.

[dr-is-in.livejournal.com]

I have no words strong enough for how horrified I am at this story.

This is only an hour from where I grew up....and I thank god my parents never heard of it (especially after catching me with other girls a few times and trying to make me think it was wrong and bad).

[austengirl.livejournal.com]

Just posted a link to Dan Savage's article over at my LJ as well as a link to the FB group.

I really have no words, and I haven't been this outraged in a long time.

[melebeth]

Oh, and one scientific comment, because someone just asked me "how does having a big clitoris make you a lesbian?" If there is a relationship between large clitorises and lesbianism (I haven't read the studies in ages) it is most likely because they're both related to prenatal androgen exposures, which can affect both clitoris size and brain development (and is loosely linked to sexual orientation and gender identity. Emphasis on loosely. The studies are not great.)

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

Needless to say, this is totally appalling, and it would be no matter what, but there's an extra creepiness to the concept that girls' development will be stunted by their extra large clits when you consider that I never saw another woman's clit until several years after I came out as bi at 19. It's extremely likely that no one other than a sexual partner will EVER see these, and a substantial fraction of those will not have seen a big enough sample to even guess what "normal" would be -- not that if they did know they would necessarily care, or find it a negative if they did. Couldn't the women do something about it at that point, if they found it so debilitating? It's not like kids on the playground are teased about genitalia that don't show even in the locker room.

[liminalia.livejournal.com]

But what if the clits were big enough to show? It does happen, and one presumes that's how the parents got freaked out enough to go to the doctor. There are various intersex conditions that do produce quite a large clit. (However, I must note I emphatically do NOT think it needs to be surgically "corrected", especially in infancy.)

[laughingacademy.livejournal.com]

So much for the Cornell University (my alma mater!) athletic teams' slogan, "Go Big Red."

Yeah, when I'm this repulsed and angry, I default to black humor.

[summer-jackel.livejournal.com]

This is utterly horrifying. Thank you for spreading the information that it happened; I hope that this person has his license revoked.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

I don't know what it says that I made an icon of Valerie's Letter yesterday and I read about this now.

Just... fuck fuck fuck. This is the sort of thing I live in fear of. Of science being uses against me us again.
It is far too close to Godwin for me to talk about calmly.

Thank you for the link on this story, much as it nauseates and terrifies me to my very core.

[51stcenturyfox.livejournal.com]

There is not enough no in the world for either the practice or the "tests".

Horrible. *works on provost letter*

[soukup.livejournal.com]

There's something so particularly heinous about the idea of an adult taking a knife and cutting up the genitals of a child that I really have always believed that cases like this deserved their own special branch of much harsher law. There isn't much that gets me really angry, but this is one of my few hot buttons.

[sinonmybody.livejournal.com]

wtfingf.
is there anything being done about this? a petition, a protest, an ANYTHING?

[elainasaunt.livejournal.com]

Yeah. See this post.

[sevendayloan.livejournal.com]

Wow, this is just ... wow.

[heartofoshun.livejournal.com]

I appreciate you posting this. The whole thing is so awful that I couldn't comment earlier. I glanced at others' comments and I notice that I am not the only mother of a daughter who was particularly horrified reading it. Who are these parents? It is very hard to try to raise a daughter in our environment so laden with all the scary/wrong gender assumptions --coping with the whole idea of trying to give a child a positive self-image and yet needing to explain the attitudes of the society in which they are living in and worrying about how much to tell them, how soon, etc., etc. and then to read something like this just made me sick.

[nicoli-dominn.livejournal.com]

That is simply horrifying. After reading about some of the fuckery that goes on even with newborn infants in Fausto-Sterling's book, hearing about this doesn't surprise me. It does piss me the hell off. It's bad enough that so many people circumcise newborn boys, but the fact that the practice is extending to females and intersex individuals, many of whom are already under later societal pressures to modify their appearances for the benefit of others, is even worse.

[anotheranon.livejournal.com]

This is just too awful to contemplate. I want to scream "it is 2010, could we step out of the dark ages already, PLEASE???" but I know I'm preaching to the choir here.

[citrinesunset.livejournal.com]

This entire thing is disturbing and depressing on several levels. I'm still kind of surprised that this guy was able to get the okay to do the study at all, though maybe I shouldn't be.

I hate that it's still seen as okay by so many people to alter ambiguous genitals when the children aren't old enough to consent or even necessarily have a strong sense of their own identities.

[tacky-tramp.livejournal.com]

I believe he didn't get any approval to undertake these "testing" methods -- he did them on his own initiative, and then later sought IRB approval to collate his notes into a paper. Which apparently is allowed.

[hoosierbitch.livejournal.com]

Horrifying and terrifying.

(Thank you for posting about it, and for the link to Valerie's letter.)

[laura47.livejournal.com]

This is making me almost physically ill. I am so horrified. IN MANHATTAN.

and i just linked this story to a bunch of my friends, my smart, liberal friends, and everyone is horrified and disgusted and thinks he should be arrested, but they are so doubtful that this isn't just one fucked up guy, that it is related to larger social issues, that it "is at all connected to the(equally terrible) sexual assignment surgery that intersex infants sometimes receive."

I wish I knew how to argue these things effectively and convince people. :-(

[rm.livejournal.com]

It is completely related to what is done to intersex infants, and they should know that intersex conditions in women can be diagnosed on the size of the clitoris alone. No hormonal or genetic component is required to declare a female intersex -- just a clit someone thinks it too large.

[deusabscondidum.livejournal.com]

This sort of thing should be done, if it is to be done at all, when the children are older. As in adults, choosing to have it done for themselves.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

There is a discussion going on over at mine on this subject (here via snakey).

At least I got to choose what was done to my body at 21 years of age thirty odd years ago when I elected to have corrective genital surgery (vaginoplasty).

This abuse reminds me of what Dr Marietta Higgs got up to during the Cleveland child abuse debacle of some years back here in the UK and she, sadly, is still practising. The 'anal dilation' technique she used to 'prove' abuse was even used by her on her OWN children! As it turned out, there had been no abuse- it was fantasy dreamed up by the so called 'experts'.

The recent reaction to the athlete, Caster Semenya, should, perhaps, remind us not to be too surprised by such prurient attitudes :o(

[natf.livejournal.com]

Mengele. V. Eugenics. Abuse. The only words I can find.

[eveningscribe.livejournal.com]

Don't forget Walter Freeman, the lobotomist.

[eveningscribe.livejournal.com]

I posted this a few days ago to my facebook, I don't know if you've seen it, it seems to have much the same information, perhaps more, I can't tell.

http://blogtown.portlandmercury.com/BlogtownPDX/archives/2010/06/17/female-genital-mutilation-at-cornell-university

Intersex surgery

[(Anonymous)]

It is nearly impossible to keep abreast of what the medical profession gets up to with Intersex.
nearly all of these articles are in Journals that are available to the medical profession and academics. Organizations like OII have to pay $30 a view for each article. The journals do not provide pro bono access to organisations that Include the subjects of the articles.
The behavior of the physicians involved in this procedure are participating in child sexual assault, pure and simple, the veneer of medical necessity and scientific inquiry should provide no immunity to this appalling behavior .

The reporters, Dreager and Feder , rather decrying the activities in academic journals Intersex are unlikely to have access to , should have reported this to the police and the child welfare authorities.

Both Dreager and Feder participated in the DSD consensus forum and Dreager invented the pathologising term Disorders of Sexual development to replace the word Intersex. The pathologising of Intersex differences was always going to lead to this kind of behavior by medical experts. Intersex was abandoned because the medical profession did not control the terminology or the protocols that surrounded various Intersex differences. Now with full control of both medicine is free to "cure" intersex and experiment , sexually, with infants to test the efficacy of those "cures"

I call on Alice d Dreager and Ellen K Feder to declare the introduction of DSD a failure, to admit it has not stopped the unacceptable behaviors by the medical profession on Intersex individuals, it has not resulted in long term follow up studies as it called for and it has not improved the lot of Intersex.

www.oiiaustralia.com