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

[lyrwen.livejournal.com]

He told the IRB he'd do a back study on their case notes. No mention of the sexual assault part, of course.

[liminalia.livejournal.com]

One of the issues is that the doc did *not* go get IRB approval for the post-surgery vibrator testing, only the surgery itself. Cornell is pissed.

[liminalia.livejournal.com]

This. Still wondering wtf about the parents, but considering some of the stories I've heard about other people's parents, I guess I shouldn't be surprised anymore.

[liminalia.livejournal.com]

It's interesting that you blame the mothers and not the fathers as well.

[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.

[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.)

[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.

[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.

[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?

[aslant.livejournal.com]

but i don't think they were non-intersexed people though...they had congenital adrenal hyperplasia. is there an overlap between cah and intersex? in any case, the original bioethics discussion of it has more details: http://www.thehastingscenter.org/Bioethicsforum/Post.aspx?id=4730&blogid=140#

[xtricks.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Intersex is a blanket term for people who may look ambiguous for a variety of hormonal/physical/genetic conditions, including CAH.

[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.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

Oh fuck. I am so, so sorry.

[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.

[st-aelphaba.livejournal.com]

It's because I'm a mother to a six year old daughter and my relationship with my own mother-figures is fraught at best. Projection is fun and easy.

[citrinesunset.livejournal.com]

Very good point.

There's a big creep factor in the use of the vibrator, but it's hardly the only problem, and it only occurred in the first place because this type of surgery is still allowed.

[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.

[hoosierbitch.livejournal.com]

Horrifying and terrifying.

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

[ravenskye8.livejournal.com]

I wonder what the doctor told the parents about the "medical need" for the procedure... I have to believe that these parents were led to believe they were doing the right thing for their daughters...

I guess I am thinking about how most people discuss surgical options in detail with their doctors before getting things done, and that many people get second opinions if the surgery is in any way optional...

It upsets me just as much as the descriptions of the procedure itself... what justifications were used to make these parents believe that this kind of thing was absolutely necessary to save their daughters from some kind of negative outcome?

[tacky-tramp.livejournal.com]

It seems that he did this on his own accord, not in the framework of research -- and then when he wrote the paper, he simply asked the IRB for permission to collate his notes. It was a fait accompli.