rm | one inch

one inch

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?

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a substantial fraction of those will not have seen a big enough sample to even guess what "normal" would be

I'm not sure I agree with this. I'm a member of

vaginapagina, and women post there all the time concerned about the shape, size, configuration, and color of their genitals, either because they've been mocked and denigrated by partners or because they've seen enough porn to fear that they will be mocked and denigrated. The average person has access to photographs of female genitalia and boys in particular generally see quite a bit of pornography before the age of 18. And then draw conclusions about what is and is not acceptable on a woman's body.

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.

Wow.

Testing on children is such an ethically tricky thing, and has to be handled with such care, to begin with. I don't see how this could be seen as okay.

Gender policing is alive and well in our society--just saw a post the other day by a girl whose mother called her a "psychotic freak" whose friends will all "secretly hate her"...because she likes to wear basketball jerseys and baggy shorts.

Children with ambiguous genitalia are routinely operated on, and as other commenters have said, parents are under tremendous pressure to "normalize" their infants' genitals, with the implication that if they don't, they're bad parents and the child will suffer. Surgical intervention remains the standard of care, unfortunately.

I have a dear friend who was born intersex and also surgically "corrected" to be raised as a boy. She grew up always feeling like a girl, now lives as a woman, but still has pain and medical problems due to the doctors' "help", not to mention a substantial amount of trauma from being repeatedly subjected to exams and surgeries as a child without anyone explaining what had happened to her body until adulthood.

This, among many other reasons, is why we have to move beyond our current concepts of gender.

Doctors and parents can be... it's difficult.Let me tell you a story. My parents were both highly educated individuals. When I was five, it became apparent that I had a medical condition which the medical community advised warranted surgery. It was a potentially fatal condition, but it could also go away over time, because I was still growing and the body could just resolve it on its own. Until and including discovery of this, I had never had any problems with it.

It took my parents a long time to make the decision to go for surgery. The surgery went without a hitch and I was fine, but the medical rigmarole around it was severely problematic, and to top it off, the surgeons asked if, while they were doing the whole surgery anyway, my parents maybe wanted my "outie" belly button corrected straightaway? They said no.

They were both well educated. I can't imagine a family going through that, with all its associated pressures and I-know-more-than-you vibes, who didn't have the same educational background. So I wasn't surprised that there are parents out there who were genuinely led to believe this was the best thing for their child.

Yeah. See this post.

Yup it's allowed.

Unfortunately*, providing treatment that you believe is standard of care and performing follow-up tests to ensure the outcome of that treatment does not require IRB oversight of any kind. Neither do attempts to optimize or track the care provided.

That the standard of care has been written by people delusional enough to believe that cutting up a baby's clitoris is in their best interest is a different issue. But the ethical breach was in the surgical and follow-up decisions, not in the decision to bypass IRB oversight until immediately before he wanted to publish.

*in this case it is unfortunate. In others**, rather important leaps of medical practice have been brought about by practitioners trying something just a little bit different. So it's not black and white. Oh, how I wish it were.

**most medications are allowed to be prescribed for their indicated purpose as well as any other reason for which the doctor thinks they would be effective. I'd hate to have my MD say, "well, I think this would work, but since no formal research has been done, we can't give it a try. Come back if I get funding for this study..." I'd much rather have them say, "no formal research has been done, but it seems like it could help. Can we give it a shot?"

Goodness that got long-winded. I'm done here, now to go write a letter to Cornell.

me too

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. :-(

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.

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.

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(

The whole thing is barbaric, but when I saw "too big" I said "what the fuck does that mean anyway?" If there was a little boy who had a penis larger than his peers, would we be lopping part of that off? I'm not talking about circumcision, which--well, I'm Jewish, but YMMV. Would a surgeon cut off the tip, remove some of the shaft, and then reattach the tip? Well, maybe this guy would. But the rest of us sane, civilized people wouldn't.

And don't even get me started on his post-op vibrator tests....

If you (general you) have a partner that mocks you because of the appearance of your sex organ(s), is that someone you really want to share your emotional vulnerabilities with? I'd be showing that person the door. Or possibly the window...

Having said that, I'm not surprised other women ask "Is this normal?" We've been conditioned to think there is a singular normal, or that "normal" is what one sees in porn. But as my gyn told me once, "If it's not falling off, bleeding or has green goo dripping from it, you're probably fine."

Of course it's not a good idea to be involved with someone who mocks your body. But I was challenging the idea that young men and women probably can't tell what's "not normal." They absolutely can.

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

Don't forget Walter Freeman, the lobotomist.

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

Oh gawd yes. I had just not remembered his name.

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

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Intersex surgery