rm ([personal profile] rm) wrote2010-06-17 01:03 pm

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?

[identity profile] xtricks.livejournal.com 2010-06-17 05:18 pm (UTC)(link)
Welcome to the intersex world. This sort of surgury has been done for years on intersex people -- in the past with absolutely no concern whatsoever that those who are medically defined as female retain any sexual sensitivity at all.

The whole history of medically/surgically correcting intersex conditions is fraught with sexual hatred, mysgyny, homophobia and a kind of callousness that better suits crazed horror movies than modern medical practice.

[identity profile] rm.livejournal.com 2010-06-17 05:21 pm (UTC)(link)
Yup, as regards to intersex people I was aware of this, although I know there's been, thankfully, some reduction of it/increased awareness of it in the US in the last decade, although I'm sure all sorts of atrocities continue to be committed.

This is certainly the first I've heard of it as regards non-intersexed (although granted, I know what gets defined as intersex often isn't anything other than large clits) female people though.
Edited 2010-06-17 17:22 (UTC)

[identity profile] xtricks.livejournal.com 2010-06-17 06:14 pm (UTC)(link)
I think it's because it's assumed that a woman who has a 'too large' clit is assumed to be intersexed in some way. Even if, in fact, there is nothing hormonally/biologically different than any other woman. Since, from what I've seen (almost exclusively based on porn images of woman's genitalia so there's a large grain of salt here), woman's genitals vary pretty widely, I'm really not sure how 'too large' is determined anyway.

[identity profile] aslant.livejournal.com 2010-06-17 10:25 pm (UTC)(link)
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#

[identity profile] xtricks.livejournal.com 2010-06-17 10:29 pm (UTC)(link)
Yeah. Intersex is a blanket term for people who may look ambiguous for a variety of hormonal/physical/genetic conditions, including CAH.