sundries

[rm]

Patty and I have not been having the best luck this week with feeling well, tolerating the heat, etc. But the heat has broken and today will be different. I'm working early to finish early and yesterday pretty much taxed me out on the Internet for the week, I think. So y'all get to talk amongst yourselves while we try to be productive and have quality time before we leave on our respective trips.

Did I really see an ad on my way to my morning tasks for a film called: Dogs and Cats: The Revenge of Kitty Galore????!?!?!? Yes, apparently I did. (Warning for Patty: contains creepy hairless cat).

A new high school and some oysters may be the key to saving New York's waterways.

Italy is fighting in European court a ban on crucifixes in its classrooms.

Soon same-sex partners will be eligible for bereavement leave in NYS. How depressing is it that there needs to be a law or shit won't happen?

Meanwhile, this made me cry in a good way. Repentance and reconciliation at Pride and probably not in the way you'd expect. via pecunium.

Apparently, a doctor is treating pregnant women in Florida with hormones to prevent the possibility that their daughters with be lesbian or bisexual and/or display habits and career interests that are deemed too masculine.

In case you missed that, let me say this again: pregnant women are being treated with experimental drugs to prevent birth defects such as homosexuality and non-traditional gender roles.

I feel unsafe. The steps from the desire to prevent to the desire to eradicate what's already here are very small.

As Dan Savage notes: "Gay people have been stressing out about a day arriving when scientists developed treatments to prevent homosexuality ... well, here we are—the day appears to have arrived. Now what are we going to do about it?"

Comments

[brightlotusmoon.livejournal.com]

I feel sick now. What the honest fuck is WRONG with people?

[bofoddity.livejournal.com]

I'm a stranger on this blog, but I wanted to express my horror over that horrible doctor and that they actually get to do what they're doing. I guess it could be wondered why anybody would do that, but the most black-and-white answer is that they hate enough.

[malle-babbe.livejournal.com]

That, or it is a sign of how deep a state of panic the changes of the past 40 years have kicked off in some people.

[behindblue-eyes.livejournal.com]

...and non-traditional gender roles.

I'm an educator at an aquarium in Kentucky. Upon occasion we take groups of teenagers behind the scenes and talk about all the different careers and roles that are needed to keep such an operation running. We're fairly small, all things considered, but try to do as much in house as possible. Including marketing and design work, the disciplines are all over the place.

I always make sure to point out that two-thirds of our regular staff and half of the biologists are female, though the director himself is male. (The non-profit and education departments are completely run by women - not a testicle in sight!) I always get a few surprised looks from the teachers chaperoning the kids. You can almost hear them thinking: "Girls can be scientists, too?" Generally the teenagers just smirk and poke each other about it, but every once in awhile I see the proverbial light bulb turn on in their adolescent brains: "Girls can be scientists, too?"

My co-educator was showing a group around and asked what the girls wanted to do when they left high school. She said that with no hesitation what-so-ever the chaperon (a middle-aged woman) replied, and I quote: "They're all going to be wives and mothers." My co-educator (a young single woman with a degree in environmental education) was speechless for a moment then came back that there were three weddings and six children born to employees of the aquarium last year and those people are still going strong. Which was better than my reaction would have been because I've never been angrier working this job and this is a guest service position so I've encountered a lot of stupid people.

I just... the injustice of it hurts, that these girls don't even see that they have options let alone what those options might be. It's times like this I sit in my testicle-free office and think about all those light bulbs turning on and all those little girls seeing the women here doing their jobs and I hope it makes a difference, I hope it does. Because otherwise we'll be left with people who don't know what's out there or who they can become.

[duikermeisie.livejournal.com]

I'm a woman, who happens to also be a scientist. Or, depending on your point of view, I am a scientist by profession, who happens to be a woman. The one is not dependent on the other.

Have you ever watched Beauty and the Geek? I normally loathe reality TV, but that one really stuck in my head for that exact reason. Many of the women on that show were clearly the type who were pretty, and were told their entire lives that they could be pretty and that was that. Once they weren't pretty anymore, if they weren't married, they could count on a lonely, awful life, because, well, they were women who weren't married and weren't pretty. Most of them stayed that way, but once every now and again, the light bulb you mentioned would go ON, and they would just...blossom.

It goes on and on. There's recent research that has shown that girls who are never told that "girls don't do well in math," surprisingly, will do well in math: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070524082806.htm (This hits home really hard for me, since I was one of those girls, the only class I ever failed was a math class, and lo and behold, a decade later, I graduated university with a math degree!)

Going back to the not-so-good doctor and heteronormative behaviour, I really have to wonder, in addition to the women Dan Savage talked about, what she'd think of Sally Ride, or Wendy Lawrence, Sylvia Earle, Marie Curie, Condoleeza Rice, Barbara Jordan (may she rest in the best of all peace with angels dusting off the ground before her every footstep), Sheryl Swoopes, and on, and on, and on.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

No, that horrifying experiment to attempt to guarantee "normal women" is probably the same old nightmare, the thing that happened to Alan Turing-- random dangerous experiments that probably won't work.

[firefly124.livejournal.com]

pregnant women are being treated with experimental drugs to prevent birth defects such as homosexuality and non-traditional gender roles.

That is absolutely fucking terrifying.

[lefaym.livejournal.com]

pregnant women are being treated with experimental drugs to prevent birth defects such as homosexuality and non-traditional gender roles.

That's horrifying. I know it's been said before, but why is it that the people who claim that heteronormative gender roles and heterosexuality are the only "natural" way for humans to be, are the same people who seem to want to reinforce those roles in the most unnatural and harmful ways possible?

[eac.livejournal.com]

Re: Doctor and anti-lesbian hormones. First, funny how he's working on girls first. Second, why in ever loving hell can't people just admit that homosexuality happens naturally in some percentage of the population -- that it's normal, but not *usual* and be done with it! Programming people away with little bursts of chemicals is so unforgiveable.

[xtricks.livejournal.com]

She. The doctor is a woman, which ads a whole 'nother layer to the issue -- since if her work is succesful, women would't *want* to be scientists.

[eac.livejournal.com]

I should really read better before posting. But yes. Ugh.

[tacky-tramp.livejournal.com]

Okay, I hope everyone is clicking through to read the Bioethics Forum piece and the Time article instead of relying on Dan Savage's commentary. I don't trust him any further than I can throw him where women or intersex issues are concerned (and since this is about CAH, it's an intersex issue).

For example, your link summation seems to be factually incorrect. You said the doctor "is treating pregnant women in Florida with hormones to prevent the possibility that their daughters will be" queer and unfeminine. Except she's not doing that. What she's been doing is recommending the off-label use of a steroid to reduce the chances of a baby being born with some CAH symptoms, and hypothesizing that such treatment could also prevent the babies from being queer and unfeminine. There's no evidence that she's handing pregnant women a scrip and saying, "Here, take this during pregnancy and your baby will be straight and love dolls." The Time article specifically states that she has prescribed prenatal dex exactly once since 2004. The thrust of her research is worrisome. But that makes it all the more important that we talk about it accurately.