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

[bodlon.livejournal.com]

This endocrinologist is conflating gendered behaviors with lesbian sexuality, and then proclaiming it a birth defect? I'm sorry, but what? Has she never met lesbians with children? Lesbians who dress and comport themselves in culturally typical feminine ways? Lesbians who do so-called "women's work" gladly because that's where their passions lie?

As others have said, does she not see the conflict between her own experience and the experience she's attempting to design?

It's strange, because the only place in the LGBTQ community I've encountered the idea that a birth defect is the root of someone's experience is within the trans community. I've never been comfortable with it -- actually, I've never found a comfortable way to get from point A to point B -- but when an FTM guy uses that language to describe why he's a man, I rather think he means it the other way around. Their masculinity isn't the defect. It's their body's failure to get all the way there before they were born that's the problem for them.

But this isn't about that either. It's about making female babies who grow up to conform with a cultural standard, not a natural one. Nature, last I checked, is what gives us babies who grow up to have a variety of sexual and gender identities. And while some congenital features may be rightly pathologized and regarded as needing treatment, matters of culture and taste are not among those.

I suggest what we do is start declaring a spade a spade. In this case, eugenics meeting misogyny in the hands of a hypocrite in violation of obvious bioethical standards is probably a good start. Challenging the institution allowing these tests is another.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Seriously, am I the only one having "international human rights court, please" as a response to this?

[graene.livejournal.com]

Nope, absolutely not.

[malle-babbe.livejournal.com]

Folks were tried at Nuremberg for stuff like this...

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

You are not alone. If this were happening in the UK, you can be sure the ECHR would be on this p.d.q. How it would be enforced in the US I don't know, since IANAL, but it needs an example made of it as a warning.

[bodlon.livejournal.com]

You are not. You're really, really not.

[eris.livejournal.com]

"This endocrinologist is conflating gendered behaviors with lesbian sexuality"

THIS. This is exactly the first thing that got me flailing in confused rage. I must be ridiculously naive to think that we've moved past, at least just a little, the idea that all manly women are lesbians and all girly men are gay, and vice versa.

I know I am a bit naive there and that my own personal experience and associations are not the hetro standard. Just ... AUGH.

Let's just assume they succeed, are the very gender role abiding queers going to be the Good Queers?

[bodlon.livejournal.com]

No, because by definition lesbianism and bisexuality here are undesirable behavior, and need to be wiped out using prenatal hormones.

Wow, typing that sentence made me want to vomit.

[eris.livejournal.com]

Except the prenatal hormones are intended to wipe out non-gender conforming behaviour. Manly woman does not equal lesbian, feminine woman does not equal straight, across the board.

This is working under a very stereotypical assumption of what causes TEH GAY.

[bodlon.livejournal.com]

See, I know that, and you know that, but I am not convinced based on the article that Dr. New knows that.

[eris.livejournal.com]

In my imaginary world this is now one of the questions on the To Become An Official Doctor Of Medicine Test.