Reading in the dark - Intersections between queer and disabled: "normal"...or else
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Intersections between queer and disabled: "normal"...or else
Kes: A lot of this article is hauntingly similar to my own childhood memories, including doctors conducting invasive procedures but never really telling the child about her/his own body, the equating of "normal" with "happy," and the implication than any failure to be normal is a failure on the part of the depressed/angry/resentful "freak" who obviously just isn't trying hard enough to fit in.
What if It’s (Sort of) a Boy and
(Sort of) a Girl?
New York Times September 24, 2006
By ELIZABETH WEIL
When Brian Sullivan — the baby who would before age 2 become Bonnie Sullivan and 36 years later become Cheryl Chase — was born in New Jersey on Aug. 14, 1956, doctors kept his mother, a Catholic housewife, sedated for three days until they could decide what to tell her. Sullivan was born with ambiguous genitals, or as Chase now describes them, with genitals that looked “like a little parkerhouse roll with a cleft in the middle and a little nubbin forward.” Sullivan lived as a boy for 18 months, until doctors at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center
in Manhattan performed exploratory surgery, found a uterus and ovotestes (gonads containing both ovarian and testicular tissue) and told the Sullivans they’d made a mistake: Brian, a true hermaphrodite in the medical terminology of the day, was actually a girl. Brian was renamed Bonnie, her “nubbin” (which was
either a small penis or a large clitoris) was entirely removed and doctors counseled the family to throw away all pictures of Brian, move to a new town and get on with their lives. The Sullivans did that as best they could. They eventually relocated, had three more children and didn’t speak of the circumstances around their eldest child’s birth for many years. As Chase told me recently, “The doctors promised my parents if they did that” — shielded her from her
medical history — “that I’d grow up normal, happy, heterosexual and give them grandchildren.”
Sullivan spent most of her childhood and young-adult life extremely unhappy, feeling different from her peers though unsure how. Around age 10, her parents told her that she had had an operation to remove a very large clitoris. They didn’t tell her what a clitoris was but said that now things were fine. At 19, filled with rage and feeling suicidal, she started trying to access her medical records and finally succeeded when she was 22. As a means of recovery,
she threw herself into her work. She graduated from M.I.T.
with a degree in math and then went on to study Japanese at Harvard.
Soon after, she moved to Japan and helped found a successful tech company, assuming she’d work really hard for now and be happy later. At 35, realizing that being happy later was not going to happen, she flew to Florida with a list of questions to ask her mother, to whom she was never close. According
to Chase’s notes from that conversation (both of her parents have since died), her mother maintained that the clitoridectomy had not impacted her daughter’s life. “When you came home,” Cathleen Sullivan told Chase about her return from the hospital after surgery, “there seemed to be no effect at all. Oh, yes,
wait a minute. Yes, there was one thing. You stopped speaking. I guess you didn’t speak for about six months. Then one day you started talking again. You had known quite a lot of words at 17 months, but you forgot them all.”
After that conversation, Chase, an extremely ambitious, focused and analytical individual, decided it was time to heal herself, and she gave herself a year. As part of that project, she moved to San Francisco and started calling and writing to doctors, academics and gender activists — anybody who might have
something concrete to say about the predicament of being born part male, part female, or who might be able to tell her why it had been necessary to have her clitoris removed and if she’d be able to get any sexual function back. Along the way, in 1993, Sullivan called Anne Fausto-Sterling, a professor of
biology and gender studies at Brown, who had published several papers on intersex (the term that has come to replace “hermaphrodite”) and who was about
to publish an article in a magazine called The Sciences. Sullivan wrote a letter that was published in the next issue calling for people with intersex conditions to get in touch with her, and she signed it Cheryl Chase, the Intersex Society of North America, though neither a person named Cheryl Chase
nor an organization called the Intersex Society of North America yet existed.
Thirteen years later, Chase, as Sullivan began calling herself, is now known throughout the urology and endocrinology establishment as a passionate advocate for the rights of those born with ambiguous genitals, and she has succeeded in stirring a contentious debate among those doctors over how intersex babies should be treated. At the heart of the controversy is the question of whether intersex children should have surgery to make their genitals look more normal.
Chase has talked to thousands of doctors and others in the medical profession, making the case that being born intersex should not be treated as shameful and require early surgery. In doing so, she has assembled an impressive intellectual arsenal, drawing on everything from the Nuremberg Code and its prohibition against experimental medical procedures without patient consent to the concept of “monster ethics” — the idea that we perform questionable medical procedures
on certain patients, like intersex people and conjoined twins, when we consider those patients to be less than human. Reports on the frequency of intersex births vary widely: Chase claims 1 in 2,000; more conservative estimates from experts put it at 1 in 4,500. Whatever the case, intersex is roughly as common
as cystic fibrosis, and while the outcome of the debate Chase has stirred is directly pertinent to a limited number of families, her arguments force all
of us to confront some basic issues about sexual identity, birth anomalies and what rights parents have in physically shaping their kids. Will a child
grow up to enjoy a better life if he or she is saved from the trials of maturing in a funny-looking body? Or will that child be better off if he or she
is loved and accepted, at least at home, exactly as he or she is?
The old protocol for dealing with an intersex birth, the protocol Chase was subjected to as a child, was based on the belief that children should be saved
from the anguish of looking weird, or of even knowing they were born looking weird. This would come to be known as the “optimal gender of rearing” protocol
and was put forth by John Money, a psychologist who in 1965 founded the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic, which specializes in transgender surgery.
Money’s protocol guided doctors to perform genital surgery on intersex babies and then discourage families from discussing the child’s ambiguity, for fear
that the child would grow up questioning his or her sexual identity.
This protocol held for 40 years, until Chase began agitating against it in the mid-1990’s. For a dozen years, she chipped away at its logical underpinnings,
and last month Money’s protocol officially fell. The journal
Pediatrics
published a paper signed by 50 international experts, primarily doctors but including Chase, titled “Consensus Statement on the Management of Intersex Disorders.”
The consensus promotes the traditional idea that every child should be assigned a gender as soon as possible after birth, and that this should be done
by doctors examining the baby’s genes,
hormones,
genitalia, internal organs (via ultrasound), electrolytes, gonads and urine. These doctors then make their best guess as to whether that child will want
to live his or her adult life as a man or a woman. Where the consensus departs from tradition is that it also instructs doctors to discourage families
from rushing into surgery. The paper is a bit vague on this point; it doesn’t directly tell doctors not to operate but does state that no good scientific
studies prove infant cosmetic genital surgery improves quality of life.
Chase says she believes that every child should be assigned a gender at birth but that the assignment should not be “surgically reinforced” and that parents
and doctors should remain open to the idea that they may have assigned the wrong sex. She contends that the most important thing is for a child to feel
loved by her parents, despite her difference. An operation, she says, should not be done to assuage parental embarrassment or anxiety; it should be chosen,
if it is chosen at all, by an intersex individual who is old enough to make her own decision and give proper consent.
The consensus is a major victory for Chase. Yet making progress from here may prove extremely difficult. Chase now must take her arguments not just to medical
professionals but also to parents of intersex children, almost all of whom will be feeling intensely stressed and almost none of whom will have considered
the complexity of raising an intersex child. One doctor, who didn’t want to be named, put her chances of persuading parents not to choose surgery for their
intersex children at “honestly, zero.” From the parents’ perspective, the argument for surgery is almost impervious to reason. As one mother of an intersex
girl wrote on a message board: “How can anyone possibly think that a child can grow up and feel confident of her sexuality looking down at her genitals
that look like a penis? Come on.”
One day last spring, Chase traveled from her home in Sonoma County, Calif., to Chicago to tell her story to a group of genetic counselors and to distribute
the Intersex Society’s latest handbooks, one for medical professionals and one for parents. On this morning, Chase, who is 50, has short white hair, fashionable
glasses, intelligent eyes and a strong build, was wearing a wide-necked sweater meant to fall off her shoulders, exposing a black bra. She lives as a woman
and as a lesbian, and while she imagines she doesn’t look or feel exactly as other women do — for instance, she can’t find any gloves made for women that
fit — she has no desire to be a man.
Chase had been invited to speak by Rebecca Burr, a genetic counselor who several years ago found herself dealing with a 26-year-old woman who’d never menstruated,
knew she’d had multiple operations as a child but didn’t know that she was intersex. Burr felt ill prepared to handle the case and tracked down the Intersex
Society. In Chicago, Chase stood in front of 30 members of the Genetic Task Force of Illinois, telling them about the parkerhouse roll, the trashing of
her baby pictures, the hospital stay at age 8, when she was told doctors would be helping her stomachaches but when she really had the testicular part
of her gonads removed.
When Chase began her activism, more than a decade ago, few doctors were open to her ideas about the way intersex babies should be treated. “When I first
started doing this, it took some extreme kinds of conversation to get people to listen up,” she told me. She also organized a picket of a pediatric convention;
she sneaked into medical conferences and buttonholed attendees. In 2000, however, the esteemed Lawson Wilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society finally invited
her to speak, and since then Chase’s technique has evolved. She now receives and solicits speaking engagements from groups of all kinds. She addresses
nurses’ associations, doctors, medical students, anybody who will listen.
Among the Intersex Society’s primary goals is ending the shame and secrecy surrounding being intersex, and toward that end, upon founding the society in
1996, Chase organized an intersex retreat. She wanted to help people, herself included, become more comfortable speaking openly about their condition.
So she invited the 62 intersex people she had made contact with for a weekend at her farm in Sonoma. Eleven came. Chase made a raw and moving documentary
of their time together, titled “Hermaphrodites Speak!” Ten people directly address the camera. Nine tell stories of surgery and lives nearly wrecked. One
man refers to himself as a monster. Another says she’s “damaged goods.” One person, however, did not have an operation, and she alone looks fit and confident,
sitting with great posture and seeming at home in her body. She grew up in a Catholic family, and when she first saw another naked woman up close, at age
12, her initial thought was, What’s wrong with her? She modeled her sexuality on Grace Jones and David Bowie. Her story, though just one account, is consistent
with the findings of Sarah Creighton and Catherine Minto, two London gynecologists. The two have reported, albeit with small samples, that genital surgery
is likely to have a negative impact on sexual function and quality of life.
In the last several years, the Intersex Society has formed an active speakers’ bureau, and at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, after Chase addressed the
genetic counselors, a young woman stood up to speak. A 20-year-old DePaul student, she was very pretty, in a chunky necklace, floral shirt and hiphugger
jeans. “I found out last year I was intersex; I was in my freshman women’s studies class,” the young woman, who asked not to be identified in this article,
said. Her professor was lecturing about various intersex conditions and started describing the symptoms — “No periods, can’t have children, ambiguous genitals.
I called my mom, and I said: ‘What’s it called? What do I have?’ ” It turned out she has partial-androgen-insensitivity syndrome, a phenomenon in which
fetuses with male chromosomes (XY) can’t properly metabolize male hormones and are born looking mostly like girls. “When she said the name I threw the
phone across the room and started crying. I cried for like a week.”
A few weeks after hearing this news, at the urging of Lynnell Stephani Long, a member of society’s speakers’ bureau who happened to be giving a talk around
that time to the women’s studies class, the young woman retrieved her medical records from Chicago Children’s Hospital. “They photocopied them for me and
I got them hot,” she told the group of counselors. “The first page said ‘pseudo male hermaphrodite.’ Just the words ‘male’ and ‘hermaphrodite’ made me
want to throw up.” Chase has since lobbied doctors to stop using the word “hermaphrodite.” Intersex, she contends, is a medical condition, not an identity,
and the consensus suggests using the term “disorders of sex development.”
The young woman continued speaking, her story raw and captivating. “I grew up a girl. I was always a tomboy, I wrestled, I played softball. I had bladder
problems when I was a kid, and when I went in to have my urethra fixed” — at age 3 — “they decided to give me a vaginoplasty and also a clitoridectomy,”
that is, surgically reshape the vagina and reduce the size of her clitoris. “When I finally learned all this, I spent a lot of time staring in the mirror”
— she pressed her hands flat against her cheeks and stretched her skin of her face back toward her ears — “going: ‘Do I look like a boy? Do I look like
a boy?’ Now I think being intersex is pretty weird but kind of sweet. I just wish someone had given me the tools to be able to talk about it.”
Chase’s position — that cosmetic genital operations on intersex children should be stopped and that children should be made to feel loved and accepted in
their unusual bodies — is still considered radical. Most people believe, reflexively, that irregular-looking genitals would be extremely difficult to live
with — for a child on a sports team, for an adult seeking love and sex — so why not try to make them look more normal? Katrina Karkazis, a medical anthropologist
at the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford, interviewed 19 clinicians and researchers of various specialties who treat intersex individuals, 15 intersex
adults and 15 parents of intersex children, and she found that a majority of the doctors and parents felt surgery was a good idea. “We chose surgery for
my daughter mainly because we did not want her to grow up questioning her sexual identity,” one mother explained about her baby, who was born with congenital
adrenal hyperplasia, a genetic defect of the adrenal glands that causes girls’ genitals to appear masculinized at birth. “We felt that she should look
like a female, so we chose the clitoroplasty and the vaginoplasty. We felt that she would have a better self-image if she did not have a ‘phallic structure’
and ‘scrotum.’ ”
Within the medical community, Chase has been successful in tempering the explicitness with which people publicly make this argument. As Chase has explained
innumerable times, intersex babies are not having difficulty with sexual identity or self-image. The parents are, and parental anxiety about the appearance
of a child’s genitals should be treated with counseling, not with surgery to the child. When I met Melvin Grumbach, one of the doctors who cared for Chase
as an infant and who went on to become one of the most respected pediatric endocrinologists in the country, he’d clearly heard Chase’s line of reasoning
many times. He participated in forming the consensus, and he also signed it. He knew what he was supposed to say. “We say, ‘Don’t do surgery unless it’s
necessary, unless it’s important,’ ” he told me in early summer in his office at the
University of California
in San Francisco, where he’s now an emeritus professor. “But I think if the external genitals are really masculinized, you work it out with the family.
I mean, good grief. What about the parents? The parents are raising the child. Don’t they have some say?”
A debate has emerged in recent years concerning if and when parents and doctors should medically shape children. Should very short children be treated with
growth hormone and surgery? Should children have multiple cosmetic operations to try to erase all traces of a cleft lip? In these instances, no studies
have shown that these medical interventions improve children’s quality of life. The same is true for operations on intersex children, though in truth,
few well-controlled studies exist that prove much of anything, in part because the success of these treatments cannot be meaningfully assessed for at least
20 years, and by then most patients are lost to follow-up.
Among the arguments against genital surgery is the fact that sexual identity does not derive solely, or perhaps even primarily, from a person’s genitals.
As Eric Vilain, professor of human
genetics,
pediatrics and urology at U.C.L.A., has shown, many genetic markers go into making a person male or female, and those markers affect many parts of the body.
In studies of mice, he has found 54 genes that work differently in male and female brains just 10 days after conception. In humans, we’ve all been taught,
and we’d like to believe, that being male or female is as a simple as having XY or XX chromosomes, but it is not. Even the
International Olympic Committee
acknowledged this when it suspended its practice of mandatory chromosomal testing for female athletes in 2000, reflecting current medical understanding
that a female who tests positive for a Y chromosome can still be a woman. (Chase is XX, and the reason for her intersex condition has never been fully
understood.)
Vilain has a clinic devoted to treating disorders of sex development, where he sees 40 to 50 new intersex patients a year. When he first left the lab and
started seeing patients, he said he couldn’t believe that surgeons were performing genital reconstructions with so little data. “To me it was shocking,
because where I come from, molecular genetics, we’re under extreme scrutiny,” Vilain told me on the phone in July. “If you want to show that a molecule
causes something, you have to show it with a bunch of excruciatingly painful controls. And here I was looking at a lot of surgeons who were saying, ‘We
think it’s good to do genital surgery early on because the children are doing better.’ So each time I would ask, ‘What’s the evidence that they’re doing
better?’ And in fact the answer is there’s no real evidence. Then I’d ask: ‘What does it mean doing better? How do you measure it? Are you talking quality
of life, or quality of sex life?’ And there was never any convincing answer.”
Other surgeons contend that not intervening presents its own risks. “There haven’t been any studies that would support doing nothing,” says Larry Baskin,
Grumbach’s protégé and current chief of pediatric urology at the University of California, San Francisco. “That would be an experiment: don’t do anything
and see what happens when the kid’s a teenager. That could be good, and that could also be worse than trying some intervention.” In Baskin’s view, being
intersex is a congenital anomaly that deserves to be corrected like any other. “If you have a child born with a cleft lip or cleft palate or an extra digit
or a webbed neck, I don’t know any family that wouldn’t want that repaired,” he told me. “Who would say, ‘You know what, let’s wait until Johnny is 20
years old and let him decide’? You probably get those fund-raising postcards from the Smile Train all the time. I can’t send those out, because you can’t
put pictures of penises on postcards. But if you could, I think I’d be able to raise a lot of money.”
Still, Baskin acknowledges that intersex is different: genital surgery has the potential to diminish sexual function, and how do parents weigh that risk?
Doubtless, surgical techniques have improved since Chase’s clitoridectomy — Baskin describes the old operations as being “like bloodletting,” when doctors
were only able to excise the clitoris, not try and reduce it. Now, he says, “We have a pretty good handle on where all the nerves are.” But whom are these
operations serving? Do parents have a right to take chances with a child’s future sexual function? And are we more willing to risk the sexual futures of
intersex kids? The vast majority of adults — parents and doctors included — find intersex bodies, especially sexualized intersex bodies, unsettling. Karkazis,
the medical anthropologist, heard from clinicians she interviewed of numerous cases of parents who initially decided against surgery but changed their
minds when their children started to explore their own sex organs, often around the age of 2. “Masturbation in little girls with clitoromegaly” — abnormal
enlargement of the clitoris — “is a situation I’ve encountered quite a few times, and that’s actually pushed many parents toward surgical intervention,”
one doctor told Karkazis. “The little girl was masturbating, and the parents just fell apart and were back in the office the next week for surgery.”
Chase says that her own mother’s discomfort with and ignorance about sexuality contributed to the decision to have Chase’s clitoris amputated. When Chase
flew from Japan to Florida to discuss her childhood with her mother, she also quizzed her mother about sex. “No, I don’t know what human genitals look
like, exactly,” Chase’s mother told her. “I have never looked at myself, and I never looked closely at my children. The doctor said your clitoris had to
go. Mine never meant anything to me, so I didn’t think it was wrong to remove yours.”
hase claims she wasn’t even a social human being before age 35, when she started trying to recover from being “extremely pathologically shy and withdrawn.”
She has built her personality alongside her activism, both growing steadily more refined over the years. As we traveled from Chicago to New Jersey, where
Chase was to address the New Jersey Psychological Association, she told me she was working very hard on presenting herself as “extremely moderate.”
To do this, Chase has been honing her arguments about who has the right to do what to other people’s bodies. Those arguments first took shape in 1998, when
Chase wrote an amicus brief to the constitutional court of the country of Colombia. At the time, Colombia was considering the ethical and human rights
implications of genital surgery, as it pertained to a case of a 6-year-old boy with a micropenis and the question of whether his penis should be reduced
to the size of a clitoris, his testes removed and a vagina constructed out of a piece of his ileum. Medical convention has traditionally held that the
phallic structure must be at least 2.5 centimeters long on baby boys and shorter than 1 centimeter for girls. And since it’s easier to surgically construct
a vagina than to make a penis, children with anatomies that fell in the middle were almost always raised as girls.
Building on work on the Colombia case, in 2004, Chase and the Intersex Society were involved in persuading the San Francisco Human Rights Commission to
hold a hearing and address the question of medical procedures on intersex infants in the United States. Over the course of three hours, dozens of intersex
people and parents of intersex people testified. When it came time to ratify the report, Chase addressed the commission. “What the Human Rights Commission
has done. . .is to recognize me as a human being,” she said. “You’ve stated. . .that just because I was born looking in a way that bothered other people
doesn’t mean that I should be excluded from human rights protections that are afforded to other people.”
This is the one time Chase was seen crying in public. “She lost it crying, and I thought, What a perfect time to lose it,” Chase’s friend Alice Dreger,
a bioethicist and medical historian at
Northwestern University
who writes about intersex and conjoined twins, told me. “I’ve never seen her cry in public since. She’s damaged in a way that she doesn’t get very emotional.”
One of Chase’s closest allies is William Reiner, a
University of Oklahoma
urologist who retrained as a child psychiatrist to better understand his intersex patients. Reiner, like Chase, says he thinks that a child transitioning
from his or her initially assigned gender to the opposite gender should not necessarily be viewed as a medical failure. A baby who was born with a penis-size
clitoris who had that penis removed and a vagina constructed out of a piece of her intestine but who ended up wanting to live as a man — that’s a failure.
Yet transitioning from one sex to another, says Reiner, is something a child can often handle. Transitioning, Reiner maintains, is much more difficult
for parents than for children, because parents have large and complex psychological and social landscapes, while children have relatively small and simple
ones. Reiner told me about a family he worked with in which a mother told her 7-year-old daughter that she was actually born a boy. “And within an hour
the child had chosen a boy name and announced he was a boy.” Reiner continued: “The youngest child that I’ve had that spontaneously changed sexes was 4ð.
This was one of the most assertive human beings I’ve met in my life. She cut off all of her hair one afternoon while Mom was at work.” When asked to explain,
the child said proudly, “Mom, I’ve been telling you: I’m a boy, and boys have short hair, so I cut off my hair.”
Over the same period that the Intersex Society became effective, Chase’s personal life bloomed. Chase married Robin Mathias, her partner of five years,
in 2004, when gay marriage was legal in San Francisco, and the two live on a hobby farm in Sonoma. In recent years, Chase has also made some important
professional connections, like David Sandberg, a psychologist at the
University of Michigan
whose work has been instrumental in raising questions about treating children with very short stature with growth hormone and who has now turned his attention
to intersex. Sandberg joined Chase for her presentation to the New Jersey Psychological Association, and afterward they talked late into the night. Both
Chase and Sandberg say that the first few days of an intersex child’s life can set a tone within a family that persists for many years. Both say that medical
professionals, right from the start, should behave as they would with any healthy baby and encourage parents to do the same — name the child, fall in love
and bond. “If we don’t care for the parents early on,” Sandberg said as we all sat around Chase’s hotel room, “we might lose the battles in terms of creating
circumstances for a happy life for this child, and perhaps sacrifice the quality of life for siblings too.”
The next morning, Chase came down to breakfast reading “On Becoming a Person,” a book by the psychologist Carl Rogers. Her goal of appearing mainstream
while publicly discussing fused labia and unusual gonads seems, at times, unattainable. Few would argue that her current message — that doctors and families
should not rush into surgery — is nothing if not prudent. Nonetheless, her long-term goal remains the eradication of infant genital surgery for the sole
purpose of altering appearance, and this continues to sound outlandish to many medical professionals and to most of the general public as well.
Over coffee, Sandberg told Chase that he, too, could not yet join her in taking the position that cosmetic genital surgery on infants is always wrong, and
Chase was trying hard to understand why.
“But is there ever a good reason for reducing the size of a clitoris?” Chase pressed Sandberg.
“If the parent cannot tolerate it,” Sandberg replied.
Chase paused, struggling to empathize with a mother unable to raise a child because of the size of that child’s clitoris. Chase has spent her adult life
explaining why such a position is unethical. The logic she has constructed is nearly unassailable. Yet for most of us, Chase’s thinking is emotionally
difficult to embrace. For starters, we tend not to be very rational when it comes to our children and to our genitals. Complicating matters, in treating
intersex, as opposed to, say, a heart condition, what feels best for the parent in the short term may not turn out to be what is best for the child over
time. Finally, parents feel entitled to make decisions based on the (sometimes false) sense that they know what’s right for their families, and the reality
is that in the case of intersex children, the right treatment for one child, or even the majority of children, will not be the right treatment for all.
Even Sarah Creighton, one of the London gynecologists who reported that intersex patients who have not had surgical procedures tend to fare better, has
noted that no treatment is guaranteed or even likely to make the lives of those babies born intersex pain-free. “These are not all happy people, either,”
she has said. “Some of them have isolated, difficult lives. Some of the surgery patients are fine, and some of them are not, and it’s very hard to separate
all the things out.”
Over time, the public may grow to accept Chase’s idea that we, as families and neighbors, have an obligation to shed our own biases and accept bodies that
are neither neatly male nor neatly female. Or maybe we will not get there, and our discomfort with ambiguity will never fade.
Elizabeth Weil is a contributing writer for the magazine. Her last article was about a “wrongful birth” lawsuit.
Tags: disability, queer
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![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/93194978/1511936) | | From: | ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) cvirtue |
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| Date: | September 25th, 2006 01:15 pm (UTC) |
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Excellent article. Part of the problem is that many parents don't realize how sexual little kids can be, in a very innocent way. It feels good to touch themselves, so they do it. Even with my two, though, there's no inter-kid sex play, just private. So the parents of little girls think that reducing the clitoris will fix this problem (get rid of all those nasty boy things), just like the anti-masturbatory folks of 100 years ago thought. What the article doesn't cover, probably because it's so contentious, is that circumcision is also a cosmetic genital surgery. I hope that occurrs to the readers, though. the idea that we perform questionable medical procedures
on certain patients, like intersex people and conjoined twins, when we consider those patients to be less than human. I think we'd have to look at this with more granularity to figure this one out. The problem is that parents do all sorts of things for minor children, "normal" bodied or not, which we would not do for/to an adult. Some really mild examples: hold them still in order to wash their faces; compel them to do acts of various sorts (clean their rooms, use the potty); ship them off, sometimes against their will, to school. Do we do these things because they're less than human? I don't think so. We do them because they're not yet adults, which is not the same thing. As they age, they get to decide more things on their own. I agree with the Chase, that any cosmetic surgery should be decided by the child when s/he is old enough to give consent.
| | From: | kestrell |
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| Date: | September 25th, 2006 02:00 pm (UTC) |
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There is a very definite distinction, however, between the parental behaviors you describe and the surgical procedures which permanently alter the child's body. Television programs such as "Nip and Tuck" and the news magazines which mention new miracle medical procedures rarely if ever address how all invasive procedures are potentially traumatzing to both the body and the mind, in particular when the mind is that of a child who may not be able to understand or may not be given all the information needed to understand what is happening, but will still manage to understand that such pain and fear are inflicted because of being different. Being held in order to be cleaned up is pretty apparent even tot he youngest child; being handed over to strnagers so that they can drug you, stick you with needles, and change your body, which is not in any way you see sick, that's the stuff of the creepiest science fiction nightmares. If it ain't broke, don't try to pretend you're fixingit.
(replying to the comment, so you don't get the whole original article in your inbox again)
there seemed to be no effect at all. Oh, yes,
wait a minute. Yes, there was one thing. You stopped speaking. I guess you didn't speak for about six months.
I just have to say, that's the scariest thing I've read in a long time.
All these parents who "don't want their child questioning their sexuality" -- so they think it's better to *lie* to them about their sexuality? Not in my universe.
ITA. I understand the desire for simplicity, but not when it requires falsehood. Better to be honest and complicated.
I have heard a lot lately (I've been paying attention lately) about the lengths that parents will go to acheive normality for their offspring. Unfortunately, a frightening number of these lengths appear to involve catering to the standards of elementary school children, even though those standards change all the time. It is terrifying and illogical.
| | From: | kestrell |
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| Date: | September 25th, 2006 04:09 pm (UTC) |
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That is precisely the quote which gave me the heebiejeebies, because it echoes my own childhood experiences. My own family commented on how social/talkative I was as a baby and toddler, but then I "just stopped" talking at about 3, which is when I was put int eh hospital for my eye problems. What people see during visiting hours isn't much like what most of a child's experience of hospitals is like, where strange men come along and wake you up to shine lights in your eyes and talk about you as if you aren't there, or nurses stick needles in you and barely talk to you, and people keep saying things like "you aren't trying hard enough" when you fail to perform the tests correctly, or if you get depressed or scared about any of what is going on. Invasive medical procedures and hospitalization are traumatic events, even for adults. Enforced conformation isn't just a matter of physical bodies or sexuality, there is always a psychological aspect, and that is often far more traumatic, because such expectations are so arbitrary.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/7859168/1391196) | | From: | siderea |
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| Date: | September 25th, 2006 07:09 pm (UTC) |
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I just have to say, that's the scariest thing I've read in a long time.
Oh, I dunno. I think it runs neck and neck with "The doctor said your clitoris had to go. Mine never meant anything to me, so I didn’t think it was wrong to remove yours."
I'll grant that that's a scary bit as well. But, as much as I like sex (which is a lot), I find words far more central to my sense of self. The joined ideas that a) one could lose them for a long time and b) someone who (allegedly) loved one could view that as a trivial loss -- I just found to be horrific.
| | From: | cvirtue |
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| Date: | September 25th, 2006 07:29 pm (UTC) |
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I had the sense that the example in the article, the loss of words was a puzzling and mysterious thing, not that it was judged as trivial. They plain didn't understand that it was a major symptom of a problem.
It was sufficiently insignificant (to them) that it could leave the parent's first, gut response to the question be "there seemed to be no effect at all." ))Shudder((
Hi Alex! I like you thoughts!
| | From: | cvirtue |
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| Date: | September 25th, 2006 04:05 pm (UTC) |
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Yep, rabid agreement here.
| | From: | siderea |
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| Date: | September 25th, 2006 07:15 pm (UTC) |
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So the parents of little girls think that reducing the clitoris will fix this problem (get rid of all those nasty boy things), just like the anti-masturbatory folks of 100 years ago thought.
Word.
Do we do these things because they're less than human? I don't think so. We do them because they're not yet adults, which is not the same thing.
Are you sure it's not the same thing? I'm not convinced that for most people there is actually any real conceptual or emotional differentiation between "not yet adult" and "less than human". I often get the feeling that people think of children as human only on a technicality.
(And, come to think of it, that might contribute to the readiness many pro-life people seem to have to equate collections of a few hundred cells with human beings; if you have the stance that we already have a class of beings which are obviously only humans on a technicality, then it's no cognitive dissonance to expand it to other such beings/things by fiat.)
| | From: | cvirtue |
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| Date: | September 25th, 2006 07:26 pm (UTC) |
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I often get the feeling that people think of children as human only on a technicality.
While I wouldn't doubt that there are people like that, I wouldn't expect it to be a large section of the USA. Although I suppose it depends on your definitions, and where you draw the lines.
I could say that I think of my kids as fully human, but that probably doesn't hold any rhetorical water, because probably people I would identify as putting kids in a subhuman category, would say the same thing.
| | From: | siderea |
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| Date: | September 25th, 2006 08:13 pm (UTC) |
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I wouldn't expect it to be a large section of the USA.
Oh, when I say "I often get the feeling", I mean from encountering families with children, from how children are depicted in the media, from discussing with people how their parents treated them, etc. It seems downright pervasive to me.
probably people I would identify as putting kids in a subhuman category, would say the same thing.
Yeah. :)
| | From: | cvirtue |
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| Date: | September 25th, 2006 08:37 pm (UTC) |
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So you mean that treating children as subhuman in the USA is the norm, from what you've observed?
Could you give me some examples of "normal" family behavior which treat kids as subhuman? I want to figure out where your baseline is, because otherwise we won't be able to figure out if we're going to be agreeing or disagreeing.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/31415242/2583112) | | From: | rufinia |
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| Date: | September 26th, 2006 04:38 pm (UTC) |
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Take a look at The Nanny Diaries. The characters, as I understand, are based on real people, and there's a trend of "pregnancy as accessory" and "baby as accessory." You see it in the media all the time- do these parents all care about thier children as human beings? They don't act like it. Parents who over-schedule their kids and encourage them to over achieve so they can get into the best preschool, the best elementary the best high school, the best college- and don't care so much about letting their kids be kids? Kids who, when they get into those best schools realize they've never had a chance to figure out what they want, they've been doing what thier told and being who they've been told to be, they're unhappy, they are stressed, and the parents don't seem to *care*. I went to a high school full of kids like this, and at the time, I hated myself becuase I couldn't seem to compete with them. Now I see that I'm something sort of like a full person, and they aren't.
| | From: | cvirtue |
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| Date: | September 26th, 2006 05:02 pm (UTC) |
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The Nanny Diaries was dire; it upset me for days.
I wonder if there's any sort of study about this topic? We hear the bad examples in the news, like the parents who turned their kids' cribs into cages and left them alone for hours at a time, with no attention, cleanliness, etc. But the average examples are missing from the media.
| | From: | rufinia |
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| Date: | September 26th, 2006 05:11 pm (UTC) |
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Oh, there probably has been studies. I am fairly certain that the examples of kids being locked into cages and the like are extremely rare. We think we hear about them a lot because they are *so* shocking they stay in the conscious and in straight numbers, there are millions of kids who are not treated like that to a handful that are (whihc is not to make it less horrible, because it is.)
However, that not really what I was referring to. I suspect there are a lot of parents who had kids because "that's what you do." And they turn out to be okay to good parents and there are some that have kids because "it's the in thing to do." And those kids are treated as the latest Prada handbag (is Prada still in? I can never tell) when it's handy to have the kids be seen publically, and shunted off to secondary caregivers (nurse, governess, nanny, tutor, companion; pick your century, this isn't anything new) when the parent is tired of being a parent. How involved do you think Britney Spears is with her two kids?
I have seen plenty of people who were pushed by their parents to be a certain kid of way, and in some cases, I am sure that it was less about what was good for the kid and more about what looked good for the parents. Black belt in judo by 15, top 5% in high school graduating class, IB diploma, fluent in Japanese, went to the Air Force Academy where soemone else took over telling her who her friends would be, what was best for her and what she needed to do. I sometimes wonder how she would have been if her parents hadn't pushed her so hard.
The average examples aren't missing, people don't see them, because they're so convinced they're doing the right things- if the kid is alwasy overscheduled, he can't get involved with trouble, gangs, drugs right?
If you define good parenting as giving your children all the opportunities you didn't have, the overscheduling and hyper competitiveness makes a sort of sense. There is also the expectation that many people want their children to conform to their and their peer group's expectations, and the parents were raised that way, so why shouldn't they raise their kids the same way?
I don't agree with the idea, but I can see it, and see how it can be an attractive idea, especially among people who are all about conforming to the peer group idea.
The thing that squicks me out at present was N's daycare introducing some extracurricular enrichment classes in reading, math, and Spanish. For 3 year olds. And I seriously thought about it (for a minute) because well, isn't it a good thing, to have such opportunities? It is seductive, this comparing what other people are doing for/with their kids and thinking that we need to do it too, for his sake.
| | From: | rufinia |
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| Date: | September 27th, 2006 02:22 am (UTC) |
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Not having a dog in this race (I really have fallen in love with this phrase), I don't know how much weight anyone should give my opinion. But.
I am under the impression that good parent is raising a sane, adjusted kid, with a sense of who he is, and with tools he needs to make his way in the world. And overscheduling, over stressing, over loading a three year old does not look, to me, to be a way to accomplish that. You look at the kids who get into Harvard and MIT and everything they have done in their 18 years and wonder- when the HELL did they have time to be kids? They nearly killed themselves to get into these schools, and they will kill themselves to get through. For who? Do they want this, or are they doing this for their parents?
(I say this, being someone who is seriously considering applying to Harvard for a PhD program.)
(But then I taught myself how to read when mom read too slow for my taste.)
About the college students: I'm not sure I can tell, from the outside; certainly not as a blanket statement. Speaking for myself as a (technical) grownup, I stand in awe of the people on LJ who are going to school and working full time and keeping up with their outside lives and still having long philosophical discussions. I don't think I could manage the work and school parts of that! For some people, it may well have been a family pressure issue; for others, it may have been an internal drive. They may not realize themselves until the opportunity to make a choice comes their way and they decide on their own.
I agree with your statement about being a good parent, that describes my view well. The devil, as they say, is in the details. : )
| | From: | rufinia |
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| Date: | September 27th, 2006 03:05 am (UTC) |
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Hah. Well, I went through high school and college mostly slacking, so this over-achievment thing was a late blooming development. My parents are incredibly chuffed up and proud and stuff, but I honestly believe they would be okay with whatever I did, as long as I was happy and it was legal.
And hey, I learn things like how to beat drug tests, so it's fun.
| | From: | cvirtue |
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| Date: | September 27th, 2006 10:08 am (UTC) |
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And overscheduling, over stressing, over loading a three year old does not look, to me, to be a way to accomplish that.
Agreement. The parents are certainly without good sense -- but I'm not sure they're without good intentions.
You look at the kids who get into Harvard and MIT and everything they have done in their 18 years and wonder- when the HELL did they have time to be kids?
I knew lots of these kids when I was that age, and they seemed like normal kids to me. Maybe things have changed.
| | From: | siderea |
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| Date: | September 27th, 2006 02:05 am (UTC) |
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rufinia's grabbed a great example; there are others. I'm particularly thinking of how easy it seems for so many parents to slide from "I'm the parent so of course I get to make decisions for my child about their bodies" to, oh, sending them to one of those scary camps for breaking rebellious teenagers (both for "bad" kids and to straighten gay kids). That's an obviously extreme example, but it shows a point towards the end of a spectrum of disrespect for the bodies of their children, for their children's persons. And I would argue that on that continuum, further in that direction than most people want to admit, lies the sort of micromanagement control that our culture says it is normal for parents to try to exert over their teenagers' dress and hairstyle. One of the things which leaps out at me from the narratives of people who have been physically abused by their parents, is how common it is that those parents persisted in certain body-boundary-crossing behavior long after it had ceased being appropriate. There is nothing wrong with the mother of a six year old sticking a hand unceremoniously down her daughter's shirt to grab some cookie crumbs out of it. But that same behavior is seriously creepy when that daughter is sixteen. And when you consider just how intensely, how rigorously we humans experience those sorts of boundaries -- taboos, really -- on interpersonal touch, it seems very clear that the only way for a mother to do something like that to her teenage (or middle aged!) daughter is for her to have done something very fundamental with categories. There are no other humans she would do such a thing to: not to friends, not to coworkers, not to employees, not to lovers, not even her spouse or her parents. Clearly she has a special category of people it is OK to do such a thing to, a category into which she has put her daughter. And it is a category which is a profound and -- IMO, scary -- one of "People I can do things to which I wouldn't even consider doing to any other human." It really does look like it is a category of "not really human". And if we posit that's what's going on in the deeper, inarticulate, categorizing level of some people's minds, towards their children, then suddenly the sexual abuse of children makes a certain sense it didn't before. At least I have always wondered at those who abuse children, "What on earth made you think that was an acceptible thing to do? Or did you just think you'd never be caught? You committed a crime and left a witness and never worried about getting caught?? What were you thinking? What on earth is happening in your mind that made that sequence of actions rational?" Well, if someone has a category of "people who aren't really humans" because it grew out of "people I get to do things to I would never dream of doing to anyone else", then it's a natural carelessness to forget that non-human will become a human who might be inclined to press charges. That's the thing: it seems to me very common for people to behave towards their children not only as if they could do anything they felt like for any reason at all, but to behave as if their child were never going to be an adult to whom the parent might be accountable. And the number of parents who seem surprised that their children turn into adults, when those adults are then very unhappy with the conduct of their parents, boggles me. [continued]
| | From: | cvirtue |
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| Date: | September 27th, 2006 10:09 am (UTC) |
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I think your analysis of the sexual abuse "not human" type is valid.
| | From: | siderea |
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| Date: | September 27th, 2006 02:07 am (UTC) |
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[continued] Parents in our society have more power over their children than any other adult has over any other sort of person (even more than over an adult who has been ruled incompetant). Or put another way, the parent/child relationship has a greater power differential than any other in our culture. That's a staggering amount of power when you think about it: it's as close as you can get in our society to absolute power. It should come as no surprise that there are a lot of people who are corrupted by it. Some are corrupted in obvious, flamboyant ways, committing atrocities against their kids. But I think there's a lot of others who are corrupted by that power, who simply don't have the sadistic appetites which lead them into such crimes; the power goes to their heads, but they are content to treat their children like dolls to manipulate however they wish, from the sort of life programming rufinia mentioned (which can and does extend into meddling in or downright controling the adult child's choice of career and mate) to dressing and clothing them like toys to using them as racehorses in beauty pagaents, spelling bees, little leagues, etc. I think that our culture is extremely threatened by any discussion of that power as power. Witness how any discussion of it quickly garners deflecting "but it's really the kids who have the power" protests, usually in the form of folksy humor. I think our culture is very much in denial about it, which is always a bad thing where power is concerned. One cannot expect people to exercise power ethically, responsibly, morally when that power is denied. And certainly we don't have, and aren't going to have, a big open dialog in our culture about the moral and ethical challenges of wielding that power responsibly and thoughtfully when to admit or at least state that parents have power is a taboo. So instead, the big dialogs about parenting in our culture are about whether specific choices are good or bad. Breast vs. bottle; attachment vs. spoiling; corporal punishment; daycare; etc. etc. etc. We argue about what choices people should make, as if one size fits all, instead of arguing about how people should go about making choices.
As the latest local example, I assume you saw the article about the woman from ME who was kidnapped by her parents?
I don't think that it is very likely we as a culture are going to have any discussion of the wielding of power in almost any arena, since in order to begin such a discussion someone has to recognize their powerlessness.
| | From: | siderea |
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| Date: | September 27th, 2006 02:45 am (UTC) |
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Yeah, saw that.
And the fact that there two cases of mugging-caeserians within, oh, a week or so of one another. In at least one case, I gather the husband of the alleged perp has said she was much more interested in having (i.e. possessing) a baby than in raising the children she had. That's the case in which she also murdered the three children of the pregnant woman she slashed.
Now, to be clear, I think this was Big Crazy in the wild. But even so, if there's a clearer case of people thinking of children as possessions than a perfectly fertile mother of two who kills someone else (and her three other children) for a newborn, I can't imagine what it is, unless it involves taxidermy.
| | From: | cvirtue |
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| Date: | September 27th, 2006 10:13 am (UTC) |
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There is a lot of *romance* in this culture about having a baby. Not about raising kids, but about the baby. The reality of having a baby is much different, *and* if you have more than one kid, you don't get to do the romance-of-baby thing at all. Loss of the 'promised' romance can be very disappointing; crushing, even. (In this, I speak from experience.)
So I'm not sure that case was entirely "baby as posession" but a perversion of the baby-romance scenario. Big Crazy, no doubt, but possibly a different Big Crazy.
| From: | (Anonymous) |
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| Date: | September 27th, 2006 01:28 pm (UTC) |
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when to admit or at least state that parents have power is a taboo.
I am so burning in common-culture hell, then! I've discussed my power as Mom, and how they'll acquire more power as they get older, with my kids, even! I might as well buy them sex toys!
Ahem.
instead of arguing about how people should go about making choices.
Yeah, because talking about how to make choices implies rational thought habits, which are generally not taught.
The crumbs-in-the-blouse example is a good one, because it illustrates something I have found critical, which is reviewing parental behaviors for appropriateness relative to the child's development. It's difficult, because behaviors get to be a habit, but it's essential, because otherwise everyone is discontent.
| | From: | cvirtue |
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| Date: | September 27th, 2006 01:29 pm (UTC) |
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This comment was made by me, sorry to not log in!
I often get the feeling that people think of children as human only on a technicality.
Interesting notion. Expandable, too, I think. Foreigners, immigrants, women... Lots of pesky technicalities, these days.
| | From: | kestrell |
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| Date: | September 25th, 2006 07:31 pm (UTC) |
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Which leads to the question: when would an individual be considered old enough/competent enough to make this choice? And if the child/adult made a choice which the family/doctor/group didn't agree with, wouldn't the first argument made be that the person trying to make a choice was incompetent? This is where child/disability/queer issues often overlap, becuase the "less than" label often switches to the "insane/depressed/incompetent" arguement pretty quickly once the "wrong" choice is made. As queer and disability studies often shows, there is rarely just one issue being addressed, but instead often a number of issues being clumped together. After all, if you can't know with certainty the gender of your child, you can't say with certainty whether that child, once an adolescent, is going to be having straight or gay sex.
you can't say with certainty whether that child, once an adolescent, is going to be having straight or gay sex.
Or sex that defies the common labels entirely...
| | From: | siderea |
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| Date: | September 25th, 2006 08:08 pm (UTC) |
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When would an individual be considered old enough/competent enough to make this choice? Eighteen. Elective cosmetic surgery properly requires the person getting the surgery to be legally able to sign a binding contract.
That's my vote.
| | From: | cvirtue |
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| Date: | September 25th, 2006 08:12 pm (UTC) |
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That's what I told Arthur about his foreskin.
About parents you're right. There are a big variety of misbeliefs that hold generation of uor parents.
About parents you're right. There are a big variety of misbeliefs that hold generation of our parents.
About parents you're right. There is a big variety of misbeliefs that hold generation of our parents. |
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