To Have Is to Hold

What's wrong with trying to engineer your child's sexual orientation?

Or more specifically, what's wrong with taking a steroid, while you're pregnant, to try to increase the odds that your female fetus will someday grow up to be a straight woman who gives you grandchildren, and not a lesbian daughter more interested in puppies?

I have a funny feeling I'm about to get hit by various versions of that question, since Ellen Feder of American University, Anne Tamar-Mattis of Advocates for Informed Choice, and I just submitted a new post to Bioethics Forum revealing what we think is the first organized medical "paradigm" for attempting to prevent homosexuality in the womb.

Let me give five answers to that question. Maybe six.

Can You Hear Us Now?

Why is a Cornell doctor vibrating little girls' clitorises . . . and is this really medicine?

In a brief article entitled "Bad Vibrations" just posted at the Hastings Center's Bioethics Forum, my colleague Ellen Feder and I express our shock over the follow-up techniques being used by pediatric urologist Dix Poppas at Weill Medical College of Cornell University on girls whose clitorises Poppas has cut down in size.

There's no point in my repeating here what we say at Bioethics Forum. Instead, I want to use this space to answer some questions I'm already getting from people about this scene.

Sugar, Boys, and Sugar Boys

Ok, here goes: I'm going to see how many people I can offend by suggesting that maybe many little gay boys, like many little girls, are made up of sugar and spice and everything nice.

In North America, I suffer from a terrible disease. When the disease flares up, I am virtually incapacitated by the symptoms. But if I go to many other parts of the world-for example, most of Asia, I am miraculously cured. There's something in the North American environment that makes me sick, and that thing is largely absent in Asia. What is it?

Milk. It took me a long time to figure out that my body can't tolerate lactose, the sugar in milk, long enough that I also managed to develop an allergy to the milk protein casein. If I lived in a part of the world where milk was not part of the adult diet, I'd be fine. In fact, that's most of the world; scientists estimate that eighty percent of the world's adult human population is lactose intolerant. Thus, most of the world's cuisines skip milk. Frankly, from an evolutionary perspective, it's rather freaky to keep eating milk past the age of weaning. Y'all are freaks. I'm normal.

Except in North America, that is, where I live in constant fear of accidentally ingesting milk. I've learned the hard way that Americans sometimes hide milk in margarine, Cool Whip, baba ganoush, "vegan" muffins, Tums (Tums!), French fries, and, increasingly--tragically--beer.

Now, as my good friend Paul Vasey, the super sharp Canadian sex researcher, packs to head off for his annual research trip to Samoa, I have been thinking about how my milk problem is analogous to what Paul has been tracing in his work with regard to male androphilia. "Androphilia" refers to being sexually attracted to males. Paul uses the term "male androphilia" where other researchers talk about "male homosexuality" because Paul studies a special population of people in Samoa, the fa'afafine.

Of Kinks, Crimes, and Kinds: The Paraphilias Proposal for the DSM-5

When is a kinky interest really sick?

That’s the central question the Paraphilias Sub-Work Group of the American Psychiatric Association has had to face as they’ve developed proposed revisions for the DSM-5. Pity those given the task of trying to figure out how, when, and why to medicalize or de-medicalize everything from asexuality to zoophilia (the latter being the sexual interest known to less progressive types as bestiality).

Looming over the whole task is the ugly history of the pathologizing of homosexuality. As I teach my students every year, it took until 1973 for the American Psychiatric Association to stop officially categorizing all forms of homosexuality as mental disorders. And that official demedicalization happened not because a happy and spontaneous consensus emerged that the science supported the change, but because gay psychiatrists understandably had had enough.

Nowadays, you can find self-appointed representatives of every sexual interest who will try to align their history with homosexuality, because, like the gay psychiatrists of the early 1970s, they want out of the DSM. The bondage folks, the zoophiles – even the pedophiles want out. At least the vocal ones do. They’ll tell you that, like gay men and lesbians, they never should have been in the book in the first place.

I would have been watching the progress of the Paraphilias Sub-Work Group regardless; as an historian of sexuality, I’m professionally fascinated to see where it will all go. But as it turns out, I’ve had something of a ringside seat, because my friend Ray Blanchard has been serving as the chair of the sub-work group.

Intersex and Sports: Back to the Same Old Game

More craziness around sex divisions in sports.

If you’re trying to make sense of the “decisions” just made in Miami about sex-typing in sports, and you’re struggling, join the club.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) presumably tasked the group of expert physicians who just met in Miami with the job of coming up with a fair way to decide who should be allowed to compete as a woman in cases of sex ambiguity. Instead, the group “did not address fairness” according to Dr. Joe Leigh Simpson of Florida International University.

What the group did apparently conclude is this: anomalous sex is always primarily a medical condition, athletes must submit to “treatment” if they want to compete, and expert doctors will play by an “I know it when I see it” approach as these doctors personally decide, on a case-by-case basis, who will and won’t compete.

Sex at the Office: The Other Problems

David Letterman’s admission of fooling around with his employees has got me thinking about sex at the academic office, and particularly about sexual relations between professors and their graduate students, or between senior and junior faculty. Especially since sex researchers appear to be famous for engaging in this behavior.

I don’t happen to be one of those feminists who thinks that sex between someone in a superior role and someone in an inferior role can never really be consensual. I think men and women can actually be grown up enough to manage sexual advances at the office in a way that is respectful and fair.

How and Why to Take "Gender Identity Disorder" Out of the DSM

As a wizened gender rights advocate, I know better than to assume the activists making the most noise are actually representative of “the community” they insist they represent. So, while American transgender activists have lately been fairly unified and very vocal about the need to remove “Gender Identity Disorder” (GID) from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), I know that not all trans people agree.