Doctors Receive $1.2 mil to Study "What's Wrong With Intersex"

[Emi]

Update on earlier Australian news article... - ek

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US$1.2 mill for intersex research

By Judy Skatssoon, National Medical Writer
SYDNEY, July 14
Australian Associated Press

Australian and US researchers have been awarded a $US1.2 million ($A1.83 million) grant to study the genetic causes of intersex conditions.

Associate Professor Vincent Harley of the Prince Henry's Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne and Dr Eric Vilain of the University of California will receive the grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) tomorrow.

Intersex conditions are the result of DNA abnormalities which can cause a person to be born with the wrong, or ambiguous, sex organs.

For example, they may be born genetically male but with female sex organs, or born genetically female but with fused labia and a penis-like clitoris.

Prof Harley said the study would involve some 30 intersex patients from Australia and overseas, as well as genetically engineered intersex mice.

"We have a bank of patients and the aim ultimately is to understand what is wrong in those patients," Prof Harley told AAP.

"We're looking at how sex determination is initiated and the genes involved in that process."

Dr Vilain said the most common intersex condition was congenital adrenal hyperplasia, or CAH, which accounted for 80 per cent of all intersex conditions.

CAH causes the clitoris to become enlarged so it looks like a penis and fuses the vaginal lips so they resemble a scrotum.

He said the study had major implications for diagnosing and treating intersex conditions, as well as helping assign a gender to intersex babies.

"When a baby is born intersex it's quite traumatic for the family so knowing the molecular explanation for this syndrome (helps) perform rapid diagnosis," Dr Vilain said.

"So we can say to the patients ... your baby will be more comfortable in a male or female gender."

Prof Harley and Dr Vilain have recently discovered the genetic mechanism behind an intersex condition known as Campomelic dysplasia, which results in dwarfism as well as sex reversal.

The finding will be published tomorrow in the international journal Human Molecular Genetics.

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Also see ipdxWIRE Intersex News: http://www.ipdx.org/news/000034.html

[RGMCjim]

I'd like to apply for a grant to study what's wrong with Doctors who study intersex. Cripe, here's a doctoral thesis just dying to be done.

Take a look at this guy. He has so many sexual/gender hang ups that his first concern is how uncomfortable parents might be with a child that isn't clearly male or female. He's not actually qualified to address the issues of parents of intersexed children - this is just his personal phobic reaction. He's not alone, this seems all too common in the medical establishment. How crazy is it to hack up a child's body because you think the parents might be "uncomfortable" with it? So much for the "patiend centered approach", the Hypocratic Oath (first do no harm...) and the "Patient's Bill of Rights"!

I'm the adoptive parent of a child with cerebral palsy and my partner's daughter has a rare degenerative neuromuscular disease. Trust me, parents get counceling, support groups, LOTS of education and emotional support when they have to parent a child with other types of physical differences. What makes us so different? Why didn't our parents get that? Um....it's not us, surely the difference is that many of the people who gravitate toward studying intersex have emotional problems with sex/orientation/gender. Are they studying us to try to find answers to their own internal conflicts?

Secondly, his gender/sex hangups spill over to the way he refers to human genitals. You can't get out of High School in the USA, let alone college anatomy, let alone medical school (and I'd bet a month's pay this is true of Australia as well) without learning that a clitoris and penis are the same structure, labia and scrotum are the same structures... they differ by degrees of development. They are not mutually exclusive of each other. Yet look how he describes intersex genitals. "The clitoris is so mishapen as to look "like" a penis, the fused labia have the appearance of a scrotum." He knows perfectly well that the result of a clit continuing development is a penis. He is imposing artificial, misleading and patently erroneous differences to make our genitals seem malformed and distorted. You'd think that comparing a penis to a clit is like comparing a tongue to a foot. What's his problem? Why does he feel he needs to widen the distance between male & female?

Think of the money we could make off these guys if we had only got our sex therapy degrees!

So many of the "medical" mavens that are interested in intersex seem to have serious gender/orientation/sex issues. Study "what's wrong with the intersexed"? The taxpayers might do better to fund studies on what's wrong with the Frankenstein wannabe's who are peeking up our shorts.

Do we really want to allow these people to continue to define us to others and ourselves?

Jim

[Betsy]

Originally posted by RGMCjim
So much for the "patiend centered approach", the Hypocratic Oath (first do no harm...) and the "Patient's Bill of Rights"!


That's why I call most of our presentations "First Stop The Harm" This title is particularly effective when talking to medical students.

The doctor getting these funds called the parents the patients, which is a fundamental error. The parents are not the patient and their hangups must not be fixed by cutting their child.

They also think they can determine gender by genetic makeup which we already know is a faulty way of thinking. How can they possibly predict what gender an intersex baby will be more comfortable in? What about "happy in"?

Betsy

[RGMCjim]

Betsy,

This man should not be practicing medicine, or doing research. He is so ignorant of human sexuality and identity development he doesn't have the most basic idea of how it all happens. Using genetics to predict identity? He's a quack with emotional issues - I wonder what type of Mad Hatter's Tea Party approved the study and authorized the funding.

Jim