Seeking Volunteers for Interviews

[Jennifer Fortad]

I am writing to ask for your assistance

I am sensitive to the fact that past researchers have objectified the intersex community and treated many as if they were guinea pigs and lab rats. I hope no one participating in this study will ever feel that I have done this. I hope having Dr. Milton Diamond as my research advisor will ensure that this possibility is avoided.

My motivation for doing gender based research is the feeling of betrayal and outrage toward the medical community when I first learned about the experiences of intersex children through the work of Phyllis Burke (Gender Shock), ISNA, and GIRES. I've spent the past 2 years (26 months to be exact) designing a sociological study that can offer up some scientific evidence to convince the medical establishment and society at large that infant genital surgery is a travesty, mislead by their notion that gender is socially constructed. Its the best I can offer, but trying to tear down the 30 years of feminist and social theory that came out of Money's early publications requires just that.

I believe that in order to change gender and sex based discrimination we need to challenge the larger assumptions that sex and gender are the same, and that gender is only a matter of socialization.

I am currently conducting a study of gender identity formation as a mix
of social and biological elements, using sociological methods to expand
on the work of Dr. Milton Diamond. Mickey is actually a member of the
committee overseeing this study, and has had a huge influence on my
work. As a sociologist, I have been dismayed that little has been
studied or written on gender that factors in his work: almost all
sociological theorizing has cast gender as exclusively socially
constructed, a perspective that I have found too many exceptions to for
me to embrace.

Contemporary social problems directly related to society?s ?one-size-fits-all? understanding of gender include the treatment of intersex conditions as medical emergencies in need of a cure, the construction of deviance around gender bending behaviors, and the classification of cross-gender identification as a mental disorder.

This study is directed toward improving our understanding of how gender identity develops at the individual level, as well as to document the impact that rigid definitions of gender have for individuals as members of society.

Volunteers of all sexes, races, ethnicities, genders, sexualities, and nationalities are being sought for this study. Participation is strictly confidential. The responses will be aggregated for analysis, protecting the anonymity of participants.

As a volunteer, you will be asked to discuss how you think of yourself as a man, a woman, or occupying an intermediate position in the gender continuum.

Interviews can be done in writing, using the internet as a means of receiving and returning the interview questionnaire. This will ensure complete privacy and confidentiality for participants.

If you would like to volunteer for this study please contact me by email at jfortado@<hidden>

Jennifer Fortado
Department of Sociology
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
:confused:

[Sunshine1]

From the ISNA

" Suggested Guidelines for Non Intersex Individuals Writing about Intersexuality and Intersex People.

by Emi Koyama Editing suggestions by Cherly Chase

Number 1 to 11 are great and I hope you go to the web page and read them all but Number four stuck in my mind and I'll post it here. I particulary liked the last part when it comes to a survey like yours.

#4. Do not judge the politics and narratives of intersex people or movement based on how useful they are to your political agenda (or agendas) Intersex people are no more responsible for dismantling gender roles or compulsory hetrosexuality than anyone else is. "

[Jennifer Fortad]

Sunshine,
Your message implies I have a political agenda: I do not. It also implies I am unfamiliar with Emi's guidelines: I am not.

I am interviewing ALL people in an effort to counter popular assumptions that gender identity (not gender, gender identity) is socially constructed when there is already scientific evidence that supports the theory that prenatal neurology is involved.
If I were using Intersex people to dismantle gender, I would not have constructed a study that includes EVERYONE.
I could have a study inwhich I only interview people with traditional same sex-gender identities, but then I would be doing the same thing every other gender study has done: framing gender as a dichotomous variable, which it is not.
Results from this study will document the broad range of how individuals self-define as being somewhere along the gender spectrum.

Take care and be well.

[Sunshine1]

Your reponse wasn't all that sensitive but rather defensive and crisp. I don't think you would want me in your survey anyway because I would skew it in the wrong direction. Even with the androgen bath in Utero, I'm a heterosexual feminine female.

A t-shirt and jeans kind of girl but I also have as many skirts in my closet as I do jeans Kinda boring and most likely not the the good stuff you were looking for from someone with an intersex medical condition. I've always seen gender as a spectrum anyway and I've read articles where the author had used the term spectrum also. Gender has never been a dichotomy there has always been that middle ground and that's just a given. I know people that don't have any intersex medical condition and they act much more guy like than me but it seems like their is only an interest of sociologist when someone like me expresses any non-typical gender responses. Then we are used to prove points.
All interesting in regard to Gender Idenity:
Enculturated Lens Theory, Identity Construction Theory, Biological Theory, Gender Schema Theory.Psychodynamic Theories- Psychoanalytic, Cognitive Developmental. External Theories - Socialization or Social Learning Theory,Social Strutural or Situational Theories.

I've read studies that use people with CAH against so called normal people and I truly wonder where they get the people because everthing they say about the CAH PEOPLE I don't relate to. For example " Girls with CAH don't where make-up" Well, I did when I turned 12. "Girls with CAH are agressive" Well, not me. "Girls with CAH aren't interested in marriage" I am. On and on I can go with studies that pit us against others and make us seem different to suit the authors needs. Your study includes everyone but in a paragaph before that you state that "your motivation for doing gender based research is your feelings of betrayal and outrage toward the medical community when I first learned about the experiences of intersex children ..." that's why it seemed like you were looking at people with conditions such as mine as an opportunity to dismantle gender. Some of us don't fit into any gender but many of us do. The same can be said of people that don't have any conditions also.

You will do your study and you will get some great answers and that's great. Your very lucky to be in your shoes and not mine. Right or wrong, I have sinking feeling that when people post just looking to do surveys they have a sweeping generalization of all intersex conditons as the same.

I would love to see a cure for CAH. It is a medical emergency - did you know that ? You can die from it.
I'm just one fucked up individual and what I post doesn't mean shit. As for the surgeries... hell ... do you think a little girl that has only female chromosomes and internal organs should have to walk around with something that looks and for all purposes is a penis ? Someone has to make a decision sometime and age five was a good time or age six might of be cool too but the point is the decision had to be made, it's a prader scale thang. Do you know what the prader scale is? I might not like the surgery I had back then but I can respect and am glad it was done. My other choice would of sucked as far as I'm concerned.

Toodles,

Aimee

[Jennifer Fortad]

Aimee,

I do feel I owe you an apology for the abruptness of my response to yours. I am sorry about the gut reaction people feel when encountering requests from "researchers" for interview or survey participation. I would not want to feel that my suffering was being used to further someone else's cause, but not my own.

What I was reacting to (bad me!) was my own frustration over how best to contribute to changing the current environment surrounding unnecessary infant surgeries, and being hit in the face with the "you are not one of us so you must be the enemy" line of rhetoric. I really am sorry about that, I should have been more empathetic.

Frankly, what the medical establishment has accepted as quid pro quo for these past 50 years is, IMHO, criminal. As Americans we point our fingers in outrage at the practice of Female Genital Mutilation that takes place in many Muslim countries -- as high as 97% in Sudan -- when we are allowing this to take place on babies in our own backyard. We prosecute sexual abuse against children, and yet we turn a blind eye to the shame and humiliation inflicted upon children by their pediatricians and parents in the name of reinforcing "normative" gender? In any other context, inserting a foreign object up a child's vagina would land a person behind bars: but this is encouraged and
accepted as common practice for families with "post-sex-assignment-surgery" intersex children? I am honestly horrified that such ignorance and hypocrisy exist, and intend to do what I can to bring this to public attention. I have a daughter and the thought of subjecting her to this makes me sick to my stomach.

As a Sociologist, I feel somewhat responsible for the state of affairs as they exist. Within sociology, so much emphasis has been placed on gender as socially constructed that virtually any consideration of biology has been erased. And this can be directly linked to John Money's work which was picked up on by Feminist theorists and subsequently by sociologists. I am working to correct this. It is a small contribution, but it is where I think I can make the biggest difference.

There will be other studies, other questionnaires, other focal points to my work in the future. But they will all share, at their center, directing public attention to what is going on with children of intersex birth in the name of maintaining "normative" codes of sex and gender.

My best wishes to everyone,
Jennifer Fortado



:eek:

[Sunshine1]

Jennifer:

Apology accepted even though it wasn't required because you responded to my post exactly like how I thought you would. You and people like you aren't my friend or enemy but just people that don't see the vast differences of individuals with intersex conditions. You seem like you want to sweep us all together with one color of the paint brush.

When I was a social worker, I was leery of comparing vastly different cultures and any situation that may come out of them. To compare my surgeries and those with girls of such places as the Sudan is an insult to both. This is my opinion and I respect your view. I imagine that someone that has gone through the same things that I have will most likely agree with you.

As for the dialators, I had my first vaginoplasty in 1975 and my parents nor I never used any dialators. I know of doctors that frown on the use of dialators. I have a bit of personal insite for you. As a ten yr old, I realized that my vaginal canal wasn't as big as it should be. This caused me concern and stress. I don't know if it is just me but I've always had an insinct of how to manage, cope, deal with the CAH (notice how I didn't say suffering?) I don't know if a dialator would of helped but I might of been able to not of had to do the second vaginoplasty not that it was a bad thing it was just disruptive of my job and school. You call the dialator child abuse but I would call it a helpful tool for my situation. I respect you opinion on that with no problem and I am aware of people that had terrible experiences because of how their doctors treated them with the dialators but that is the individual's doctors fault for treating them like crap and not the dialator. For me, a couple of years later menstraution went as planned thanks to the surgery that I had at age five, the one you refered to as mutilation. I really hate that word because I know that surgeons don't go to school to learn how to mutilate people. However arrogant and misdircted they might be at times, truely they want to help and not hurt. Sure, I might call the clitoridectomy a butcher job but that is because I'm angry at times that in the 1970's with my degree of virilization that was all they could offer me. That's life and I deal most of the time and the other opption was worse in my opinion. In 1991, the second vaginoplasty allowed me to do what most women take for granted which is sexual intimacy with a man. Thank God for the medical establishment for having the skill to allow me to do this.

You never answer the last paragraph of my prior post ? You know, I have every right to fit into the "normative" codes of sex and gender and it seems like you people want to take that away from me. I only have female chromosomes and internal organs biology wise even with the androgen bath my brain is female. Do you think women going through menopause are somehow less female? I have respect for those that don't /can't fit in but please remember that each person is an individual and each intersex condition is different. Some have more to do with a glitch on the metabolic pathway and some just are. People that don't have any conditions also don't sometimes fit into the norm. The norm is subjective anyway based on individual circumstance.

I could be wrong but I don't feel that you really read my second post based on your response which seem to me like you were talking at me and disregarding what I stated.

None of this is easy and sometimes I feel like a pawn or that I'm being used or set up as a victim for someon else's gain for monetary/ professional profit.

I hope that what I've stated gives you some understanding and maybe you might be more empathetic in the future. It's no fun when the lab rats talk back....is it ? Where is my cheese ? (lol)


aimee