Regardless of your chromosomes and/or your sex, does anyone consider gender...hummm....I don't know just something like a hobby that you can take or leave?

Aimee

Maybe with a lobotomy. I think we are born with a gender. That doesn't mean I think our hard-wiring in the brain is necessarily in the binary though.

Betsy

PS...will we see you in Florida?

__________________
Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is. --Margaret Mitchell

Dear Betsy:

Ouch ...lobotomy. I guess my view of gender didn't go over that well. Oh well, (lol) there were certain life experiences that brought me to the conculsion that gender (not someone's sex or chromosomes) is nothing more than a hobby or game that each individual person (intersex medical condition or not) plays if they want to and/or in some respect if they can. I've had certain people in my life do a flip- flop with regard to certain general gender ideas.

Where are you going to be in South Florida? It would be interesting to take in one of your presentations.

Aimee

DOH...I probably should have put a smilie face in there .:p While I was serious about it, it was also said quite tongue in cheek. I think our gender ---whether in the binary, or outside, is pretty ingrained in our brain. The fluidness that some people experience, I think, is really the result of getting in touch with their inner self and being honest with themselves.

Florida...our schedule is here: http://www.bodieslikeours.org/upcom...omingevents.htm If you are interested in the FIU/Miami items, write me off line and I'll give you details. They are graduate level classes at FIU and while not open to the public per se, arrangements have been made to allow interested people to attend. This is for anyone interested.

Betsy

__________________
Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is. --Margaret Mitchell

All Gender behavoir is the result of the interaction of two major factors: inborn factors, either genetic or developmental, and environmental factors. The relative importance of these two determinants varies, but even in the most rigid, genetically determined behavoir can be modified by the enviroment that we live in.
A good starting point for determinants of behavoir is the concept of instinct.
Modern usage of the term instinct dates to the influentail writings of Charles Darwin. Darwin suggested that the behavour of lower animals must not be guided only by instinct but also by primitive forms of the same reasoning processes that guides humans. Therefore, because humans (could) have evolved from animals we must to some part be guided by instinct. For example, Sigmund Freud claimed that all normal and abnormal behavoir is powerfully shaped by two major fundamental instincts. The LIFE instinct: (Sexual) and the DEATH instinct: (aggresion) In contrast William Dougall (A Introduction to Social Psychology) claims that humans have up to a dozen instincts.(fight or flight, repulsion, pugnacity, self- assertion, curiosity, sexual pleasure ect,,)
Instinct refers to stereotyped observable sequences of moter behavour that are unlearned.
athough It is even temping for me to veiw all gender behavoir as a biological controled mechanism.

:D

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You really have to love yourself, to get anything done in this world!

Julanne

Hi Jules,

You are a little bit confused here. You are referring to the Joan/John story, a well known case commonly referred to as the John/Joan story. By the time "Joan" was 14, she knew she wasn't a she, and over the course of time, did go back to living as male, happily..."

The case is well-documented, has been studied extensively starting with Milton Diamond (who blew it open for the most part when he tracked "John" down and discovered that Money had for the most part been lying when he said that the case was a success when in fact, it was an complete failure. The case has also been written about and covered extensively in popular media, most notably by John Colapinto who wrote the best seller, "As Nature Made Him" David Reimer ("John's" real name) has been interviewed on several news magazines and is married and has grandchildren.

Betsy

__________________
Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is. --Margaret Mitchell

Jules wrote:
"A single dramatic example should reminded us all that a overriding role of life exsperiences can mold human sexuality and gender. This thirty year lonitudinal study, reported by Money and Ehrhardt involves a set of monozygotic male twins, sharing an identical genetic constitution, and sharing the same hormones in the womb. Durring a circumcision procedure at seven months (Way beond the critical peroid) one of the boys penus was removed accidently by the means of electrocautery. Eight months later the child was reassigned a girl and reconstruction of the genitalia was done. The boy changed into a girl took to his new role perfectly. Become very very femmine unlike his brother who was very mascline. She even found a male sex partner in adulthood whome she married and now even knowing the truth about her past could never see herself as a man!!"


This example of the flexibility of gender in humans is, in fact, erroneous (not to say gender flexibility doesn't occur -- because it does certainly appear to in some cases, as best i can tell). The case you're describing, here, however, unless i'm seriously mistaken, is the infamous "John/Joan" case. It has, for some thirty years, been the sole test case used to justify thousands (hundreds of thousands? Who really knows?) of genital surgeries on infants -- surgeries that have left people scarred, humiliated, insensate, and even dead. The follow-up in the "John/Joan" case was grossly incomplete (one is tempted to call it "incompetent," in fact) and certainly did not follow the patient closely for thirty years, though Dr. Money claimed in his initial publication that he had been thorough and the patient was "happily" living as a female. In fact, Dr. Money lost contact with the patient when "she" was fourteen years old, if i remember correctly. "She" certainly did not go on to live happily as a woman -- in fact, the patient in question is now living as a man and married to a woman. Even in childhood, the "girl" in question (whose biography, btw, is now available in the book -As Nature Made Him-) never felt comfortable in "her" assigned role. "She" conformed to the female role because "she" felt there was no choice. Today, the patient speaks of the pain and humiliation of his childhood openly. Dr. Money either allowed his enthusiasm to cloud his judgment (it was clear early on that the adjustment to a female role was, in fact, not happening) or openly lied in his published findings; either way, he acted in error and committed serious indiscretions where methodology was concerned. To this day he continues to refuse to acknowledge (though it is widely known) that his methodology was deeply flawed and his results were, in a word, bogus.

This very case is the sole evidence originally used to justify nonconsensual surgeries on intersex children -- IMHO, a pretty scary reality. Physicians have long implied to their students that there was good science behind this practice -- in fact, there never has been. Studies on intersexual patients have been massively insufficient and frequently flawed in their methodology. Control groups were generally not used. Most intersex patients have been "lost to follow-up" early in adolesence.

It's not only bad medical practice but is *extremely dangerous* for researchers to point to one test case in determining treatment protocols for an entire group of patients. First of all, one test case does *not* a representative sample make; to state that this case suggests the universal flexibility of gender was, on Dr. Money's part, at best, extremely careless and, at worse, criminally negligent. First, with only one case in question, flaws in researchers' methodology and approach may not come to light. Second, one cannot make a broad determination based on one individual patient -- there may be an anomaly in the test case that would e.g., if we thought strychnine might cure influenza, and only tested it on one patient, and that person happened to be immune to it and seemed to recover soon after the administration of strychnine, and we then widely prescribed strychnine for 'flu, the result would be a tragedy of monumental proportion. We have an example of the potentially disasterous results of poor follow-up in such drugs as the infamous "Phen-Fen" (which caused fatal heart attacks in a number of patients and left many others with heart disease) and the little-known "Pamelor," an antidepressant that was pulled off the market because it caused people (who did not have latent epilepsy) to develop epilepsy -- sometimes severe, intractable epilepsy -- not to mention other serious side-effects. Both these drugs were hailed as the next big thing in their fields. Both were released without adequate testing. Both resulted in discomfort, debility, and even death. i hope the analogy i'm trying to draw is a clear one. Had follow-up really been pursued across a broad enough spectrum of time, the researchers in the "John/Joan" case would have realized that the end result proved their initial hypothesis false. My point herein is that a single example, no matter how dramatic, can not prove a medical hypothesis (not even "misquito bites are itchy" -- some people don't react to them). At best, it bumps the hypothesis into the "theory" stage ... but even theories can be proven wrong (the history of physics demonstrates that!).

This is not to say i don't believe at all in the flexibility of gender -- i do think there are *some* people out there whose sense of gender is pretty flexible. Mine, however, is not (this is not to say it's "standard," by any means -- i admit freely that i'm not what the Western world thinks of as a "typical guy," not by a mile -- but that gets into the question of gender role vs. gender, which is fodder for another discussion entirely, IMHO). My parents spent ten long years trying to raise me as a girl -- it didn't work. The same can be said for many intersexuals (not to mention the transexual population, some of whom feel that their gender was a choice but many of whom feel it was inborn). There number of cases in which intersexuals subjected to early gender reassignment have later "changed horses midstream" is far from insignificant. The medical establishment, however, really doesn't like to admit its errors and is also slow to change -- so the momentum of revelation of this gross error in judgment on Dr. Money's part and its propagation throughout the medical establishment has been slow. It is, however, gaining momentum now.

I think it's really quite dangerous to try to say of psychological and neurological ideas, "All humans experience x state in y fashion." (This is not to say, btw, that i thought Jules was saying that.) Psychology, by its nature, is an inexact science -- because we, as humans, have such complex and varying personalities. Neurology is still in its infancy; we can tell, for example, that a sample of gay men had smaller hypothalami than a group of straight men, but not where the cause and effect lay (were they born that way? Did that occur as a result of behavior? Was it noted as a potential factor in the results that a great many of the test patients in question had advanced AIDS, which is known to cause wasting of the brain tissue?). Certainly, i believe a grave danger lies in stating that female genitals = female brain = female role and attempting to use this idea to enforce "traditional" ideas regarding gender, since obviously this isn't the case. The brain is more sensitive to hormonal fluctuations in utero (and also takes longer to develop) than the genitals; it is, at present, impossible to say for certain that one who is born with a physiologically male body will be born with a physiologically male brain. i think it's probable that some of us are born with neutral brains.

More or less, what i'm getting at is that i don't believe we can, with our present knowledge, say for certain much of anything at all about the etiology of gender. Our evidence is largely anecdotal -- e.g., you and i know how we identify, but we know little or nothing about the structures of our brains. Science doesn't precisely how brain structure affects gender; it also doesn't know where the cause/effect relationship occurs or which way it travels. i am conservative by nature; it is my inclination to say that we should be free to make all the hypotheses we want ("i identify as male because i wore argyle socks as a child" is a valid hypothesis; so was "the universe rotates around the earth"; hypotheses are by their nature uncertain, and it is research that proves them right or wrong) but it is also my inclination to think that we should stop saying "X = X" until we're certain that X does not, in fact, also equal Y, N, P, Q, and R (for values of X...).

Heh, um, that was my $0.02. Sorry it's so long, lol. This concludes my broadcast day ^-^

--asher--

Well, what can I say if the imformation that I'm reading is a lie then I do have to rethink what I said so I will remove a part of that post so that I'm not giving misimformation, thanks Besty for pointing that out so that I don't sound like a fool;)

__________________
You really have to love yourself, to get anything done in this world!

Julanne

Jules, no problem...;)

Maybe you are reading Money? He is still in denial as Asher wrote.

Betsy

__________________
Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is. --Margaret Mitchell