Category: Global

All entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.

What should be done about the small proportion of babies born with genitals that are neither typically male nor typically female? Many of those affected believe parents and doctors are often too quick to schedule operations.

[T]he Secret of Me, a new documentary by British film-maker Grace Hughes-Hallett, . . .follows the life of Jim Ambrose, who was born in Louisiana in 1976. Like Luk, Ambrose had genitals that, as he puts it in the film, “fall outside of an arbitrary acceptable norm”.

The course of action that his parents had been advised to follow brought Ambrose a great deal of misery – he never felt like a girl growing up, and it was a massive blow to learn that such huge decisions had been taken about his body before he could have a say in them.

The Secret of Me draws a direct link between the harmful way Ambrose was treated and the work of psychologist John Money, whose theories about gender informed medical guidance about children born with atypical genitalia. In the 1960s, Money studied a pair of Canadian twin boys, originally called Bruce and Brian Reimer. Bruce was left without a penis after a botched circumcision, and the academic encouraged the boys’ parents to raise him as a girl, Brenda. Money studied both children as they grew, with his research claiming the experiment was a total success. Brenda, according to him, was a stereotypical and happy little girl, showing that a child’s gender could be moulded by the adults raising them.

In fact, there were clear signs that Brenda was never happy as a girl, which Money simply left out of his papers. As an adult, he began living as a man, changing his name again, this time to David. The brothers were left traumatised by Money’s research (which involved having them inspect each other’s genitals as children and “rehearse” sexual acts) and their story has an incredibly sad end – both Brian and David killed themselves in their 30s. Money’s work was eventually debunked – but its impact on medical treatment for children born with ambiguous genitalia was felt for years. Richard Carter, the surgeon who operated on Ambrose as a baby, appears in The Secret of Me, and apologises to his former patient. He says when he was tasked with treating Ambrose, he “went back to [his] textbooks” – which featured Money’s work.

Shocking as this all now seems, Money’s offer of a straightforward “fix” to non-stereotypically sexed babies clearly had an appeal, and perhaps still does: we live in a world in which many parents want to know whether to put their newborn in a blue or a pink hat, and gender reconstruction surgery for babies born with differences in sex development (DSD) is still legal in most countries, including the UK and the US.

Source: ‘I don’t want anyone to suffer like I did’: the intersex campaigners fighting to limit surgery on children | Children | The Guardian

All entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.

Up until around six-seven weeks after fertilization, all fetal genitalia are the same and are phenotypically female. Phenotype refers to how something looks, not necessarily what it is or what it will become. At this point the expression of a gene on the Y chromosome induces changes that result in the development of the testes, and it becomes increasingly obvious which sex is going to eventually be born.

Only those signed up the Gender Woo Academy maintain that sex is not real and that gender (a belief akin to a cult) is.

Sex dependent differences contribute to altered growth and developmental outcomes for fetuses. Studies on the human placenta, show that male fetuses prioritize growth pathways in order to maximise growth through to adulthood, which helps to ensure their greatest chance of reproductive success. The downside to this evolutionary pathway is that prioritizing growth means that males may not cope with shifting conditions in utero, which increases to a greater risk of morbidity or mortality, when compared with female fetuses.

Conversely, female fetuses adapt more adeptly to changes in the uterine environment, which means they end up comparatively smaller than males, but with better overall outcomes.

After birth, somehow a mother’s body knows if she is breastfeeding a boy or a girl (despite any “assigned at birth” “errors” committed by medical staff) because breast milk has a different composition that is sex dependent. Continuing on a growth trajectory, breast milk is higher in fat for boy babies than girl babies. This study concluded that the breast milk “of lactating mothers from all lactation periods, were affected by the sex of infants”.

Fetal microchimerism: babies and mothers can’t disconnect!

During pregnancy in placental mammals, there is a bidirectional transplacental cell exchange between a mother and her fetus. Because these cells are both present and persistent in women this is referred to as fetal microchimerism (FM). Fetal cells have been found in maternal tissues in elderly women who were pregnant many decades earlier and in women who miscarried, so never gave birth to a live baby.

My hormones made me do it

Both sexes produce the same hormones, but our hormonal profiles create profound and obvious differences between women and men. Adult women have a cyclical pattern of sex hormones, but men do not.

The brains of men and women are structurally more similar than different, but they do age differently and brain aging is largely a product of our sex hormones. These hormones play a crucial part in brain health.

Transplanted uteri won’t help men gestate babies

Men will never be physiologically female, however hard they wish for this or however much they pay for “treatments”. Their challenges include their pelvic structure, which is not designed to accommodate a growing fetus presenting a major physical obstacle, the complex process of successfully connecting a uterus to a recipient’s blood supply, the lack of an appropriate hormonal response to pregnancy and the impossibility of creating a functional vaginal canal.

Since when is it socially acceptable for babies to be used as fetish props?

I do not regard babies as suitable subjects for medical experimentation, especially when the outcome measure is adult satisfaction, rather than infant need. An uncontrolled example of such experimentation in male fantasies is to encourage them to join birth and breastfeeding groups set up to support women.

A final thought about homeostasis

Do you know why men who have paid to have a neovagina made for them have to continually dilate this or it will close over? Because their male bodies, even in the absence of testosterone and under the influence of estrogen views this as a surgical wound, not a natural phenomenon and in the interests of corporeal integrity, men’s bodies are trying to fix this bodily insult.

If their bodies put this much effort into closing an artificially created vagina, what might happen to any embryo unlucky enough to have been inserted into the abdominal cavity of a man?

Source: Why and How Men Can’t Be Biological Mothers