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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29716 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Nope, any attempt to class Bill Blevins as "female" or Tiffany Lewis as "male" is going to be objectionable to somebody. Read this edifying tale from 2016 and be instructed.

In 2013, when Evan made an appointment with his primary-care physician at the Boston LGBT health center Fenway Health, he was the first prospective birth father his doctor had seen. Several years earlier, a few trans men who, like my brother, had undergone hormone treatment but kept their reproductive organs, had begun consulting physicians about pregnancy and speaking openly about wanting to give birth. In 2008, Thomas Beatie posed for People magazine, bare-chested with a rotund belly, and went on Oprah to talk about his pregnancy. Trans men began to trickle into fertility clinics more frequently. When Andy Inkster was turned away from a Massachusetts clinic in 2010 because he was told he was “too masculine” to have a baby, he sued for gender discrimination. The case settled a few years later; Inkster sought out another clinic and later gave birth to a daughter.

...Evan’s midwife was Clare Storck. Really, that’s her name. She’d been catching babies for five years at a practice attached to Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, but she’d been working with expectant mothers for most of her adult life as a doula. My brother was her first male birth parent.

When Evan arrived at the midwifery center for his first appointment, he filled out an intake form, but the receptionist had trouble entering his information: if she checked the “male” box, she couldn’t open an obstetric record for him. This was a problem throughout the pregnancy–medical forms and insurance claims are not set up to allow people like Evan to be honest about their medical needs.

At first, he fought this at every turn. When his health insurance refused to cover his pregnancy test because he was male, he spent several hours explaining his situation to a representative, waiting on hold and explaining it again. “My sex is female, and my gender is male,” he told the rep. She was able to override the system and get the cost reimbursed, but he had to call back and do the same thing every time he had an appointment.

...I asked Evan if childbirth had changed how he thought about his gender. Wasn’t there some part of him that questioned his masculinity? Since he’d first come out, I’d watched him challenge our binary notions of gender–male or female, boy or girl, husband or wife. And yet I still had questions. Were you always a boy trapped in a girl’s body, I wanted to ask him, or are you really a girl who got lost for a decade? “You know, people who are not trans talk about being ‘trapped in a body.’ But that’s not really the way my friends talk about it,” he said. “I was always Evan. I always had these parts. I always just felt like me, and like I was a guy.”

But that was back in 2016 and as you know, time marches on. While some trans people may be happy with the "my sex is X, my gender is Y" formulation, there are those who object to the idea of biology as determinative:

Feusner’s “deeply pathologizing approach to studying transgender identities has been used to rationalize corrective and conversion therapies, a set of practices that are widely rejected by transgender people and the medical and psychological establishment,” they wrote. “By locating the stress that transgender people experience solely in human biology, rather than emergent from social systems that have been arranged to police and maintain gender conformity, we weaken efforts to change institutionalized relations of power.”

Naturally the scientists were properly chastened and resolved to do better:

Feusner told MedPage Today that he has asked UCLA's Institutional Review Board (IRB) to "re-review our entire protocol to ensure that it meets all ethics and safety standards."

He said his team is "actively engaged with members of the LGBTQ community" to help inform potential adjustments to study protocols. It wasn't clear whether the entire study is on hold or just enrollment of new participants.

Ezak Perez, executive director of Gender Justice LA, said in the statement that the "research design unapologetically aims to cause mental health distress to trigger 'dysphoria' to an already marginalized and vulnerable community."

So just imagine the reaction to using a term derived from veterinary medicine to describe trans people which might include triggering terms like "female" or "male".

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