The same point would apply to other aspects of feminism, as well as Civil Rights, gay liberation, anti-imperialism, and other movements. Ethics can be active and innovative.

Kat, 91, there is a pretty good pro-Dex blog entry here. I can’t personally vouch for the author or her views but I found her via a link from Echidne of the Snakes and she doesn’t say anything obviously stupid. She has at least one more entry on the subject which is also worth looking at.

According to this blogger, CAH can have significant effects — the urethra and vagina can develop as a single opening, producing incontinence, chronic vaginal irritation, and frequent vaginal and urinary tract infections. Dex can reduce the likelihood of this. That sounds like a legitimate medical issue to me. She also suggests the evidence for danger, thus far, is low.

This is what I was thinking of when I said that there seem to be disagreements about the facts.

The problem with criticizing experimental treatments is that every treatment is experimental until it’s proven — and ultimately, the proof has to come from human trials. Twenty years ago AIDS activists were concerned about exactly the opposite problem. They felt that the medical establishment was being too cautious about introducing new drugs. Obviously that was a different, more urgent context, but the point is that there are two sides to this issue. We can’t only look at examples like DES and be perfectly conservative.

I still can’t see any defense for medicalizing ideas about gender roles, but the broader issue of CAH and Dex is unclear to me.

I do want to post this link from infoshop, though:

http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20100707g20

Supporting the Prisoners of the G20 Police State

by Peter Gelderloos
CounterPunch

“…To talk about broken windows when the G20 come to town is to participate in a policing operation that has our doors broken in and guns pointed in our faces, regardless of whether we justify this collaboration with a discourse of nonviolence or one of security. It is to contradict even that most tepid of progressive clichés: people over profit.

To consider questions of guilt or innocence in the case of these sixteen people facing conspiracy charges is to indulge in all the hypocrisy of a judge, a prosecutor, or a cop. It doesn’t matter that most of these people were already arrested when the property destruction occurred, and it doesn’t matter that they didn’t lead any conspiracies because we anarchists don’t have leaders, and we certainly don’t need them to carry out a little bit of vandalism.

What matters is that when all those workers died, when all those people were evicted, when all that money was taken from us by the banks, when all those bombs fell, when all that air and water were poisoned, no one in power was punished and it didn’t matter whether rules were broken or followed. To speak of rules and laws is to perpetuate one of the greatest lies of our society.

What matters is that a great many more banks and cop cars will have to be thrown on the trash fire of history before we can talk about a new world, so we’d better stop getting so upset by such a modest show of resistance.”

I didn’t speak up though, because I was 12 and knew the police wouldn’t want to hear that.

Ellen

Alex K, the trouble that I have (well, the one I’ll focus on now) is not “precedent vs. science,” it’s that the science itself, at least according to the multiple articles that I’ve read, is seriously faulty.

New (and some other pediatric endocrinologists) advocate the use of “dex” in women whose fetuses risk being born with CAH. The drug, however, does nothing to lessen the chance that the fetus (if female) will be born with CAH. It’s sole use would be to decrease the possibility that the eventual baby will have “ambiguous genetalia”*.

Here are the problems as I see them:
1. This does nothing to address the actual disease (syndrome?) in question

2. The injection of high levels of steroids into a fetus early in development seems have only one benefit (possibility of a “normal sized” clitoris”) and many, many possible detriments/side effects that researchers know nothing about as of yet

3. CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL CAUSATION!!!!! That’s like, a hugely important rule in science! New’s collaborator state in a study:
“Most women were heterosexual, but the rates of bisexual and homosexual orientation were increased above controls . . . and correlated with the degree of prenatal androgenization.”

“Correlated” is the important word there. There’s nothing showing that higher presence of prenatal androgens CAUSES one’s orientation to go one way or the other.

4. New’s colleagues have claimed that a drug whose known effect is a physical change (preventing a large clitoris) will somehow prevent the girls in question from behaving a certain way.

The logic gap here is huge. Heino Meyer-Bahlburg, a psychologist (!!!) who works with New, published the following:

““CAH women as a group have a lower interest than controls in getting married and performing the traditional child-care/housewife role. As children, they show an unusually low interest in engaging in maternal play with baby dolls, and their interest in caring for infants, the frequency of daydreams or fantasies of pregnancy and motherhood, or the expressed wish of experiencing pregnancy and having children of their own appear to be relatively low in all age groups.”

M-B goes on to claim that “dex” might cause these girls’ behavior to become closer to “expected heterosexual norms”.

They want to give large doses of steroids known only to change a physical attribute in the hopes that it will affect the way that the children daydream??? I may not be a scientist, but this seems to me (and my scientist boyfriend, by the way) to be terrible science!

The leaps and assumptions are huge, and the articles go on to call childhood play that is not home/family centered “abnormal.”

So, in a nutshell (and sorry if this is terribly unclear), my issue is that an unproven drug is being injected into pregnant women (some of whom are not fully informed as to it’s ACTUAL purpose and outcome, by the way) in the hopes that it will prevent a sexual organ from becoming too large, but a psychologist is wanting to do this in a hope that it will also prevent children from engaging in activities that said psychologist deems to be “abnormal” based on societal, not biological, expectations.

Unbelievable.

My quotes are from the “Bioethics Forum”:
http://www.thehastingscenter.org/Bioethicsforum/Post.aspx?id=4754&blogid=140#ixzz0sSwu6Wgt

I also read the Time, Newsweek and The Stranger (written by Dan Savage. It wins for sarcastic humor, but is much less in depth than the others), and some website called “i09″

* Is an enlarged clitoris but otherwise clearly female reproductive organs really “ambiguous genetalia”?? I was under the impression that ambiguous genetalia meant that they were truly ambiguous?