The John/Joan case catapulted Dr. Money to fame... and it was bad science
from the start. He started with a preconceived idea and altered his
experimental data to support it. He got away with it for almost 15 years.
It was used, not just by the "feminist and poststructural `social
construction' texts", but by anybody who had a vested interest in showing
that gender identity is malleable. The apparent truth is we are born with a
definite gender identity. Every transgendered person knows this already
and on a very personal level.
Dr. Money was also in charge of the Gender Clinic at Johns Hopkins and it
was due to his recommendations that Johns Hopkins stopped performing sex
reassignment surgeries on adults.
In the trans community, this story is already old hat.
The saddest result from Dr. Money's falsifying experimental data is hundreds
of intersex children who had perfectly good genitalia mutilated shortly
after birth and grew up being forced into gender roles that didn't match
their gender identity. Dr Money and his adherents created a whole
generation of artificial transsexuals.
The truth came out about 3 years ago... but David just cashed in this past
year with the book and guest appearances on several daytime talk shows like
Oprah and Leeza.
You could have something in your theory about castrati... but I haven't
even been curious about those individuals. Personally, I sing a passable
bass. Tenor is completely out of my range. People did strange things in
the not to distant past to one another for the oddest of reasons. I'm not
sure if ANY (let alone "most") of the castrati were happy that they'd been
castrated. I'm pretty sure that most of them didn't choose... they were
chosen.
OTOH, there is a subset of the bodymod crowd that are eunuchs by choice.
I've met a few of those folk online and in real life... as well as many
transsexuals. Physical body type doesn't seem to correlate with choosing
some form of alternative gender expression. My understanding that sex
differentiation of the brain occurs at a completely different time for a
fetus than sex differentiation of the body. There is some experimental data
that suggests that male to female transsexuals have physically female brain
structure... but it isn't conclusive due to the small sample size:
http://www.symposion.com/ijt/ijtc0106.htm
Did I cover/respond to the points you were interested in Damien?
Onward!
Loree
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger.
http://im.yahoo.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:12:48 MDT