Bigotry is Sick

As matter of course this blog abhors prejudice and discrimination. It hardly matters what its source is, or who it is directed at. HBS Transsexuals are subjected to bigotry from many quarters. Some of it even comes from gay and trasgender identified indivuduals who should know better. No Matter! Bigotry is inexcusable. When this email arrived we decided to publish it. So the world can see that homophobia and bigotry is alive and well in Columbia.


Colombia: Acción de Alerta – Discrimination to Student at Universidad Javeriana Cali



The rights violated in this case include: The right to education, the right to be free from discrimination and the right to equality, right to judicial protection



The Issue



Francisco Botina Hidalgo, Colombian laws student at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana Cali, has has suffered repeated samples of discrimination from Mario Humberto Lopera and Ricardo Zuluaga Gil, two professors at the university. These teachers publicly mocked his sexual orientation in the classroom, denying him the right to submit his examination, speaking in an aggressive manner and disrespectful when he claimed for his rights. These facts violate his fundamental human rights protected in the Colombian legislation as well as many statements and international treaties.

Francisco has not received a response to his complaint with the university authorities and the Ombudsman of Valle de Cauca, whose representative Dr. Andres Garrido Santamaria, who has working links with the university, has refused to investigate the allegations. Given this omission, Francisco Hidalgo Botina has raised a complaint with the Attorney General's Office and the Office of the UN Human Rights. Francisco has also received threats to their physical, psychological, and on his life.

The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) requests that you send emails to Colombian authorities to quickly investigate the alleged discrimination, compensate the victims fairly, and take all necessary measures to ensure that similar acts of discrimination are not repeated in the future. Please send your letters to:


Fernando D'Elio / IGLHRC

fdelio@iglhrc.org


Francisco Botina Hidalgo

fbotina@hotmail.com

Selling Psuedo-Science: Politics, Psychiatric Theories & The CAMH

The role politics play in the perpetuation of psychiatric theories have been demonstrated by the actions of the CAMH clique, including Blanchard, Zucker, Bailey, Lawrence & et al on many occasions.

This example rather speaks for itself. The original article, written by Michael J.Bailey and Kiira Triea, heavily supported Ray Blanchard's theories. The article contained a number of inconsistencies and demonstrated poor analytical skills. It is not uncommon for academic journals to make mistakes. It is standard practice that such mistakes are remedied in subsequent publications.

In this case "Perspectives in Biology and Medicine" failed to publish either the corrections, or Professor Swaab's letter. It should be noted that Alice Dreger is involved in the editorial side of "Perspectives in Biology and Medicine".

Finally, Under the pseudonym 'Denise Tree', Kiira Triea was one of the original perpetrators of the "transkids" hoax. On that occasion Triea was assisted by Hontas Farmer, aka 'BrendaQG'; aka 'Aisha X'. Currently Farmer can be found working in tandem with James Cantor, another CAMH employee, rewriting Wikipedia entries to align them with Blanchard's theories.

Readers may draw their own conclusions.

Professor Swaab's letter was addressed to the journal's editor and reads:


Dr. Robert Perlman,
Editor Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

Dear editor,
In their 2007 paper “What many Transgender Activists Don’t Want You to Know: and why you should know it anyway”, Bailey and Triea discuss the interesting idea of Ray Blanchard that there may be two distinct subtypes of male-to-female transsexual persons. They argue that this idea is opposed to the "brain sex" theory, which they see as supported by our studies on the BSTc. What is more, not only do they criticize the good citation scores of our papers (Zhou et al., 1995; Kruijver et al., 2000) on the reversal of a sex difference in a brain structure in transsexual people, they also slate our interpretation of the data.

They state:“The most critical problem is that neither study includes the necessary hormonal controls to exclude the possibility that the feminization of the BSTc in MtF’s was due to hormonal treatment, especially estrogen therapy, received for transsexualism. Recent research shows that the volume of the hypothalamus is highly dependent on such hormonal treatment, with smaller volumes associated with estrogenic treatment (Hulshoff Pol et al., 2006). We concur with Lawrence (2007b) that this is the most likely explanation of the Zhou et al. (1995) and Kruijver et al. (2000) findings”.

In contrast to what Bailey and Triea suggest, we did have observations in our studies showing that the BSTc volume of patients with abnormal hormone levels concurred with their genetic sex and thus did not support what Bailey and Triea call “the most likely explanation”. These observations may, however, not have been absolutely convincing because of the relatively small numbers of patients involved. However, if one makes the effort of comparing the data of our two studies, it will be clear that such controls are not essential at all to prove that the feminization of the BSTc in MtFs cannot simply be due to hormonal treatment, and that Bailey and Triea make a serious mistake here.

Hulshoff Pol et al. (2006) used structural MRI in transsexual people and concluded indeed that hormone therapy may change the volume of the brain structures. However, the statement of Bailey and Triea that “Recent research shows that the volume of the hypothalamus is highly dependent on such hormonal treatment” is highly misleading: The volume of the hypothalamus in transsexual women changed less than 6% and did not change at all in FM transsexual men (Hulshoff Pol et al., 2006). On the basis of the Zhou et al. (1995) paper only, and neglecting our data on the patients with abnormal hormone levels that did not point to that possibility at all, one might still argue that hormone treatment might have caused the sex-reversed BSTc volume in transsexual people.

That was one of the reasons why our first study was followed up by the Kruijver et al. paper of 2000, where we did not only determine the volume of the BSTc, but also the total number of somatostatin neurons.

It is basic morphometric knowledge that the total cell number in a brain structure is independent of pre- or postmortem changes in the volume of that structure. Kruijver et al. (2000) found that BSTc neuron number was even more sexually dimorphic than BSTc volume. The average BSTc cell number in males was 71% higher than in females. Once again, the transsexual women showed a sex-reversed pattern, with an average BSTc cell number in the female range.

In addition, it should be noted that the BSTc neuron number was also in the female range in an untreated gender dysphoric male and was in the male range in a transsexual man, again showing that swelling or shrinkage due to hormone treatment does not explain the data. Since swelling or shrinkage of the tissue could not have played a role in the total BSTc neuron counts (Kruijver et al., 2000), Bailey and Triea's “most likely explanation of the Zhou et al., 1995 and the Kruijver et al. 2000 findings”, should be dismissed out of hand. We fail to understand how it is possible that these authors did not reach this conclusion.Maybe they just did not want to know?


Dick Swaab and Alicia Garcia-Falgueras
Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Amsterdam



Aknowledgements:


BSTc NEURON NUMBERS ARE INDEPENDENT OF HORMONAL EFFECTS ON VOLUME

There has been much misrepresentation (1, 2, 3) in the attempt to understand the potential for hormonal administration to alter sexually dimorphic human brain nuclei.

In an effort to correct these misconceptions, OII staff member M. Italiano has received permission to post an unpublished letter by Dick F. Swaab, M.D., Ph.D. of The Netherlands Brain Research Institute to publicly correct these misconceptions.


1) Hulshoff Pol, H.E. et al. (2006) Changing your sex changes your brain: Influences of testosterone and estrogen on adult human brain structure. European J. Endoc., 155 (Suppl. 1), S107-S114. Click Here.

2) Lawrence, A.A. (2007) A Critique of the brain-sex theory of transsexualism. Click here

3) Bailey, J.M. & Triea K. (2007) What Transgender Activists Don't Want You to Know: and why you should know it anyway. Persp. Biol. Med., 50(4): 521-534.




Professor Mark Italiano: Critique of Lawrence's argument: Click Here.

This is also posted on OII's website.

More Bad News For The Chromosome Myth (And Identity Politics)

In 2001 Chinese geneticists working out of Peking University Medical College Hospital published a study containing information that a female with XY chromosomes had given birth.

"Case 8 was a XY female who gave birth to a normal baby. Peripheral blood DNA was assessed and no deletion or mutation was revealed within the SRY motif. Detection of SRY revealed no deletion. Further investigation should include sequencing and detection of more parts of the SRY gene."

Here, yet again, is another example of evolution's biological pallet at work creating human diversity in the area of sex biology.

http://cmj.org/Periodical/PaperList.asp?id=LW9058

For many years the spectre of biological fundamentalism, expressed below by Harry Benjamin, but rampant throughout psychological and medical literature, has mantained the binary myth.

"As we have seen, these persons, [true transsexuals] in a strictly scientific sense, fool themselves. No actual change of sex is ever possible. Sex and gender (to repeat for the sake of clarity) are decided at the moment of conception, when either two X chromosomes, one from the father and one from the mother, lay the foundation for a future girl, when one Y chromosome (from the father) and one X chromosome (from the mother) insure the birth of a boy."


Unfortunately, the same perspective has driven fundamentalist gender identity politics and transgenderist arguments for over fifty years. Now the "One Big Club" arguments and the "we're All In It Together" claims need to be reconsidered.

Transgenderism is predicated on policing the immutability of sexual biology and arguing that gender role alone permits scope for variation. "Sex", argue the transgenderists, " can't be changed, only gender, and since we are all just changing gender, then all anyone can ever be is transgender:" QED!

But is it? Electron Microscopy and nuclear biology are opening new doors to understanding with almost every month that passes. The fifty year old fundamentalisms, predicated on John Money's theories, are not standing up to the new technologies.

Transgenderism and identity politics will need to revisit their postulates, recognizing that what works for some does not work for everyone after all. Their alternative is to be left, flawed identities, lost in the dustbin of history.

Science: Exposing the Myths!

OII reports that a seven year old girl has been "diagnosed" as having XY chromosomes, but has a uterus, ovaries etc.

Interpreting the potential ramifications, geneticist Dr Sophia Siedlberg notes that, "firstly the MSRs on the Y chromosome are not the "male master switch" (In plain English SRY is not the six pack penis gene it was said to be) and secondly the fact that the "real master switch" resides in Chromosome 17 and everyone, male or female has a copy of it."

"Sex differentiation is more complex and in terms of chromosomes, more diffuse than the commonly held misconception of everything being on the 23rd pair of chromosomes. What Dr Anna Biason-Lauber has found is simply the fact that sex differentiation is not what people have for years thought it to be," Siedlberg writes.

"There is no excuse now for anyone to think that XX = "Girl" and XY = "Boy". It clearly does not work that way. You are only "genetically male or female" if you have all the genes line up to produce an unambiguous phenotype of one or the other sex. Since this is also not so clear cut, even talking of "Genetic sex" is foolish, and to claim a woman or girl such as the one mentioned in the New Scientist is "genetically male" is little more than petty minded ignorance."

"Genetically sex is a complex set of variations, more complex than "social constructs and some mythical gender spectrum." The real spectrum is the entire human genome and that differs from individual to individual. Someone’s approximation to a given sex is like their fingerprint, unique to them. And when people realise the full consequence of that, the two sex system and not just the "gender binary" face a very profound challenge"

Dr Siedlberg's full analysis can be found HERE

Ethics and Research: Misinterpretation Can Spoil Results.

Regional gray matter variation in male-to-female transsexualism


There are times when even a scream of outrage isn't enough to vent frustration. As interesting, perhaps even seminal, as these findings (below) are it is tempting to dream of throttling the scientists who interpret them.

Lets run through the sex gender distinction yet again for the sake of clarity and understanding.

Sex: the biological and physiological components of being male or female. Sex is anatomy. Sex is the physical hardware!

Gender is the social and cultural expression of maleness and/or femaleness. Gender is behavior, dress and who wears the makeup. Gender is who waltzes backwards. And the concept of 'gender identity' was constructed to describe the end result of applied gender role conditioning, which was thought to culminate in the belief that one was male or female, man or woman. Gender identity is learned.

This is the abstract from research using PET scans on the brains of twenty five male to female transsexuals prior to beginning HRT.

"Gender identity—one's sense of being a man or a woman—is a fundamental perception experienced by all individuals that extends beyond biological sex. Yet, what contributes to our sense of gender remains uncertain. Since individuals who identify as transsexual report strong feelings of being the opposite sex and a belief that their sexual characteristics do not reflect their true gender, they constitute an invaluable model to understand the biological underpinnings of gender identity. We analyzed MRI data of 24 male-to-female (MTF) transsexuals not yet treated with cross-sex hormones in order to determine whether gray matter volumes in MTF transsexuals more closely resemble people who share their biological sex (30 control men), or people who share their gender identity (30 control women). Results revealed that regional gray matter variation in MTF transsexuals is more similar to the pattern found in men than in women. However, MTF transsexuals show a significantly larger volume of regional gray matter in the right putamen compared to men. These findings provide new evidence that transsexualism is associated with distinct cerebral pattern, which supports the assumption that brain anatomy plays a role in gender identity."

This research is significant. It has important consequences. It shows us that a region of the brain known as the Right Putamen has a distinctly female structure in male to female transsexuals. Its a biological, or sex side, issue: and these scientists have not produced an iota of evidence that relates this finding to cultural and social gender expresssion.

Instead they have fallen back on a sixty year old paradigm that rejected biology as a component of transsexualism. They have then used the sixty year old paradigm to interpret research that wasn't even technologically possible when the paradigm was dreamed up.

It is not unreasonable to charge these researchers with behaving unethically. They have interpreted this result in a manner that supported their preexisting assumptions and in doing so they have mislead both themselves and the subjects of their research

The point becomes starkly obvious right here:

"These findings provide new evidence that transsexualism is associated with distinct cerebral pattern, which supports the assumption that brain anatomy plays a role in gender identity."

Actually Scientists, you went to a lot of trouble to select individuals that wanted to change sex: not gender. And what the research shows is that brain anatomy plays a role in transsexualism! It shows that and it shows nothing but that.

As interesting as this research, and other research on the same topic is, it is worthless and a waste of precious research dollars if the interpretations that are put on the results mislead everyone involved.

And if it doesn't get changed, that is precisely what this interpretation does.

Behaviour, Is Gender Influenced by Mullerian Inhibiting Substance?

Nuerobiologists working at the Otago Medical School in New Zealand have found that a hormone previously known to suppress the development of Mullerian and Ovarian tissue in males also influences brain development.

"...sex differences occur throughout the entire body", says Associate Professor Ian McLennan. "Outside of the primary reproductive organs, the range of male and female characteristics overlap, [1] creating what we call 'sex biases' that actually only exist as a generalisation, at the level of the population, such as men being taller than women. This is not always the case, but is an accepted difference between men and women."

"The sex-biases in the body do not define a person's sex or sexuality. The brain is one of the organs with the greatest sex biases, giving rise to many subtle differences in the behaviour of the sexes. Empathy, for example, has a female bias, but some of the greatest men are empathetic. Likewise, girls engage in less rough and tumble play than boys, but a boy who shuns rough and tumble play is still a boy."

The hormone known as Mullerian Inhibiting Substance (MIS) is found only in males and has for many years been known to play a significant role in foetal reproductive sex differentiation during the months immediately after conception.

Scientists have been aware of MIS, which only occurs in men, for about 100 years. But it was always thought to have a single function in male development - to prevent the formation of a uterus. However, the Otago research indicates that MIS has a wider influence than previous thought.

Speaking on Radio New Zealand on Wednesday the 8th of March, Dr Mclennan said that the research team were surprised by the new finding. "Until now MIS has never been considered as a hormone involved in brain function and behaviour."

The new research, conducted only on mice to date, shows that male mice lacking Mullerian Inhibiting Substance demonstrate subtle changes in their brain anatomy, and their behaviour is more akin to female mouse behaviour.

A three year study of the affects of MIS on human behaviours is currently underway in an attempt to ascertain if the hormone exerts a similar influence on human subjects.


Visit TS-Si.org for an in depth report on this study.


[1] There can also be overlaps in male/female reproductive organs. Undifferentiated or 'overlapping' reproductive systems are one of many permutations of intersex.


Contact HBS-NZ

Zucker v OII - The Saga Continues

In Febuary this blog starting reporting on charges of sexual misconduct being brought against Kenneth Zucker, a psychologist at the Center for Addiction Management and Health (CAMH) in Canada. Its no secret that Zucker is widely known among those who take an interest in the issues, for his unorthodox views and practices related to anything he can put the word 'trans' in front of.

Starting with the first report we have faithfully tracked events as they unfolded and reported them objectively and without bias. We are concerned to now learn that Zucker's lawyer has issued Curtis Hinkle of OII with a letter requiring him to remove information relating to the sexual misconduct charges.

The letter can be read here:
http://www.intersexualite.org/Ltr_to_Hinkle_-_Mar_20.09.pdf

These demands raise some interesting issues for those of us who report to a wider community. They are not only aimed at preventing readers from accessing the information directly, they also have an important flow-on effect by drying up the sources we rely on so that we can keep our readers informed.

The issues here were and remain significant. The original allegation (name deleted) can be read here:

'N' went on to expand on her alleged experiences in a letter to Ms. Emily Laumeier, Governance Coordinator in the Ethics Office of the American Psychological Association. This is an example of 'N's' claims.

"... he began to make me touch and grab my penis below while he just stared at me and saying "you're a boy, remember that", he also made me touch him down below for several minutes, sometimes he would make me rub him and he would move his hips while sitting and I was made to kneel or stand..."

In truth nobody knows whether 'N's' claims are true or false. Dr Zucker has vehemently rejected the charges and under Common Law he is entitled to be treated fairly and regarded as innocent until such time as it can be proven otherwise. That has not happened yet, and may very well not happen at all. The best that can be said for now is that both parties have a legal right to an objective and fair hearing.

On the other hand a significant number of people feel they have a stake in the matter. They are entitled to be kept informed by reasonable and objective reportage which has access to the necessary sources of information. And that's where the claims that Zucker is not trying to stifle free speech, fall down. Through his lawyers, Zucker is attempting dry up the information sources. This directly curtails the ability of people such as myself to provide a news and information service.

Its no good Zucker's lawyer claiming that his client is a proponent of free speech when his actions have the opposite effect