The reality star and transgender activist Caitlyn Jenner, who has been denounced for her politics by the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community, visited a high school in Brooklyn with Nicholas Kristof to meet some of her critics.
One national study found that 41 percent of trans people surveyed had attempted suicide, 57 percent had experienced family rejection and almost one-fifth had endured homelessness.
More information
Caitlyn Jenner Goes to School, NY Times, MAY 5, 2016.
From Caitlyn Jenner to a Brooklyn High School, NY Times, JUNE 11, 2015.
PRENATAL EXPOSURE TO DIETHYLSTILBESTROL IN MALES AND GENDER-RELATED DISORDERS: RESULTS FROM A 5-YEAR STUDY
Important research on DES exposure in males.
For many years, researchers and public health specialists have been assessing the human health impact of prenatal exposure to the estrogenic anti-miscarriage drug, diethylstilbestrol (commonly known as DES or “stilbestrol”). The scope of adverse effects in females exposed to DES (often called “DES daughters“) has been more substantially documented than the effects in males (“DES sons“).
This paper contributes three areas of important research on DES exposure in males:
an overview of published literature discussing the confirmed and suspected adverse effects of prenatal exposure in DES sons;
preliminary results from a 5-year online study of DES sons involving 500 individuals with confirmed (60% of sample) and suspected prenatal DES exposure;
documentation of the presence of gender identity disorders and male-to-female transsexualism reported by more than 100 participants in the study.
Sources and related posts
PRENATAL EXPOSURE TO DIETHYLSTILBESTROL (DES) IN MALES AND GENDER-RELATED DISORDERS: RESULTS FROM A 5-YEAR STUDY, shb-info, 8/09/2009.
This event serves as a memorial, a protest, an opportunity for reflection and a chance to see old friends and meet new ones
Join the public event on Facebook, hosted by The 519
Each year, The 519 and Toronto’s trans communities join in an international commemoration of those who are no longer with us. This event serves as a memorial, a protest, an opportunity for reflection and a chance to see old friends and meet new ones.
The 519 acknowledges transphobia as a root cause of violence in our community, and recognizes the various forms of oppression in our culture that increase violence, and limit protections for many members of the trans community. We remember everyone lost to transphobia, racism, ageim, ableism, sex-worker stigma, classism, HIV stigma and homophobia.
Violence has impacted our communities through intentional acts and also through the act of neglect. Violence affecting trans communities includes cuts to social spending, and the depletion of the social safety net.
Violence impacting trans people includes the ever decreasing pool of social services that leaves marginalized members of society struggling on their own without affordable housing, access to nutritious food, access to necessary health care services, and sympathy from a Canadian government that deports trans women and men to their countries of origin even when violence will be waiting for them on their homelands.
The impact of violence on the trans communities is pervasive. For many the vulnerability is constant.
How endocrine disrupters are reinventing humans, animals, and water systems from the cellular level out
How endocrine disrupters are reinventing humans, animals, and water systems from the cellular level out.
Environmental history has traditionally told the story of Man and Nature. Scholars have too frequently overlooked the ways in which their predominantly male subjects have themselves been shaped by gender. Seeing Nature through Gender here reintroduces gender as a meaningful category of analysis for environmental history, showing how women’s actions, desires, and choices have shaped the world and seeing men as gendered actors as well.
In thirteen essays that show how gendered ideas have shaped the ways in which people have represented, experienced, and consumed their world, Virginia Scharff and her coauthors explore interactions between gender and environment in history. Ranging from colonial borderlands to transnational boundaries, from mountaintop to marketplace, they focus on historical representations of humans and nature, on questions about consumption, on environmental politics, and on the complex reciprocal relations among human bodies and changing landscapes. They also challenge the “ecofeminist” position by challenging the notion that men and women are essentially different creatures with biologically different destinies.
Each article shows how a person or group of people in history have understood nature in gendered terms and acted accordingly often with dire consequences for other people and organisms. Here are considerations of the ways we study sexuality among birds, of William Byrd’s masking sexual encounters in his account of an eighteenth-century expedition, of how the ecology of fire in a changing built environment has reshaped firefighters’ own gendered identities. Some are playful, as in a piece on the evolution of “snow bunnies” to “shred betties.” Others are dead serious, as in a chilling portrait of how endocrine disrupters are reinventing humans, animals, and water systems from the cellular level out.
Aiding and adding significantly to the enterprise of environmental history, Seeing Nature through Gender bridges gender history and environmental history in unexpected ways to show us how the natural world can remake the gendered patterns we’ve engraved on ourselves and on the planet.
What it means to be a man, a woman, and a human being
What it means to be a man, a woman, and a human being..
How do nature and nurture interact to produce a persistent awareness of one’s identity as male or as female? How does understanding the psychology of transgendered people illuminate gender psychology?
When Deborah Rudacille learned that a close friend had decided to transition from female to male, she felt compelled to understand why.
Coming at the controversial subject of transsexualism from several angles–historical, sociological, psychological, medical–Rudacille discovered that gender variance is anything but new, that changing one’s gender has been met with both acceptance and hostility through the years, and that gender identity, like sexual orientation, appears to be inborn, not learned, though in some people the sex of the body does not match the sex of the brain.
Informed not only by meticulous research, but also by the author’s interviews with prominent members of the transgender community, The Riddle of Gender is a sympathetic and wise look at a sexual revolution that calls into question many of our most deeply held assumptions about what it means to be a man, a woman, and a human being.
Book Review: The Riddle of Gender: Science, Activism, and Transgender Rights, N Engl J Med 2005; 353:1751-1752October 20, 2005DOI: 10.1056/NEJMbkrev38761.
Book Review: The Riddle of Gender, fanniesroom, February 24, 2009.
DES-exposed male subjects appeared to be feminized and/or demasculinized
This 1991 study confirms that DES-exposed male subjects appeared to be feminized and/or demasculinized, and there is some evidence that exposed female subjects were masculinized. Dancing statues image by Dixie Lawrence.
1991 Study Abstract
Nineteen studies on the behavioral effects of prenatal exposure to hormones administered for the treatment of at-risk human pregnancy are reviewed. Because the role of prenatal exposure to hormones in the development of human behavioral sex differences is potentially confounded by society’s differential treatment of the sexes, comparisons between exposed and unexposed subjects were evaluated and summarized separately for male and female subjects.
Therefore, this review focuses on data for individuals whose prenatal hormone environments were atypical relative to what is normal for their own sex. Overall, it appears that prenatal exposure to androgen-based synthetic progestin exerted a masculinizing and/or defeminizing influence on human behavioral development, whereas prenatal exposure to natural progesterone and progesterone-based synthetic progestin had a feminizing and/or demasculinizing influence, particularly among female subjects.
The data on prenatal exposure to synthetic estrogen derive primarily from subjects exposed to diethylstibestrol (DES). DES-exposed male subjects appeared to be feminized and/or demasculinized, and there is some evidence that exposed female subjects were masculinized. These findings are discussed in the context of prenatal hormonal contributions to sexually dimorphic behavioral development both within and between the sexes. Recommendations for the conduct of future research in developmental behavioral endocrinology are presented.
Sources and more information
Hormonal contributions to sexually dimorphic behavioral development in humans, Reinisch JM1, Ziemba-Davis M, Sanders SA, Psychoneuroendocrinology. 1991;16(1-3):213-78., NCBI PMID: 1961841, 1991.
