Call for a Pro-LGBT Picket of the White House

I reported in my September 9th post that I will be going to Washington DC with other members of Chicago's Gay Liberation Network (GLN) to participate in the October 11th National Equality March.

But we will also picket the White House during the prior evening!

Why does GLN want to picket the White House?

Here is our statement:

6 PM, Saturday, Oct. 10th

Lafayette Square (on H Street just north of the White House)

Many of us watched in disgust this past January as the homophobic Reverend Rick Warren was given an honored place at the inaugural festivities. It was as if a leader of the White Citizens Council had been invited to the White House.

After indignant complaints to the incoming administration about this homophobic slap in the face, what was our consolation prize? Openly gay Episcopalian Bishop Gene Robinson was invited to speak at a lesser inaugural event, as if "balancing" a bigot with a non-bigot was good enough. Then, for good measure – at the behest of the White House – Robinson wasn't televised (see http://www.gayliberation.net/opinion/2009/0122chicagod.html).

 This homophobic behavior by the Obama White House has been repeated several times before and since:

 ** During the South Carolina primary, when his campaign featured rabidly anti-gay Gospel performer Donnie McClurkin at a major rally;

 ** With the quiet dropping of most pro-gay promises from the Obama website earlier this year – until a firestorm of protest forced them to return much of it;

** With the failure to rescind President Clinton's ban on HIV+ people traveling to the United States, and his ban on granting green cards and citizenship to HIV+ immigrants;

 ** With the unnecessary administration brief in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), with language worthy of the most vicious anti-gay bigot, making a mockery of his promise to repeal DOMA;

 ** With the statements by Obama that his "Christian beliefs" make him oppose equal marriage rights, as if the former Constitutional law scholar from the University of Chicago doesn't know anything about separation of church and state. Obama's homophobic statements were of course gleefully quoted to great effect by pro-Prop 8 forces in California;

 ** With the failure to blunt "Don't Ask Don't Tell" (DADT) by issuing a stop-loss order. Instead, he authorized surrogates to endlessly delay the junking of DADT, thereby breaking his promise to repeal it;

** While an inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act has been reintroduced into Congress, President Obama has expended virtually no political capital in getting it or any other pro-gay measure passed.

 The organizers of the Sunday, October 11th March on Washington have placed almost their entire focus on Congress (which will be out of town) and almost none on the President. Indeed, rather than making demands of the President, the official march website goes out of its way to praise "Obama's Mobile Messaging Team (for) Donating Services To The National Equality March"!

By targeting congressional districts and lobbying Congress in an effort to win legal equality, the organizers' strategy looks suspiciously like a drive to elect and re-elect Democrats in the 2010 bi-elections, rather than make uncompromising demands on this President and his Congress.

Their current focus on cajoling Congress and the President to do the right thing ignores a very basic fact – this approach has never won civil rights gains. While LGBT activists fawned over the last Democratic President, Bill Clinton repaid our love by giving us much of the crap bullet-pointed above. Like today, many of those anti-gay measures came while the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress plus the Presidency.

By contrast, uncompromising street protests led by ACT-UP and others gave us the Ryan White AIDS Care and the Americans With Disabilities Acts – despite a very reactionary political climate during the first Bush administration. An era of such protests – the 1960s – caused the radical change in consciousness among LGBT people which thereby gave birth to our modern LGBT movement.

The last thing we need today is to parrot "yes we can" chants, like we are cheerleading this president and his party. Instead, we must take as our maxim the quote from the great anti-slavery organizer Frederick Douglass: "Power concedes nothing without a demand. Never has, never will."

Therefore on October 10th we will be picketing the White House to demand that the most powerful politician in the world implement the many reforms that the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans community needs. Please join us.

6 PM -- Saturday, October 10th

Lafayette Square (on H Street on the north side of the White House)

We also will be marching in the Sunday, October 11th march. We invite you to join us – just look for the big yellow banner that reads "President Obama – Keep Your #$^! Promises! Repeal DOMA, DADT"

For more information or to endorse this statement, please email the Gay Liberation Network in Chicago (LGBTliberation@aol.com) or Queer Liberaction in Dallas (LGBTliberaction@gmail.com).

British Prime Minister Issues Posthumous Apology To Alan Turing

Alan Turing pioneered computer science, broke the Nazi Enigma code and changed the course of world history.  But he was also gay.  He was prosecuted for being gay, chemically castrated to “cure” his homosexuality, and took his own life at only 41.

As stated in my August 17th post, there is a campaign in the United Kingdom to recognize Alan Turing as a genius and a hero and to apologize for the horrific discrimination he endured as a British citizen because he was gay.  This petition has been signed by many thousands of British citizens.  Now as the list of petitioners continues to grow, the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has issued a posthumous apology to Alan Turing.  Below is the text of this apology.

2009 has been a year of deep reflection – a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have stirred in us that sense of pride and gratitude which characterise the British experience. Earlier this year I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take up arms against Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing.

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison - was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.

Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.

I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue.

But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate – by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices – that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.

So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.

Gordon Brown

See The Alan Turing Home Page for a wealth of information about this great genius and Geoffrey Wansell's article for a good synopsis of this unsung World War II hero's life story .

The GLBT March On Washington for Equality Across America

     I'm so excited because I will be taking part in the historic GLBT Equal Rights March on Washington this October.  I will be taking a van to Washington with other members of Chicago's Gay Liberation Network.  In fact, GLN will be teaming up with another group to picket the White House on the Saturday evening before the big march.  That's right!  It would be awful to be in Washington DC and not picket the White House, wouldn't it?

Ending Professional Bigotry Against Transsexual People

In this video I present the scientific evidence showing that transsexuality is a natural variation and that transsexual people are simply different, not disordered. Consequently, the American Psychiatric Association should remove "gender identity disorder" from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. My thanks to Chicago's Gay Liberation Network . This video of the cable television broadcast is in FOUR PARTS.
PART 1


PART 2


PART 3


PART 4


References specifically referred to in this video are (in order of mention):

• Zhou, J.N., Hofman, M.A., Gooren, L.J. and Swaab, D.F.. A Sex Difference in the Human Brain and its Relation to Transsexuality. NATURE, 378: 68-70 (1995)
• Kruijver, Frank P. M., Zhou, J., Pool, Chris W., Hofman, Michel A., Gooren, Louis J. G and Swaab, Dick F. Male-To-Female Transsexuals Have Female Neuron Numbers In A Limbic Nucleus. J CLIN ENDOCRINOL METAB, 85: 2034-2041 (2000)
• Garcia-Falgueras, Alicia and Swaab, Dick F. A Sex Difference In The Hypothalamic Uncinate Nucleus: Relationship To Gender Identity. BRAIN, (Nov 2, 2008)

Alan Turing - Gay Genius Who Changed the Course of History Was Hounded to His Death

Alan Turing, “father of computer science,” mathematician, philosopher, visionary and hero who helped win World War II by breaking the Nazi code, has been a major and positive force in shaping our modern life and the future; yet few people know of his enormous and rightful place in history. Why? Because Alan Turing was a homosexual (androphilic) man and he died young by suicide. Now there is a campaign in the United Kingdom to recognize Alan Turing as a genius and a hero and to apologize for the horrific discrimination he endured as a British citizen because he was gay and that no doubt contributed to his suicide.

But Alan Turing deserves to be celebrated around the planet, not just in the United Kingdom. Alan Turing’s accomplishments as a scientist, great thinker, and military hero have benefited all of humanity; thus he is a global hero and should be known and celebrated around the world. Over the years that I have been in American academia, I have observed to my dismay that many computer science students don’t know anything about Alan Turing. This is like a physics student not knowing about Isaac Newton! American students should be taught about Alan Turing in their computer science, math, philosophy and history classes. And they should be taught how Alan Turing died and how all humanity has lost so much due to prejudice.

We will never know what other incredible achievements Alan Turing would have given the world had he been celebrated rather than persecuted for being gay. The same innate brain difference that made Alan Turing a gay man may well have been a factor leading to his genius. We suffer when we punish diversity. The world destroyed a genius and a hero. The whole world lost. Homophobia is a cultural disorder!

Intersex People – Disordered or Different? The DSD Debate

Curtis Hinkle – founder of OII

Should intersex people be regarded as having a disorder that needs to be fixed or should they be viewed as natural variations and simply different? Robert Davidson has traced the framing processes executed in a debate over the reshaping of a code among three groups of the intersex social movement in order to understand how the groups engage with the medical discourse on intersex. His paper entitled “DSD Debates: Social Movement Organizations’ Framing Disputes Surrounding the Term ‘Disorders of Sex Development’” is an ongoing PhD research project that summarizes the history surrounding the medical community’s treatment of intersex people. It also includes discussion of the influence of John Money and his nemesis Milton Diamond.

Davidson does a good job of explaining the history of the term Disorders of Sex Development (DSD) and analyzing the different perspectives of the three intersex organizations on the issue of terminology: disorder versus difference/variation. Here is an excerpt from the introduction of his paper:

“In the last 15 years discussions around ‘intersex’ have increasingly moved beyond the medical/biological realm and taken growing prominence in gender studies, within social movements, and in the socio-cultural realm. This shift was highly promoted by social movement organizations (SMOs) that have arisen to address various issues related to intersex and was also encouraged by some academics in the social sciences and the humanities. Social movement research is only beginning to address intersex advocacy in social movement terms (Turner, 1999; Preves, 2005; Greenberg, 2006). Research regarding social movements in the last two decades has paid increasing attention, however, to discourse (Steinberg, 1998) and how social movements engage with cultural institutions and use frames (Snow & Benford, 2000) to reshape cultural codes (Melucci, 1985, 1996). This article traces the framing processes executed in a debate over the reshaping of a code among three groups of the intersex social movement in order to understand how the groups engage with the medical discourse on intersex. A medical discourse on intersex is traced based on a Foucauldian perspective. A textual framing analysis of the websites of three intersex SMOs is then presented to examine the internal frame disputes between them over the proposed terminology ‘Disorders of Sex Development,’ or ‘DSD’. The SMOs included are the Intersex Society of North America/Accord Alliance (ISNA/Accord)1, Organization Intersex International (OII), and Androgen Insensitivity Support Group UK (AISSGUK).”

While it is a minor point in the paper, I wish to inform the reader that Davidson mischaracterizes Milton Diamond when describing Diamond’s role in discovering the John/Joan hoax, when he says: “This discovery led to the critical reevaluation of the Money Protocol but has had other problematic side effects, as Diamond and Sigmundson have used this case to re-institute a binary view of sexuality (emphasis mine) based on prenatal influences of androgens on the brain.” Untrue! Diamond would be among the very last to advocate a binary view. Milton Diamond has an evolutionary perspective (like any good biologist) and has repeatedly demonstrated how he values diversity. Diamond is widely quoted for saying: "Nature loves diversity, society hates it."

Dr. Milton Diamond

This controversy over whether intersexuality per se is a disorder was addressed in 2006 in the journal, the Archives of Diseases of Childhood. Here is the letter that Dr. Milton Diamond sent to the editor. In this letter, Dr. Diamond chides the medical profession for its arrogance: “What medicine observes are variations in human sex development, it does not know the biological purpose of such variations, and there remains great controversy about how, whether or when to intervene. Terms such as error or disorders reveal an unwelcome arrogance in light of medicine's limited vantage. Medicine can do better. One way is to, instead, use the term Variation in Sex Development (VSD), a term that is without judgment and neither prohibits or ordains medical intervention”

And here is what Dr. Diamond had to say about this issue in a footnote of his recent historical review of the science on sexual development: “It has been recommended that intersex conditions be referred to as Disorders of Sex Development (DSD) (Hughes et al., 2006. Consensus statement on management of intersex disorders. Archives of Disease in Childhood. 91, 554-563.). This I refuse to do. I consider using the adjective disorder to be demeaning and pejorative to the individuals so identified. And so too does it seem insulting to members of the Organisation Intersex International, the largest intersex organization in the world (http://oii-usa.blogspot.com/2006/08/three-intersex-activists-defend.html). I use the abbreviation but with the meaning of Differences of Sex Development Diamond and Beh, 2008. Changes In Management Of Children With Differences Of Sex Development (Nature Clinical Practice: Endocrinology & Metabolism. 4, 4-5).”

So Milton Diamond refuses to refer to intersex people as disordered and likes to turn the acronym DSD into "Differences of Sexual Development". He also favors “Variations in Sex Development” that is advocated by Organization Intersex International and its founder Curtis Hinkle.

I agree with Milton Diamond and Curtis Hinkle that intersex persons are natural variations and are not disordered. In my presentation of “Science and Sexuality”, I discuss the different perspectives of biologist versus medical doctor. A dominant theme of my presentation is “Difference does not equal disorder.” Biologists see differences or variations. Medical people are predisposed to see disorders or anomalies or aberrations or faults or pathologies that they can “rectify” (for a fee of course). Medical professionals want to “fix” people even when the people are simply different.

The cultural taboo nature of sexual matters has allowed untold thousands of sexually-different people to be grossly mistreated by the medical profession and to suffer in secrecy and shame. Three sexual groups have been medicalized and pathologized by the medical professions: gay/lesbian people, transsexual people, and intersex people. (Note that intersex people have sexual identity and sexual orientation issues also.)

Gay and lesbian people were mentally-disordered in the United States until the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) was revised in 1973 and remained mentally ill elsewhere in the world according to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) until 1992. Some quacks (e.g., Exodus International) still purport to do “reparative therapy” on gay people. Now reputable psychologists and psychiatrists do not treat gay or lesbian people for their sexual orientation but do treat other problems caused by the culture’s treatment of homosexual people. The culture is disordered, not gay or lesbian people!

As for transsexuals, who are currently regarded as mentally disordered in the DSM and ICD, any medical concern (e.g., gender dysphoria) can be treated without considering transsexuality per se as a disorder. (This is my position in my letter to the American Psychiatric Association regarding the revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual).

The same logic applies to intersex people. Treat any problems the patient presents and wants treated but do not consider the intersex condition itself as a disorder – consider it as a natural variation, one of the many differences to be expected in any normal population. The stigma of the label “disorder” should be replaced with “difference” or “variation”.

People do not need surgery just because their genitalia are ambiguous. Many intersex people have an “intersex identity” and their anatomy feels appropriate to them. I know of intersex persons who would gladly identify as “intersex” if the culture permitted. (Of course, intersex persons should be able to decide what surgery, if any, they require. Only they can know that - because only they can know their sexual identity, their unique sensibility which is something else again and is an issue some intersex people share with transsexual persons.)

Intersexuality is natural. Intersex people should come out of the closet. There should be no secrecy or shame. Intersex is beautiful! Intersex people do not need to change; the culture needs to change. Society needs to be enlightened, and the culture should change to acknowledge and accommodate intersex people.

Milton Diamond Reviews A Half Century Of Science On Sexual Development

Clinical Implications Of The Organizational And Activational Effects Of Hormones

Milton Diamond, who I regard as the most important figure in modern sexology, has reviewed the scientific history of the nature-nurture debate about sexual behavior. This is a wonderful summary of the science, the theories, and the medical controversies regarding intersexuality and transsexuality written by a leader in the field. Below is the abstract of Dr. Diamond’s article, “Clinical implications of the organizational and activational effects of hormones” which was published in the journal Hormones and Behavior in March 2009.

"Debate on the relative contributions of nature and nurture to an individual's gender patterns, sexual orientation and gender identity are reviewed as they appeared to this observer starting from the middle of the last century. Particular attention is given to the organization-activation theory in comparison to what might be called a theory of psychosexual neutrality at birth or rearing consistency theory. The organization-activation theory posits that the nervous system of a developing fetus responds to prenatal androgens so that, at a postnatal time, it will determine how sexual behavior is manifest. How organization-activation was or was not considered among different groups and under which circumstances it is considered is basically understood from the research and comments of different investigators and clinicians. The preponderance of evidence seems to indicate that the theory of organization-activation for the development of sexual behavior is certain for non-human mammals and almost certain for humans. This article also follows up on previous clinical critiques and recommendations and makes some new suggestions."

This is the paper to read if you are looking for a quick way to be brought up to date on the evidence for the “organization-activation theory” of sexual development and an understanding of the controversies on “core sexuality”. Here is the complete article entitled Clinical Implications Of The Organizational And Activational Effects Of Hormones.