Posted on 06/15/2014 1:15:18 PM PDT by NKP_Vet
Post of the day! Great answer, brief and to the point.
It caused me to go back and read your entire posting history. I see you trying hard to get people involved in a discussion of hormone intervention/starvation in the developing fetus with regard to later manifestation of transgender issues. It would appear that your deep research is over the head of the average FR poster; however, I will also keep you in mind for pinging to others who may have medical/scientific knowledge.
With regard to the topic, I remain committed to compassion towards individuals who earnestly seek answers and spiritual wholeness rather than institutionalized victim status; however, the reality of minority status must not be denied in society, which is what schools and the media are attempting to do with regard to sexual outlier populations. I do not think it will help society in the long run to deny medical research in the name of political correctness; yet there are virulent movements to shut down open-ended research into trans- or same-sex-related issues -- even laws forbidding therapy for individuals who want to become better adjusted to realizing that their awareness of sexual self is outside the mainstream.
The left's abuse of language such as "normal" and "natural" with regard to statistical populations of less than 3 or 4 percent is ultimately not an effective way to make transsexual or homosexual people more comfortable and accepted, in that such language is usually accompanied by accusing religious believers of bigotry and fear. I have been interested in the growing understanding of brain plasticity after witnessing combat injury and stroke recovery. I do believe in principle what the Bible says: "Be transformed by the renewing of your mind."
Naturally, renewing of the mind, attitudes, beliefs and spiritual knowledge will not regrow a lost limb or cure various congenital disorders. However, renewing one's mind may have previously unimagined effects for helping the adjustment of the individual; or by supporting research into the condition of persons such as you have described who were subjected to hormonal irregularity through no action of their own. A greater degree of emotional or functional recovery may be possible than previously imagined, to be met halfway by church and society better informed about root causes.
I'm for whatever can make for a more balanced individual and society, instead of today's vicitim-of-bigot mentality directed collectively at religion from groups outside the mainstream with a fascist agenda, which is just as toxic as the former persecution by the mainstream towards those with unwanted behavioral or physical differences.
When the Saudi money started flooding in a couple of decades ago, for starters, to built GU's "Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding" (trojan horse indoctrination/influence center in DC). But it was always a Jesuit school, so that in itself guarantees a lot of sophistry and mental gymnastics. And it was always committed to diversity, although its Catholic population had traditionally been the majority until, again, a couple of decades ago, when the chillun of the Boomers decided to renovate the United States, starting in DC, and happened to notice this formerly outstanding university sitting right there on the Potomac in an upscale neighborhood. Having already tolerated a sizeable number of feminists on its faculty, round 2003 or 04, GU installed its first non-priest as its president. A perfect storm ensued.
I don’t put it past the Kenyan to issue an executive order to overturn the SBC.
There were cultural practices in place at the time in which poor families may have had one or more of their boys castrated (families were large before birth control) in order to offer them to rich or influential households as servants. It's not far from the equally abhorrent practice of female genital mutilation still practiced today among some groups in Africa and the Middle East. Wikipedia: Eunuch
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0055387
“Plastics Derived Endocrine Disruptors (BPA, DEHP and DBP) Induce Epigenetic Transgenerational Inheritance of Obesity, Reproductive Disease and Sperm Epimutations “
Excellent — a discussion where your research fits right in!
Hasn't overturned the church yet; just hasn't gotten around to it:
It was still barbaric. Then and now.
Of course you may be taking your life into your hands as the "tolerant" left may not approve.
Ok, explain the sudden proliferation of people who think they should be the opposite sex? Including little kids? What would they have done before modern surgery or artificial hormones? They would have dealt with it! I don’t remember scads of people committing suicide over their parts. Some who make the transition find out it doesn’t solve all their problems after all. I get particularly perturbed at those who make families then decide in their forties to “be who they are,” destroying their spouse and children along the way when Daddy “becomes” Jennifer.
Albion, thanks for taking the time to read the stuff I’ve posted on FR, and for telling some of your friends about it.
As you can see, I’ve been trying for over a year now to make people aware of what happened with DES, and of the possibility that other synthetic hormones still in use might also be capable of interfering with normal male development. I’ve tried posting on medical websites and contacting news organisations, but nobody seems to want to know. Even trans people have by and large either ignored me or reacted with hostility, and I’ve had my posts deleted and even been kicked out of some groups. It saddens me a great deal, because here I’ve been given an opportunity to put right a terrible injustice and hopefully improve the lives of millions of people, and yet more than a year on, there’s still precious little signs of progress.
One other thing that puzzles me is the degree of animosity towards gender nonconforming folk coming from certain people who call themselves Christians. I saw a documentary about early Christian art last year, and, if what the presenter says is accurate, then there’s a great deal of irony involved in taking that stance. I’ve uploaded the relevant segment to youtube. See what you think:
http://youtu.be/lchE2acC4Wk
Your post deserves a thoughtful reply, which I haven’t time for today, so I’m bookmarking this post and will get back to you, HughE. :-)
Given that I’ve read all your long posts about the possibility that perceived transgenderism may be the result of hormonal damage caused during pregnancy of the mother, and that your lines of discussion are detailed and intriguing, I wanted to answer you in detail as well. There is much I don’t know about you; our contexts US vs UK do have differences as well as similarities, nor am I sure of your priorities with regard to what needs a response. I've tried to take the topics you have presented more or less in chronological order. So take your time to consider what I’ve written in good faith. It’s likely we can break our responses down into shorter posts going forward, should you choose to continue a dialogue.
Getting Your Theory Out There
I don't know enough about whether you are credentialed or not in order to comment on why you haven't found a place to publish, but let's go over the basics:
In order to be published in the scientific community, a research study needs to meet classic guidelines for the scientific method: clean statistics, adequate sample size, clear definition of the premises and conclusions, no coaching to elicit pre-conclusions from the respondents, etc. Further, medical publications are looking for
• someone with established credentials in the field (a graduate degree), or
• someone who already works in a reputable research organization, or
• someone who has already published in a reliable publication.
If the research meets the basic criteria of clean scientific method but the author is not credentialed, a publisher would have to have a very compelling reason to publish your work out of the large pile of competing manuscripts. In short, getting published isn't easy in any field, and newcomers often are rejected many times before finding a slot. Many best-selling authors with multiple awards have written about the many rejection letters they received early on.
It is a dog-eat-dog world in publishing, research universites and laboratories. So your best bet for scientific publication if your research is not completely documentable or you are not credentialed would be to find an individual researcher with qualifications who is interested in your topic, make a deal of some kind to share credit, apply for a research grant to fund a precise study, and then try for scientific publication or speaking engagements.
Failing all that, there is always the Internet and YouTube, as you have already started to do; or self-publishing of a pamphlet on which you place your copyright. I am unfamiliar with copyright laws in UK, but if your aim is not just to share the information, but to have some recognition and legal claim for its originality with you, that is one way to go.
In short, there is no easy path to getting new scientific ideas out there; nor is there any way to avoid the kind of negativity that always, always accompanies anything new. Have you read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn? It's an older title, but few other books I've read more clearly explain the dynamics of human rejection of anything new until evidence is literally overwhelming -- then comes a cascade of change.
Your YouTube Link
To be perfectly frank, I found the title misleading, if not a plain attempt to find something simply not in evidence. The art historian made it very clear that early art used classical Greek models to make symbolic representations of Jesus; however, he gave no dates as to when the sculptures were done, and made claims that he could not substantiate, such as that the sculptures were blond, when in fact they are marble carvings that do not show color at all. If he could substantiate that the sculptures were eyewitness accounts created between 1 A.D. and, say, 75 A.D., he might have a point. Otherwise, there is simply no connection whatsoever to physical reality or to the Shroud of Turin -- and let me stress, none whatsoever. His bringing in the mosaic of the baptism of Christ in the dome is also completely irrelevant, as it depicts a short, beardless youth. As a Jew, the adult Jesus would have worn a beard according to Jewish custom and the Biblical account of his baptism takes place when he is in his early 30s -- during the period of his active ministry, approximately three years before his crucifixion at age 33. Here is a summary of the historic likelihood that Jesus was an adult when baptised, that his ministry and that of John the Baptist who baptised him can be historically dated, and that he was baptised outdoors, likely in a river, and not as a youth in a tub as the dome art depicts. Therefore the entire video contains so many untrue or improbable assertions, it does nothing whatsoever to support the title you have assigned to it, nor your general theory.
Participation on FR
People from many walks of life come to FR to discuss issues. However, it is a privately owned Forum, and the owners do limit continued participation to persons who generally support the deep principles of American conservative traditions. Those include a broadly favorable view of JudeoChristian moral, social and legal principles, and rejection of the atheist, socialist views that attempt to deconstruct a fundamental understanding of the human being as a created being under the God of Abraham. In that general framework, people who post here often find disfavor if they appear to promote the view that these beliefs are outdated and therefore invalid. Christianity recognizes the eternal nature of God, and that deep fundamentals of human life and behavior do not change, even as technology changes. Conservatives do not want to turn back time, but rather to conserve what is best from every generation and adapt incrementally to new technology, without throwing out all that has come before to adopt an essentially unknown but wishfully-proposed utopian future in which every thing and person is equally wonderful, and anyone who says that politically correct but unsubstantiated beliefs aren't really substantial are bigots and should be silenced. Atheists believe conservatives harm people when we warn them of consquences they may not be willing to foresee. Conservatives believe we harm people if we fail to warn or try to forestall consequences we see with our eyes, would like governments to study instead of inflict, and have been warned about by tradition or even in scripture.
Therefore your comfort level on this forum would depend on whether you have a “progressive” or anti-Christian agenda. To the extent that you wish to find a pathway for the truth of your assertion that many trans or intersex people got that way from egregious medical interference from drugs in the womb, or were subject to misguided surgical mutilation in childhood that interferes with their integrity as adults, all that fits in; yet there are few people posting here whose politics center on what you must concede is a very small slice of the population. FR is mostly about keeping the overarching principles of freedom alive and well. Advocacy for legislated social acceptance of openly rebellious behaviors against traditional social norms do not fly well on FR.
Again, I stress that you have not done any of these things; just giving you a fair assessment of the relative usefulness of FR to your issue. I think you will find the next section clarifies more specifically where the Baptists seek to draw a line in the sand.
A Biblically Conservative View of the “Born That Way” Theory, as Relates to the Baptist Resolution Cited Above
Regardless of how people got "that way", whether their social minority is sexual, behavioral, financial, racial or any other way, the Biblical goal of "peace on earth, good will to men" requires a degree of tolerance, but not of acceptance or embrace of disordered or disruptive behaviors that can reasonably said to be voluntary. While a person’s belief that they are born in the wrong body may in a few cases be completely involuntary, their decisions to honor that condition by cross-dressing or undergoing surgical alteration are voluntary, in the same way that a married heterosexual’s attraction to a third party may be involuntary, but the decision to engage in sex with a third party is voluntary.
To those of a Christian mind, the circumstances of one's birth and the properties of one's physical body are temporary conditions, and do not constitute an "identity" or a victim status, because every true Christian acknowleges that he or she is imperfect in the sight of God due to their drives toward human goals that “fall short of the glory of God.” The challenge is to grow in the path of “death to self” -- becoming ever more an instrument for God's purposes rather than an independent agent for our own desires. With that humble spirit, Christians may long for any number of earthly rewards: acceptance, recognition, companionship, ownership, attractiveness, power, wealth, influence, children, pleasures, accomplishments, distinction, or even conformity to normality — but may find that one or many of those desired conditions elude oneself. This is the Christian’s cross to bear.
Christians’ job here is to live not for the short term, the medium term or even the long term, but for the eternal term, which is determined ultimately by the God of the universe. With a quiet heart, one accepts one’s limitations with patience and are at peace with the pains one must take to blend one’s individuality within a society. Christians work towards the seemingly impossible goal of forming a society that upholds the standards of right behaviors found in the Gospels; unlike the Taliban, those standards encourage the growth of the individual to accept authority, and do not force acceptance of the religion per se at the point of a sword. It is enough to accept the norms of cultural Christianity in order to live within the freedoms its laws create in harmony with “the laws of Nature and Nature’s God” (in the words of our Declaration of Independence from England). Progress is only possible against limitations; otherwise, there is nothing to push off against, no floor under our feet, and we drift aimlessly. Human limitations and one’s efforts to deal with them in this often-dark life are like a photographic negative from which the image in the likeness of God can eventually be printed.
Therefore, bottom line, even in those individuals of whom you write — in whom the condition of intersex or gender uncertainty is medically induced and not a psychological problem, there is no justification within Christian ethics for letting that particular limitation either curtail one's joy in the Lord, nor to assert a "right" to voluntary behaviors that undermine the normative social patterns of male/female differentiation. Christian communities should have compassion for the journey of the chemically-created intersex person to find adjustment in society. But churches under our First Amendment should not be forced to endorse cross-dressing, shared bathrooms based on what sex a person feels themself to be rather than what their equipment may be, the use of gender pronouns opposite to one’s equipment or any of the rest of the revolutionary agenda of the psychologically transgendered persons who are not chemically-created intersex persons.
The actual number of intersex persons, while it may have grown due to the chemical interference of which you write, remains very small, yet large enough to form internet support communities that may bring in psychologically-driven transsexuals, homosexuals and gender non-specificists under the same banner. This safety in numbers may also introduce confusion for the intersex person, because it blurs the lines of what is truly intersex from what is essentially a psychological rejection of the sex at birth or the social norms associated with the chromosomal sex. It is only in accepting that each human being — no matter how he or she is born, no matter how popular he or she may have been in high school or how successful he or she may appear in the life of the world — has troubling conditions in life and must walk this valley alone, that an intersex person may find peace and a way to fit in to a Christian community. Believe me when I say that many, many other persons whose outward lives scream “normalcy” also have deep doubts, fears and anxieties about deserving the mercy of God. One doesn’t have “rights” in a church; one has grace.
Since the very small numbers of intersex persons of whom you write truly cannot be conflated with those persons who psychologically reject the sex into which they were born, your theory has great validity in helping persons born intersexed or chemically damaged in development by the introduction of hormones in the mother's pregnancy, whenever they may seek medical treatment or counseling of any kind at any point in life. The actual medical history of whether the mother took those drugs in pregnancy should be determined regarding any patient who presents as gender confused; and further, research such as you propose would develop a benchmark of probability that a person exposed to those hormones in utero would develop gender issues, as an aid in achieving a peaceful determination to give the condition over to Christ for healing, along with whatever remedies science may develop in safety.
I mentioned to you the brain plasticity studies that have been in development, in which science is discovering that the brain may develop new pathways where old ones were damaged or malfunctioning due to trauma from stroke or injury. I see no reason why researchers would not at least give organic brain healing and relief from negative self-image some study with regard to chemically altered individuals presenting as intersex. It may or may not result in normatively heterosexual conditions; but it may end up easing a transistion, for those troubled by intersexuality, to a fulfilling life of service to God in which full heterosexual functioning is a option, and not an absolute goal in life. They may end up like many of the single women in Europe during WWI and WWII who lost their sweethearts and any chance to marry after the devastation of a generation; yet went on living and found purpose. They may end up like many of our brave wounded soldiers who accept that they will never function as the strong, athletic youths they were when they went into battle; but they can grow new skills and realities in which to serve the Lord and their fellow man.
In sum, persons who are either naturally-occuring or chemically-induced intersexuals should make every effort to differentiate themselves from those who have a psychological belief that they are "transgendered." I believe it is this latter group about whom the Baptists were speaking when they adopted their resolution. On obvious grounds, they reject the unproven assertion that peychologically-driven transgenderism is a hard-wired condition, without comment on any incidence of chemically-induced or organic variation of intersex presentation in a minority of individuals. And while some degree of genetic tendency towards a minority sexual development may exist, any absolute genetic indicator has never been found, despite decades of determined research..
The chemically-induced intersex condition of which you write may be as close to an immutable physical starting point as any other of which I’ve read. Nevertheless, regardless of the starting point, individual adult behaviors are a choice; and social limitations are always a reality in this life. Therefore, I find nothing amiss with the Southern Baptist Convention wanting to discourage the psychological or political agendas accompanying gender-blurring behaviors, in favor of a Christ-confessing community unified around optimum norms for children growing up with both their biological mother and biological father in the home, in extended biological families wherever possible.
That said, in the rare instance of a truly intersex person in their community, such a person should be treated with compassion and encouragement to join the mainstream of worship, to accept the social norms even where they don’t exactly apply in the knowledge that everybody has a cross to bear, and find peace in Christ. To be in community is to align oneself with what is best for most people, most of the time, rather than to rebel against norms in order to focus on the self one should instead be in the spiritual process of “dying to.”
Albion,
Once again, thank you for taking an interest and sharing your advice. I’m not looking to publish in a scientific journal, partly because of all the difficulties you mention, but also because that route’s already been tried without success. In 2001, two scientists, Dr Scott Kerlin and Dr Dana Beyer, set up an online “DES sons” network to study the effects of DES on gender identity in natal males. They recruited several hundred DES sons into their group, and found high rates of both physical intersex-realted disorders and gender dysphoria. One of their findings was that 150 out of 500 of the DES sons who participated in their survey identified as women rather than men. Their work was presented in 2004 at a conference about endocrine disrupting chemicals and published in 2005. It went down like a lead balloon.
By and large, people within the trans community have little or no interest in what made them trans, and outside it, well, as I’ve since discovered, this is a problem that certain people must have known about since at least the 1970s, and yet for whatever reason, nothing’s been done about it. I guess the status quo suits too many people, and it would be too difficult to admit that millions of people have probably already been born with brains that are, to varying degrees, the wrong sex for their bodies, due to exposure to these drugs.
I was in contact with Dr Kerlin in 2012, and I’ve seen the archive of messages posted to his group during the period 2001-1005 when the research was underway. At that time there were several hundred DES sons actively participating in the group, and many of them gave a personal history of their experiences when they joined. What I saw there ties in with what I’ve since seen on two large trangender websites (Laura’s Playground and Susans.org), as well as in a number of trans and gender related facebook groups I belong to.
There was a standard dosing schedule for miscarriage treatment which is what most DES sons worldwide were exposed to, so you’d expect them all to be experiencing fairly similar effects. Everywhere I’ve looked, the same types of problems get talked about again and again, so I think the entire population of between 2 and 3 million DES sons worldwide is most likely experiencing similar effects - intersex-related disorders, hormonal problems, impaired fertility and gender dysphoria. If you do a bit of digging, you soon find that probably the majority of trans women born in that era either know they were DES exposed, or show symtoms consistent with DES exposure. The effects are obvious enough that there’s no way anyone studying the aftermath of the DES disaster could have failed to notice. In other words, certain people must know, but for whatever reason, the public is being kept in the dark about what happened.
Another thing is that it’s been known for a good 40 years that prenatal exposure to synthetic hormones used for miscarriage prevention (DES, ethinyl estradiol and progestins) causes measureable, lifelong changes in behaviour and personality. From there, it’s not an enormous leap to them also causing gender dysphoria. Jill Escher (who I mentioned earlier), was, as a child, a participant in one of the key studies demonstrating this. On her blog, she talks about how she discovered this, and became probably the only person among the millions who were exposed to these drugs, to obtain copies of her mother’s medical records from during the pregnancy:
http://prenatalexposures.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/worse-than-thalidomide-consequences-of.html
Here’s the actual 1977 paper Jill talks about:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01541201
“Prenatal exposure to synthetic progestins and estrogens: Effects on human development”, Reinisch & Karow, Archives of Sexual Behavior July 1977, Volume 6, Issue 4, pp 257-288
The abstract looks innocuous enough, you need to read the actual paper, which is unfortunately behind a paywall unless you have institutional access. Fortunately I’ve obtained a copy of it, and I posted a few choice quotes from it in this message (which hopefully you can view without registering at susans.org):
http://www.susans.org/forums/index.php/topic,157142.msg1361416.html#msg1361416
In the paper, not only do the authors talk about masculinised behaviour in girls and feminised behaviour in boys, but it’s clear that there was a belief (for a time at least) amongst some of the world’s leading psychiatrists, that pernatal exposure to synthetic hormones could increase intelligence. Hormones are extensively used as growth promoters in cattle, so the idea that they might work as intelligence promoters in humans isn’t as outlandish as it sounds.
I can’t help but wonder if that was part of the reason why, when the scale of the problems caused by DES and first generation progestins became apparent, an outright ban on the use of hormones during pregnancy wasn’t implemented. Instead, all that happened was that DES was withdrawn from use, and prescribing guidelines changed to minimise hormone exposure during the first trimester, which is when genital development takes place.
Given that background, do you think (even assuming I were able to), getting a scientific paper published is going to make a lot of difference?
Regarding the youtube video, if it’s true that all the early representations of Jesus are of a youthful, androgynous-looking figure, and the portayals of a tortured Christ bleeding on a crucifix didn’t start appearing until 1000 AD or so, then it does suggest that a “rebranding” excercise has taken place at some stage!
According to wikipedia, feudalism became the mode of government around AD 900, and to me it looks like the way Christ was physically represented and the message he brought to the world were both altered to better suit the feudal aristocracy (his original message of togetherness, joy and hope for the future, being transformed into one based on fear and obedience to authority).
Fortunately, feudalism and its culture of slavery and oppression was largely consigned to the dustbin of history centuries ago, and Christ’s original message of love and hope restored. However it looks to me like the imagery of the feudal era has lingered on in the way Christ is portrayed! Our Western culture doesn’t treat “third sex” individuals very well, but in some cultures we’re held in high regard and made into religious or spiritual figures. Maybe that was the case for the Romans?
I’m not trying to belittle your faith, by the way. While I’m not affiliated with any religion as such, my personal belief is that: the history of our planet shown through geology and the fossil record; the fact that every human society has a creation myth and a belief in some kind of higher being or beings; and and the state of the world today, can all be much better understood if there’s some kind of sentient presence directing the overall course of worldly affairs, which can only exert influence over the physical world by acting through living things, and that has brought the human race into being for a specific (and very important) purpose.
It’s also my belief that animals are basically self replicating machines, but humans have been endowed with something beyond that, a spirit or soul if you like. There’s a kind of essence to who we are, which has an existence beyond that of our physical bodies, and grows with every noble or selfless act we perform, but is diminished by every act of selfishness or spite.
These are just my personal beliefs of course, which don’t necessarily coincide with anyone elses! Hopefully there is one thing we can agree on though: that there’s two opposing approaches to living our lives. The first is one of love, honour, humanity, dignity, self sacrifice and hope for the future, in which, by making small sacrifices now and by working with others of a similar disposition, together we can build a better world for everyone. Then there’s an opposing philosphy, one of greed, envy, dishonour, animalism, selfishness, and immediate gratification, which basically involves taking whatever can be gotten by fair means or foul, and squandering it with no thought for others or the future consequences of one’s actions.
In case you’re wondering, I’m endeavouring to follow the first philosophy (and hopefully through my words and actions to inspire others to do the same!).
Thanks for replying, Hugh. Again, I must schedule some time in days to come to think over how to respond. Cheers until then!
What kind of New Age garbage are you trying to peddle on here?
Fortunately, feudalism and its culture of slavery and oppression was largely consigned to the dustbin of history centuries ago, and Christ’s original message of love and hope restored. However it looks to me like the imagery of the feudal era has lingered on in the way Christ is portrayed! Our Western culture doesn’t treat “third sex” individuals very well, but in some cultures we’re held in high regard and made into religious or spiritual figures. Maybe that was the case for the Romans?
I’m not trying to belittle your faith, by the way. While I’m not affiliated with any religion as such, my personal belief is that: the history of our planet shown through geology and the fossil record; the fact that every human society has a creation myth and a belief in some kind of higher being or beings; and and the state of the world today, can all be much better understood if there’s some kind of sentient presence directing the overall course of worldly affairs, which can only exert influence over the physical world by acting through living things, and that has brought the human race into being for a specific (and very important) purpose.
I can see that you are of the mindset that lengthy scientific sounding posts will somehow lend credence to your beliefs, but I have a feeling that you would be wrong.
As best I can tell, you are a "transgender" atheist who thinks that Creation is a lie and that our Lord Jesus Christ was some "androgynous" pacifist.
Free Republic is a PRO-LIFE, PRO-GOD, PRO-FAMILY forum and what you are pushing is garbage.
Thank goodness.
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