An international meeting of experts on HIV has called for transgenderism to be reclassified as a medical condition, rather than a mental illness.
The second International Experts' Meeting on HIV Prevention for MSM, WSW [men who have sex with men and women who have sex with women] and Transgenders took place in Amsterdam in early November with 130 experts from around the world.
A report, called Moving from Intentions to Action, has now been published and calls for change in how trans people are treated.
It argues that trans people would then escape the stigma of mental illness that is frequently attached to them.
The report said: "Gender identity variance (transgenderism) should be reclassified from its current classification as a mental health disorder in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and the World Health Organisation’s International Classification Of Diseases (ICD).
"Instead it should be classified as a medical condition. This would provide a diagnostic category in the ICD that would accommodate the needs of those gender identity variant people who require medical care for their condition, but without the stigma attached to mental disorder."
Professor Stephen Whittle, of Manchester Metropolitan University and trans group Press For Change, welcomed the move.
He said: "This is another major contribution to the very important, and crucial debate on whether simply having a gender identity and the desire to express yourself through it can be a mental illness.
"We accept that many trans people need the support of mental health specialists – but not because of their gender identity, but because of the rejection of their gender not just on a personal transphobic level but also institutionally and at the wider structural levels.
"Every one of us has a gender identity and look at any group of people and one can see a vast number of ways ordinary people express their person gender place – how they want others to know them. At their core trans people want nothing more than to have the privilege to do the same."
Medical opinion once held that homosexuality was a mental illness. It was removed from the list of mental disorders by the World Health Organisation in 1990.
Gaza City (CNN) -- Two Palestinian teenagers stroll amid the mounds of rubble left by last year's Israeli military offensive, listening to the tinny beat of a Turkish pop song playing on a cell phone.
Nadir Mohammed Saleh and Ahmed Fayiz Abed Rabo are cousins and next-door neighbors. With their gelled hair, buttoned-down shirts and jeans, they look much like any other 16-year-old Palestinian boy. But looks, Ahmed says, can be deceiving.
"Only my appearance, my haircut and clothing, makes me look like a boy," Ahmed says, gesturing with his hands across his face. "Inside, I am like a female. I am a girl."
Until last summer, both Nadir and Ahmed were -- for all intents and purposes -- girls. They wore female headscarves, attended girls' school and even answered to the female first names Navin and Ola.
Both Nadir and Ahmed were born with a rare birth defect called male pseudohermaphrodism.
Deficiency of the hormone 17-B-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase (17-B-HSD) during pregnancy left their male reproductive organs deformed and buried deep within their abdomens.
At birth, doctors identified Nadir and Ahmed as girls, because they appeared to have female genitalia.
As a result, they spent the first 16 years of their lives dressing and acting like girls. It was a role that grew increasingly difficult to play, as they hit puberty and their bodies began generating testosterone, resulting in facial hair and increasingly masculine features.
"They used to travel by car to girls' school and back," says Nadir's father Mohammed Sadih Ahmed Saleh.
"Because of their facial hair, it was difficult for them to go out into the street. Psychologically they were distressed."
Finally, on June 22, with the support of their families, both Nadir and Ahmed transformed themselves into boys.
"They transferred on the same day," Saleh says. "Clothing, they switched to the other [boys'] school on the same day. They cut their hair on the same day. Both of them helped each other get through this crisis."
There are an unusually high number of male pseudohermaphrodite births in the Gaza neighborhood of Jabalya, where Nadir and Ahmed live.
Dr. Jehad Abudaia, a Canadian-Palestinian pediatrician and urologist practicing in Gaza, says he has diagnosed nearly 80 cases like Nadir's and Ahmed's in the last seven years.
"It is astonishing that we have [so] many cases with this defect, which is very rare all over the world," Abudaia says. He attributes the high frequency of this birth defect to "consanguinity," or in-breeding.
"If you want to go to the root of the problem, this problem runs in families in the genes." Abudaia says. "They want to get married to cousins... they don't go to another family. This is a problem."
In Western, more developed countries, doctors typically identify and then operate to correct disorders of sex differentiation at birth. But in war-torn Gaza, which has a lower standard of medical care, the birth defect can go undetected for years.
"Some of them unfortunately will be discovered late, when they are more than 14 years [old]. When they have been living as a female and they don't have menstruation, then they will go to the gynecologist," Abudaia says.
Abudaia's first advice to patients with the disorder is to immediately adopt male clothing and hair cuts, and then to plan for a sex-change operation.
This unusual ritual has been performed several times in the extended family of Nadir and Ahmed, where sex differentiation is a recurring disorder.
Nadir's 21-year-old brother Midyam and his 32-year-old cousin Ameen Abd Hamed share the same condition of male pseudohermaphrodism. As adolescents, they too underwent the gender identity transformation process the family refers to as "the transfer."
The traumatizing experience is all the more difficult because Gaza is a socially-conservative society, where there is a fair amount of segregation between males and females.
"I sat down with Nadir and explained to him how to adapt to the street, how to sit with the guys and talk to them... because at the beginning his mental state was bad, just like what happened to me," Ameen says.
"We did not understand what to do," says Ahmed, one of the 16-year-olds. "It was a new life for us, as if we were born again."
Though Nadir and Ahmed clearly have the love and support of their family, they say that is not enough. They are appealing to the international community to help them get the expensive and complicated sex-change operations they say they need to live normal lives.
"It's the only obstacle and the source of all the problems," Nadir says.
Until the sex-change operation is completed, Palestinian officials won't change the gender on their identity cards to "male," thus restricting their access to higher education.
In addition, Nadir and Ahmed complain of health problems like kidney infections due to complications resulting from the disfigurement of their genitalia.
"This is 100 percent a humanitarian issue," says Nadir's father, Mohammed. "There are four conditions in the same [extended] family. If we propose conducting the same operation on all four of them, the cost would be $30,000. We don't have $30,000 and there is no advanced medicine in Gaza."
Until then, these troubled Palestinians say their genders and their identities will remain in conflict, much like the land around them.
Source: Click here
On the evening of Monday 14th December, CSI:Miami series 8, episode 11, Delko for the Defence, was broadcast and it characterized an intersex person as dangerous, evil and a threat to society. That is the very last thing that intersex people need right now.
By Sophia Siedlberg
How often have I said that genes in the autosomes have the final say when it comes to sex differentiation? Probably about 500 times on record and at least 20 in my writings.
Well, the publication Cell has some nice, hard laboratory evidence of precisely the mechanism I have been describing. My point is that autosomal regulation of sex differentiation was something I had myself understood quite well in terms of computer models. And while Dr. Robin Lovell-Badge of the National Institute of Medical Research in the UK would not have been aware of my computer models, it is certainly true that the good doctor has confirmed what I have known all along. The dogma XY for a boy and XX for a girl is an old idea that is toast.
Let me quote Dr. Robin Lovell-Badge:
“We take it for granted that we maintain the sex we are born with, including whether we have testes or ovaries. But this work shows that the activity of a single gene, FOXL2, is all that prevents adult ovary cells turning into cells found in testes,”
And the response from the Murdoch Press is:
“The research, published today in the journal Cell, challenges a common perception that gender is determined purely by the X-chromosomes and Y-chromosomes. The gene that was switched off, known as FOXL2, lies on a non-sex chromosome that is shared by males and females.”
I am tempted to gloat given that in a previous article I said to a reporter from the Murdoch Press who asked whether I was genetically male or female that “I am genetically me”. But given that the Murdoch press were showing signs of being nice, I am not going to gloat. I am not in a position to because all the research has shown is that the sort of model I have been describing for years was true after all. But I am not the one who published it in a scientific publication (having been marginalized) and the research I did was purely theory. These people were not even testing my own theory. They just proved it correct as a consequence of their research.
However, I believe it was only a matter of time before some research in a lab proved this autosomal sex regulation model to be correct. The truth is when you look at the human genome up close and personal, that is spend the best part of five years gawking at nucleotide sequence data and constructing a polygenic model, you do end up predicting that the number of genes in the human genome is less that 40,000 before the Human Genome Project figured it out and you do know how sex is regulated by genes not in the 23rd pair of chromosomes.
What I am saying is, I am not some idiot (as the textbooks often claim about intersex people). I am saying I knew prior to both the discoveries I mentioned, and it is documented what those discoveries would be, and it was not down to some mystical power but hard work.
I am also not going to reap any benefits because I was not involved in the research on both occasions. But this is a question of personal integrity; you know the textbook description of intersex people being “mentally retarded”.
But the one thing I will benefit from is knowing that because of this latest discovery by Dr. Robin Lovell-Badge’s team I will be regarded as a human being instead of a monster, not because I was aware of the possibility that such research would incidentally prove me correct, but because the unholy dictatorship of “XX or XY” is over. I can call myself “genetically me”. And even that was in the Times a few weeks before Dr. Robin Lovell-Badge’s work was published, and reported on in the self same newspaper.
So I am going to ask just one thing. Can I be allowed to lead my life with some dignity, and not be dismissed as a mentally deficient monster or a pair of chromosomes that say nothing of who or what I am?
It seems the Murdoch press understand this is what intersex people are saying now. And to me this is perhaps far more important, because finally there is a degree of understanding that people who do not fit the classical biological definitions of what is male or female are not “dangerous” or “evil” or a “threat to society” they are just natural variations of the human genome. Genetically we are us.
Just like my namesake in religious mythology, she didn’t get listened to either but wisdom always gets proven right in the end. Let me just get on with my life is all I and those like me ask.
Source quoted: Click here
SYDNEY: Female ovaries spend their entire existence suppressing an innate capacity to become male, according to a new study that overturns existing theories.
The study, published in the journal Cell, could have important implications for understanding sex disorders in humans.
It found that the ovaries of adult female mice could be ‘reprogrammed’ into non-sperm-producing male testes by silencing a single gene, called FOXL2.
Another gene, called SRY and found on the Y chromosome, is responsible for undeveloped foetal gonads becoming male testes, rather than female ovaries. SRY then activates a gene called SOX9, which takes over from there.
Complete article: Click here
The IAAF is still awaiting the final results of the gender verification test carried out on the South African teenager during the World Championships in Berlin in August, though leaked reports have indicated that she is a hermaphrodite with internal testes and has three times the normal level of testosterone for a female.
If that is confirmed by the panel of scientists studying her condition, then the issue for the IAAF will be whether her raised testosterone gives her an unfair advantage over her rivals – a situation that would require remedial treatment if she wishes to race again in women's competitions.
Complete article: Click here
Scientists have identified the gene that keeps females female. An international team found that the action of a single gene is all that stops females from developing male physical traits, including testes and facial hair.
When this gene was artificially “switched off” in adult female mice their ovaries began to turn into testes and they started to produce a level of testosterone found in healthy male mice.
The discovery could eventually revolutionise gender reassignment therapy and improve treatments for babies who are born with a mixed gender.
The research, published today in the journal Cell, challenges a common perception that gender is determined purely by the X-chromosomes and Y-chromosomes. The gene that was switched off, known as FOXL2, lies on a non-sex chromosome that is shared by males and females.
Complete article: Click here
Please read the following letter written by Gina Wilson from OII-Australia about intersex children in Uganda and the current homophobic laws and how they affect intersex people there.
By Staff Writer, PinkNews.co.uk • November 19, 2009British doctors are becoming "world pioneers" in treating children and adults who are born with ambiguous genitals, it has been reported.
According to The Times, the NHS is the first health service in the world to begin treating intersex babies on the assumption that they should not automatically be operated on.
For years, medical opinion has held that it is best to attempt to assign gender at birth where a child is born with an unclear sex. This often led to surgery and distressing results once the child reaches adulthood.
A recent Scottish study found that ambiguous genitals are far more common than previously thought – up to one in 4,000 babies is born with this condition.
Sarah Creighton, a gynaecologist at University College Hospital, produced the first study which compared children who had undergone surgery to "normalise" them and those who had not.
The study, published in the Lancet, found that those who did not have surgery were faring as well as or better than those who had.
Creighton spoke to The Times about how parents are treated: “We advise parents to say the baby’s poorly, they are awaiting tests. All children are then allocated boy or girl, but much more controversial is: do you proceed to surgery? That is hard to undo.
"We tend to think that surgery is all-powerful and by having surgery you have a cure. These aren’t conditions that you can cure.”
She added: “We are leaders in this field, worldwide, in terms of disclosure to the parents and child, and challenging surgery.”
To read the full article, click here
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