Brave New World Revisited: Reflections on Uppity Women, Reframing the Concept of Homosexuality as a Disorder

Pandora by Martha Dahlig

I've had some very interesting conversations with readers, friends and family since I first blogged about Dr. Maria New in Brave New World and started my Uppity Women series. While the consensus of responses about the Uppity Women series has been overwhelmingly positive,  it seems as if for a few, the sense of sarcasm with which I call these women "Uppity" has been lost in the rhetoric. When my fellow uppity woman TL questions it, clearly I'm missing the mark. So I thought I'd mention the backstory for the Uppity Women concept, and revisit some of the serious issues that Dr. New is convolving with what she terms as "masculinized" behavior in women.


My concept of Uppity Women is, of course, borne from the series of books, by author Vicki Leon, that came out in the 1990's. Leon recounts various historical women who were going against the grain of subservience or gender expectations (and sometimes very cleverly so) in their era. As an amusing aside, in my Guardian ad Litem work, the first time I had one of my GAL kids talk with their judge in her chambers, I was delighted to see that she had several Uppity Women books, just like me. It, almost irrationally, set me totally at ease to think that she liked the idea of uppity women throughout history. But then, she's pretty uppity, herself, so I guess it shouldn't be a surprise. Leon's titles include Uppity Women of Ancient Times, Uppity Women of Medieval Times, Uppity Women of the Renaissance, Uppity Women of Shakespearian Times, and Uppity Women of the New World.

When I look at the meaning of uppity in my lovely Apple New Oxford American Dictionary, I see:


uppity |ˈəpətē|adjective informalself-important; arrogant : an uppity sister-in-law.ORIGIN late 19th cent.: a fanciful formation from up .

Whence I can definitely relate to TL's unhappiness with the term. She thinks the whole idea that accomplished and enterprising women would be called uppity is just like a form of racism. But that's also my  entire point. Are women who seek to pursue careers or lifestyles more traditionally associated with men being arrogant or self-important? Well, of course they aren't. At least not in my mind. They are seeking to make personal choices about self-fulfilment, self-actualization, or the pursuit of happiness. Whatever you want to call it, they are finding themselves and last I checked, since we're not in a country run by the Taliban or certain mullahs or ayatollahs with an interest in keeping women subservient, we thankfully get to make such choices and not have them, or so I thought, labeled disordered. We can have jobs that are usually associated with men. (Just like Dr. New who was Chief of Pediatric Endocrinology from 1964 through 2002 at Cornell's Weill Medical College and Chairman of the Pediatric Department from 1980 through 2002, as well.) We can skip having children. We can skip having a male significant other or in fact, any significant other at all. Short of some fundamentalist (and that could be Christian just as easily as many other faiths*) agenda in keeping women at home, having and raising children, it's really hard to see what's wrong with a woman exhibiting these purportedly "masculine" behaviors. I actually went back to Dr. New's foundation website, The Maria New Children's Hormone Foundation, and have found that they have altered some of their text and even removed some items, no doubt in response to the massive 'feminist' (I'd rather think of it as humanist) outcry about her treatment of fetuses with off-label dexamethasone in an attempt to remove the risks of Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia and specifically as had been mentioned on her website, non-traditional feminine behaviors. I find it fascinating that they have removed all reference to the behavioral aspects of androgenized women. But they can't remove (short of withdrawing the publications) the studies in the literature that point in the direction of Dr. New's evident interest in preventing lesbianism:

[Abstract Reproduced for Educational Purposes, emphasis mine]

Arch Sex Behav. 2008 Feb;37(1):85-99.

Sexual orientation in women with classical or non-classical congenital adrenal hyperplasia as a function of degree of prenatal androgen excess.

Meyer-Bahlburg HF, Dolezal C, Baker SW, New MI.

New York State Psychiatric Institute & Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University, 1051 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10032, USA. meyerb@childpsych.columbia.edu

Abstract

46,XX individuals with classical congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) due to deficiency of the enzyme, 21-hydroxylase, show variable degrees of masculinization of body and behavior due to excess adrenal androgen production. Increased bisexuality and homosexuality have also been reported. This article provides a review of existing reports of the latter and presents a new study aimed at replicating the previous findings with detailed assessments of sexual orientation on relatively large samples, and at extending the investigation to the mildest form, non-classical (NC) CAH. Also, this is the first study to relate sexual orientation to the specific molecular genotypes of CAH. In the present study, 40 salt-wasters (SW), 21 SV (simple-virilizing), 82 NC, and 24 non-CAH control women (sisters and female cousins of CAH women) were blindly administered the Sexual Behavior Assessment Schedule (SEBAS-A, 1983 ed.; H. F. L. Meyer-Bahlburg & A. A. Ehrhardt, Privately printed). Most women were heterosexual, but the rates of bisexual and homosexual orientation were increased above controls not only in women with classical CAH, but also in NC women, and correlated with the degree of prenatal androgenization. Classifying women by molecular genotypes did not further increase the correlation. Diverse aspects of sexual orientation were highly intercorrelated, and principal components analysis yielded one general factor. Bisexual/homosexual orientation was (modestly) correlated with global measures of masculinization of non-sexual behavior and predicted independently by the degree of both prenatal androgenization and masculinization of childhood behavior. We conclude that the findings support a sexual-differentiation perspective involving prenatal androgens on the development of sexual orientation.

PMID: 18157628 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

In text now removed from her website, Dr. New offers treatment for fetuses in families "at risk" of having the dread anomaly, a lesbian daughter or even just a daughter who doesn't like dolls, want babies or to embody the gender stereotypical Stepford Wife female behavior. (Ironic, coming from you, Dr. New, so ironic that I continue to ponder you and the reason you left Cornell...) 

I had an interesting discussion with my father, a retired academic physician, about Dr. New's work, my take on it, her take on homosexuality and my take on her take. My father is of the mind that clearly since CAH is correlated with homosexuality in women, it proves that homosexuality is a disorder that is potentially treatable and that Dr. New is just trying to treat. Make no mistake- CAH can be an extremely serious (especially in males) in its classical form. But as the Time magazine article states, many women are offered Dr. New's treatment (by other physicians) even when they don't know the gender of their fetus. What kind of scary crap shoot is that? 

In its milder manifestations, I'm still considering the scoping problem of this concept of disordered behavior. Is wanting to do a conventionally man's job and not have children disordered? Why? Says who? Who got to be the arbiter of what was normal for a woman? Dr. New? Ayatollah Khameni? Pope Benedict? Me? (Talking about giving people a wide berth!) You? 

Evolution is all about reproduction. In theory, anyway. [groan] ;) Genetic changes typically occur by mutation and selective pressure (meaning whether a particular mutation or variation is either more or less successful) usually determines whether or not a mutation will be passed on. Clearly you're less likely to reproduce if you are homosexual (although I know an awful lot of gays and lesbians who have had biological children...) so that would disfavor propagation of any "gay" genes. But I have still a lot of questions about when something ceases to be a disorder and just becomes a normal variation. I can go back to the blue eyes versus brown eyes business, for instance. Or light skin versus dark skin, or short versus tall, or any number of things that are genetic. I'm betting the first relatively tall, relatively white, blue-eyed human was probably considered aberrant in their culture of shorter, darker, brown eyed humans. Can selective pressure start to disfavor reproduction on an overcrowded planet, I wonder? Shades of Children of Men, for sure, right? 

Anyway, from the perspective of the whole evolution and genetics argument, I look at all the gay and lesbian friends I've had and I could never pigeonhole them, saying they were all creative or all somehow gifted in other ways that made the reason for them to be here evolutionarily obvious to me. But what I can say, as the person who can always be counted upon to be fascinated by the new, the different, the foreign, the elusive, and to be more curious than threatened by people who are not just like me, is that I like them just as they are. I might want Brian to be more punctual or Bobby to have been less verbally caustic, but the very last thing I'd change about any of them would be their sexual orientation. If they don't care, I don't care. Maybe it's the perspective of a liberal, atheist, middle age person, but I really just don't think that who you're having sex with is that all important in the scheme of things, as long as it's consensual and you're kind to your partner. 

Likewise, I really just don't think that whether a little girl plays with dolls and wants babies defines female normalcy.  

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* To be honest, I used to say I was a fundamentalist Buddhist. I was extremely tolerant of other peoples beliefs and ways of being because I figured sometimes it's so hard being here in the first place, I'd best not be judging how other people get by unless they do something very obviously (to me) immoral. (You know, cruelty to animals, abusing children, rape, murder, that kind of stuff). This drove my spouse to the edge of insanity. He thought I was way too tolerant, especially of cultures that end up using their beliefs to justify abuse of women. (Though I already had plenty of bad words to say about things like honor killings, child marriage, female circumcision, purdah and such.) I just... tried to accept that other people had the right to do things another way, or differently. Now, in my pre-50's dotage,  I've decided he's totally spot on. A bit of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, some Mukhtar Mai, a dash of Somaly Mam and Nujood Ali, and even just reflecting on the fact that I was raised in a pro-civil rights home in Georgia and Florida in the 1960's, and hey, basic decency to living creatures trumps human rights, women's rights, and civil rights. Because it comprises all of them.

I know my Won Buddhist teacher would say it's definitely sattva to say that, maybe just maybe, people ought to be more tolerant. Step back and realize that so few of other people's personal choices really affect us or our own choices. With a nod in his direction, I honor him, his principles and the remembrance of the hardest concept I've ever (including superposition and the particle/wavelike duality) pondered. 

Detached Compassion, if you're interested.

Maybe all these people who think that females should all be girly girls should give it a spin? 

When they're not busy being in awe of what all these uppity women out there are doing or have done, that is.

© Bright Nepenthe, 2010

The Scoping Problem and the Petroleum Industry

It is hard to imagine that the Gulf oil spill is the microscopic view. But my friend Sally has a telescope. And she sent me an article the other day that reminded me of the broader view. You want to talk oil and disaster? 

“I’ll tell you this, I may be dead but my ideas will not die and I know that I have the moral victory”

How many of you recognize the face of the man above? I betting none of you do.

That's Ken Saro-Wiwa, playwright, author and environmental activist. I remember contributing to an environmental group associated with his name back in 1997 after learning about him from outspoken (no surprise there) comments by Wole Soyinka on PRI. A member of the Ogoni peoples of Nigeria, Saro-Wiwa was the son of the chief of the Ogoni tribe. (Saro is a designation that means 'oldest son' in the Ogoni language.) The Ogoni are the indigenous people of the Niger Delta and Rivers State, which lies on the Gulf of Guinea. Ogoniland possesses some of the richest oil fields in the world. And hence, its sorrow.

After existing largely unscathed during the slave trade era that decimated other populations along the coast, the Ogoni of Rivers State were part of the area of Nigeria colonized by the British in 1885. Resistance among the Ogoni, who had a loosely organized tribal structure, continued until 1914. As industrialization and dealing with a monetary-based economy took hold, the Ogoni were propelled into the modern era. And then there was the great Nigerian Civil War, which decimated populations to the North in the 1960's, wiping out large numbers of Ibo people in pogroms and scattering the Ibo people, a substantial tribal group who had been very involved in the military and government into refugee status all over the world. The Rivers State, which had been a autonomous region, was re-annexed with the discovery of oil in Niger Delta, a point which further fractured the Nigerian political scene as people to the south and east felt leaders in the north would simply exploit the oil-rich Delta at the expense of the indigenous people. How prescient they were.

Ken Saro-Wiwa was the leader of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People  and an environmental activist. His group espoused non-violent resistance to the Nigerian politicos who had brokered a deal with Royal Dutch Shell that laid waste to Ogoniland and the Niger Delta. For his leadership and resistance, Saro-Wiwa was arrested, along with eight others in his resistance movement, in 1994 on apparently trumped up charges in the involvement in the murders of four Ogoni chiefs. They were executed by hanging in November 1995, after conviction by a military tribunal at a closed trial in which most of the defense attorneys resigned stating, at the clear risk of their own lives, that the trial was rigged by the regime of Sani Abacha, the military dictator running the show in Nigeria at the time. Abacha, considered one of the most corrupt leaders in modern history, siphoned off approximately $4.3B in USD during his five year tenure as de facto president of Nigeria. Where did that money come from? Hmmmm. Petroleum, anyone?

In a rare concession, oil giant Shell agreed in 2009 to pay out $15.5M to the families of the Ogoni Nine. Although accused of collaborating in the execution of Saro-Wiwa and the other eight men, Shell refused to accept any culpability and instead said the monies were offered in the spirit of reconcilliation.

     Members of Nigeria's Ogoni community protest against Shell in New York. Photograph: Bebeto Matthews/AP

As columnist John Vidal pointed out, although a victory for the Ogoni people, the settlement by Shell stops short of real justice because the displacement of the Ogoni from Ogoniland, and the massive amount of dumping of petroleum waste, really cannot even begin to be addressed with this settlement from Shell. The displaced people of the Niger Delta have become poorer and poorer. Their agricultural areas have been ruined, as has their water supply, from the ravages of petroleum industry development in a country with a government that is far removed from the region and which has little incentive, thanks to corruption, in oversight and responsible mining.

From the Guardian's Photo Gallery on Shell in the Niger Delta:

A privately owned water tap is locked in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, October 2004. Port Harcourt, the oil capital of Africa is a crowded city plagued by crime where most people live on mud streets without electricity, running water or sewer. Despite producing 2.26 million barrels of oil a day, 60 percent of Nigerians live below the poverty line.

Photograph: Jacob Silberberg/Getty Images

Oil from a leaking pipeline burns in Goi-Bodo, a swamp area of the Niger Delta in Nigeria, October 2004. Oil company Royal Dutch Shell said the leak was caused by unknown saboteurs on Monday who used a hacksaw to cut open a major pipeline feeding oil to an export terminal at Bonny, southern Nigeria.

Photograph: Austin Ekeinde/Reuters

What is the Niger Delta like today? We can scroll ahead, fifteen years after Ken Saro-Wiwa gave his life for his cause- preserving Ogoniland from the ruination of unchecked crude petroleum extraction, and unremediated environmental destruction of the Niger Delta. What has changed? Sadly, only the name of the Petroleum Villain du Jour. 

The new bad guy is Exxon/Mobil but the old bad guy, Shell, is still in the game. From a recent article by John Vidal, estimates are that 2.4M barrels (that's 101M gallons) of oil has been spilled in the Niger Delta. It contaminates the drinking water, agricultural areas, fishing areas and more. Exxon/Mobil had a rupture just last month on one of their pipelines that gushed oil for some seven days before it was sealed. The source of the majority of the leaks? A contentious issue. Of course, the petroleum companies say it isn't their fault. They blame vandals and even claim delays in repairs are because of communities that refuse to let their workers in for reparations because they hope to make monetary claims against the oil companies. However, a network of rusting pipelines, storage tanks and pumping stations that in some cases are almost fifty years oil, might also have a thing or two to do with it. 

From Vidal's article, (not even considering land-based spills) Activist Ben Amunwa, of the London-based oil watch group Platform, is quoted as saying: "Deepwater Horizon may have exceed Exxon Valdez, but within a few years in Nigeria offshore spills from four locations dwarfed the scale of the Exxon Valdez disaster many times over. Estimates put spill volumes in the Niger delta among the worst on the planet, but they do not include the crude oil from waste water and gas flares. Companies such as Shell continue to avoid independent monitoring and keep key data secret."


The Guardian article suggests the Delta has suffered about 7000 spills between 1970 and 2000. Shell admits to having spilled 4.45M gallons in 2009 alone. There have been about 2000 "major" spillages by official government and industry reckoning. In the face of Tony Hayward of BP calling our Gulf disaster modest, I really struggle to think of what that might mean that there are 2000 "major" spillages in the Niger Delta.

Vidal's article also quotes Judith Kimerling, a professor of law and policy at the City University of New York and author of Amazon Crude, a book about oil development in Ecuador, who says: "Spills, leaks and deliberate discharges are happening in oilfields all over the world and very few people seem to care."

Ogoniland today is barren, horribly polluted and sadly disproves Ken Saro-Wiwa's dying assertion. 

Maybe you really can kill an idea.

Shell oil spill at Goi, Ogoni Land, NIger Delta. © Alison Dilworth/Friends of the Earth, April 2005

    

   Shell oil spill at Goi, Ogoni Land, NIger Delta. © Alison Dilworth/Friends of the Earth, April 2005

Shell oil spill at Rukpoku, Niger Delta, showing no clean up or remediation after 3 months. © Elaine Gilligan/Friends of the Earth, June 2004

Shell oil-heads leaking at K-Dere, Ogoni. © Elaine Gilligan/Friends of the Earth, June 2004

Ogoni Oil Spill, 2007, ©George Osodi.

You can view photographer George Osodi's amazing gallery of Oil-Rich, Poverty Stricken Nigeria here. I'm using his image above totally without permission to further awareness of his cause.


You can view the Friends of the Earth portfolio here..

The Secret Life of Bees and the Scoping Problem

This is the second in a series of posts devoted to food.

A honeybee on an apiary, cooling by flapping its wings. Location: Tübingen-Hagelloch.

(Wikimedia Commons)

In the last quarter of 2006, a massive die-off, or more accurately complete disappearance, of North American honeybees alarmed beekeepers, farmers, agricultural departments and academics nationwide. When reports started to make it to the mainstream media that honeybees were disappearing, in vast numbers, and at an alarming rate, the idea that the population of honeybees had dropped by more than 30% in major agricultural areas was not at first put into context by the general public. It's easy to do that though, with the reporting of one simple fact: 90 common crops in the continental US require honeybee pollination. A honeybee does over the course of an hour what it would take a human many, many hours, if not days, to do by hand. Commercial monetary value of bee pollination is in the range of $15-20B a year. Crops that are bee-pollinated (some crops are wind-pollinated) include a vast majority of fruits, vegetables and nuts, and also notably, the majority of common livestock feed crops like alfalfa, clovers and vetches. You can get a fuller picture of what's involved here. When you look at the extent to which the world is dependent upon these ardent little creatures for its meals, you can easily see why even the relatively anti-science Bush administration went into overdrive trying to figure out why bees had literally disappeared overnight. Because beekeepers weren't reporting a bunch of dead bees that you could do necropsies on. Their bees were just plain gone. (Some beekeepers report losses of up to 90% of their bees, leaving only young and poorly skilled worker bees who could not survive and thrive on their own.) The majority of states in the continental US have been affected by what is now termed Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Mobile or migratory beekeepers who run commercial crop pollination services have reported alarming bee colony die-off and disappearances in the following states:

The hallmarks of CCD include: rapid loss of adult worker bees, few or no dead bees found in the hive, presence of immature bees in a small cluster with live queen present, and ample pollen and honey stores in hive. This means the worker bees have disappeared leaving behind what appears to be a healthy hive with immature bees and their queen. It's like they went out for pollen and never came back. Where have these bees gone and what is their fate? No one knows.

James McWilliams, who blogs for the NY Times under the Freakonomics banner, had an insightful and informative post just last month about the complexities of the honeybee decline. He cites the recent Congressional Research Service report on the topic. The stressors brought to bear on bees are varied and there is no one simple factor that appears to be the "answer" on the issue of CCD. Among the factors that appear to be significant are infestation of the bee population with Varroa mites, or the pathogenic fungus Nosema ceranae,  viruses such as the devastating Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV), which is believed to be transmitted by a Varroa mite vector, poor nutrition due to apiary overcrowding, pollination of crops with low nutritional value, or pollen or nectar scarcity; exposure to limited or contaminated water supplies; and migratory stress due to beekeeper overuse of mobile colonies. (Thus far, IAPV is one marker most strongly associated with CCD.) Unlike prior bee losses in the US, CCD represents a sudden and dramatic disappearance. In the course of three to four months, entire colonies have been wiped out and disappeared, leaving growers of bee-pollinated crops scrambling to find commercial beekeepers with viable bees to pollinate. Some studies have shown that irradiating the apiaries with ultraviolet spectrum light to kill pathogens has permitted some colonies to recover.¹ It hasn't worked in all cases and it's not clear that a single or even any pathogen is involved in CCD, however.


The reality is that after intensive research, more than three and a half years later, we are still no closer to understanding CCD with any certainty. In fact, while colonies of bees continue to be decimated at alarming rates in the US and Europe, in other areas of the world, bees populations appear to be increasing. Argentine scientists Marcelo Aizen and Lawrence Harder have shown that worldwide, the population of commercial honeybees has actually increased by some 45% over the past fifty years.² Futhermore, production and yield of bee-pollinated crops have kept pace with the increased production and yield of wind-pollinated crops. You'd expect a fall off in those values if there were really fewer bees. And yet... and yet... the alarms are real. The number of beekeepers in Washington State has fallen from forty-five to only eight as of 2010.³ The trend of fewer beekeepers in the US, and in agricultural areas is a point of  concern.

The real crisis of crop pollination may have, in the long-term, less to do with CCD and more to do with the global demand for luxury crops that demand pollination. The 'scoping' problem,³ focusing on the narrow or microscopic picture, misleads us by focusing on the bees themselves instead of taking the broader view (the telescopic view) of what we're asking the bees to do. While honeybees producing honey have largely been outsourced to Asia and to a lesser extent Latin America, fewer beekeepers remain in the US and those are largely the commercial and migratory beekeepers. Wind-pollinated crops like wheat, corn and and potatoes have doubled, however the production of bee-pollinated crops has quadrupled worldwide. That 45% increase in the honeybee population thus pales in comparison to the task set before the pollinating bees, a 400% increase in the number of crops they are to pollinate.⁴ The first world craving for watermelon in winter and more and more chocolate and fancy nuts is fueling the increasing demand for pollinators. And yet fewer and fewer honey producers, and therefore commercial beekeepers, are based in the US and Latin America in the agricultural areas that produce these fancy products. Here in the US we get a large amount of out-of-season food from Latin America (plums in December anyone?) where Marcelo Aizen notes that bees are still, thankfully, largely unaffected by CCD. 


What will happen if or when the complex cause of CCD becomes a worldwide phenomenon? As  Nathanael Johnson, in his article for Conservation Magazine says, "In the process of demonstrating that no global pollinator crisis was occurring, Aizen and Harder found the portents of, well, a global pollination crisis. However, the crisis they foresee is one driven not by mysterious die-offs but by market pressures plainly visible in the produce aisle. It has to do with people in poor nations developing an appetite for good cocoa and coffee. It has to do with people in wealthy countries assuming that tomatoes will be ripe and readily available year-round. Bee scarcity, in other words, is an economic problem caused by economic forces."³

What comes to mind is that we are getting to be too many people, eating things that we never really give much thought to, on a very crowded and rather disordered planet. Portents, indeed...

Parents may enjoy sharing the site: www.helpthehoneybees.com with their children.

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1. K. Ramanujan, “Parasites, pathogens and pesticides called possible suspects in honeybee decimation,” Cornell Chronicle, Cornell University, May 17, 2007,
http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/07/05_17_07.pdf

2.Aizen, M.A. et al. 2008. Long-term global trends in crop yield and production reveal no current pollination shortage but increasing pollinator dependency. Current Biology 18:1572–1575.

3. http://www.conservationmagazine.org/articles/v11n1/stung-from-behind/ by Nathanael Johnson.
4. Aizen, M.A. and L.D. Harder. 2009. The global stock of domesticated honey bees Is growing slower than agricultural demand for pollination. Current Biology 19:915–918.