The Anti-Lesbian Drug
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....Both cases—cutting a clitoris surgically, feminizing a brain through hormone treatments—reflect an almost desperate attempt by some doctors and scientists to keep their patients from straying from gender norms. It may all be well-intentioned, a reflection of the view that a nail that sticks up will be hammered down and so it is better to conform.
What makes both the clitoral surgery and the prenatal steroids so cringe-inducing, however, is that they seems like throwbacks to the 1950s, not only culturally (when there was really only one way to be female, and it came with an apron and kids) but scientifically (when anatomy and biochemistry were destiny). If the hue and cry over what Dreger has uncovered shows anything, it is that although many of us thought the modern, scientific west had moved beyond those views, many in the medical and scientific community have not.