Doctor Testing Prenatal Drug to Prevent Homosexuality and "Low Maternal Interest"

Fellow Women's Rights blogger Pema Levy recently wrote about a Cornell University professor who mutilates girls' genitals to make their "oversized" clitorises more attractive. Now, The Stranger reports that a Dr. Maria New is offering a risky steroid, dexamethasone, to pregnant women to prevent their daughters from having genitalia that looks too "male."

But Dr. New's research isn't just about the cosmetic stuff: she's looking at the drug's potential to prevent girls from developing same-sex attractions; "abnormal" lack of interest in dolls, babies, and traditional mommy-ing; and "masculine" career interests.

Prenatal "dex" is used by Dr. New to prevent the development of androgynous or masculine-looking genitalia in girls with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH), which is caused by an overproduction of androgens. This is an already controversial practice and has raised ethics questions: as Time magazine discusses, dex carries significant unknown dangers and doesn't address the underlying disorder, which can pose serous health problems in both boys and girls.

Yet Dr. New, instead of dialing back and worrying about the potential harm that she is doing, sees an opportunity to take that research further and find a way to make sure we only reproduce straight stay-at-home moms. She believes her research demonstrates a connection between excess production of androgens and girls who are queer or exhibit "masculine behavior" in "childhood play, peer association, career and leisure time preferences." So Dr. Maria New is essentially saying that things like, oh I don't know, wanting to be a scientist, are "abnormalities."

“The challenge here is... to see what could be done to restore this baby to the normal female appearance which would be compatible with her parents presenting her as a girl, with her eventually becoming somebody’s wife, and having normal sexual development, and becoming a mother," Dr. New told a group of parents while displaying a slide with the ambiguous genitalia of a girl with CAH. "And she has all the machinery for motherhood, and therefore nothing should stop that, if we can repair her surgically and help her psychologically to continue to grow and develop as a girl.”

This idea of "helping" a girl psychologically to be somebody's wife and mother sounds an awful lot like ex-gay therapy, which attempts to brainwash queer individuals into a heterosexual orientation and has been deemed ineffective and harmful by the American Psychological Association. And as to "repairing" the girl surgically, that sounds quite a bit like the "corrective surgery" that Pema so recently wrote about — after all, "masculinized genitals" and "oversized" clitoris usually mean about the same thing: the goal in both places is to chop away any part of a girls' anatomy that might look too much like a penis.

If a girl wants to play with dolls and dreams of becoming a stay-at-home mom, fine. If she wants to play with trucks and pursue a career in construction, good for her. This isn't "abnormal": it's a choice every girl should have, without being constantly pressured and pigeon-holed by what society deems proper. It's a shame anyone in the medical profession perpetuates such sexist stereotypes.

Photo credit: storyvillegirl