Dedicated to the acceptance, medical treatment, & legal protection of individuals in the process of correcting the misalignment of their anatomical sex, & supporting their transition into society.
Springfield, VA, USA. Those of us born with Harry Benjamin Syndrome (HBS) had (or still have) a correctible medical condition. Despite the pre-existent nature of HBS, critics on both the social left and social right often characterize our striving for surgical correction as an example of making a wholly optional lifestyle choice. But how can that be so when it is a medical condition identified at birth? And why should the critics be in control anyway? Shouldn't the right to personal liberty prevail?
The story of human social development contains within it an important component: a continuing desire for enhanced abilities and improved prospects. These yearnings can take the form of formal religion, scientific investigation, or political activism. All of them, and more, can reach fruition as positive contributions to human progress or write dark and terrible chapters in a downward spiral toward sociopathic authoritarianism.
HBS people, like people everywhere, try to find their way in the midst of bewildering attempts to corral and categorize them for processing by those who set themselves up as their judges. But let's leave the potential oppressors out of the discussion for a moment and consider the debate that goes on among ourselves. Do we really want to
know the origin of HBS?
Some say no, it does not matter. What matters is what we do about it. Besides, the more detailed the knowledge of our birth condition becomes, the more strident becomes the objection of critics to our existence. What would happen of our critics could control the information? Would we be hounded out of society or worse, pinned wriggling like a butterfly on an examining table?
Eugenics Movement. Adherents of eugenics ("eugenicists") advocate intervention to ensure the transmission of "favorable" human hereditary traits to ensure the optimization of human beings. Eugenicists regard their motivations as altruistic, a matter of social responsibility.
They mean to create more people who are healthy and intelligent, figuring they will be more efficient (which saves resources) and homogeneous (which in their view would alleviate human suffering).
Opponents argue that eugenics is an immoral social philosophy that depends on pseudoscientific trappings for its persuasion. Critics like G. K. Chesterton ranked eugenics as one of the great modern evils.
Video: Time 09:33
I certainly agree with one part of that: I had no choice in how I was born, but I did have final say in what I did about it. We do this in a culture that values motives more than actions, effort more than results, and impugns design on simple acts of charity. If discussion surrounds birth defects, breast cancer, a broken leg, or any number of medical conditions, critics are mainly silent. However, matters of sex and gender can raise accusations that lifestyle choices and indulgent desires guide our actions.
Where do these accusations come from? Are such motives so imbued in our culture that everyone's actions are automatically suspect? And what of those who do not conform to the expectations of those who would coerce social development to satisfy their own ends?
Egalitarianism vs. Competition
Americans (and others) have struggled since the nation's founding to reconcile egalitarian principles with desires for competitive superiority. The USA's historical narrative tells the tale of America's struggle to both eliminate slavery and the unequal treatment of people on the basis of sex, race, medical conditions, the circumstances of their birth, and other arbitrary criteria.
And yet, we still find the residue of European class-consciousness plaguing our deliberations. Some authoritarians among us cloak their condescension in pseudoscientific politics, while other authoritarians game the system to gain articifical advantage. We wind up with a sorry list of excuses by whiners for what is, at best, rude behavior. At worst, we live in peril of a takeover by genocidal maniacs.
In the end, otherwise dissimilar people have underlying assumptions that are very nearly interchangeable when they decide to engineer social development. We all have our personal favorites. Consider how this plays out in actual practice and the differences and similarities in my example list of outrages:
creationism, the designated hitter, falsifying scientific data, gender studies,
Springfield, VA, USA. Reports of a transsexual gene? Skewed research and hack journalism harm acceptance of HBS as a medical condition. Research without rigor from the Medical University Vienna and uninformed ...
Washington, DC, USA. The Manual for Diagnosis of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) has long outlived its intended purpose, the legitimization of psychiatry as a medical discipline. Even if we forgive the suspect o...
Springfield, VA, USA. Those of us born with Harry Benjamin Syndrome (HBS) had (or still have) a correctible medical condition. Despite the pre-existent nature of HBS, critics on both the social left and social...
Springfield, VA, USA. I avoid commercial pastries; they are bad for my waistline. However, I do love a really good blueberry scone. Every so often when out doing my tasks in life I simply can’t resist and swing...
Springfield, VA, USA. I have met two men in my life who lost their penises to a misfortune of life. They weren’t born with HBS, but accident or disease confronted them. These are my notes on our encounters...
Washington, DC, USA. Can we at all agree and let transsexuals be transsexuals? Human language, while inherently imprecise, does convey rich meanings that frequently become the basis for action, inaction, or dis...
Every so often, a scientific advance comes along that provides a wedge into rationality by dilettantes. Consider the study of genetics. It is, of course, just one step in a series of advances that brought us entreé into the genome.
In biology, the entire hereditary information of an organism is encoded in DNA (or, for some viruses, RNA), including both the genes and the non-coding sequences of the DNA.
A genome is all of an organism's DNA.
We have only begun to understand all of this but that doesn't stop people from advancing questionable social practices — or worse — resurrecting some of the darkest chapters of human folly.
Social movements often do not wait upon facts, so following along on the initial genetic insights came the pseudoscientific field of eugenics. It was simplifying and attractive to have human heritability reduced to the level of simple arithmetic:
A + B = me,
except when a D is around that trumps C and you get
A + B + D = me.
The best part was that this could map easily into a laundry list of specific traits we do not like in others, such as big noses, small breasts, swarthy complextions, or even the elements of disliked political positions. Anyway, it ignores the calculus of the genome.
Adherents of eugenics ("eugenicists") advocate intervention to ensure the transmission of "favorable" human hereditary traits to ensure the optimization of human beings. It is a social philosophy that depends on pseudoscientific trappings for its persuasion. Eugenicists regard their motivations as altruistic, a matter of social responsibility. They mean to create more people who are healthy and intelligent, figuring they will be more efficient (which saves resources) and homogeneous (which would alleviate human suffering).
Self-righteous Eugenicists
Sir Francis Galton formulated the term eugenics and defined its modern study in 1883 [1]. Galton drew on his misunderstanding of the work done by his second-cousin, Charles Darwin. From the beginning, a group of All-Stars lined up with support. At various times, its supporters included such figures as Charles Elliot, William Keith Kellogg, Margaret Sanger, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, and Emile Zola.
The geneticist Charles Davenport (1866–1944) was quite popular in his time. The World Magazine published a sensational article in 1907 called The Man of Mystery Who Is Searching for the Secret of Life that sparked a lot of interest [2]. In 1911, he published Heredity in Relation to Eugenics [3]. Davenport's book was one of the first — and most prominent attempt — to summarize human genetics after Gregor Mendel [4].
Davenport's book presented his ideas on how to improve 20th century society and proved quite influential in his time. It was the foundational text for what had become a widespread eugenics movement in the United States, embraced as an accepted academic discipline at many colleges and universities. The textbook propelled eugenic ideals in the early part of the 20th century to the point that, by the 1920s, nearly three-fourths of high school social science textbooks taught eugenic principles.
The year 1911 also marked the first appearance of Frederick Winslow Taylor's influential monograph on The Principles of Scientific Management [5]. Taylor devised scientific management as a form of industrial engineering which, along with industrial psychology, moved management theory from early time-and-motion studies to the latest total quality control ideas. His work was widely read and became the clarion call for the efficiency movement. This suited the eugenics movement, based as it was on their goals on improving human capabilities and productivity (as they saw them).
The eugenics movement thrived in this atmosphere. Prestigious organizations lined up to support and fund eugenics, including such major players as the Kellogg Foundation, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the Harriman family, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Eugenicists gained a global venue with three International Eugenics Conferences (London, 1912; New York, 1921 and 1932).
There had been a gathering reaction to the increasing complexity of modern life throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. After World War I, Americans confronted booming growth rates in its major cities and absorbed numerous waves of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. The Great Migration of Southern blacks and whites was underway and labor tensions were very high. The advance of industrialization and a burgeoning population made many wonder if modern societies were even governable. In reaction, overtly violent groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) preached nativism, racism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Communism, and anti-Semitism. But many other groups, like the eugenicists, joined in with programs of their own.
Eugenicists proposed a variety of means for achieving their goals, with a strong focus on selective breeding, exclusion and isolation, and enforced sterilization. The US congress passed an immigration law in 1924 that excluded the people of Eastern and Southern Europe that eugenicists branded as inferior. The US Supreme Court even ruled 8-1 in 1927 that the forced sterilization of unwilling men and women was constitutional [6].
The scientific reputation of eugenics began its decline in the 1930s when Ernst Rüdin incorporated eugenic rhetoric into Nazi racial policies. The post-war world was justifiably spooked by the likes of Hitler, Mao, Stalin, and the Japanese War Lords.
Since World War II, the public and the scientific communities associate eugenics with suspect practices. Eugenics has been used to justify enforced racial hygiene, state-sponsored discrimination, human experimentation, forced sterilization of supposed "genetic defectives", and killing off populations that have been institutionalized for a variety of perceived shortcomings. Eugenics was used to rationalize certain aspects of the Holocaust and the extermination of undesired population groups.
Eugenics In A New Disguise
Eugenics, using genetics to "improve" the human condition, never really goes away, but takes on new disguises. The ideals have long been rejected, but the issues remain and resurface from time to time. Apologists continually raise reformatted questions and concerns about the exact meaning of eugenics and what the modern era might have to say aboiut its ethical and moral status.
Contemporary academics have started in on new contribitions to the debate, most recently in a book called Davenport’s Dream: 21st Century Reflections on Heredity and Eugenics [7]. The essays discuss such things as human evolution, genetic variation, nature versus nurture, the sources of mental illness, and other contemporary concerns. True to post-modernist relativism, some of the authors try to redefine eugenics in a new, more socially acceptable, manner.
In their preface, editors Jan Witkowski and John Inglis write that Davenport and his contemporaries tried to solve problems, while addressing the moral and ethical choices presented by eugenics. But the editors conclude that such issues "… remain a source of public interest and cautious scientific inquiry, fueled in recent years by the sequencing of the human genome and consequent revitalization of human genetics.”
This sort of analysis leads some apologists to argue that state-sponsored eugenics intiatives are so 20th century. Today, they argue that eugenics has returned as a form of individualized self-help. Modern eugenicists focus on genetic counseling, prenatal testing and screening, birth control, in vitro fertilization, and genetic engineering. Couples can select an embryo that more nearly meets their specifications, abort a fetus that does not, choose the preferred sex of their offspring, or whatever. Even so, the desire to impose one's personal preferences on society has become de rigor among fundamentalists.
Critique Of The Dark Side
Opponents argue that eugenics is immoral. G. K. Chesterton was an early critic of eugenics; in 1922, he expressed his displeasure in Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State [8]. Chesterton was isolated in his criticisms by the intellectuals of his time. He ranked eugenics as one of the great modern evils, delivering a prophecy that eugenics would lead Germany, the land "from which the ideal of a Superman had come" to a catalog of crimes. When the eugenicists identified Jews and the Slavs as biologically unfit, the Nazis agreed. We know how that came out.
A common contemporary criticism is that the flawed foundation of eugenics leads inevitably to unethical measures. For instance, if measurements of a racial minority group shows that it is, on average, less intelligent than the majority racial group, then they are more likely to be subjected to a punitive eugenics program rather than applying the program to the least intelligent members of the population as a whole.
Left-leaning academics take it as a conventional wisdom that the identification of, and emphasis on, specific genes will result in genocide. The right-leaning sort tend to focus on individual genes. Their arguments can, at times, sound like the old "biology is destiny" arguments. Both sides ignore the genome, which often results in the selective use of genetic information to service their ideologies.
Marxism and Nazism had opposite positions. Marxism ignored race, denied the existence of genes, and denied human nature any status as a meaningful concept. Nazis used distorted and falsified genetic information for state purposes. Even so, both ideologies led to genocide.
Despite their separate explanations, what really mattered to such people was an imperative to coerce humanity (eugenics or social engineering) and coerce human development. In that way, the "superior" races or classes can triumph over their "inferiors". There is little evidence that the situation has improved very much.
Any social philosophy that drifts away from verifiable evidence can result in ethical abuse. At times, some Christians have denied civil liberties to populations they do not favor, burned heretics at the stake, and justified all manner of predatory acts. However, Christians do point to a bright side: some have advocated the abolition of slavery, poor relief, and other social initiatives. If anything, the flaws in Christendom derive from an untimely silence in times of injustice. This is such a time, the time when HBS concerns are largely ignored or suppressed.
And what about HBS?
Certain politicians, social commentators, and activists deliberately have at HBS-born men and women because they see us as disposable. They blur meaningful categories, which has the effect of ignoring the medical needs of HBS-born people and lumping us in with cross-dressers and the like.
And disclosure? Transparency would be best, but the dark promise of eugenics lies just around the corner. We have already seen what bigots on all sides can do with their current tools. Imagine what they will try if our genetic information should come under their gaze. The potential for abuse is enormous.
As before: I had no choice in how I was born, but I did have final say in what I did about it. So did we all, but I can well understand why some of us try flight under the radar to avoid detection — I respect and protect anyone's decision to pursue a stealthy existence.
For me, and for the many others who depend on us, I choose to remain visible and fight.
[1] Sir Francis Galton F.R.S. (16 February 1822 — 17 January 1911) was a half-cousin of Charles Darwin. He was an English Victorian polymath, knighted in 1909.
[2] The Man of Mystery Who Is Searching for the Secret of Life that sparked a lot of interest.The World Magazine. 1907. Archive source: American Philosophical Society, Dav, B:D27,Ser 2,CSH-ERO.
[3] Heredity in Relation to Eugenics. Charles B. Davenport. Ayer Co Pub (1972). ISBN-10: 0405039468; ISBN-13: 978-0405039461.
[4] Gregor Johann Mendel (July 20, 1822 — January 6, 1884), an Augustinian priest, was a scientist credited as the father of genetics. His study of trait inheritance in pea plants showed showed that the process follows a set of verifiable laws (later named in his honor). The full significance of Mendel's work was not recognized until the turn of the 20th century, when it led to the modern foundation of the discipline of genetics.
[5] The Principles of Scientific Management (1911). Frederick W. Taylor. New York: Harper & Row. 1967. ISBN 0-393-00398-1.
[6] Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927). The ruling upheld a Virginia statute that instituted compulsory sterilization of the mentally retarded "for the protection and health of the state." The ruling effectively endorsed negative eugenics — an attempt to improve the human race by eliminating "defectives" from the gene pool. Many critics argue that the case ws flawed in the first place since it depended on questionable, and perhaps falsified, data. Pierce Butler (March 17, 1866 — November 16, 1939) was the only dissenting Justice. Butler did not write a dissenting opinion, a practice that was much more common then than now.
[7] Davenport’s Dream: 21st Century Reflections on Heredity and Eugenics. Edited by Jan A. Witkowski and John R. Inglis. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. 2008. ISBN 978-087969756-3
[8] Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State. G. K. Chesterton. Ed. Michael W. Perry. Inkling Books: 2000. ISBN-10: 1587420023; ISBN-13: 978-1587420023
Ms. Sharon Gaughan is the Co-Founder, VP, and Executive Director of TS-Si, Inc. She also serves as the Managing Editor and columnist for the TS-Si website. Ms. Gaughan's signed articles contain her own opinions and do not necessarily convey an official position of TS-Si, its partners, or affiliates.
Sharon welcomes your comments. You can use the public form below or send private correspondence via her TS-Si Contact Page. We will not divulge any personal details or place you on a mailing list without your permission.
The geneticist Charles Davenport (1866–1944) was quite popular in his time. The World Magazine published a sensational article in 1907 called The Man of Mystery Who Is Searching for the Secret of Life that sparked a lot of interest [2]. In 1911, he published Heredity in Relation to Eugenics [3]. Davenport's book was one of the first — and most prominent attempt — to summarize human genetics after Gregor Mendel [4]. 
Opponents argue that eugenics is immoral. G. K. Chesterton was an early critic of eugenics; in 1922, he expressed his displeasure in Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State [8]. Chesterton was isolated in his criticisms by the intellectuals of his time. He ranked eugenics as one of the great modern evils, delivering a prophecy that eugenics would lead Germany, the land "from which the ideal of a Superman had come" to a catalog of crimes. When the eugenicists identified Jews and the Slavs as biologically unfit, the Nazis agreed. We know how that came out. 
Ms. Sharon Gaughan
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Show/Hide comments