This is outrageous - medical paper argues that wanting healthy, undeformed babies should be "queered"

[Sidaway]

So shocked I'm beyond words. I read on Twitter this morning that a paper, in a mainstream medical journal published by Elsevier, says:

"The authors argue that “gendered” pregnancy care is too focused on helping women have healthy babies, and that it might be okay for transmen to continue taking testosterone during pregnancy despite the known health risks to the fetus and effects on its normal development. The desire for “normal fetal outcomes,” according to the authors, is rooted in a problematic desire “to protect their offspring from becoming anything other than ‘normal’” and “reflect historical and ongoing social practices for creating ‘ideal’ and normative bodies."

https://twitter.com/babybeginner/status/1681087794998030337
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/is-there-a-doctor-in-the-house

The queer lobby must really, really hate children.

What did Elsevier think they were doing by publishing this? They should be called out for this very hard.

What on earth 🤣 If they have a PhD in Britpop, maybe I could get a job in “lived experience Britpop”.

Sooo, in short, because they believe fatness needs to be liberated from health discourse, it’s also ableist for society to aim for healthy pregnancies and healthy babies?

Bring back thalidomide, then.

Testosterone is a known teratogenic. What other substances are you thinking of which have the same level of medical acknowledgement of teratogenesis?

Many trans men on social media also say they have to take accutane or one of its derivatives for the severe cystic acne which testosterone causes in women. Accutane is so severely teratogenetic that doctos will not prescribe it to women without regular pregnancy tests conducted in the doctor's surgery.

Again, please would you name another subtance, unrelated to the trans trend, that woemn are encouraged to take in pregnancy due to teratogenesis.

Well I hope the medical professional will robustly reply and tell these vacuous evangelisers to stay in their professional lane. I hope Prof Susan Bewley does one of her excellent papers.

These international man pleasers are giving social research a very bad name in the huge overreach of professional leaps they are trying to make here. It’s absolutely not the job of social researchers to be political advocates. Much less to undermine the professional advice of other disciplines they have no training in.

I’m sure it’s subjectively horrible coming off testosterone (depending on your dose) but it’s also objectively horrible to ignore professional medical advice and subject a fetus unnecessarily to unknown health risks.

Listening to advice and within reason changing your habits as needed is just being a responsible adult in any part of life. There’s going to be loads of sacrifices to be made as a parent and a few months or years off hormones is really probably not the biggest one that’s coming to anyone.

Like often these days, this is so close to a reasonable argument, but so clearly not a reasonable argument, but I struggle to quite pinpoint the tipping point.

It's long been understood that there are many deaf people who do not view deafness as a disability, and who find the assumption that a deaf child must automatically be fitted with hearing aids/implants incredibly offensive. As a hearing person, this goes against what I would have assumed, but I absolutely get it now. Although I do still think it is much easier to be hearing in our current society, there's nothing actually "wrong" with being deaf.

I follow Nina Tame on Instagram. She and her son both have spina bifida, and I always thought that was a horrendous life limiting condition that should be avoided at all costs. But she's very vocal about the fact that it's lack of accessibility that makes her life difficult, not the fact that she needs a wheelchair.

So I do understand the idea that people without disabilities can be overly terrified of the prospect of a child being born with a disability, and some people in the Disabled community find this infuriating and offensive. However, it still seems totally bonkers to knowingly put an unborn child at risk of unnecessary health complications!

(and then of course there's the issue of giving foetuses rights in utero, and the knock-on implications for women's rights.)

These fools need to leave Britpop alone!

I do NOT want to hear their ridiculous retconning of the glorious androgyny of such godlike beings as Brett Anderson, Jarvis Cocker, and Sonya Maden.

Further, a number of empirical studies report associations between PCOS and being lesbian and/or trans (Agrawal, 2004; Baba et al., 2007; Gezer et al., 2021; Swift-Gallant et al., 2020).

Really?

Yes agreed lots to think about in the medical vs social models of disability.

But Isn’t the point here that we know what the spectrum of hearing loss at different severities is going to entail? Although inherited not acquired hearing loss can sometimes come as part of genetic syndromes in which other health issues affect other functions of the body, so not just one health and social challenge at a time) but we have no real knowledge of what giving pregnant women male hormones might do to them or to the outcome of the pregnancy or to the resulting child assuming they have a safe pregnancy and birth? There isn’t an ethical way to do that research. So caution has to be the way.

Yes, it will end humanity, or just Western culture.

I vaguely recall that (perhaps unsurprisingly) female foetuses are far more at risk than male foetuses when it comes to maternal use of exogenous testosterone.

Also, emerging evidence that suggests maternal use of exogenous testosterone is linked with poor placenta development and subsequent low birthweight of neonate (perhaps even when testosterone use is discontinued prior to pregnancy).

Can anyone remember the study I’m thinking of?

https://www.google.com/search?q=female+foetuses+are+far+more+at+risk+than+male+foetuses+when+it+comes+to+maternal+use+of+exogenous+testosterone.&rlz=1C1CHBF_en-GBGB882GB882&oq=female+foetuses+are+far+more+at+risk+than+male+foetuses+when+it+comes+to+maternal+use+of+exogenous+testosterone.&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOdIBBzEyM2owajSoAgCwAgA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Twitter is quoting the paper wildly out of context. No idea as to the motivation behind the objective of generating outrage towards pregnant transmen.

The conditions correlated to (no causal link established) higher testosterone in pregnancy by studying women with PCOS are the fetus having a higher likelihood of being diagnosed with ASD, ADHD, PCOS, and being lesbian/bisexual or having a trans identity.

I think it’s fundamentally disingenuous to argue that ND people and intersex (PCOS is an intersex condition), or not straight/cisgender are “unhealthy”.

I think it’s also deceptive to promote what scientific literature have established as “tenuous links” or “simple correlations” to “known health risks” when that normally requires some sort of proof of a causal link.

I remember years ago reading of a deaf woman who chose to insemination herself with sperm from a deaf man, so her child would be born deaf. She wanted a child who would be part of deaf culture. It was a long time ago, pre-internet. I was shocked but mixed up with not wanting to look down on or patronise deaf people.

Stuff like this advocated in the paper could be dangerous to reproductive rights. We expect women to want to have a healthy baby. If women are going to disregard the foetus or actively 'queer' it, there will be a push for legislation to protect it. This will inevitably overlap with anti abortion.

I have terrible hay fever…. When pregnant there was NO antihistamine I was allowed to take (not even piriton which is allowed for small children) and I really suffered. I was, however, determined to do the best for my child.

anyone thinking that unborn children can be exposed to whatever and that any resulting medical issues are ok, should consider reframing their expectations of what a family should look like. Maybe I, myself (and potentially my partner) would be more suitable?

I didn't imagine it

https://jme.bmj.com/content/28/5/283

PCOS is an intersex condition
No it's not. I know some people want it to be. But the clue is in the name......

I didn't read the rest of your very long post @ReleasetheCrackHen but PCOS is not an intersex condition. That's a really offensive thing to say (as is using the term intersex).

Not a single one of the authors of the paper is a medical professional.

Yes it is. All the symptoms are due to excess male hormones in a biological female.

We can but hope.. But I'm currently not feeling particularly optimistic that it's going to be any time soon!

Disorders of sexual development (DSD) are conditions with an atypical chromosomal, gonadal or phenotypic sex, which leads to differences in the development of the urogenital tract and different clinical phenotypes.

Women with PCOS develop entirely normally.

You've proven by your last few posts that you have no idea at all about the mechanisms of PCOS. No credible medical source believes it is an 'intersex' condition. A female endocrine condition is being misappropriated by those who want to push the idea that sex is a spectrum (it's not).

I am sick to the back teeth of this shit.

For Fucks sake this is so disingenuous misinformation.

PCOS despite the TRAs constantly trying to convince people otherwise is an issue only experienced by WOMEN. It's got absolutely fuck all to do with DSDs.

Poly Cystic Ovary Syndrome: A common hormonal disorder that affects ovaries in women during childbearing years. This results in irregular menstrual cycle.

No it's bloody not. It's actually primarily a hormone imbalance. In a female body of all the hormones female bodies usually have except not in the right quantities / responding in the right way (one of the features of PCOS is insulin resistance also). Only female bodies can have PCOS. It is not 'intersex' and saying it is is medically illiterate and also incredibly offensive.

ReleasetheCrackHen must have gone to the same medical school as the authors of the paper.

Well, I was wondering how the resident TRAs would attempt to defend this, but calling PCOS an intersex condition is a surprise.