(I owe the link to Alina Stefanescu’s commentary at Totalitarianism Today 2004/12/05.)

For the past couple decades or so, the mainstream of the gay rights movement has been insisting, as emphatically as they can and in every forum that they can find, that sexuality is determined by a more-or-less fixed sexual orientation and that sexual orientations are something innate–that is, either determined by genetics or by developmental factors during pregnancy. I understand how the tendency came about, in the face of bigoted bluster about the Evil Gay Agenda’s plans to recruit children, the deceptiveness and brutality of ex-gay aversion therapy programs, and more. But it’s an understandabe error, on any number of fronts. The cluster of ideas involved has any number of problems; one of the most fundamental is that it just bypasses the real argument. Let’s suppose, for example, that it turns out to be true that chemical effects on brain development in early pregnancy do have a major effect on adult sexuality, and that diet pills and thyroid medications really do make children much more likely to be gay if mothers take them during the first three months of pregnancy. What should we say about the discovery?

If you haven’t already got good grounds for saying that there’s nothing wrong with being gay or lesbian, then this discovery might make you less inclined to say that gay people can choose to be straight, or that the cultural environment you encounter in childhood can decide whether you’ll be gay or straight. But it won’t keep you from saying idiot things such as this (emphasis added):

These analyses support the conclusion that female offspring are more vulnerable to alterations in sexual orientation via exposure to a variety of prescription drugs, and suggest that this vulnerability is greatest during the first trimester.

Or this:

The finding adds to mounting concern over the use of slimming pills by women trying to lose weight. Prof Dornan said: All drugs can cross the placental barrier and, looking back, we weren’t so aware of what was going on inside the womb. Nowadays, the Royal College’s view is that women should not take drugs unless there is a clinical need.

Look, there are good medical reasons to be concerned about how medications taken during pregnancy affect children’s health at birth or later in life. But making your baby vulnerable to catching gay is not one of them. It’s not a birth defect, dummy. If there’s nothing wrong with being gay, then the increased likelihood of having a gay child ought to have no effect whatever on whether or not you decide to take pills in early pregnancy. (If it were discovered that diet pills made your child more vulnerable to having green eyes, would any researcher make comments like these?)

But it’s vital to notice that, even if the inntatist line on sexuality turns out to be true in every single respect, it does nothing to rule out either subtly (and perhaps unwittingly) homophobic comments like these, or stridently bigoted appeals from explicit homophobes. (Imagine Pat Robertson on television urging Christian mothers that taking thyroid medication during pregnancy makes the baby Jesus cry.) The fact is that there is nothing wrong with being gay–if it’s a choice, it’s not a wicked choice; if it’s a culturally cultivated taste, it’s not a pervse taste; and if it’s innate it’s not a congenital disease. But you can only say that if you have independent reasons for saying that there’s nothing wrong with gay romance or gay sexuality, aside from We can’t help it!

Gay liberation is a demand for the justice and respect that are due to rational human beings, whatever might happen to be under our loved ones’ underwear. Quibbling over whether our sexuality is ultimately up to us or not is an interesting scientific question, but it’s a political diversion. We shouldn’t waste our time on peripheral arguments to get homophobes to think of us as tragic accidents instead of depraved sinners; if we want to win, we need to head straight for the real argument, and we have to go all the way.

Let’s take an informal review of some case studies in the political economy of medicine and public health.

Aspirin

Risks: Aspirin caused about 500 cases of Reye’s Syndrome in 1980, resulting in over 100 children’s deaths within one year.

Uses: Women and men use it to relieve headaches and minor pain.

Response: In the 1980s, physicians launched a public education campaign to inform parents that they should never give aspirin to children. Competing drugs such as ibuprofen and acetaminophen were recommended for children’s use and over-the-counter pain-killers made specifically for children were brought onto the market. Because of widespread, responsible adult use, aspirin is still sold over the counter today.

Viagra

Risks: in the first year after its introduction, Viagra caused heart attacks, strokes, and coronary artery disease, and severe hypertension, resulting in 564 deaths worldwide within one year.

Uses: Men use it to help them get it up.

Response: A collective shrug of the shoulders. Because of widespread, responsible adult use, Viagra is still prescribed without restriction by ordinary physicians, with a standard side effects warning.

Pregnancy and childbirth

Risks: a rewarding and widespread but dangerous process with health risks involving hemorrhage, sepsis, pregnancy-induced hypertension including preeclampsia and eclampsia, obstructed labor caused by cephalopelvic disproportion, iron-deficiency anemia, and gestational diabetes, among others, resulting in an estimated 500,000 women’s deaths, and 416 deaths in the U.S. alone, in 2001.

Uses: After men get it up and make a minor contribution, women use it to make babies.

Response: It’s the will of Jesus.

Mifepristone (also known as RU-486)

Risks: Use of Mifepristone has resulted in somewhere between 1 and 3 deaths in the four years since approval.

Use: Women use it for early term abortions, as an alternative to invasive surgical procedures, when they aren’t interested in making babies.

Response: In spite of widespread, responsible adult use, distribution of Mifepristone is already heavily restricted; it is not available by prescription and stringent requirements are set on doctors who wish to make it available to their patients. The FDA imposed its most stringent level of safety labeling on it in light of the possibly related deaths; prominent Republican legislators are using the moment to push for special legislation to ban it.

Conclusion

Clearly the political agencies responsible for controlling what drugs you can or cannot take are motivated by the purest concern for your own safety, and not by political pressure. This has nothing to do with abortion politics and it has nothing to do with sexuality or gender. Move along citizen, there’s nothing to see here.

Today (or yesterday, depending on how you count these things) is the 6,000th birthday of the Universe, according to the calculations of Bishop James Ussher. I hope that Young Earth Creationists around the world are living it up over this sextamillenial weekend.

Well, not really: life, the Universe, and everything was calculated by Ussher to have been created around 6:00pm on Saturday, October 22, 4004 BC; and from 4004 BC to AD 2004 is actually not a round 6,000 years, but rather 6,007 (remembering that there is no year 0). The cosmos’s 6,000th actually passed us by at this time of the year in 1997. But if a preference for nice round numbers can make 2000 CE the time to mark the beginning of the second millennium, it can make 2,004 the time to mark 6,000 years from the Beginning.

In the meantime, you can celebrate the occasion with a delightful article about Pufferfish genomes from The Panda’s Thumb, or Roderick Long’s post on the shared premises of creationism and (state) socialism from earlier this year at Austro-Athenian Empire. (Let me just add that Long’s comments on socialism apply to state socialism but not to those of us whose flags are Black as well as Red. There is no place for central production boards or Five Year Plans here, and spontaneous unplanned harmony is no problem for us in nature or in politics–just ask Prince Kropotkin.)

A while ago I was looking for some good pages to reference about some of psychiatry’s more barbaric procedures. Along the way, I stumbled across the Washington Post’s peculiar profile of Dr. Walter Freeman, the pioneer of the ice-pick lobotomy and one of the most controversial figures in the past few decades of clinical psychiatry.

For those who aren’t familiar, Freeman performed thousands of lobotomies on people suffering from depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, mental retardation, and other disorders. Sublimely apathetic to the fact that there was no actual evidence that his treatment worked, he carried on mutilating people’s brains–knocking them out by electroshock or anesthesia, and then hammering an icepick through the tear duct and swinging it around in the frontal lobe to destroy the connection with the thalamus.

Freeman made his fame, and a great deal of money, by refining Egas Moniz’s techniques for human lobotomy and touring the country evangelizing its use to psychiatric hospitals. Because lobotomy succeeded in making some trouble-making patients more docile, it was widely adopted by psychiatric hospitals after presentations by Freeman. It didn’t seem to bother them that most patients suffered severe losses of functioning after the procedure, that adult patients ended up pissing on themselves and having to be re-taught how to eat. It didn’t even matter to them that Freeman had forcibly anesthetized patients in order to carry out his assault on their brain whether they wanted it or not. What mattered to them was that patients were docile and manageable, not whether their humanity was being respected or their underlying mental conditions improved. In the period of Freeman’s greatest activity, between 1936 and the late 1950s, somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 Americans were subjected to lobotomies.

Along the way, Freeman managed to kill several of his patients in surgery and to try bizarre experiments to refine his technique, such as a case where he followed the lobotomy of 14 patients with an injection of hot water into the brain, in which he was prepared to accept two fatalities. Prior to his career as a lobotomist, he had also personally introduced electroconvulsive therapy and insulin shock therapy to the hospital in which he worked.

A few of the incidents are recounted by the Post:

When the day arrived, Mrs. Hammatt tried to change her mind when she found out that her head had to be shaved. Freeman and Watts promised to spare as much of her hair as they could, before forcibly anesthetizing her. Later, Freeman recorded that her last words before surgery were, Who is that man? What does he want here? What’s he going to do to me? Tell him to go away. Oh, I don’t want to see him, followed by a scream.

The Post doesn’t bother to point it out, but what Freeman and Watts had just done was to cut into a person’s brain against her will, committing a bizarre and wantonly cruel surgical assault. Later in his brain-slicing career, he committed what could only be called murder from depraved indifference to human life:

At Cherokee State Hospital in Iowa, he accidentally killed a patient when he stepped back to take a photo during the surgery and allowed the leucotome to sink deep into the patient’s midbrain.

We’ll leave alone the question of why he was never put in prison for his crimes; so many atrocities against mental patients have gone unpunished. But why is it that the Washington Post has decided to portray Dr. Freeman, whose wanton disregard for human life and barbarous procedures should put his medical influence alongside that of Dr. Josef Mengele, as some kind of unheralded psychiatric innovator? They conclude their profile by writing:

Lobotomy also raised high hopes in its day. During the late 1950s, when the new tranquilizing drugs had grown popular in state hospitals, Freeman wrote letters to his psychosurgical colleagues around the world, praying for a time when brain operations would again gain wide favor in the battle against mental illness. It didn’t happen in his lifetime.

Now that it might happen in ours, Freeman’s presence is unwelcome. He flits around, a pesky spirit looking for the recognition he believes he is due, an unwanted ghost causing sighs and regret.

Poor Walter Freeman! As to the reason for these sighs and regret, the Post writes that The answer lies in the complex tangle of Freeman’s personality and motivations, and in the public’s fear of past abuses.

Perhaps the Post should reconsider the possibility that Freeman is discredited not only because of a grating personality and lingering public hysteria. Maybe it also has something to do with the fact that he was an irresponsible, sadistic asshole who killed several people and ruined the lives of tens of thousands more with a procedure that was completely useless, cruel, and barbaric.

Of course, methods which are not much more refined are carried on today–the ice-pick lobotomy was replaced with the chemical lobotomy of tranquilizers and other disabling psychiatric medications. The article would have been no more responsible if it had stridently condemned Freeman but uncritically endorsed these modern methods. But I really have to wonder what could have blinded the Post to something so thoroughly obvious as the evil that Freeman perpetrated on innocent people. It’s a fucking ice-pick driven through the skull. Even some of his psychiatric contemporaries, who regularly used electroconvulsive therapy and insulin shock, fainted at the sight of Freeman’s procedure. Can’t we expect at least that much sympathy out of those of us who have lived to have the benefit of hindsight on the horrors that Freeman wrought?

An article on same-sex sexual contact in animals and the outraged reception of this research from many mainstream biologists helps perfectly to illustrate why sociobiology is, as science, useless: biologists’ interpretations of animal sexual behavior remain one of the healthiest repositories of every patriarchal and heterosexist prejudice you could think of.

Some true classics:

• Mainstream zoologists are shocked and alarmed by such queer activities as male lions head-rubbing and rolling with each other, or male whales caressing each other with fins, none of this involving actual genital contact. This tells us more about male zoologists’ hang-ups about physical intimacy between men than it tells us about whether there are queer animals or not.

• Mainstream sociobiologists seem to simply refuse to admit that animals might engage in sexual contact because it is pleasurable; one colleague of a primatologist who dared to suggest this as an explanation of lesbian sexual contact between Japanese macques remarked Well, if that was the case we’d all be in the aisle now having sex.

• Zoologists such as Tim Clutton-Brock of the University of Cambridge argue that

  “true” homosexuality–if strictly defined as male anal penetration by males who show no interest in females–is virtually unknown among wild mammals. They argue that animals who mount same-sex partners and the like are behaving aggressively or merely practising for heterosexual encounters. Or they may be advertising their availability, or trying to make a heterosexual partner jealous.

  I shouldn’t even have to say anything to ridicule this, but a few notes are in order: (i) Who the hell defines true homosexuality as male anal penetration by males who show no interest in females? Have lesbians, bisexuals, trans people, or even exclusively gay men who don’t particularly like anal sex, simply ceased to exist? (ii) What does the definition of mounting as an aggressive act tell you about the view of heterosexual sex being espoused? (iii) Aren’t these the exact statements that unrepentant homophobes make about LGBTM humans (e.g., they’re just experimenting, it’s just a phase, they’re trying to make their heterosexual partner jealous, etc.). It is explained that the favored theory of primatologists trying to cope with the fact of widespread lesbianism in Japanese macques was that it was a response to a shortage of male attention – because, as we all know, those dykes just need to find the right man.

All this helps highlight one of the main problems with the gene-programmed outlook of sociobiology: it simply refuses to acknowledge that there might be accidental consequences of evolution which have no basis in selected adaptations, but merely ride in on gene-complexes that are selected for other features. For example, there is clearly no genetic basis for the human practice of writing Petrarchan sonnets, but it is a consequence of our brains being adapted to cognitive and emotive processing for the purposes of survival. Since sociobiologists feel compelled, however, to find an evolutionary function for every behavior, they invariably subsitute in their own cultural prejudices about the proper purpose of behaviors. Thus, the purpose (or evolutionary function) of sex is assumed to be procreation, a page straight out of Catholic dogma.

Well, there are lots of different functions I could think of other than babies for generalized sexuality (such as reinforcing social relationships), which don’t require special explanations such as mistaken identity or dominance or jealousy for queer sexualities. And it may just be that sexual practice is an accidental feature of evolutionary adaptations rather than a functional adaptation in the first place. But since sociobiology rules such explanations out a priori, it inevitably has to substitute in all kinds of incedibly overt Right-wing cultural conservative ideology and pass it off as Eternal Laws of Nature. It is for this reason that late 20th/early 21st century Sociobiology has become the modern equivalent of late 19th/early 20th century racist anthropology as the naturalization of reactionary ideology.