Comments

1
sick sick sick sick sick

oh wait, I forgot to add something

SICK!
2
There's always some idiot in the crowd.
3
So why hasn't this been reported to the Federal authorities that can shut him down, with follow up from Stranger?
4
If this isn't perversion than nothing is! This is some of the sickest shit ever passed off as legitimate research ever. Not one peep from congress? Fucked up shit!
5
rosin/rosen?
6
@4 -- I say get Levin on this. He mastered "shitty deal;" surely he can now lay claim to repeating "clitoris" 58 times in a hearing. Save the children, Carl!
7
The Dreger piece is terrific, thanks for the link. They're following up very strongly.
8
Slate is a worthless rag.
9
It would be really useful if there was another research study that showed that girls born with large clitoris's didn't have sexual problems later in life.

From the comments in the slate article, it seems parents that do consent to this procedure because they want to keep their kids from eventual psychological harm, but are unfortunately wildly misinformed.

10
IRBs represent!!
11

Since most of us had them totally removed, or submerged inside our bodies, I don't think you're going to find many of us with our genitals in place. Unless that place is the pathology lab where they discovered, "Gee, this was healthy tissue!", or in the garbage where they ended up.

And let's be honest, EVERYONE has sexual problems in life. Our problems start when someone dictates form over function. I vote for function!
12
Your sixth point is the most salient one, and the one that should be repeated any time this topic comes up. It should be the girls' decision, when they become adults, as to whether or not to undergo body modification this extreme. It should not be inflicted on a child.
13
@12 Agreed!!! My foreskin was taken away without my parents consent, or mine for that matter. My brothers born 10yrs before me were not cut because it wasn't standard practice in that part of the country yet. When I asked my mother why some of us were and some of us weren't she said, "with you we weren't given a choice we were told it was being done for the good of the child and they did it", and she assumed the Dr's and Nurses knew best and trusted their judgement so didn't question it/them.

And for the record, as an adult I would've chosen to remain uncut, as would many of my friends. One of whom has very little feeling in the head of his penis. These poor girls are no different, with the exception that at least we boys weren't further tortured and traumatized by getting prodded w/ Q-Tips, etc.
14
Will we never be able to call our bodies our own?
15
Point-by-point response:

1) Agreed, full-stop.

2) Hate to say it, but Dan, your hands aren't exactly sterile. You pushed the uninformed alarmist button. It's very good to be concerned about this. The manner you brought this to attention was written from a naïve placement to an audience of naïve readers. That naïveté, while meaning well, made reckless assumptions about who are the protagonists and who are the antagonists in this narrative. Where we differ — and why I believe you take issue with me — is that some of the people you characterize as the protagonists have hands much more soiled than your own. Yours are sullied mostly because of that naïve recklessness of presuming some of the antagonists somehow aren't..

3) Yes, it is huge. And as with the last two threads on this topic in SLOG this past week or so, this was very much the same point — different circumstance/event — I made pertaining to your friend/colleague/ally/uncle tom, Anne Lawrence. You freak out that Poppas touches little girls' tender bits without their consent, but you are mute on Lawrence touching the tender bits of non-Western patients doped under anaesthesia. You cannot play it both ways.

4) Hanna Rosen demonstrates recklessness of a different order than you, but it's still recklessness due to its naïveté. Watching this entire conversation has been like watching automobile dealers (analogized here as self-asserted sexuality experts with à priori biases and motives) assuming strong policy positions on the state and safety of, say, bike lanes in cities (which have nothing to do with selling cars, with the sole exception that it is tangentially related to transportation — much in the way that sexuality and sexology are related to sex development and the policies meted on that sex development for a vulnerable minority of people). I'd say to leave it to people with the most authority on the matter. Not even Dreger, with her "sexology" credentials, is sufficient here — much less you, a cissexual, gay sex columnist. Go ahead and say, "Eff off, Telsa," but this doesn't change the attendant situation.

5) I would say that Rosen is a molester in the same vein that Lawrence was a molester of one of her patients: all broke the broad-stroked Hippocratic Oath of vowing to do no harm to the patient. All have harmed their patients — in many cases more psychologically than physically, but really: isn't that like arguing the difference between a farmer's house burning down versus the farmer's barn with all the animals inside being burned to death? Both are catastrophic in different ways.

6) That's right. Informed consent, but not necessarily adulthood as you put it. To say that must be the standardized threshold as you argue would suggest that an individual by the time of pubescence lacks the maturity and self-insight to make informed decisions about their body and their lives before legal adulthood. Let's put it alternatively in two ways, outlined here as A and B:

A) This is the same backhanded, harmful position levied against young transsexual people who, before the age of eighteen, assert autonomy and self-ownership over their bodies and their lives. Your argument of making the individual wait until 18 to make their informed decision before is harmful and hurtful to an individual who by, say, 15, knows bloody well what is and isn't right for themselves. For you to take that away from the informed teenager means more years of psychological stress that could be avoided if only giving that person the voice to speak for their own body's behalf.

And B) ? You would pitch a raging hissy fit on SLOG, on your iPhone App, and on television and radio (and probably with a megaphone on the corner of 11th and Pike if need be) if the same rubric were applied to homosexual and bisexual kids being told they can't make definitive decisions about their sexuality before the age of 18. This would be saying to, say, Queer Youth Space in Seattle that, no, "you're too young to really know for sure if you're gay and whether you all should be 'doing that'" — whatever "that" is. Yet, you already know that people like Ken Hutcherson and anti-queer fucktards like him lob this argument at queer time and again against pre-adult queer kids.

I really don't see a difference here. All three examples — kids with unconventional sex organs, transsexual kids, and cissexual gay kids — smack of condescending paternalism which is only meant to harm these kids while assuaging whatever guilt the grown-ups have on whether they're "doing their part" or not. Gigga plz.

*

So, continue to let your head a'spload, but at least be informed about it — or at least let people reading you be better informed than what you're providing them. Or you could just once more tell me to fuck myself. I don't really care.
17
@11: Word.
18
Important correction on @15:

On point #5, "Rosen" was a typo. The correct name was "Poppas." I regret the error.
19
Best comment in the Slate piece thread: "For me, if I had the choice and was given the risks of downsizing, I think I would keep my oversize clitoris. Most men could sure use some help in finding the normal sized ones!"
20
I agree with Rosen on one point: That many calling for Poppas's head have failed to take into account that reducing clits that are deemed "too big" is actually standard medical practice, and therefore the issue is much, much bigger than what this one guy is doing. (On whether or not it should be standard practice I agree with Dan: It should not.)

BUT any guy who does research on children without getting IRB consent should lose his license, no? That seems pretty cut and dried to me.
21
This is absolutely OUTRAGEOUS. Why is this not on the front page of every paper in the country? Most people probably don't even know this is going on. Let's let them know. Ask your local news outlets to run this story. It has to stop. Boy and girls have a right to the healthy genitalia they were born with.
22
The IRB issue is huge, huge, huge. If I so much as change wording around on a questionnaire, that requires IRB approval at my institution. Asking participants about same-sex attraction is considered high-risk research and is likely to be rejected or heavily constrained. Research that involves archival data from public sources needs IRB review to verify that the project doesn't need IRB approval. What is going on at that medical school?
23
"Their clitorises are theirs—they do not belong to their parents, or their doctors, and their parents and doctors should not be subjecting these girls to unnecessary and risky surgeries that have done irreparable damage to other women."
I <3 you, Dan. This reminded me of how you decided against circumcision for your son. It is common sense, I just can't understand what happens in the heads of parents who have their children's genitals mutilated.
24
#13

Mine was taken and it was my parents' choice. Kinda sucks when you grow up thinking it's "normal" or "healthy" to slice the skin off the end of the dick, and then realize your parents pretty much opted for genital mutilation.

Honestly, I think any unnecessary modification to the genitalia of a nonconsenting individual (ie minors) should be considered mutilation and a felony.
25
Good comments from Slate:

"People who object to the entire practice of surgical treatment for clitoromegaly probably have a point, but their beef should be with the entire practice; not just Poppas in particular. If you think Poppas is barbaric for doing what he's doing, you should think the rest of peds urology is even more barbaric for doing the stanard, non-nerve-sparing procedure."

"I think it's a little strange that some people seem to be more upset about the sensitivity test than about the actual procedure, as if it's perfectly fine to cut up a girl's genitals but god forbid you touch them afterward.

I agree that people should not be focusing on Poppas alone, but maybe it's a good thing this blew up in the media, because it might make parents of girls born with this condition think a bit harder before they agree to this surgery."
26
@22 Seriously. One of my friends is working on his dissertation and he need to go through an approval process just to ask people if they like listening to flamenco music. Swear to god.

@25 I agree that it's not just Poppas but I think this is probably the first time that people were made aware that this was going on, I know it was for me. Hopefully it WILL start a broader conversation.
27
@22 & @26:

IRB oversight has gone completely off the rail re: social research of late.

But for both clinical and invasively psychological research, this is why oversight should be unwavering and strict!
28
This is so sick. Why do parents think they deserve any control over their children's sexuality? When/if I have kids, I'm not going to be peering at their genitals and deciding if I want them "trimmed down to size". If I have a daughter with an overlarge clitoris she can damn well ask me to pay for the surgery when she's 18 or whenever she's done growing. It will be HER choice about HER body.
Parents need to stop thinking they'll be judged over their children. Children are separate entities, not extensions of self.
29
@15

Point 2) This response is hard to connect to the point it's supposedly responding to. Do you think that homophobia plays a role in "correcting" larger-than-average clits, or not?

4) Again, your point seems to be nothing more than fuck off Dan, you're cissexual. What does that have to do with whether such tests are traumatizing for the subjects?

6) Unnecessarily combative... I agree that informed consent is what matters here, but you make it out as if Dan has been crusading against young transsexuals, rather than (more likely) merely having overlooked the consequences of his statement.

But the main point is that it should be the girls' choice with what to do with their genitals. You and Dan probably agree, but you chose the most abrasive way to point out his mistake.
30
Tesla, re #15,

I'm not going to tell you to "eff off" (again), but I do want to point out if you want to make a point to the readers of SLOG, use language the general population can follow and don't write us a book.

If you have a point to make to Dan alone, send him an email and save the rest of us the frustration of trying to figure out what the hell you're talking about.

Thanks.

BTW: I know it's not all about me. The above comment is simply my opinion.
31
What Dan fails to realize is that children do not have rights. They are wholly the property of their parents until the moment they turn 18. Parents may do whatever they please with their children (with a few small exceptions) even if what they want is not in their child's best interests. Our society insists on this level of control; each and every time a child attempts to assert the rights supposedly granted to them in the constitution, they are violently squashed, and this is the end result. The lesson to take away from this incident is not that Poppas is a bigoted child molester disguised as a researcher, it's that parents have the freedom to mutilate their children if they so choose.
32
Rosen is married to that massive bonehead, David Plotz. Isolated in his Ivy League, East Coast, bubble he attempts to frame inside-the-beltway conventional wisdom as outside-of-the box thinking. He makes the Slate Gabfest podcast impossible to listen to without retching at least twice.

She must be externalizing the pain of what must be a horrible marriage on these unfortunate girls.
33
@31 - not quite. You can't just randomly decide to blind your child in this country so they can get more handouts as a street beggar, for example. But for some reason, the genitalia is fair game. We are very selective in our permissiveness toward child mutilation.
34
wow there sure are plenty of people on the slate comments saying they'd have that done to their daughters.
35
@30: I'm dreadfully sorry how there isn't proper lay language to articulate the points that were put forward in comment 15. Comparatively speaking, I thought the comment made above at @15 was fairly straightforward. Perhaps you could indulge me by selecting passages which were too difficult to understand (unfortunately, "cissexual" and "transsexual" are not allowed to be a part of that since these were already discussed in another thread). That said, I am not about to write at the level of a grade eight student when SLOG readership is supposedly better than this — based in a city with the highest literacy rate in the U.S. (your mileage will vary). Of course, you could always challenge yourself by learning from others, or you could just lambaste them for their use of language over which they seem to have a canny grasp.

Actually, I should save you the trouble and cut to the chase, MaiaD: I don't really like you, and I know you don't really like me. So let's move on already.
36
That's disgusting, and I hope Dr. Poppas loses his licence. There is absolutely no excuse for not letting these girls choose what to do with their own bodies once they reach adulthood.

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