Jill righteously calls him out for it (as did many others):

The deflecting from legitimate concerns, and the fact that the OWS “public” includes a lot of men who think it’s ok to treat women at a protest like we’re there for their visual fulfillment, troubles me. No one is saying, “Don’t find women attractive.” . . . No one is objecting to the fact that straight men are attracted to some women (fun fact: straight women are also attracted to some men! So really, no one is pissed about attraction, I promise). What people are pissed about is what Rebecca Traister says:

“The larger, simpler argument, outside of consent or permission, is: This video is sexist. It’s an example of women participating in public life — political, professional, social — and having their participation reduced to sexual objectification. That’s what happened here, nothing more, nothing less.” . . .

Emphasis mine. . . . [C]reating a blog and a video dedicated to showing women at a protest with the sole purpose of reminding dudes that women at the protest are hot? That does reduce women to objects of male attention. It’s another reminder, for women, that how seriously we’re taken and how valuable we are depends on how sexually attractive we’re deemed.

Read the whole thing; she’s got good things to say. But the part that really triggered something for me was this:

Frankly, the kinds of dudes who would come to the OWS protests because they heard there are hot chicks there? Are not the kinds of dudes I want to be protesting with. I would hope they’re not the kinds of dudes that most progressives would want to be protesting with — but judging by the lefty-dude reaction to Steven Greenstreet (hi Matt Zoller Seitz, looking at you!), that’s not the case. It’s disappointing.

To say the least. And far too common, from way back. It’s no secret that supposedly “progressive” groups have always been rife with sexism and sexual pressuring, and it doesn’t seem to be getting better. Progressives have never been immune to human failings, including stereotyping and bigotry of the kind that they supposedly abhor but sometimes don’t recognize in themselves; the long fight for acceptance in progressive movements of gays and transexuals is one case in point, and the difficulty many white (and especially male heterosexual) liberals have in recognizing and acknowledging their own privilege is another. But the LGBTQ community, people of color, and other marginalized groups, though still embattled, have by now to a considerable degree been granted by progressives the one thing many persist in denying to women: recognition of the fact that they have real interests, problems, and worth that must be taken seriously. The situation is far from perfect, and not everybody agrees on how the tensions between different progressive constituencies should be resolved, but in most cases they are acknowledged, and the human pain and human interests that lie at their heart are given due deference. Except in the case of women.

To be sure, progressives are not right-wingers. They don’t overtly hate women. They don’t gleefully consign them to death by deliberate neglect at the hands of sniffy sex-negative religious bigots. They don’t dishonestly and cynically strain moral concepts – often ones introduced and championed by progressives – such as “informed consent” to create barriers to the very autonomy they are intended to protect. They don’t penalize the fact of women’s having sexual natures – just the opposite! But in too many cases they don’t grant them the respect and freedom needed to act on their own natures and seek their own good. Just as with conservatives, women exist for far too many progressive men for the purpose of their gratification – an impersonal usage that erases those women as persons themselves.

Which leads me, finally, to the question that came up for me on surveying this latest stupid and distasteful incident: how, exactly, are these dipshit “progressive” men progressives? What goes through their heads, what process takes place in their heads, such that they wind up thinking things like “let’s go to the OWS protest and photograph women’s breasts!”? How, when they are called out for that, do they expend so much energy defending their childishness and sexism? Why do they not care about offending or humiliating their supposed fellow activists – about derailing or undermining the movement they claim to support – about embarrassing that movement by acting in a regressive manner and then elevating their own bad behavior into the limelight? More particularly, what is it that allows progressives to empathize with everyone but women, even women in their own movement? What allows them to hear everyone else’s protests at mistreatment, and dismiss those of women out of hand?

In a way, I suppose it has something in common with the denial and self-absorption that allowed Southern slave-holders to rationalize their own crimes. Patriarchy is its own form of slavery, more complex and less overt, but very real, and it is very hard to acknowledge you are doing wrong when your entire lifestyle, all its comforts and conveniences and pleasures, derives so much from others’ service to your needs. It is easy to protest obvious wrongs that don’t require you to change your own life to amend. But progressive men, in many cases, are no better than the privileged classes of the Confederacy, of apartheid South Africa, of Wall Street itself, at admitting that their own satisfaction depends on bending others to their desires, against their will and at the denial of their basic human personhood.

You can’t be progressive just for causes you aren’t invested in, at the expense of people you don’t like. Being progressive means wanting to live in a better world – not just wanting to take down the most guilty in this one and then carry on regardless. Being progressive means checking your privilege, living the dream you envision, being part of the solution – all slogans that have at their heart the basic truth that you have to be as critical of yourself as you are of others, or more so, since you can only really change yourself.

You aren’t a progressive if you mistreat women. You aren’t a progressive if you think progressivism is defined as rallies, protests, and events, rather than a mindset that is grounded on a world in which people are treated with respect, by everyone, starting with yourself. You aren’t a progressive if you go to events but don’t treat the people there with regard. You aren’t a progressive if you revel in your own privileges at the expense of the pain and diminishment of others, then feel hurt because you’ve decided that whatever superficial support you feel for “the cause” entitles you to use others for your pleasure and then resent it when they object.

If you’re not a progressive for any of these reasons, you’re little better than a reactionary even if you vote the right way. You’re pro-choice? Great. You don’t think being pro-choice encompasses the choice to control, and present, your own sexuality on your own terms? You’re not a progressive, and you’re a pain and an embarrassment to those who sincerely try to be.

What got me onto this is that there’s just so much cool stuff in this post and the comments thread. I don’t have anything to say about the basic question of natural transitioning, but I want to point out several things that come up in the discussion.

First, it’s interesting that this post arose on a skeptic (i.e., atheist, anti-paranormal) site in the first place. Transexuality isn’t inherently an issue for skeptics, but the questioner identified as a skeptic and was apparently feeling vulnerable as both a transexual and a skeptic, so sought out a welcoming community. He found the right place: DebGod happens to be gender-queer, and is knowledgeable about transexuality and a former bodybuilder, and the community of readers was supportive. From some of the comments, it appears that many perceive the skeptical community as not uniformly welcoming for LGBTQ people – something I hadn’t known or expected. This post included some interesting discussion of LGBTQ issues among skeptics, and raises questions that – especially in light of the recent conflict over misogyny among skeptics (notably involving another prominent Skepchick poster) – I hope the skeptical community will take the opportunity to address.

More importantly, DebGod’s response is a model of careful and helpful analysis. She gives her own background, with appropriate disclaimers, then lays out the issues clearly and concisely. She notes red flags with the claims being made (no professional credentials, buzzwords, trademarked terminology, skeptical responses from people directly affected). She then reviews the suggested procedure, notes that it relies heavily on biochemical supplements, comments intelligently on their purity and efficacy, and discusses the vague distinction between “natural” and “non-natural” that the promoters take advantage of. She seeks information from a more knowledgeable source. Shen then concludes by running down all the issues this analysis raises, categorically, giving pros and cons for each and pointing out dangers. This is a really well-done, intelligent, well-argued analysis, at least as good as that commonly seen from Quackwatch or prominent skeptics like PZ Myers.

What I really like about DebGod’s analysis is that she is carefully value-neutral in all of this. Though it’s clear that there is much to be worried about in this suggested regimen, she never takes it on herself to make other people’s decisions for them. Her final statement is a clear and balanced sketch of the relationship between all the competing factors – health, personal goals, available support, and insurance or income – that influence a decision among the many different options for transitioning; she doesn’t declare any of them right or wrong for any individual, but makes it clear that each may be better or worse under different conditions. She includes just a single sentence offering her opinion that the “natural” process is too risky and low-benefit, but clearly identifies it as her own perspective and doesn’t insist that anyone else has to adopt it. She really gets her role as guide and analyst, as opposed to parent, judge, or dictator – something that so many culture-critic blowhards, and even many licensed professionals, can’t accept.

As she notes:

When it comes to gender identity and transsexualism, where you want to go, who you want to be, and how you want to do it is up to you, of course.

- a message that needs to be heard more widely, and not just regarding transexualism.

That leads to another issue that comes up obliquely, but importantly, in the comments. The medical community’s response to transexualism has been mixed, in ways that have generated a lot of resentment in the T/Q community even when the doctors and psychologists thought they were being helpful. For many years, transexuals seeking medical treatment in the US were commonly required to conform to the so-called “Harry Benjamin Standards of Care” (now the “World Professional Association for Transgender Health Standards of Care”), requiring extensive counseling and explicit authorization from multiple psychologists, and a set period of pre-treatment life in the transitioned gender, before professionals would agree to provide the requested treatment. Those standards have been eased but still exist. Many critics have pointed out that this is not only paternalistic but unnecessary – transexual patients have a higher level of success and satisfaction with their treatment than patients of many other conditions, including cosmetic procedures, that do not involve such heavy-handed gatekeeping. The professional societies – starting in the 1950s, when this work was extremely controversial – saw themselves as protecting patients and preventing harmful mistakes, while also going to lengths to provide treatments that more conservative caregivers would have prohibited in the first place. Patients, however, saw it as condescending, offensive, and wasteful of time and money. (Note that in other parts of the world, clinical standards for transexual therapy are much looser or non-existent; there is no known epidemic of regretful genderflippers.)

There are some very interesting comments from “natalie1984″ noting that the sex-reassignment gatekeeping system has been eroded in recent years, and along with it the stereotyped view of what it means to “really” be transexual or gender-dysphoric in the first place. Not only has therapy become more accessible, but what kind of therapy and what therapeutic endpoint the patient seeks have also been thrown open. As she notes: “Now we’re all able to simply work out for ourselves who we are and what we want from transition, and what will make us feel happiest”. She speaks with understanding of why many healthcare professionals are not current on T/Q issues, and simply encourages patients to find caregivers they are comfortable with. There’s also an interesting exchange further down the thread between her and one of the promoters of the natural therapy. She comes across as uncompromising but smart, thoughtful, and understanding.

There’s more, including the politics of gendered pronouns, but even just this adds up to a rich and complex discussion, with intersections between skepticism, healthcare autonomy, gender issues, and, vaguely, perhaps some philosophy-of-science stuff. What this post brings up for me is the deeply connected ways in which such issues always do surface in any similar debates over the proper application of facts to values – that is, the use of science or medicine to achieve chosen goals in human lives, and the conflicts that arise between those who control the science and those whose goals are at stake. It is common in ethics and philosophy of science to emphasize the “fact/value distinction”, but real cases often dredge up facts – and perceived facts – from many aspects of our lives, and competing values that arise from very different lived perspectives.

In this one issue, the skeptical community provides a useful mindset for analyzing clinical claims, but has also been charged with hostility to the LGBTQ community in whose interests those questions are asked. The “natural health” community offers the autonomy and self-direction that many patients want, but also harbors liars and scammers. The doctors who invented the sex-assignment gatekeeping system that so many transexual people hate did so as a way to make it possible for those patients to get care than had never previously been available. It is impossible for anyone to assert an exclusive claim to the moral or epistemological high ground here.

This stuff is hard, and, like so many progressive programs, requires a dedication to working through all the implications of a given position, and to striving to make one’s positions more defensible, more responsive, and more accepting. Every one of these communities – the skeptics, the healthcare professionals, the alternative-health promoters, and to some degree the LGBTQ population as well – have work to do in that way. Some of it has been done, though, and some of it is being done now, over at Skepchick. Good start.

This is funny, in the way that bad things happening to bad people are always funny, but, aside from the speed of his panicked reaction, the only thing surprising about a married sex-negative right-winger’s dishonesty and hypocrisy is that he appears to actually be heterosexual. For myself, not being a sex-negative right-wing bluenose, I’m not generally inclined to stand in judgment of other people’s sex lives. I would normally regard whatever promises of monogamy he made to his wife as an issue between them only, and I don’t regard lying about your age on Craigslist to be exactly the kind of transgression that rises to a Constitutional level. The fact that he chose to resign without even waiting to see the political consequences of his behavior speaks to his state of mind, but not to any rule of Congressional probity that I would think was necessary.

In fact, I had stopped reading Gawker after their nasty “expose” of Christine O’Donnell’s drunken hookup from the past; though O’Donnell’s a weird and creepy reactionary, the fact that she may actually like sex is not something to be held against her (the fact that she wants to criminalize it for other people is).  Treating sex as some sort of scandalous behavior is wrong, often sexist, and plays into the right wing’s tactic of using people’s sex lives to punish them. Gawker, however, puts a trenchant point on this particular case:

Lee['s] support for “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and vote to reject federal abortion funding suggests a certain comfort with publicly scrutinizing others’ sex lives.

That’s what caught my attention about this case, and made me think it might be worth discussing, even though the basic content – dude gets some on the side, is embarrassed to be found out – should not in itself be a public issue. But there is a special kind of hypocrisy in engaging in private behaviors you want to criminalize or punish on other people’s parts. And there’s an argument for publicizing hypocritical behavior of that kind.

You can make an analogy here to the “Frank Rule” – the informal guideline for outing closeted gays in politics formulated by Barney Frank: people have a right to privacy, but those who seek to invade others’ privacy by punishing or criminalizing what should be a private matter have no expectation of privacy in that regard themselves, which is to say that closeted gays who promote anti-gay policies should be outed, but those who do not overtly work against gay rights should not be, even if they’re conservative in other ways. For similarly private issues other than homosexuality, I would think a parallel rule is reasonable: people have a right to be left alone, unless they refuse to leave others alone, in which case they should be regarded as fair game for scrutiny of their own behavior in its relevant aspects.

That raises the question whether this Craigslist idiocy (dumbass used his own name, picture, and Facebook account) is relevantly similar to the kinds of behavior Lee had previously devoted himself to demonizing – specifically, the sex lives of women and gays – to make his extramarital peccadilloes worth revealing or discussing. (Again, Lee resigned in such a flighty panic that almost nobody actually had discussed it. But it was Gawker’s expose that triggered his resignation, so we can ask whether Gawker itself should have broken the story, and whether it’s fair game for continued discussion now.) You could argue that, because his sexual pursuits were heterosexual, and he himself wasn’t having an abortion, his antipathy to other kinds of sexual autonomy does not implicate his own meandering. But that’s exactly the kind of straight-male privilege that most sexual discrimination turns on, and that leads wingnuts like Lee to believe they have the right to criminalize sexual freedoms that they don’t personally happen to need or want.

This case should be seen as an issue of sexual freedom pure and simple – the right of an individual to make their own sexual decisions and accept their consequences as a private matter. Lee should have that right, in regard of his skeezy hetero Craigslist trolling, just as gays should be free to seek and indulge the relationships they prefer, and women should have the authority both to own and indulge their own sexuality and to control their bodies in service of that end. Lee wants to strip those rights from everyone else, knowing that he will continue to enjoy almost unfettered privilege in his own sex life. When his openly-published Craigslist ad was revealed (along with his private e-mails), he complained that he had been violated:

A spokesman for the Congressman confirmed that the email address belonged to Lee, and that he had deleted his Facebook account because [Gawker's] initial inquiry had him fretting about “privacy.”

But Lee’s career has been devoted to destroying the privacy of more than half of all society, in its most vital dimensions, not by revealing lame e-mail come-ons but by stripping them of control of their lives and sexual identities – in fact, subjecting them to imprisonment on such grounds in some cases. The issue is not whose privacy is being invaded, or what acts are subjected to scrutiny and punishment, but the simple fact that sex is used by people like Lee to punish other people, and they should, at the very least, not be allowed to enjoy immunity from that same punishment on those same grounds.

The fact that he cheats on his wife is a tawdry and ordinary hypocrisy that is of no concern to anyone but them – it’s a kind of lie he tells her, and is contemptible in its own way but not a public matter (we’re surely not going to start cashiering Congressmembers for lying). But Lee and those like him would like to think that their sexual preferences enjoy a privileged status, one that not only gives them immunity for their own behavior but the right to denigrate and demonize those whose preferences are different. Everyone should enjoy privacy in their sexual lives (note here the vicious hypocrisy in Lee’s claim of a right of “privacy” to commit “adultery” while working against the right of privacy in women’s lives that underlies their right to abortion). But if Lee is going to decimate the vital privacy that protects the most persecuted aspects of people’s lives, he can hardly claim the trivial right to privately hook up on Craigslist behind his wife’s back. Outing Lee in this case is an affirmation that his right to sexual freedom is not just equal to, it is exactly the same right as, that of homosexuals to live their lives without interference, and of women to make their own sexual choices. The only difference is that the stakes in Lee’s case are so much lower.

I don’t have much to say about that, except to offer support and the wish that the homophobia that infects our society, among other lingering forms of discrimination and prejudice, will soon fade, and “coming out” can be the act of celebration and affirmation that it should be, rather than an act of courage and risk-taking in the face of dangers that should not be allowed  to exist.

I’ll note, by way of parochial hyper-focus, that the pressures and threats that impede coming out and living openly in one’s chosen orientation have health consequences as well as many other harmful impacts; they cause stress and depression, create barriers to healthcare access, often result in abusive or discriminatory treatment in emergency care, and not infrequently result in violence. And of course the pervasive legal discrimination LGBTQ people face, in particular regarding health insurance, visitation and decision-making rights for gay couples, and barriers to assisted fertility and adoption, are also health and family-rearing issues as well as being rank discrimination in the basic sense.

Ending homophobia for reasons of good health is an odd and circumlocutory approach to the problem, but it’s one reason among many. Simple moral necessity is a better one. It’s long past time.

AN OPEN LETTER TO
MR. JAMES THATCHER,
BRAND MANAGER,
PROCTER & GAMBLE.

February 6, 2007

Dear Mr. Thatcher,

I have been a loyal user of your Always maxi pads for over 20 years, and I appreciate many of their features. Why, without the LeakGuard Core™ or Dri-Weave™ absorbency, I’d probably never go horseback riding or salsa dancing, and I’d certainly steer clear of running up and down the beach in tight, white shorts. But my favorite feature has to be your revolutionary Flexi-Wings. Kudos on being the only company smart enough to realize how crucial it is that maxi pads be aerodynamic. I can’t tell you how safe and secure I feel each month knowing there’s a little F-16 in my pants. . .

Have you ever had a menstrual period, Mr. Thatcher? Ever suffered from “the curse”? I’m guessing you haven’t. . . .

Last month, while in the throes of cramping so painful I wanted to reach inside my body and yank out my uterus, I opened an Always maxi pad, and there, printed on the adhesive backing, were these words: “Have a Happy Period.”

Are you fucking kidding me? . . .

One one hand, this is a worthy contribution to the “stupid product marketing” museum – and Aarons is far from the first to comment on the absurdly chirpy ad campaigns for menstrual products, or their seemingly inexplicable design. But, without making too much of it, there’s something more here as well, something that reflects the “sexism as a health issue” theme writ small, as I previously tried to express it more broadly.

Simply put, women’s health is largely in the hands of clueless, careless, and uninterested (if not outrightly hostile) men, and this has consequences. Only a man would write “Have a Happy Period” on a maxipad. Only men would perform 80 – 100,000 unnecessary hysterectomies a year in the US, mostly on women in their reproductive years. Only men would create close to 100 different types and formulations of prescription birth control methods that act on women’s bodies, and not one for men. The effects are substantial, and pervade every aspect of care for women. But “Have a Happy Period” says it all. The rank ignorance of women’s lives, bodies, and health, and the thoroughgoing disgust with which women’s biology is perceived, even among professionals engaged in caring for them on a daily basis, renders the health options offered to women not merely absurd but destructive. The simple fact that women are a secondary concern for – and, still in this day and age, a complete mystery to – the men who shape their lives and healthcare, leads to asininity like happy menstruation, and to outrages like unnecessarily dangerous pregnancies and abortions.

Progress has been made on women’s issues, and women’s health, in many ways, but in many ways we’re still in the 1950s. Somewhere out there is an idiot (possibly named “Mr. James Thatcher”) who believed that cheery slogans on women’s hygiene products would be appreciated. Somewhere out there are legions of pharmacists – all, as far as is known, male – who think they can simply deny a woman prescription medications if they choose for her to live her sexual life differently from the way she has chosen for herself to do so. Somewhere out there, in a prominent place and in prominent positions, are these assholes:

They all look like they’re having a very happy period. But as long as men like these have any control over women’s healthcare, women will suffer severe dysgynorrhea. The only treatment is to eradicate the cause.

Hat Tip: Tgirsch at Lean Left.

I suggested that (macro) bioethics [bioethics "which tries to impact public policy, culture, and the methods by which {clinical} bioethics is conducted"] is not a discourse and not a matter of bioethicists being “neutral arbiters” of complex moral dilemmas. Nor, is it a profession, as there is no specific training required to become a bioethicist, no state licensing, no professional discipline, etc. Rather, mainstream bioethics is a political and social movement, and like all such movements, seeks to implement policy based on a distinct ideology. . . .

The cause of the divide is fundamental: Mainstream bioethicists reject the intrinsic value of human life and instead have embraced personhood theory. Those of us perceived to be in the other camp, accept the intrinsic value of human life. This divide is too wide for the two sides to reach accommodation. Thus, we will always be in conflict.

But, this is good. These conflicts are how democracies decide important issues. Moreover, we will not decide how it all turns out. The people will through our democratic institutions. Thus those of us in the fray owe it to society to vigorously and energetically debate these matters. But how we do that is important. The people have a right to make informed decisions based on accurate information.

Without accusing Smith of being disingenuous, it seems to me there is a great deal of that is both wrong and highly politically convenient (to the conservative side) in these remarks.

First, I am both puzzled by his claim that bioethics is “not a discourse” and strongly in disagreement with his claim that it is “a political and social movement . . . based on . . . ideology”. I’m not sure what he means by “discourse” (surely there’s no lack of discursive rhetoric in bioethics), but he appears to have in mind either “scholarly field” or “profession” – as witness his evidence against its status as as profession. As to its being a profession, that is neither here nor there; for one thing, the definition of “profession” is famously contentious, and the term is widely misused (often, today, synonymously with “white collar”, or merely “anyone who doesn’t want to be considered working class”). Status as a profession is largely a question of one’s role in professional practice, which has nothing to do with Smith’s main point, that bioethics is merely a matter of practical politics driven by ideology.

As to whether bioethics is a field of learning, it’s hard to imagine that it is not. Bioethics is grandly interdisciplinary, which makes it harder to define a clear demarcation for the field, but its methods are just those of ordinary scholarship in the humanities (mostly), and its content, by acclamation, is the ethics of biomedical science and practice (some would add environmentalism as well). If ethics is a “discourse”, how can bioethics not be?

Smith seems to be attempting to remove any claim to scholarly authority from the field. Of course, it is bioethicists themselves who have been in the forefront of disavowing the imputation of decision-making authority to their own field: one of the impetuses for bioethics in the US was revulsion at the “God committees” who decided unilaterally who would get scarce kidney dialysis in the 1960s; today, clinical ethicists play strictly advisory roles, and even when sitting as boards of approval for proposed procedures, invariably act as members of large committees, working under public scrutiny, on which a single professionally-trained ethicist is vastly outnumbered by numerous clinicians as well as lay people and others. There is no federal ethics body with regulatory authority, nor any at state level that I am aware of (the VA has an ethics program with some policy-making authority, but it is deeply embedded in their overall managerial structure). And most ethicists want it kept that way.

In declaring that ethicists are not “neutral arbiters”, if he means by that judges or unilateral decisionmakers then he is merely denouncing a role that ethicists have never sought to play. But he appears to imply also that they are not trustworthy sources of knowledge – that they are merely advocates playing games of political interest, and that what they have to say about their subject is no more reliable as information or knowledge than the pronouncements of a politician or political lobbyist. In this he is wrong, and in a revealing way.

He goes on to make his point more explicit: bioethics really is nothing more than politics and ideology, he claims. It is the clash between two “camps”, which he calls “mainstream” and “conservative” (though he puts the term “conservative” in scare quotes, which is odd; there is no better – polite – word for it). In places his language is inconsistent: he calls the non-conservative bioethical beliefs “mainstream”, but also says “mainstream bioethics is a political and social movement . . . seek[ing] to implement policy based on a distinct ideology”. If by this he means that bioethics in general today has become a big political contest, that’s surely true, but if he means that only “mainstream” (not conservative) bioethics functions in this way, he is delusional or dishonest.

“Mainstream” – which I think is an apt word – bioethics is grounded on traditional philosophical ethics and related disciplines, as applied to the biomedical sciences and practice. It offers arguments for its positions, and grounds its theories on well-known and widely-used works from respected scholars. (Beauchamp and Childress, by far the most influential workers in the first 30 years of the field, go to lengths to tie their theory to Hume, Kant and medical tradition. Fletcher was a Utilitarian. Engelhardt is a Libertarian. Some have tried to build Rawlsian theories of medical ethics. The respectable conservatives – Pellegrino, notably – are Hippocratics. These are respected and weighty schools of thought.) There are some conservatives doing serious work in bioethics, but the bulk of conservative thought in the field is mere religious assertion, and most of the rest of it is far worse. In the policy arena, invariably, progressive positions are justified by reference to foundational principles of ethics, while conservatives have abandoned reasoned discourse for public demonstrations, harassment, violence, and the most empty-headed and embarrassing slogans and emotional displays.

A Colorado State House member was all the rage in right-wing circles recently for arranging for a handicapped woman to sing the national anthem in the legislature. She got a round of applause, naturally, because what else would you do? – then he revealed that she had once been the subject of a late-term abortion. And . . . ? What? To the right wing, the fact that this had happened on “Planned Parenthood Day” was some kind of coup. To anyone thinking carefully about abortion, it’s incomprehensible. Someone underwent an abortion and survived. It happens. That’s an argument? No – but to the right wing, it’s good enough for them to accept as proof that abortion is wrong. During the earlier debate over stem cell research funding, some clown brought his twin sons onto the floor of Congress, revealed that they had been gestated from frozen IVF embryos, and then asked plaintively “Which one of my children would you kill?” Apparently he didn’t realize his 9-month-old sons were no longer frozen embryos, or believe that anything about them at that stage – their developing personalities, their self-awareness, their consciousness and experiences – is in any way morally significant (a fact that ought to make them pretty mad when they get a bit older). But this was supposed to tell us something about stem cell research. What, exactly? That it’s wrong because babies are cute. It would be regarded as mean to point out that that’s asinine. I know it would, because when I did, lots of people blogged extensively about how mean I was. But none of them, I’m certain, ever had the presence of mind to be embarrassed by the stupidity of these displays.

And never mind the activists, terrorists, and harassers – the “pro-life” movement’s leaders are just as clueless, and just as shameless. In state after state, lawmakers have enacted crippling restrictions on abortion, virtually none of which is honestly intended to do what it actually says. Nobody really believes women need a “waiting period” to make up their minds about abortion; nobody cares how wide the hallways are in a gynecological clinic; the “informed consent” statements doctors are required to read in some states are grossly false, and the people who wrote them knew that full well. All the restrictions – every one of them – are intended merely to create logistical hassles that will block as many women as possible from exercising the rights they legally and morally hold. The think tanks are just as bad – virtually unanimously they tout the “breast-cancer/abortion link” and “post-abortion trauma” that have been disproven and discredited over and over and over; it makes no difference to them. All this is part and parcel of the right-wing’s approach to the subject in general. “Discourse”, to that side of the debate, does not require saying things that are actually true, or even things that you really mean or believe.

In contrast, a woman’s right to abortion is invariably justified by “mainstream” ethicists and activists by reference to one simple, profound, and quintessentially ethical-philosophical principle: the woman’s right (autonomy, self-determination, bodily integrity, call it what you will) to make her own choices about her own body. The right to refuse or to terminate medical treatment is grounded on the same essential principle – and it was academically-trained philosophers who played a central role in establishing the legal right to exercise that moral right, with clear and eloquent arguments (many of them still standard content in bioethics textbooks) based on recognized moral principles, not with bombs, or slogans, or lurid photos, or underhanded legislative steamrolling.

Of course there are bad thinkers on the left as on the right, and in public activism you see protests and slogans and banners – some of them ill-chosen. But these irrelevances are the content of right-wing bioethics, not its substance. (Substance? “The wisdom of repugnance”? Please.) And this brings us to the heart of Smith’s post.

In declaring that “mainstream” (i.e., progressive) ethics is ideological, he accuses his opponents of the crimes of his own fellows. (To his credit, Smith is far from the worst on the right wing – which is not to say he does not engage in frequent wild and groundless accusations, as this post alone gives evidence.) By claiming that all of bioethics is merely a poltiical fight between idiosyncratic dogmas, he tries to bring bioethics down to the level of his own ideological pandering. In fact, mainstream bioethicists consistently engage in careful, often heated, but painstaking and sincere discussion of ethical issues in light of the best thinking known on those subjects from over the years. Right-wing religious writers also often engage in detailed Biblical jousting, but that is an infight for believers only – it is by definition not rationally-grounded discourse. Aside from that, most right-wing bioethics is, simply, exactly what Smith says it is: self-consciously self-interested political manipulation, employing emotional appeal and deliberate obfuscation. Consider the “debate” over gay marriage as a case in point – the tactics used by the right wing in that travesty are precisely those used on ever other major social issue they attack, and it couldn’t be more different from the approach used by their opponents.

Smith seems to be making a deliberate attempt to invalidate bioethics as an intellectual discipline, in order to claim that one need not take reasoned conclusions seriously – they are, after all, just as empty and politically motivated as those of the buffoons on the right wing. But this is false. I am glad to see Smith admit that right-wing bioethics is naked ideology, political posturing, and fighting for political influence. We should make sure that admission is widely known. But his insinuation that there is no other way to do bioethics at all is simply false as a question of fact – the counterevidence is to be found in the last 30 years of progressive bioethics. Smith is engaged in political “framing”, to strip actual intellectual discourse and ethical reasoning from bioethics and reduce it entirely to what his side is good at: sloganeering, power politics, mob psychology, and political tricks. But his insistence that there is nothing more to the field is really a hopeful bid that no one will remember where that real substance lies.

(Does Smith really claim that Tom Beauchamp and James Childress were just ideologues seeking political influence? That the widely read, magisterial article on abortion by J.J. Thomson – former President of the American Philosophical Association – has exactly the same intellectual credibility as some Jesus-freak jackass waving a photo on a stick at a terrified patient outside a women’s clinic? That the original National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects, which produced the Belmont Report that became the groundwork for all federal research safety legislation, has no more claim to respect than the current President’s Council on Bioethics under its discredited Chair Leon Kass, who is widely regarded as a loon and who fired two of his own members for publishing a dissenting opinion? That Ron Cranford, a vastly admired central figure in most of the groundbreaking end-of-life cases and issues over the years, is on the same plane, in professionalism, intelligence, or integrity, as his counterpart in the Terri Schiavo case, William Hammesfahr, a nutcase who touts himself entirely falsely as a “Nobel Prize nominee” for a completely unproven treatment so groundless he is listed on “Quackwatch” for it, and who testified that Terry Schiavo was not in PVS and that he could cure her – after the majority of her brain tissue had actually decomposed? [Smith is constantly critical of Cranford, who did more than anyone in the profession to bring end-of-life care from the 1960s to today - but look at the best the right wing could put forward on the opposite side of one of his last cases!])

His final appeal to “democracy” (recall again the gay-marriage pogrom – that’s the kind of democracy right-wing bioethicists practice) is heartwarming but misguided. There are some things not open to democracy, in a democracy – fundamental human rights are among them. You cannot properly vote someone’s rights or autonomy away, no matter how large a mob you can assemble to picket and harass them, no matter how successfully you can demonize them. This is why the sneering about “activists judges” and the Roe decision is so much empty rhetoric: the Roe case was, in its central holding at least, rightly decided and for precisely the reasons Brennan articulated: because freedom at all in this country requires the freedom to choose your most central values, and to control your most vital interests. The freedom-giving amendments to the Constitution cannot work at all if a large enough cabal of right-wing yahoos can take your body away from you – and so, to have any freedom, we must have the most basic freedoms. That includes at the very least, the freedom to control your own body by your own values alone, and thus the freedom to determine what happens to your body and what you will do about it.

Smith wants to put women’s bodies, and dying people’s bodies, and gay people’s private lives, and, really everything about every one of us that some right-winger doesn’t like, to a vote. Ethics, properly understood, won’t let him. So he’s out to change that.

Globally, the number of child brides is hard to tabulate; they live mostly in places where births, deaths and the human milestones in between go unrecorded. But there are estimates. About 1 in 7 girls in the developing world (excluding China) gets married before her 15th birthday, according to analyses done by the Population Council, an international research group. In the huge Indian states of Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, the proportion is 36 percent; in Bangladesh, 37 percent; in northwest Nigeria, 48 percent; in the Amhara region of Ethiopia, 50 percent.

But that’s not the worst of it.

Child marriage is only one form of women’s oppression. It brings with it all the harms and constraints that women labor under worldwide: sexual abuse and exploitation, lack of legal rights and autonomy, the loss of opportunities for education and independence, exploitation of women’s labor, and on and on. It is of a piece with the practice of “dowery death” in India, and female genital mutilation, female infanticide or femal fetal abortion in many parts of the world.

But aside from the horrors of a life lived under these conditions, there are other concerns attaching simply to these vicious and abusive marriages. Childbirth at an early age is the single leading cause of childbirth mortality. It is also the primary cause of the epidemic of obstetric vaginal fistula that has ruined millions of lives in Africa and Asia – the girls’ bodies are simply not physically large enough to deliver a full-term infant, and are literally torn apart in the process, killing them or leaving them maimed and in horrible pain. These deaths and medical nightmares are the direct result of child marriage. So also is the continual drain on women’s bodies of constant and frequent pregnancy beginning in childhood. Child marriage is a medical epidemic as well as, more importantly, a sweeping human rights pandemic.

And, finally, this sort of problem is why we must hold the line as fiercely as we can on women’s rights, and especially women’s reproductive freedom – the right to decide not merely her own sexual destiny, but all the freedoms of association, marriage, contraception, and abortion that come with it. We can forget how closely reproduction is tied to marriage in much of the world – but the fact that our own American Taliban is fighting to renew and tighten that link should be a warning to American women how much they have to lose after they lose the right to forego forced childbirth. Already part of our society is denied the right to marry if they choose, and in many states the rights to conceive or adopt a child; more than half the population is also on the verge of being denied the right not to undergo forced childbirth, and, again childbirth and marriage are synonymous in concept for the American right-wing, while synonymous in fact for much of the rest of the world. Once it is determined who cannot marry, and who cannot bear children and who must bear children, and once unbreakable “covenant marriage” spreads further, there remains only on more step to take to wrest women’s sexual autonomy entirely from their hands in every respect.

A few years ago, worrying about forced marriages in America would have been insane. But a few years ago, worrying about legal prohibitions on contraception would have been equally paranoid. A few generations ago, both would have been commonplace. And our right wing is headed back there – by way of abortion, gay marriage, and contraception bans – full steam ahead.

Meanwhile, here are some “traditional marriages” as practiced by the family-values crowd in Afghanistan (the country George Bush liberated, remember?):

(“Ghulam Haider, 11, is to be married to Faiz Mohammed, 40. She had hoped to be a teacher but was forced to quit her classes when she became engaged.”)

( “Roshan Qasem, 11, will join the household of Said Mohammed, 55; his first wife; their three sons; and their daughter, who is the same age as Roshan.”)

Wow.

This hit me with an unexpected force. It was one of those moments when you suddenly see things from a completely new perspective – a “click” moment. Usually those incidents leave me feeling chagrined at what I had overlooked or been oblivious to. In this case I was just taken aback – partly at feeling so goddamned old, partly at the thought of what our history with AIDS has meant for us.

I was aware of the “AIDS at 25″ anniversary now upon us, but hadn’t converted that to its meaning in human lifetimes. An entire generation grown up with AIDS. How very strange. How very sad. And how . . . different.

I was a teenager living in the San Francisco Bay Area when “the gay disease” – later “GRID”, then “AIDS”, then “ARC” – was first bruited in the news. I witnessed, and had strong feelings about, the debate over closing the bathhouses and gay bookstores and backroom bars. I vividly remember attending a public lecture by Marcus Conant in which he nattered vaguely about lowered gay immune response due to anal sex or poppers – theories now discredited, but as good as any others at that time. I remember a private conversation with Conant, again, in which he resoundingly retold the (somewhat overdramatized) story of Dr. John Snow removing the handle of a local pump in London to stop a cholera epidemic – his analogy was to shutting the bathhouses. I remember the fear these debates engendered, and the sense of political opportunism and scapegoating that attended them.

George Will, in his luxuriously ignorant Op-Ed, laments that:

The U.S. epidemic, which through 2004 had killed 530,000, could have been greatly contained by intense campaigns to modify sexual and drug-use behavior in 25 to 30 neighborhoods from New York and Miami to San Francisco. But early in the American epidemic, political values impeded public health requirements.

For him, generations of violent repression of gays in the same insitutions on which he wanted to focus “an intense campaign”, and barely a dozen years of grudging freedom in those same institutions, bears no relevance to the response to a poorly-understood disease that even at that time was being touted by his political compatriots as “God’s judgment on fags”. The fact that any public health campaign necessarily arises from political values – that the whole idea of forcing people to do what they don’t want to do for themselves is an inherently political act – is likewise absent from his pinched “told-you-soing”. Wanting a safe place for gays to congregate – that’s a “political value”. Closing places where gays congregate (or arresting gays who carry one particular disease, or putting gays in concentration camps, or forcibly tattoing HIV+ gays on the arms and buttocks, as Will’s beloved William F. Buckley has repeatedly recommended) – those are not “political values”. But AIDS was entirely political in the time before it was “AIDS” – it could not but be, given that it was in virtually no sense medical.

Those of us who witnessed the whipsawing of fears and dangers inside and out of the gay community in the first years of the growing epidemic were both bewildered and, usually, torn by competing impulses to warn, to publicize, to educate, and also to avoid hysteria, to protect, to guard against a further backlash. The assassination of Harvey Milk at the hands of a bigoted ex-San Francisco cop – and the police department’s intoxicated open celebration of the murder – came barely two years before the first anomalous cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma were reported in gay men. The outcome, if gays were blamed for a new plague, was ominous, and colored every thought and action about the subject. The public backlash built almost day by day – people being thrown out of their apartments, segregated on airliners, reportedly starving in hospitals because housekeeping staff would not deliver food to their rooms. The Reagan administration’s cowardly and indifferent abnegation on this issue left a feeling of being cut adrift, left to the elements. And above it all the uncertainty, the constant fear – what really caused this, how did it work, why did they not seem able to find an effective treatment?

The gnawing encroachment of this strange invader was draining. For someone just becoming sexually active at that time – even heterosexually, and not exactly with (non-)gay abandon – the idea that sex itself could kill you hardly eased the passage to a healthy sexual being. Condoms today are standard equipment, and “getting tested” is a rite of commitment in a relationship, but in the late 1980s, all that was still being negotiated. What was a reasonable risk was hard to say, and your beliefs about it largely testified to your political alliances and level of bigotry, not your level of scientific knowledge. You had to choose just what kind of life you wanted to lead, what connections you wanted to make, with, for really the first time in history, your life hanging in the balance. Worrisome enough to anyone, a real burden to the young who had anticipated exploring their own sexual landscapes, and found them suddenly, newly toxic.

Today, most of those early questions have been answered, and reasonably effective treatments – but no cure – have been found. The public backlash has been managed, and has somewhat receded. Talk of closing high-transmission locations has resurfaced, but with much less of the whiff of Nazism. Contract tracing is standard practice, and is no longer controversial. Much remains elusive, and far too much undone. Conditions in the Third World are horrendous, and the trend is difficult to gauge. But the brunt of the storm has been weathered and we are managing.

That is the world today’s young grow up in: a world in which AIDS looms from their day of birth, but has also already been corralled and characterized. A world in which the dangers they face are greater than in my childhood, but the assurance with which they can face them is greater than in my youth. A world in which their country’s level of affluence determines whether a single act of pleasure may hand them a death sentence, but a world in which they know that the consequences of that act need not be a death sentence. And a world committed to fighting disease wherever it manifests – a world in which they do not wonder, despairingly, if they are being left to die as a convenient resolution of the larger world’s contempt for them.

I remember a quote from a somewhat overeager Star Wars fan, when one of the later installments of the seemingly interminable saga was released: “Today’s children grow up without ever not knowing that Darth Vader is Luke’s father! I wonder what that must be like?” The first two Star Wars films were released in the years just preceding “the gay plague”. It never occurred to me to wonder what the world is like for kids born after those movies, but I now recognize that today’s children – indeed, today’s adults in their mid-20s – grow up never not worrying about AIDS, but also never being taken by surprise by it, never having their world turned upside down by it, never wondering how far the shakeup will extend, how much unlike their world their future world will be because of AIDS.

It is strange to me that so manifest a horror, so overwhelming a sea change in the grounding of intimacy and health, as the one that shaped my formative years is simply absent from the lives of those who now live with the same epidemic I do. I realize that, however similarly informed and educated on AIDS issues we may be, that generation can never see it as those of my generation did. Very likely those born only a few years or a decade after me see it very differently as well. AIDS must seem more normal to them, less a derailment than merely one of the parameters they take into account in plotting their lives, less a tragedy than simply a problem.

I wonder what that must be like.

It’s a juicy subject for a worthwhile discussion, and a welcome sign in these days of otherwise unbridled bigotry and repression.

You all know the basic story, I’m sure: the Earth is populated with “mutants” who have supernatural powers, including not merely such mundane stuff as mind-reading or telekinesis, but the ability to create fire or ice out of nothing, to control the weather, to shoot laser beams from the eyes, or, in one case, to do “anything she wants”. Some mutants merely have unusual bodies, including one with angel wings and another with rather startling retractable hedgehog spikes that perform as easily the most risible special weapon in the history of the superhero movie genre. There is also the character “Wolverine”, who has a hardened skeleton and steel blades that shoot out from between his knuckles, as the result of a hideous military experiment in creating the ultimate soldier (for service in the many battalions engaged in hand-to-hand fighting with steel knuckle blades); he apparently is an honorary mutant or something.

At any rate, the mutants appear spontaneously from non-mutant parents. The science is pretty sketchy throughout. The movie makes reference to a “mutant X chromosome”, which unnecessarily complicates things because it makes it sound like a sex chromosome, though I suspect the scriptwriters were merely trying to play off the “X-men” phrase. No explanation is given for how you mutate an entire new chromosome, or why it expresses as such bizarrely different paranormal phenotypes in different people. Why chromosomal mutations should grant control of the weather is also a mystifying blank field, and the law of conservation of energy seems to mean little to these people. But never mind.

Finding mutants in the family causes consternation among squares and reactionaries, who regard them as abominations. This viewpoint is strangely mirrored by the mutants themselves, who consistently refer to non-mutants as “humans”, implicitly accepting their own categorization as a different species. In fact, there is virtually no overlap of community between mutants and “humans” in any of the movies. It is a given that they are distinct and separate groups. Nobody in the film, as I recall, ever advances the view that mutancy is merely part of the spectrum of human “species normal” phenotypy. I think this is a telling point.

Some “humans” want to eradicate the mutants; others want them controlled, removed, or somehow “dealt with”. Among the mutants, there are two factions: those who advocate peaceful coexistence, with the mutants using their powers for the good of all, and those who are angered by the hostility of the humans, and advocate separatism or even an attack on human society and the eventual rule of the mutants. The “X-Men” are among the former group; they operate a boarding school for mutant children who have been rejected by their parents, teaching them tolerance and self-love, and they also act as some sort of private paramilitary force, intervening in disasters, especially those caused by hostile mutants whipping up violence between humans and mutants.

This scenario creates a raft of political and biological parallels with contemporary society, and these parallels give the “X-Men” movies much of their cultural salience. To start with the most obvious, mutant status as an unexplained deviance from the norm, resulting in a feeling of confusion and lostness among mutant children, with rejection by their parents, legal and de facto oppression by the rest of society, and the relief of discovering others like themselves, is an obvious and much-remarked on metaphor for homosexuality. Earlier X-Men movies made this clear with scenes of children being turned away by their families and embraced by the synthetic family of the mutant community, and with attempts to outlaw the use of mutant powers, or to prevent mutants from teaching in public schools; apparently the mutant/gay trope is widely embraced by the comic-book culture that spawned these movies, as well.

There are other themes invoking social outcast groups, however. The main hostile, separatist mutant is a Nazi concentration-camp survivor, who makes explicit parallels between the drive to wipe out mutants and Nazism. The X-Men father figure uses a wheelchair, creating an explicit link between mutant status and disability; the debates over “genocide” by removal of the “mutant gene”, and calls by mutants to be seen as normal, evoke the disability rights movement and its rejection of “ablism”. There are also echoes of the US civil rights movement (with its pacifist and confrontationist camps), including rather pointed references to a “dream”, and to progress “by any means necessary”. One character’s mutation is so deadly she is unable to prevent it from killing anyone she touches, and so she must avoid direct physical contact with others; the AIDS metaphor here is obvious. Other parallels have been identified, and apparently are made much more explicit in the comic books.

There is no room here to pursue all these references. The content of the third movie, by itself, is more than can be dealt with adequately in this space.

SPOILER WARNING (Plot Points Revealed Below)

In this movie, a shadowy pharmaceutical company operating on Alcatraz (why? – who knows?) has developed a “cure” for the “mutant X chromosome” – inject one ampule of this stuff and, within seconds, your whole body reverts to “human”-normal and you lose your mutant powers. The drug is derived from the body of a young mutant whose mutant power is to reverse the mutant powers of anybody who gets within 10 feet of him; the drug company kidnaps him, holds him prisoner in their lab, and somehow extracts the stuff from him – without him, they can’t make any more of the drug. They offer the cure to the public, which sets off a howling social conflict: between those who want it made mandatory for all mutants and those who want it banned as a form of genocide against mutants, and between those mutants who accept it as a way of escaping from their social isolation and those who reject it as an attack on who they are as individuals. The hostile mutant group heats up the controversy by attacking the lab to kill the source of the drug and thus prevent it being used against them; the government responds by turning the drug into a biological weapon and mowing down mutants with tranquilizer-dart guns. Chaos ensues.

Here we need to pause again to note the social parallels. First and always, there’s the mutant/gay identity: the controversial “cure”, the conflict between self-hating mutants who will do anything to assimilate into mainstream society and those who insist on their right to be accepted as they are, the larger social tension between assimilation and ostracism, and the delicious irony that the drug company’s CEO has a son who is himself a mutant (he is shown mutilating himself in the bathroom in an early scene, to try to keep his father from seeing his mutant wings), and who refuses to accept the treatment when his father tries to force him into it. (Shades of Alan Keyes!) The mutants who accept the treatment in order to end their ostracism parallel self-hating gays who attend “ex-gay” indoctrination in search of acceptance from the right wing. (Given the “mutants as Nazi victims” theme, there may also be a parallel with self-hating Jews who attempt to over-assimilate, or who have plastic surgery to erase any distinctive ethnic appearance.)

The debate over “cure vs. accomodation” again invokes the disability-rights struggle and the debate over the definition of “normal health”. An interesting twist is the fact that the drug is taken from the body of a young child (without killing him) without his consent: this seems to be an indirect reference to stem-cell research, with a (clumsy?, or perhaps ironic?) twist: here it is the reactionaries who want this research done to assist in their attempts to stamp out a group of people they despise, while one group of mutants seeks to kill the “embryo” to prevent the development of cures for “diseases” they don’t think should be cured, and another seeks to protect him for the same reason. That throws a weird kind of monkeywrench into the right/left politics of the plot.

So too does the notion of separate species, which both embraces and rejects biological essentialism: if having a mutation makes you a separate species, then there really is something to the notion of ineradicable differences; at the same time, the fact that you can be changed into a “human” by eradicating those differences suggests that one’s “essence” is maleable. In this way, the movie is ambiguous about where it stands on the possibility of change at all, though it does seem to endose the right-wing perspective on both issues (a seemingly impossible feat).

Finally, we shouldn’t overlook the role of the pharmaceutical company, both in kidnapping “embryo boy” and in developing a medication aimed at genocide. At any rate, there are certainly many parallels between plot points in this movie and contemporary controversies in bioethics and medical research or treatment standards.

In view, particularly, of the sex-obsessive nature of contemporary bio-politics, it is important to note the sexual politics of the movie as well. I have said that the choice by mutants whether or not to take the “cure” parallels debates within the gay, Jewish, and disabled communities; it also plays as a metaphor for abortion-clinic confrontation as well. There are lines of angry activists from both sides outside the clinics where the treatment medication is being given out, waving signs and shouting slogans; the mutants lined up for the treatment are nervous and self-conscious, and some feel ambivalent about their choices. When one main character takes the treatment so that she can finally touch her boyfriend without killing him, he tells her “This isn’t what I wanted”, and she asserts her autonomy by saying “It’s what I wanted.”, simultaneously invoking the “woman’s body/woman’s freedom” aspect of abortion, and positioning the anti-mutant treatment as an exercise of autonomy. (This parallel also brings in the “sex kills” meme of the right wing, but again with a perverse twist: in this case, she’s making a fateful choice, and undergoing a controversial medical procedure in a besieged public clinic, so that she can have sex, while it was her sexual-outcast mutant status that kept her from doing so.)

Another female mutant – one of the “hostiles” – appears most often completely nude, her spectacularly stereotypically attractive body covered in blue scales (and a body suit) that make her just-barely legal for the screen; when she is shot with the treatment dart, her scales and blue skin evaporate, leaving her a perfectly ordinary, spectacular, completed naked white woman (who for some reason chooses exactly that moment to cover her body with her arms). At that moment, the other hostile mutants turn their backs on her, saying “She isn’t one of us anymore”; the leader glances at her pale-skinned, voluptuos naked body and remarks “It’s a pity. She was so beautiful.” Here we revisit the “two species” concept, and also half-heartedly reinforce the idea that there is a range of bodily normality standards – but again with a perverse twist: the hostile leader is not saying that mutants should also be considered beautiful, since that would be too expansive for his partisan viewpoint; he is saying that only mutants are beautiful, and she becomes ugly when she becomes merely a conventionally attractive human woman.

On another note, it is never established whether mutancy breeds true, or whether mutants are interfertile with either group, mutants or “humans”, which may be a significant point in respect of their plan for world domination. The implications of the “two species” view are never really addressed, and it seems as if that is mere shoddy science on the part of the scriptwriters, rather than an overt attempt to assert an ideological point.

As with the identity politics that is brought out by the various oppressed-minority metaphors of the movie, the sexual politics is confused here and somewhat inverted. Using a controversial medical treatment is rightly portrayed as a free choice available as an exercise of autonomy (in this way it matters very much that it is a female character who goes to the treatment clinic); however, this treatment is inherently a rejection of one’s nature in the face of (mostly) outside pressures. The openly sexual presentation of the pre-change blue-skin mutant is positive (even if she is a hostile character), as compared with her huddled, covered-up, and traumatized post-treatment self, but the statement that she can only be beautiful as a mutant echoes some of the more extreme fringes of separatist activism, which seems as off-putting as the parallel real-life statements by lesbian, minority, or disability separatists often are. The choice to take treatment in order to pursue an active sex life is likewise positive, but the refusal to find a sexual identity as she already is seems to offer a defeatist approach to AIDS.

And, finally, there is a deep contradiction in the transformative treatment itself: the fact that one can, and perhaps would want to, change one’s essence in this way is a kind of backhand affirmation of the transsexual community – but the fact that it works only one way, to transform “gene queers” into “normals”, seems to cut in exactly the opposite direction. Similarly, there is a brief scene with two threatening femme-y transgender hostile mutants – again a nod to the trans community, but put in a negative light. On the sexual level, then, there’s at least as much going on in this movie as in other respects, but it seems even more confused than otherwise.

The political stances these tensions and conflicts force on the movie’s characters are as complicated as the biological and social metaphors they are burdened with. The strangest of these seems to be the position of the X-Men themselves. They are unquestionably the heroes of the X-Men universe of stories: they embody a vision of mutual tolerance between humans and mutants, they reject violence and seek to stop it (their own powers are used almost exclusively against other mutants, those from the “hostile” camp), they embrace “working within the system” to effect legal equality for mutants, and they teach mutant children to accept themselves without becoming bitter toward the outside world. They represent the values that tolerant, liberal, centrist Americans are told to uphold. In this, they stand in direct contrast to the angry, hostile mutants who embrace violent dissent and seek to overthrow the system by force. This makes the X-Men the Martin Luther King faction to the hostile force’s Malcolm X (and each is explicitly associated with phrases or codewords from the two men in the movies).

On the other hand, given the Jew/Nazi parallel also evident, the X-Men appear to be assimilationist Jews who didn’t see the terror in time, opposing the violent resistance of those few who actually fought back, even, literally (in this movie), as the uniformed troops undertake a genocidal assault in the open streets.

And, in keeping with the gay theme, the X-Men break with the accepted liberal history of the gay-rights movement by taking a go-slow approach, eschewing direct confrontation (no mutant Stonewall for them), and working with the political powers to quietly advocate for less legal restriction. One of the X-Men is even a Cabinet member in the movie White House – who is kept in the dark about the development of the anti-mutant weapon and treated as a diversity figurehead for the administration. (Tellingly, he has non-white [OK . . . blue] skin, and is recycled as Secretary of State later – making his humbling by the deceitful President an even more pointed jab at a certain person.) This makes the X-Men essentially the Log Cabin Republicans of their world – which is not the kind of heroes we are hoping they would be.
This leaves us with quite a mess of a movie. It offers a broad message of tolerance for the biologically or sexually non-typical, which has got to be great news for the gay, transgender, and minority communities. At the same time, it eschews rejectionism, separatism, and even direct confrontation on issues, which may be good news for middle-of-the-roaders but slows progress in some ways, and plays off tensions in the activist community in what may be unhelpful ways. It introduces but consistently fails to interrogate seriously such claims as that non-typicals have the moral authority to stand in judgment of other nontypicals, or that mutations place one in a distinct biologically essentialist category aside from the rest of “humanity”. More than anything, it insists that the most important thing is to maintain the peace and trust the government – exactly what the Civil Rights Movement taught us was not the case in many circumstances.

In the end, the parallels and anti-parallels between the movie mutants and the bio-deviants of the real world – and the tensions that afflict both of them – are too inconsistent to sort out. At times it seems as if the movie is making a clear statement about contemporary bio-political issues, particularly gay rights. (In fact, both the director of the second X-Men movie, and the co-star of all three – Ian McClellan – are openly gay and spoke of their desire to make pro-gay themes more visible in the movies. McClellan states he only took the role in the latest film for that reason.) At other times, though, the film seems to endorse contrasting statements on the same issues, and in many places it seems as if familiar elements from these cultural conflicts are visible in the movies, but not in consistent patterns that make a coherent argument. It’s a fascinating melange, however, and a provocative one. I was intrigued enough to be willing to see it again to try and tease out all the elements. I’m not sure that it will ever unravel to a clear-headed and strong position statement on any such issue, but there are hints a-plenty in various places. Worth a look, if only to get the conversation going.

UPDATE: The Women’s Bioethics Project also notes the bioethics themes visible in the movie. They are sponsoring group discussions on X-Men III. Read here for interesting commentary and more information.

Beyond abortion and women’s sexuality, though, without doubt the one issue that prompts more purely delusional pseudo-scientific spewing is the question of homosexuality – its source, its practice, and its consequences. “Answers” to the befuddling question what “causes” homosexuality are legion. It will surprise no one to discover that James Dobson, purveyor of so much amusing right-wing bloviating, has discovered yet another such theory – one he claims is “being discussed in the child development clinics and in the universities throughout the country and around the world”, none of which seem to have heard of it.

From a transcript of last week’s TV broadcast by Dobson:

This is fairly new information that’s being discussed in the child development clinics and in the universities throughout the country and around the world, and it is called “detachment and differentiation.” In other words, a boy detaches from his mother and then begins to accept the role model that he sees in the father. The father really needs to entice the boy away from the feminine characteristics in the mother and begin to teach him to identify with the masculine model.

Now folks, listen to me, it is now believed that homosexuality is very typically rooted in the failure to accomplish that differentiation and when you see individuals who are very very feminine and you go back and you look at the early childhood development characteristics you will see a failure to make that change.

Needless to say, no references to such a concept can be found, either on Google or Medline. [NB: There is a theory of developmental psychology known as "attachment and differentiation" that emphasizes a child's degree of closeness with caregivers - as do almost all theories of child psychology - but it has nothing to do with the development of sexual identity, and it's hardly new, stemming from at least the late 60s and to some degree earlier. It's the source of the now-common jargon "separation anxiety" and "avoidant personality", among other concepts. I can't tell if this is what Dobson has in mind, since his comments are so idiotic, but even if so he's completely wrong.]

What’s notable about this, though hardly unique, is the sheer, unabashed departure from reality it represents. Dobson has a degree in child development and is a licensed child psychologist, formerly in practice at USC and elsewhere. He claims he “rejects” parts of traditional psychology, based on his Bible beliefs, but otherwise upholds the discipline. Yet he has no qualms about touting what can at best be described as garbled, unscientific gibberish in what is supposedly his own field of expertise – then relying on that expertise to validate this demonstrably false nonsense. He makes particular, explicit factual claims – that there is a theory such as he describes, that it is new, that it is widely accepted at “child development clinics and . . . universities . . . around the world”, and that it is the basis of what are now generally-accepted beliefs about sexual orientation – all of which are completely false. They refer to theories that no one believes or has even heard of, and professional trends that are simply non-existent. It’s not a matter of opinion – he asserts the existence of things that are not real – but he seems to feel no necessity to conform his claims about facts with the actual facts.

Much has been made of the right-wing’s war on science, and its increasing estrangement from the “reality-based community“. It’s hard to know what to say on that topic, since, for members of the reality-based community, pointing out that someone – George Bush and James Dobson being two relevant examples – is not a member of the reality-based community is enough of an argument. Those who occupy the realms of non-reality should return to reality and stop saying stuff that isn’t true – self-evidently so. But, clearly, those who have deliberately chosen to sever their ties with truth and logic are not going to be swayed by the logic of adherence to truth.

It is especially disconcerting when this kind of delusionality invades supposedly reasoned discussions of science and health policy. It is distressing enough to witness the right wing’s increasingly-aggressive insistence that its particular values or preferences should be embodied as law; it is far worse when those untethered beliefs are advanced as matters of fact which rational observers are then expected to accept at face value. In this way, weird beliefs attain the status not merely of respectability but of scientific fact, by assertion alone, and provably false or ineffective doctrines such as creationism, abstinence as birth control, post-abortion trauma, and now “detachment” are insisted upon as factual groundings for policy-making. Falsity was once a guarantor of irrelevance to fact-based policy; now truth is itself irrelevant in world in which any self-aggrandizing yahoo can simply assert whatever comes to the top of their head and demand that it be accomodated. Dobson’s unhinged maunderings about non-existent psychological theories are just the latest example of a trend that is making fact-based health policy an oxymoron under the current administration.

Hat tip: Pam at Pandagon.