"Bodies like ours" last time I was there they did not have an interactive message board such as this,
You must not have looked very hard. BLO has a very active online community. Maybe you were looking too hard for pictures or something.
I find it dismaying however that parents such as the two who replied to you would think differently of you because you don't have CAH or have a child with it. I find that isolationism odd given people here are always griping that not enough folks know about CAH. Like it or not, the hormonal and body issues are part of CAH. Just because they have a boy and may not have to deal with it doesn't lessen the fact that the issue is there and it is a big one. By not wanting to discuss it, people just buy into the shame and secrecy that has been prevelant and problematic throughout the history of it happening.
Anyways, I digressed with that.
You wrote,
And it is equally POSSIBLE for adrogens to have a masulizing effect on the brain but virtually no effect on the genitals. Its a possibility but you will never see it written in a report. Doing such would say homosexuality is absolutely born.
Consider an unscientific comparison here. There is an absolute higher incidence of homosexuality and bisexuality among women with CAH than unaffected women. There are many studies that put this forth. Women with CAH are XX, fertile, and by all accounts, most, but not all, identify as women.
Compare that to women with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. Women with CAIS are XY, but their body doesn't respond to testosterone. At birth, they look female, are raised female and almost always identify as female. Most are also heterosexual. The rate of homosexuality among women with AIS is about the same as unaffected women. There is no doubting the fact that a women with AIS is female even though her genetic makeup is XX.
You can draw your own conclusions from it.
Both of these hypothesis have been written about, so you haven't done enough homework yet, Timid.
On the gender identity issue, a dirty little secret among many doctors and parents who believe them is that there are not gender issues with CAH. It's a lie. I know a ton of guys with CAH, raised female and who now identify as male. Know what really pisses these guys off? Surgery that was done on them as children. Doctors will say it doesn't happen because their research doesn't show it.
Of course their research doesn't show it. Those there are not making themselves available to the research and they likely never will. Most research on adults conducted is done using patient databases of those treated at the researchers medical facilities as a child. Upset people don't avail themselves to those facilities and to the very doctors they feel harmed them.
This is reason enough to question much research done, particularly here in the US because that is the standard method of recruiting patients to study yet again. Adults with CAH make for good research lab rats here in the US and only the compliant obey.
If you need proof of that, compare research done here in the US with research done in the UK by Creighton and Minto. They often illustrate opposing results; why is that?
I am of the believe it lies within patient recruiting. You can find out where the research subjects (as they are warmly called) are recruited from by reading the methodology of any research paper. In the UK, they use a crossectional recruitment policy of reaching out to those who were treated at any one hospital and also recruit from advocacy organizations. Of course, recruiting from advocacy orgs you always run the risk of people being included who don't have CAH or whatever is being studied but it's easy enough to figure out the real folks from the wannabe's.
Now adays, the child is reared as a BOY because of the POSSIBLE masculizing effects on the brain. And surgery is left open as an option latter on in life depending on how the PATIENT feels about the issue.
You are delusional if you believe that. Children with micropenis are still being sex reassigned in childhood. It is not being done with the same frequency it used to occur, but it is happening. It wasn't until Reiner came out with research last year on kids with cloacal extrophy assigned female showing that huge numbers of them go back to male that doctors sat up and went, "Oh, I guess we were wrong"
Yeah...guess what you were wrong and you f****** up a whole lot of lives being wrong.
Hopefully one day the same will come forth with CAH with doctors sitting up and recognizing that big clitoris doesn't make someone more or less female and that all the surgery in the world won't diminish the impact the hormones make on our brain.
I understand that research being published soon in book form by Dr. Katrina Karkazis will examine many of the issues I put forth along with the lies parents are told by doctors pretending the parents are the patient and the parents themselves pretending they are the patient when they are not. A simple quick reading of the posts by parents (and grandmothers) justifying clitoral mutilation will illustrate that...
"we had the surgery..."
"I chose the surgery..."
"We are healing well from the surgery..."
"Do we need surgery...?" (and to that, I would answer yes--a lobotomy would do you fine)
Anyways Timid, you should probably do more homework if you really think you are a scientific type of thinker.
Betsy
http://www.bodieslikeours.org
