Skip to main content

Home/ Choice for youth and sexuality/ Group items tagged taboo

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Marina Lacroix

China launches sex education campaign-China-World-The Times of India - 0 views

timesofindia.indiatimes.com/...4132715.cms

sex education China

shared by Marina Lacroix on 18 Feb 09 - No Cached
  • China launched a national sex education campaign on Sunday in order to break traditional taboos and encourage people suffering from A couple at a kissing contest in Hefei, central China. (Agencies Photo) sexually transmitted diseases and infertility to seek medical help.
  • The new campaign for safe sex has been named as "The sunshine project to care for gender health". It involves use of posters and holding competitions besides sponsoring an international sex toy fair in Beijing, organisers said. The idea is to get people to discuss “painful topics" concerning their sexual life. The government recently intensified a television campaign to promote condom use, which is significant in a country where talking about sex is problematic for many people.
  • Officials bemoaned the fact that more than one-third of those suffering from sex related problems never seek medical help. Only seven percent of women and slightly more than eight percent of men seek immediate medical help for sexual problems while a lot of others take a lot of time before deciding to visit hospitals
Marina Lacroix

The Atlantic Online | November 2008 | A Boy's Life | Hanna Rosin - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...transgender-children

transgender transsexuality gender

shared by Marina Lacroix on 29 Oct 08 - Cached
  • “If a 5-year-old black kid came into the clinic and said he wanted to be white, would we endorse that?” he told me. “I don’t think so. What we would want to do is say, ‘What’s going on with this kid that’s making him feel that it would be better to be white?’”
    • Marina Lacroix
      Marina Lacroix on 29 Oct 08
       
      The other side of the debate: don't change the biology, adapt the psychology.
  • Zucker says that in 25 years, not one of the patients who started seeing him by age 6 has switched gender. Adolescents are more fixed in their identity. If a parent brings in, say, a 13-year-old who has never been treated and who has severe gender dysphoria, Zucker will generally recommend hormonal treatment. But he considers that a fraught choice. “One has to think about the long-term developmental path. This kid will go through lifelong hormonal treatment to approximate the phenotype of a male and may require some kind of surgery and then will have to deal with the fact that he doesn’t have a phallus; it’s a tough road, with a lot of pain involved.”
  • When they reversed course, they dedicated themselves to the project with a thoroughness most parents would find exhausting and off-putting. They boxed up all of John’s girl-toys and videos and replaced them with neutral ones. Whenever John cried for his girl-toys, they would ask him, “Do you think playing with those would make you feel better about being a boy?” and then would distract him with an offer to ride bikes or take a walk. They turned their house into a 1950s kitchen-sink drama, intended to inculcate respect for patriarchy, in the crudest and simplest terms: “Boys don’t wear pink, they wear blue,” they would tell him, or “Daddy is smarter than Mommy—ask him.” If John called for Mommy in the middle of the night, Daddy went, every time. When I visited the family, John was lazing around with his older brother, idly watching TV and playing video games, dressed in a polo shirt and Abercrombie & Fitch shorts. He said he was glad he’d been through the therapy, “because it made me feel happy,” but that’s about all he would say
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Catherine Tuerk, who runs the support group for parents in Washington, D.C., started out as an advocate for gay rights after her son came out, in his 20s. She has a theory about why some parents have become so comfortable with the transgender label: “Parents have told me it’s almost easier to tell others, ‘My kid was born in the wrong body,’ rather than explaining that he might be gay, which is in the back of everyone’s mind. When people think about being gay, they think about sex—and thinking about sex and kids is taboo.”
  • A 2008 study of 25 girls who had been seen in Zucker’s clinic showed positive results; 22 were no longer gender-dysphoric, meaning they were comfortable living as girls. But that doesn’t mean they were happy. I spoke to the mother of one Zucker patient in her late 20s, who said her daughter was repulsed by the thought of a sex change but was still suffering—she’d become an alcoholic, and was cutting herself.
  • A recent medical innovation holds out the promise that this might be the first generation of transsexuals who can live inconspicuously. About three years ago, physicians in the U.S. started treating transgender children with puberty blockers, drugs originally intended to halt precocious puberty. The blockers put teens in a state of suspended development.
  • Around the world, clinics that specialize in gender-identity disorder in children report an explosion in referrals over the past few years. Dr. Kenneth Zucker, who runs the most comprehensive gender-identity clinic for youth in Toronto, has seen his waiting list quadruple in the past four years, to about 80 kids—an increase he attributes to media coverage and the proliferation of new sites on the Internet.
  • Dr. Peggy Cohen-Kettenis, who runs the main clinic in the Netherlands, has seen the average age of her patients plummet since 2002. “We used to get calls mostly from parents who were concerned about their children being gay,” says Catherine Tuerk, who since 1998 has run a support network for parents of children with gender-variant behavior, out of Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. “Now about 90 percent of our calls are from parents with some concern that their child may be transgender.”
  • The point was to take the situation out of the realm of deep pathology or mental illness, while at the same time separating it from voluntary behavior, and to put it into the idiom of garden-variety “challenge.”
  • Diagnoses of gender-identity disorder among adults have tripled in Western countries since the 1960s; for men, the estimates now range from one in 7,400 to one in 42,000 (for women, the frequency of diagnosis is lower). Since 1952, when Army veteran George Jorgensen’s sex-change operation hit the front page of the New York Daily News, national resistance has softened a bit, too. Former NASCAR driver J.T. Hayes recently talked to Newsweek about having had a sex-change operation. Women’s colleges have had to adjust to the presence of “trans-men,” and the president-elect of the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association is a trans-woman and a successful cardiologist.
  • “Yeah, it is fixable,” piped up another mom, who’d been on the 20/20 special. “We call it the disorder we cured with a skirt.”
  • The problem with blockers is that parents have to begin making medical decisions for their children when the children are quite young. From the earliest signs of puberty, doctors have about 18 months to start the blockers for ideal results. For girls, that’s usually between ages 10 and 12; for boys, between 12 and 14.
  • Blockers are entirely reversible; should a child change his or her mind about becoming the other gender, a doctor can stop the drugs and normal puberty will begin. The Dutch clinic has given them to about 70 children since it started the treatment, in 2000; clinics in the United States and Canada have given them to dozens more. According to Dr. Peggy Cohen-Kettenis, the psychologist who heads the Dutch clinic, no case of a child stopping the blockers and changing course has yet been reported.
  • This suggests one of two things: either the screening is excellent, or once a child begins, he or she is set firmly on the path to medical intervention. “Adolescents may consider this step a guarantee of sex reassignment,” wrote Cohen-Kettenis, “and it could make them therefore less rather than more inclined to engage in introspection.” In the Netherlands, clinicians try to guard against this with an extensive diagnostic protocol, including testing and many sessions “to confirm that the desire for treatment is very persistent,” before starting the blockers.
  • The most extensive study on transgender boys was published in 1987 as The “Sissy Boy Syndrome” and the Development of Homosexuality. For 15 years, Dr. Richard Green followed 44 boys who exhibited extreme feminine behaviors, and a control group of boys who did not.
  • Green expected most of the boys in the study to end up as transsexuals, but nothing like that happened. Three-fourths of the 44 boys turned out to be gay or bisexual (Green says a few more have since contacted him and told him they too were gay). Only one became a transsexual. “We can’t tell a pre-gay from a pre-transsexual at 8,” says Green, who recently retired from running the adult gender-identity clinic in England. “Are you helping or hurting a kid by allowing them to live as the other gender?
  • In 2012, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—the bible for psychiatric professionals—will be updated. Many in the transgender community see this as their opportunity to remove gender-identity disorder from the book, much the same way homosexuality was delisted in 1973.
  • Zucker has compared young children who believe they are meant to live as the other sex to people who want to amputate healthy limbs, or who believe they are cats, or those with something called ethnic-identity disorder
  • Marina Lacroix on 29 Oct 08
     
    Account of the life of a transgender boy and the history of thinking about transsexuality
Marina Lacroix

Istanbul en de dubbele moraal tegenover homo's - Buitenland - de Volkskrant - 0 views

www.volkskrant.nl/...dubbele_moraal_tegenover_homos

homosexuality Middle-East Turkey taboo stigmatisation

shared by Marina Lacroix on 22 Oct 08 - Cached
  • dubbelleven
  • Onder druk van zijn familie heeft Hamid moeten besluiten toch maar te trouwen.
  • ‘Het erge is dat zo twee mensen ongelukkig worden, niet alleen zo’n jongen, maar ook het meisje met wie hij trouwt.’
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Net zoals de Amsterdamse hoofdinspecteur deed met Vietnamdemonstranten in de jaren zestig, laadde de politie de travestieten in vrachtwagens en dumpte die buiten de stad.
  • Ik zat zelf een keer in een homobar bij een inval van de politie. Toen ze zagen dat niemand met lang haar of make-up rondliep, gingen ze weg omdat er geen homo’s zouden zijn’, lacht Özkan.
  • Ter illustratie vertelt hij een waargebeurd verhaal uit het leger. ‘Twee mannen werden met elkaar betrapt in een washok. De passieve werd uit het leger gegooid, maar de actieve, de echte vent dus, kreeg alleen celstraf.’
1 - 4 of 4
Showing 20▼ items per page