[IP] on Mixed-sex human embryo created

[Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Jamie McCarthy <jamie@mccarthy.vg>
Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2003 12:55:02 -0400
To: dave@farber.net, ip <ip@v2.listbox.com>
Cc: NRLC@nrlc.org
Subject: Re: [IP] Mixed-sex human embryo created

What I find disgusting is not the research, but that people have
started to imply that a so-called "she-male" is inhuman and
intolerable:

    "must send shivers down the spines of the public"
    
    "The creation of a 'she-male' is disgusting"

Keep in mind that we're talking about a few hundred cells.

The legislative director of National Right to Life was quoted as
objecting:

    "Each member of the species Homo sapiens is genetically male
    or female from conception"

That's simply not true.  People are born with ambiguous gender.
To label them as not human is wrong;  they are people just like
the rest of us.

Gender-reassignment surgery, making a major or minor alteration in
physical makeup of the genitals, is more common than most of us
realize.  NOVA did an excellent program two years ago on what
happened to a baby who underwent that surgery and lived through
childhood in what apparently was the wrong body:

    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/gender/

There is nothing wrong with such people, except that they must
endure a culture that tries to force them to fit norms they cannot.

As the links off that page make clear, there are people who are not
"genetically male or female."  I just found a very interesting
homepage here (but its author died last year, sadly).  I challenge
the National Right to Life (Cc'd) to say that the author of this
webpage was not a member of our species:

    http://hermaphrodite.arriba.net/


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