The recent column by Jordan Osserman '11 ("What's In A Name?" Apr. 2) touches on material that is both dangerous to society and has been thoroughly discredited by science. I am reminded of one of my clearest memories from college, a time 30 years ago when the greatest scientific hoax of the 20th century was being presented to Dartmouth students in Dartmouth classrooms.
I refer to what is now known as the "John-Joan" or "twins" case, a tragic true story that is chronicled in the superb book by John Colapinto, "As Nature Made Him" (2000).
The story involved a Canadian boy who following an injury was surgically altered and raised as a girl for the first 14 years of his life. The psychologists at Johns Hopkins who advocated the treatment based their decision on the very same beliefs found in Osserman's editorial: "But a child's gender is not the same as his or her sex. Gender is learned through culture." No it isn't.
In 1977 I took a sociology class from Joan Smith. In that class she talked of rigorously controlled scientific studies that showed that men are more physically powerful than women because they are given baseball gloves as children and girls are given dolls. At the time that struck me as nonsense -- no women's basketball team will ever compete against their male counterparts. I did not stand up and challenge her that day and for 30 years I've always wished I had. There is no question in my mind that she was talking about the "twins case," which at the time was at the center of the debate over nature or nurture in human development and of intense interest to the burgeoning women's movement.
Only a decade ago, fully 30
years after the surgery, did the truth come out. The case was a horrific failure and the scientific community had been misled. According to Colapinto "thousands of sex reassignments were performed based on this example." The 1997 article in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine that exposed the fraud stated that "in instances of extensive penile damage to the infant it is standard to recommend rearing the male as a female."
Many times I have considered the terrible harm that came to society -- and to a brave Canadian man named David Reimer -- from the very same scientific fraud that I chose not to confront that day in 1977.
The liberal arts education of course cannot remain static; it must constantly morph into new areas. Sometimes what you find, though, is that on its fringes it exists on the edge of madness. That is what I think of "Queer Theory."
I also wonder about the backbone of Dartmouth's scientific community. But watch out, anyone who takes on this challenge will get the Larry Summers treatment.
