Personaltiy is not a disease

via Pharyngula

CAH [congenital adrenal hyperplasia] is a serious hormonal imbalance that can lead to abnormal genitalia.
However, some doctors are developing treatment with an in utero drug (“dex”) against this imbalance, to reduce an excess of adrenogen before birth.
That, so far, is good – but the drug apparently has a serious side-effect, which is altering the identity and personality of the future person. That’s a problem to be considered, but instead of worrying about it, some people working in the field are actually endorsing this side-effect. And that is ethically very wrong.

One group of researchers, however, seems to be suggesting that prenatal dex also might prevent affected girls from turning out to be homosexual or bisexual.

In their definition, the following traits of some female’s personalities are “wrong” and need to be fixed, because they’re too masculine:

1. taking traditionally male jobs
2. lesbianism
3. bisexuality
4. not wanting babies galore
5. not playing with dolls and fantasizing about pregnancy
6. not wanting to fulfill traditional household roles
7. not focusing on sex enough

No, I am not kidding you:

Meyer-Bahlburg writes that “CAH women as a group have a lower interest than controls in getting married and performing the traditional child-care/housewife role. As children, they show an unusually low interest in engaging in maternal play with baby dolls, and their interest in caring for infants, the frequency of daydreams or fantasies of pregnancy and motherhood, or the expressed wish of experiencing pregnancy and having children of their own appear to be relatively low in all age groups.”

In the same article, Meyer-Bahlburg suggests that treatments with prenatal dexamethasone might cause these girls’ behavior to be closer to the expectation of heterosexual norms.

(emphasis mine)

It’s basically the abuse of a real disease to establish a treatment against someone’s personality that some people may find undesirable. And a ton of medical/endocrine societies appear support the research. At least for these societies one may hope that their interest is focused on the treatment of the genital (and genuine) problems of the disease and that this group’s obscure views somehow slipped through the door.

For the record: It’s completely irrelevant whether CAH patients are less likely to conform to some other people’s medieval housewife expectations – who are we to want to “design” people’s personalities after our own interests? These character traits are perfectly healthy, perfectly normal and common and anything but dangerous, nor are they hurting society in any form or way. If someone’s perfectly healthy personality traits are clashing with the unaccepting, dominantly white-heterosexual society that’s actually not a problem of the person, but of the society.

It’s ethically inacceptable to twiddle with another person’s personality to turn them into some robot that conforms to the twisted expectations of other people.

The authors of the Bioethics Forum article warn that showing that homosexuality might be genetic could backfire on homosexual activists – because it could be viewed as a genetic problem that can be ‘treated’. For me, this of course this leads to a slippery slope as it falls into the same line of saying we should treat people for being too empathetic, too determined, for prefering soccer over basketball, or music over sports, metal over classical music and for playing with cardboard boxes instead of pre-made wooden toys. However, I am sure the Bioethics forum has a point – people would use any new findings in a way that pleases them and it’s the task of every rational, intelligent being on the planet to counteract such abuse of facts. There’s a difference between a genetic disease and a genetic variation and we cannot allow people to blurr the boarders after their own interest.