In het recent gepubliceerde boek 'Why Is The Penis Shaped Like That?:
And Other Reflections on Being Human' van auteur Jesse Bering wordt de
stelling ondersteund dat vrouwen die regelmatig onveilige seks hebben
minder depressief en intelligenter zijn. Bij onveilige seks wordt
bijvoorbeeld geen condoom gebruikt en kan het sperma zijn gang gaan.
Stoffen die humeur verbeteren Sperma
bevat naast angstverminderende elementen ook nog andere stoffen die het
humeur verbeteren: cortisol verhoogt de genegenheid, estron verbetert
het humeur, prolactine is een natuurlijk antidepressivum, melatonine
bevordert de slaap en serotonine is het bekendste antidepressivum.
Op
basis van deze onvolledige lijst van ingrediënten komen wetenschappers
tot de hypothese dat vrouwen die onveilige seks hebben minder depressief
zijn dan anderen.
Een onderzoek onder 293 universiteitsstudentes
ondersteunt die hypothese: vrouwen die zonder condoom vrijen neigen
minder naar depressie dan zowel vrouwen die vrijen met condoom als
vrouwen die geen seks hebben.
Keerzijde Het
vrouwelijk lichaam maakt bovendien onderscheid tussen het zaad van een
vaste partner en dat van andere mannen. Dat zorgt voor het minder
aangename neveneffect dat vrouwen die regelmatig onveilige seks hebben
met hun partner dieper in een depressie zakken wanneer die relatie tot
een einde komt.
Ander onderzoek toont aan dat vrouwen die
blootgesteld worden aan sperma beter presteren op kennistests en een
hoger concentratievermogen hebben.
Ze was ooit een anarchist, een atheïst, een linkse folkie en een man genaamd Donald. Vandaag is de Amerikaanse econome en transseksueel Deirdre McCloskey
(74) een gelovige vrouw die de barricades beklimt om het neoliberalisme
te verdedigen. De Vrije Universiteit Brussel kende haar onlangs een
eredoctoraat toe voor haar revolutionaire bijdrage aan de economische
wetenschappen. De kern van haar betoog: economen moeten meer kijken naar
de mensen achter de cijfers, en we moeten stoppen met zeuren over het
kapitalisme. ‘Het is een succesverhaal, of u dat nu wilt of niet.’
opinieHet is tijd dat mannen en
vrouwen met een intersekseconditie uit de onzichtbaarheid treden,
schrijft Miriam van der Have. Aan LHTB moet dan ook de I worden
toegevoegd, vindt Miriam van der Have, voorzitter van het Nederlands
Netwerk Intersekse/DSD.
Wat is intersekse?
Intersekse
is een parapluterm voor diverse aangeboren condities waarbij de
ontwikkeling van het chromosomale, gonadale (geslachtsklieren) of
anatomische geslacht verschilt van de norm. Mensen met een
intersekse-conditie identificeren zich meestal als man of vrouw. Artsen
gebruiken sinds 2006 de term DSD (Disorders of Sex Development), maar
steeds vaker wordt het woord Disorders vervangen door Differences.
Het geboren worden met een
intersekse-conditie werd lange tijd gezien als een ziekte. Het medisch
protocol vereiste dat kinderen van wie de geslachtsanatomie varieerde,
chirurgisch tot jongen of meisje werden gekneed en dat daar dan niet
meer over werd gepraat. Het gevolg was dat niemand meer openlijk durfde
te praten over intersekse. De mensen met een intersekseconditie waren
onzichtbaar en stemloos.
Vorig jaar had de Canal Parade een
primeur: op de boot van COC Nederland stonden twee mensen met een
intersekseconditie. Hoewel internationaal de I al aan LHBT is
toegevoegd, is de participatie van mensen met een intersekseconditie nog
gering. Dat roept de vraag op of die I wel bij LHBT hoort.
1 op de 200 Ondanks
alle toeschouwers was intersekse tijdens de Canal Parade volkomen
onzichtbaar. Nu is dat geen nieuws, want op wat artikelen in
tijdschriften en een enkele televisie-uitzending na zijn we al heel lang
onzichtbaar. Toch heeft volgens een recente publicatie van het Sociaal
en Cultureel Planbureau één op de tweehonderd Nederlanders een
intersekseconditie.
Als mensen met een intersekse-conditie zich
in Nederland al verenigd hebben, dan is dat in patiëntenorganisaties,
waar intersekse vaak wordt aangeduid met de medische naam DSD (Disorders
of Sex Development). Rondvraag onder deze organisaties laat zien dat er
weerstand bestaat tegen het toevoegen van een I aan LHBT. Het meest
gehoorde argument daarbij is dat intersekse/DSD niets te maken heeft met
seksuele voorkeur of genderidentiteit.
In Nederland bestaat
(nog) geen vereniging voor mensen met een intersekseconditie die niet op
medische gronden is gebaseerd. In het buitenland is dat anders. Ilga
(International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association)
heeft de I al in 2008 toegevoegd en ook de buitenlandse politiek is al
veel verder dan Nederland.
Mensenrechtenprobleem Zo
liggen er stevige rapporten van de VN, de Raad van Europa en de
Europese Commissie die intersekse vanuit een mensenrechtenperspectief
benaderen. De medische behandeling die kinderen met een
intersekseconditie krijgen, inclusief 'normaliserende' chirurgie, wordt
in die rapporten uitermate kritisch beoordeeld en gezien als een
schending van de mensenrechten. Kortom: internationaal wordt intersekse
niet gezien als een medisch probleem, maar als een
mensenrechtenprobleem.
Maar is het dan nodig met de Canal Parade
mee te varen? Of meer algemeen: is het nodig een I toe te voegen aan
LHBT? Het antwoord is: ja.
Seksuele voorkeur, genderidentiteit en
sekse zijn verschillend, dat klopt. Maar alle drie hebben ze te maken
met hoe de maatschappij denkt over mannen en vrouwen: word je verliefd
op een man of een vrouw, voel je je een man of een vrouw, heb je het
lichaam van een man of een vrouw? Anders dan vaak wordt gedacht, bestaan
er voor man en vrouw geen houdbare absolute definities. Zolang dat nog
niet breed is geaccepteerd door de maatschappij, hebben LHB, T en I nog
veel onderwerpen waarop de groepen kunnen samenwerken.
Interfobie Bij
elke Canal Parade vragen mensen uit de LHBTI-doelgroep zich af waarom
dat nodig is - doe maar gewoon, dan doe je gek genoeg. Deze mensen
voelen zich niet vertegenwoordigd door de mensen die op de boten staan.
Cultuuranalytisch is dat te verklaren als geïnternaliseerde homofobie
(of transfobie, of interfobie). Zelf vind ik het belangrijker om uit te
leggen dat de Gay Pride er is voor de mensen die daar behoefte aan
hebben en niet voor de mensen die daar, om wat voor reden ook, op tegen
zijn.
Het gaat erom dat je deuren opent voor degenen die daar
behoefte aan hebben. Of je door die deur gaat, is je eigen keuze. Het
verleden heeft laten zien dat veel mensen die in eerste instantie tegen
emancipatieprocessen waren, daar uiteindelijk zelf ook gebruik van
hebben gemaakt. En het toevoegen van de I aan LHBT is voor veel mensen
die intersekse niet als een ziekte zien, een belangrijk
emancipatieproces.
Zwaait u zaterdag ook even naar mij? Ik sta weer op de boot van COC Nederland (boot 25).
Interview
What can Dick Swaab tell us about sex and the brain?
The Dutch neuroscientist is as celebrated as he is sneered at for his
theories on brain development differing between men and women – and how
sexuality is decided in the womb
Controversy delights Dick Swaab;
brains delight him; complexity delights him, though I don't know if
you'd get that from reading his book, We Are Our Brains, in which causal
links are made quite casually, like a man doing a crossword with a
pencil. The Dutch neurologist is, after a 50-year career, a giant in the field.
He is a professor of neurobiology at the University of Amsterdam. His
directorship of the Dutch Institute for Brain Research yielded material
that has been sent to 500 other research groups in 25 countries. He has
propounded groundbreaking theories in his specialist area: the impact on
brain development in the womb. Nonetheless, his book, despite directing
itself squarely to the layperson, has been miles more successful than
he thought, selling 100,000 copies ("the publishers say they knew it
would be a hit. But at the start, they only printed 3,000 copies. So I
know that is not true."). There are a number of lines you might file
under, "Well, there's a curiosity" (for instance: "In professional
violinists, the part of the cerebral cortex that directs the fingers of
the left hand is five times as large as it is in people who don't play a
stringed instrument"). And yet the real fireworks of the book are both
more predictable and more profound: Swaab says hormones and chemical
substances in utero affect the development of our sexual orientation or,
put more simply, you have a gay brain by the time you are born. Male
and female brains have "hundreds of differences", which explain all the
ways in which men and women are different; "phobia, impulsiveness, ADHD
and depression later in life" can be traced back to a mother's
fearfulness during pregnancy, which activates her baby's "fear axis".
It has become fashionable to use the word "exhaustive" when
what reviewers actually mean is "long", and this book has been thus
described a number of times; in fact, it is not exhaustive. Differences
between the sexes are stressed and constantly referred to, but not named
or referenced. Very far-reaching statements are made – for instance,
that children who are adopted between nought and two have average IQs of
100, while children adopted between two and six have average IQs of 80.
But there's no footnote. Which children? From where? How many? Adopted
by whom? For what reason? Is it possible that the ones who were adopted
between two and six weren't chosen sooner because prospective parents
could tell they had a learning difficulty?
And then there are Swaab's delightful manners, the smooth, twinkling
charm of a man who has spent a life engaged in things that fascinate
him, so that even though every answer is basically "sod off …", it is
impossible not to like him. But it is not, ultimately, impossible to
unshackle oneself from the confident steam train of his assertions.
"I had this problem," he reminisces. "When I found the first
differences between male and female in the brain, I got attacked by the
feministic movement. Because it was not allowed to have any differences,
not in the brain. All differences in brain and behaviour were due to
society." He says all this as though it's years since, and yet as a
card-carrying feministic, I do not feel that our concerns have been
totally addressed. For one, there is a circularity to the argument: a
connection that is supposedly hard-wired, say that between a mother and a
son, is illustrated by the fact that "a wounded soldier on a
battlefield will always call for his mother, not his father". But this
surely is social, because the mother will have almost certainly been the
caregiver? We should at least wait until a generation has been raised
equally by both parents, then mindlessly slaughter some, and then see who they call for, shouldn't we?
Hypotheses about raised testosterone in the womb due to maternal
stress are offered on the basis that girls will need to be more like
boys if they're to be born into a hostile environment, because they'll
need to be more "robust and competitive". Yet, not long after, there's a
joke about the long-discredited dominant mother theory (about
homosexuality), in which Swaab says: "I made a habit over the years of
asking the medical students I taught (250 at a time) which of them did
not have a dominant mother. No one ever raised their hand." Sure, it's
droll, but dominance, robustness, competitiveness, these are all the
same essential trait – is he saying that women ultimately become men or
is he saying that traits that are quintessentially male are also
quintessentially female? If so, doesn't that de-sex them? Doesn't that
make them "human"? He shrugs this off. "The problem often is that if
scientists talk about something, it is on the basis of the population.
Some women have very male types of behaviour. Some males have very
feminine type of behaviour, but as a population they are different."
This is the "standard-deviation" lecture – "you won't understand,
because you're only a layperson." It didn't really address my question,
which was, aren't you yourself assigning "maleness" and "femaleness" to
traits that we actually all have? Rebecca Jordan-Young, author of Brainstorm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences,
argues that "Brain Organisation Theory is little more than an
elaboration of longstanding folktales about antagonistic male and female
essences".
Other old assumptions about men and women – for instance, that men
are aroused by images of naked women, whereas women can't be aroused
visually in the same way – are trotted out as fact. But there's new
evidence that women respond very strongly to all kinds of erotic images,
including copulating bonobos. This is based on measuring bloodflow to
the vagina rather than an MRI scan. It makes this apparently
"hard-wired" difference look like male wishful thinking. "Well," Swaab
counters, "it's measuring bloodflow to the vagina. How did the blood
flow to the vagina? By getting a message from the brain." "Then how do
you account for the different results?" "Because the image is too small
in the brain, you miss the small nuclei in the hypothalamus. It's a
limitation of the imaging." (I was too polite to push this point. But
that seems like a rum old game, publishing something as true, then
recanting it so easily. You either believe that men and women respond
differently or you don't.)
As much of a pain in the neck as a feministic can be, Swaab's most
vocal opponents, 20 years ago, were gay men, after he identified a "gay
brain". He makes the sound point, in the book and in person, that this
was actually great for homosexuality – asserting sexual orientation to
be innate ended all those painful discussions about whether to blame the
parents, whether one could persuade or train or pray oneself out of
being gay. "People can only live a happy life if they can live the way
their brain has been programmed, and the state should accept that, and
guarantee them the freedom to live that way so long as they don't harm
others. You should have the freedom to live as a homosexual, a
transsexual, a heterosexual, and be protected by the state," he says
simply. And his discoveries about transsexuality had these direct
political consequences; the science put sexuality on the human rights
agenda, in Brussels and beyond. There are laws protecting gender
reassignment that simply wouldn't exist without Swaab's findings.
And yet, his conclusions about the gay brain – specifically, that it
has an enlarged biological clock (the suprachiasmatic nucleus) – have
run into dispute. The American neuroscientist Simon LeVay remarked
recently: "Dick Swaab's group wrote in 1990 that a small group called
the suprachiasmatic nucleus was larger in gay men than in heterosexual
men. The suprachiasmatic nucleus is involved in the regulation of
circadian rhythms, not sex. Swaab's report has not been confirmed by
other groups. If the finding is correct, it is unclear whether it is
meaningful."
I put this to Swaab, that neither LeVay nor anyone else had managed
to reproduce his findings. He sort of waved at me, as if I was making an
annoying noise. "The important thing is that it's a marker for
something that happened earlier in your brain development. Of course the
clock is very much linked to sexual behaviour. There are graphs of
students that don't have anything else to do, but if you look to their
sexual behaviour, it goes up at 10, 11, 12. There is a very clear
day/night correlation in sexual behaviour. There are more nightclubs
than dayclubs."
"This is absolutely true," I say. Thinking: "Seriously? Results that
can't be replicated, called into question anyway because they were
mainly the brains of people who had died of Aids ('We controlled for
that! Because many heterosexual people at that time were dying of Aids
also. So we were able to see that the enlargement hadn't affected
them'), we're going to take on trust because of when nightclubs are
open?"
Other times, his benign dismissiveness can be quite bracing (talking
about the Dutch Hunger study, I put it to him that the Leningrad Siege
study, also conducted on babies born to women who were starving, in the
same time period, in the same sorts of numbers, had findings that were
basically opposite. "This is not a good study," he replies. "If this
were a good study, I would have heard of it." He is endearingly
mischievous – at one point, explaining that anorexia was down to the
brain's way of coping with glucose, which is why anorexics often have
problem births; he utterly rejected the idea that it was anything to do
with cultural imagery. "Fashion selects girls with anorexia and bulimia,
because they look better. But that doesn't mean that fashion is causing
it. It is merely using it." On the subject of mortality, and of his own
brain, he is absolutely wonderful. "Some time ago, I went through a
difficult period in terms of health and made some notes for my
colleagues, 'Mind this', 'Don't do that'. And then I survived. I wanted
to keep an eye on this and that, because I know my own character and I
wanted to know the relationships between structure and function."
What characteristics did you want to investigate? "I don't tell you.
You will hear in good time." The Netherlands already has laws on
euthanasia that astonished me – you can apply to die for long-term
mental illnesses, schizophrenia, lifelong depression. But Swaab is keen
to see some provision made for people who aren't ill, who are just old.
"They have pains, they don't want to live any more. It was nice, but not
any more. It doesn't fit into the law in the Netherlands that was made
for diseases, not for the end of a life that has been accomplished."
"This is a campaign of yours?" "Yes," he says, beaming. "This is my
short-term solution, and my long-term solution."
Ultimately, though, I keep returning to Jordan-Young's critique: "I
think we have to start asking different questions. It isn't possible to
do experiments on the causes of gender or sexuality, and we can never
really go backwards and separate 'biological' from 'social' elements –
that is trying to divide what is actually indivisible. So, I think that
we might do better to focus on understanding plasticity and ongoing
development, and also to stop obsessing so much about sex differences."
Many of Dick Swaab's boldest statements turn out, on closer examination,
to be an MRI scan of chauvinism. It sounds interesting, but you can't
read proper meaning into it; that part of the brain is too small. To order We Are Our Brains: From the Womb to Alzheimer's by D F
Swaab (Allen Lane), for £16.00 with free UK p&p, go to
theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.
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De Ochtendkus - Rhianna Gralike
29 okt 2015 10:48 • NCRV • 2 min
Zij werd geboren als Richard, maar bewaarde haar geheim als het goud in Fort Knox. Door kardinaal Eijk werd ze besprenkeld met een ijskoude douche. Maar toch vindt ze nog altijd warmte in haar geloof. Vanochtend worden we wakker gekust door: Rhianna Gralike.
In zijn nieuwe boek noemt hij man en paard. Een à twee op de tweeduizend geboren mannen en een à twee op de vierduizend geboren vrouwen lijdt aan ernstige genderdysforie. Zo ‘exotisch’ is transseksualiteit dus niet, concludeert Februari. Hij somt een lijstje do’s en don’ts op: de term ‘ombouwen’ is respectloos, en je zegt zeker geen ‘zhij’. ‘Ik had gisteren een nogal langdurig gesprek over geslachtsorganen met een journaliste die verder alleen naar leed viste. Heeft hij een penis, de journalisten raken er niet over uitgepraat. Dan verwijs ik ze naar wat in mijn boek staat: dat vraag je niet, dat is onbeleefd.’
