Humans feel more comfortable when they can categorize their world. When things are not simply black or white, male or female, true or false, we become less able to make quick judgments and decisions. And when we watch truths that we used to hold dear come crashing down around us, we naturally feel afraid. This is the case with the medicalization of gender roles and homosexuality in American society. One of the fundamental assumptions that we make in order to competently conduct social interactions is the assumption of gender. If we can place a person in even that general category of male or female, it is infinitely easier to find the rules appropriate for a conversation with a stranger. Even details such as which person should hold the door for another depends greatly on the gender of those two people. While rules like holding the door open are relatively lax in American society, other cultures hold them in much higher esteem, even incorporating them into language. It is therefore understandable that the idea of homosexual men and women, who straddle the gender boxes rather than remaining neatly packaged, set the nation into a panic. This panic inspired Americans to turn to the general authority figures on everything biological. “Medicine was seen as both humane and rational, its practitioners offered an enlightened way to understand and manage the problem” (Terry 1999:41). Americans looked to science to reinforce the gender boxes.
Those early answers that the American public was given appear to most of today’s society to be very rough around the edges. As Terry wrote in Medicalizing Homosexuality, “we could say that, for the most part, medical authorities neglected to devise sound hypotheses or to conduct empirically sound studies measuring a properly constituted research population against a control populations.” (Ibid. 71) It has been said that hindsight is 20/20, and in this case we should be careful to judge what happened in the past Terry also writes, “to declare them as pseudo-scientific would be expedient and even accurate…but these ideas were not only accepted for their time” (Ibid. 72). The concept that some of the “old fashioned” ideas about gender are still around today makes them worthy of a closer look.
Beginning in the 1860s, western physicians began making discoveries on the subject of homosexuality. The discoveries in this age fell into three categories of naturalist, degenerationist, and psychogenist; the ideas about homosexuality ranged from a natural and benign anomaly to socially caused behavior (Ibid. 43), and often viewed homosexual tendencies as deviant and dangerous. It was not until the late 1800s that some of the views that are more mainstream today appeared in the writings on homosexuality. A man by the name of Hirschfeld (a homosexual himself) wrote that “homosexuality is neither a disease nor degeneracy…but rather represents a piece of the natural order, a sexual variation like numerous, analogous sexual modifications in the animal and plant kingdoms” (Ibid. 54). Typical Freudian claims about homosexuality were also prevalent during this time, regarding childhood stages of homosexuality and the arrested development of adult homosexuals (Ibid. 56). 
As science progressed to the study of endocrinology at the turn of the 20th century, so did the research on homosexuality. Hormones like testosterone and estrogen were used in attempts to ‘cure’ homosexual tendencies. However these studies soon reported that “no influence upon the behavior or the personality of the patient could be detected” (Ibid. 163). The very idea that this type of hormone therapy was even attempted shows us the continued prevalence of the idea of homosexuality being a disease in need of a cure.
The views and claims about homosexuality that we see today are in some aspects very different than those discussed above. The modern method of research involves molecular biological research on genes. This research is done less by researchers looking for a cure than scientists still attempting to put a solid box around what it means to be gay. But we cannot be fooled by the apparent acceptance of homosexuality in today’s world. Prejudice and bigotry are as present as ever, and because homophobic groups are no longer in the world’s majority, they have become even more outspoken about their opinions. Gay marriage is still a hot debate around the world, and while some countries seem to have had very little resistance to the idea of gay couples being just another type of union, America has had no such luck. 
Fortunately for humanity’s sake, this view is not international. While Americans cannot seem to even allow equal rights to all sexes and genders, Iceland has recently elected the world’s first gay (and, incidentally, female) prime minister, Johanna Sigurdardottir. The difference between Icelandic culture and American culture is so great that most Icelandic people are no more interested in their prime minister’s personal life than if she were a happily married heterosexual. It is therefore not surprising that Icelandic scientists are less preoccupied with finding a ‘gay gene’, or even hoping that such a thing exists. Our fear still makes us turn to science to find answers.
Unfortunately science has not seemed to be able to fix the problem, despite all of its findings in the psychiatric and genetic realms. American culture has indeed changed since the 1800s, but our intent to package sex neatly has not wavered, indicating our residual fear of the unknown. Until the 1950s, researchers used a test that categorized people on a masculinity to femininity spectrum, which was created in the 1930s, based on the sex continuum hypothesis. The questions on this test “continued to conflate one’s preferred role in sexual encounters (i.e., passive or active) with ones overall gender identification" (Ibid. 171), indicating the continued cultural bias of research conducted as recently as 60 years ago. What makes us think that our research today is any less biased? The hunt for a way to categorize homosexuality in a scientific manner will continue for centuries, as we come to realize and then sort through all of our biases. I believe that our only real hope of recovery from this downward scientific spiral lies in American history. Not too long ago a frightened craze swept the nation regarding race, and biracial marriages. As we no longer conduct intense research on African Americans, indeed to do so would be highly frowned upon, one can only hope that the medicalization of homosexuality will eventually cease as well.Works Cited
Jennifer Terry, 1999. Medicalizing Homosexuality and Fluid Sexes, IN An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pp. 40-73, 159-177.
Images:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B3hanna_Sigur%C3%B0ard%C3%B3ttir
http://th02.deviantart.net/fs20/300W/f/2007/243/a/2/Hindsight_is_20_20_by_xsaraphanelia.jpg
http://www.slapupsidethehead.com/wp-content/media/2008/06/new-dress-code.jpg
http://toppun.com/Rainbow-Store/Gay-Pride-Pictures/I%27m-Gay-Don%27t-Worry-It%27s-Not-Contagious-Gay-Pride-Flag-Colors.gif
http://www.homophobiaday.org/utilisateur/images/homophobie/images2008/camp_homophobia2008.jpg
http://cedarlounge.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/gay_000306marriage.gif
http://www.rationalunderstanding.co.uk/Images/gg.jpg
No comments:
Post a Comment