The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [145]
Men are notoriously tight-lipped about health problems, and Kerlin was congratulating himself on having managed to create a safe, trusting environment in which list members felt comfortable discussing such personal concerns. Then, a new list member raised an issue that initiated a flood of responses, saying that he had, from his earliest youth, felt like a girl, and that he was, in fact, transsexual. Once the issue had been raised, it did not go away. Other list members began to speak about their own gender-identity issues, and “over subsequent months, these issues became more substantial in list discussions, at times becoming the dominant themes raised by members,” Beyer and Kerlin note in a 2002 paper. Some list members objected to the turn that the discussions were taking. They may have had reproductive health problems, but they were heterosexual men, and they were uncomfortable with the new focus on gender identity. Eventually, Kerlin and Beyer (who had become co-moderator of the group in 2001) set up a separate list (DES Trans) for list members who identified as trans-gender, transsexual, or intersexual.
“About 50 percent of our two hundred people in the DES Sons Network exhibit some form of gender variance. Most of them joined us when we didn’t talk about gender variance at all,” says Beyer. “I would say about half of the people on our list came unknowing that
DES was connected with gender.” In July 2004, on the fifth anniversary of the DES Sons Network, Kerlin reviewed his data and concluded that of the approximately six hundred individuals who had contacted the list for information or support in the previous five years, two-thirds of those who joined the list did not mention gender issues or concerns during their introductions, health histories, or subsequent postings. However, ninety-three individuals with confirmed prenatal DES exposure had indicated that they were either transsexual, trans-gendered, gender dysphoric, or intersexed. Another sixty-five individuals who “strongly suspect” DES exposure identified themselves using one of those four categories.
Kerlin and Beyer are convinced that the DES Sons Network has broken the seal on the conspiracy of silence about the effects of DES exposure on sons, particularly its association with gender identity disorder in males. Not a single DES cohort study has explored this question. “It seems that the entire focus of any ongoing ‘cohort’ tracking for sons is to look for signs of cancer risk. Other health issues just don’t seem to be included,” Scott Kerlin told me during a series of e-mail and telephone conversations in 2002 and 2003. All current DES research is based on the DES Combined Cohort Studies (DCCS)— approximately five thousand women exposed to DES during pregnancy; four thousand unexposed (control) mothers; five thousand exposed and twenty-five hundred unexposed daughters; and two thousand exposed and two thousand unexposed sons. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, “the goal of the DCCS is to determine whether the health risk of cancer among DES-exposed individuals is increased as a result of exposure to DES. Other health outcomes, such as infertility and pregnancy outcomes, are also being investigated through the DCCS.” It goes without saying, Kerlin and Beyer note, that there is no mention of gender variance in these studies. “Those studies are just not looking at the question of gender variance or anything remotely connected to it.”
Kerlin has located