Items of Interest

 King Kamehameha, the chief who united all the Hawaiian islands, decked in flowers on his birthday.  Photo by Milton Diamond.

Pornography and Violence in PNG

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports on the incidence of pornography in Papua New Guinea and discusses the link between pornography and violence. Dr. Diamond is quoted in the article.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-25/papua-new-guinea-tops-google-porn-searches/6262028?section=world

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Videos

 

In July 2015 Dr. Diamond delivered the WAS Gold Medalist Lecture to the 22nd World Congress for Sexual Health on the subject "Transsexuality as an Intersex Condition". Follow this link to listen to the lecture: Transsexuality as an Intersex Condition. The duration is 43 minutes 37 seconds, and the video is made available by kind permission of www.sexualhealthvisual.com.


Dr. Diamond's daughter has made a series of videos featuring Dr. Diamond discussing various aspects of his work. These videos are available at www.youtube.com/miltondiamond, or can be watched individually from this web site by following this link.


In February 2012 Dr. Diamond was interviewed via Skype by Christan Williams of the Transgender Center in Houston, Texas. The 35-minute interview is available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKqU1IxEDxk.

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United Nations speaks out against genital-normalizing surgery without the consent of the subject

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture has issued a statement calling for an end to genital-normalizing surgeries without the consent of the affected person. Specifically, paragraph 88 (recommendation 3) of the Rapporteur’s report on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment in health care settings reads as follows:

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex persons: The Special Rapporteur calls upon all States to repeal any law allowing intrusive and irreversible treatments, including forced genital-normalizing surgery, involuntary sterilization, unethical experimentation, medical display, “reparative therapies” or “conversion therapies”, when enforced or administered without the free and informed consent of the person concerned. He also calls upon them to outlaw forced or coerced sterilization in all circumstances and provide special protection to individuals belonging to marginalized groups.

You can see the full report on the United Nations web site.

This comes sixteen years after Dr. Diamond first wrote:

Perform no major surgery for cosmetic reasons alone; only for conditions related to physical/medical health. This will entail a great deal of explanation needed for the parents who will want their children to “look normal.” Explain to them that appearances during childhood, while not typical of other children, may be of less importance than functionality and post pubertal erotic sensitivity of the genitalia. Surgery can potentially impair sexual/erotic function. Therefore such surgery, which includes all clitoral surgery and any sex reassignment, should typically wait until puberty or after when the patient is able to give truly informed consent.

Dr. Diamond says:

When Ken Kipnis and I wrote our first critique of how the medical community was dealing with intersex matters in 1998, and then when I brought it up to them at the American Academy of Pediatrics meeting in 1998, I felt we were gnats that would be dismissed and strongly decried.

And when Hazel Beh and I wrote our first legal and ethical paper on the subject of how intersexed individuals ought be ethically and legally dealt with in 2000, little did we think how the idea would spread.

The ball was picked up by others, particularly Anne Tamar-Mattis who founded AIC (Advocates for Informed Choice), and all those efforts have paid off in ways that could not have been predicted. The UN recognition is obviously a major accomplishment. It is a wonderful acknowledgement of the importance of what we have all been working toward.

 

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Recommended book on Klinefelter's Syndrome

The KS Story - You are not alone

An account of Klinefelter's Syndrome by Iain W. McKinlay (47,XXY) , with a foreword by Professor Milton Diamond Ph.D.

There are two documents which you can download for free: the book itself (PDF file, 8MB) and an introduction by the author (PDF file, 67KB).

 

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NEW ZEALAND DOCUMENTARY ON INTERSEX

A television documentary fronted by Mani Bruce Mitchell has been televised in New Zealand in July 2011, and has been very well received. It has been divided into segments of approximately ten minutes each and placed on Youtube, so that anybody anywhere can watch it. (Dr. Diamond makes a brief appearance in Part 2.)

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08LEXo9ajmY
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44nLMsc_GGo
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LnP4dnVHjM
Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkJeRDq-8aA
Part 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtED32wQFaA

 

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HJERNEVASK ( "BRAINWASH")

DOCUMENTARY SERIES ON THE NATURE-NURTURE ISSUE IN BOY/GIRL BEHAVIORS

The series is in Norwegian with English subtitles. Each episode is around 40 minutes in length.

Note: You will be asked for a password; this is hjernevask (all lower case) . You must also have Javascript enabled for the site vimeo.com.

Part 1: The Gender Equality Paradox - http://vimeo.com/19707588
Part 2: The Parental Effect - http://vimeo.com/19893826
Part 3: Gay/Straight - http://vimeo.com/19869748
Part 4: Violence - http://vimeo.com/19921232
Part 5: Sex - http://vimeo.com/19921928
Part 6: Race - http://vimeo.com/19922972
Part 7: Nature or Nurture - http://vimeo.com/19889788

 

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