PUBLIC LECTURE: Beyond Masculinity: Testosterone, Sexual Desire, and Gender/Sex

Everyone knows that sexual desire and testosterone are linked because men have higher testosterone, and testosterone is tightly linked to masculinity and sexual desire - right? But what do empirical data actually say? Professor van Anders discussed findings that support decoupling testosterone from masculinity and provide insights into the nuanced ways testosterone and sexual desire are - and are not - linked in humans.

From her multi-method research program that includes experiments, correlational studies, and qualitative focus groups, she argues that social neuroendocrinology, rooted in feminist science, provides a way to ask hormonal questions that have evolution and social construction in their answers, sidesteps nature-culture debates, and separates biology from biological determinism.

This event was presented by The Science and Social Difference Working group of the Columbia University Center for the Study of Social Difference and co-sponsored by the Departments of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Psychology at Barnard College and the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

KEYWORDS: Interdisciplinary Roundtable Conversations

Colleagues from the Humanities, the Social Sciences and the Socio-medical Sciences discuss “Vulnerability” as a keyword in the study of social difference.

Featured participants were:

Walter Bockting
Professor of Medical Psychology (in Psychiatry and Nursing) and Co-Director, LGBT Health Initiative, Division of Gender, Sexuality, and Health, Department of Psychiatry
Columbia University

Katherine Ewing
Professor of Religion and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Sexuality
Columbia University

Marianne Hirsch
William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Women's and Gender Studies and Director, Center for the Study of Social Difference
Columbia University

Richard Parker
Professor of Sociomedical Sciences and Anthropology, and Director, Center for the Study of Culture, Politics, and Health
Columbia University

Moderator:
Alondra Nelson
Professor of Sociology and Women's and Gender Studies, Director, Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and Co-Chair, Women's Gender, and Sexuality Studies Council
Columbia University

Keywords: Interdisciplinary Roundtable Conversations is a series inspired by theinnovative interdisciplinary scholarship promoted by the Center for the Study of Social Difference. The series draws participants together from a wide range of disciplinary homes in order to explore the various ways we think about fundamental critical/theoretical ideas and to generate new vocabularies and new methodologies.  The WGSS Council is a network of leaders from centers, institutes, and initiatives at Columbia University dedicated to women's, gender, and sexuality studies.

REFLECTIONS: Debating the “Woman Question” in the New Middle East: Women’s Rights, Citizenship, and Social Justice

At first glance, 2014 does not seem like a banner year for women in the Middle East. We heard that ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, was requiring female circumcision around Mosul in Northern Iraq (a claim the group denied). A new law regarding domestic violence in Lebanon failed to criminalize marital rape, apparently thanks to conservative religious opposition.

The prevalence and persuasive power of these headlines about women in the Middle East was part of the reason I was so excited to attend a conference last May entitled, “Debating the “Woman Question” in the New Middle East: Women’s Rights, Citizenship, and Social Justice,” sponsored by the Women Creating Change Initiative at Columbia’s Center for the Study of Social Difference and held at the Columbia Global Center in Amman, Jordan.

The conference brought together scholars and practitioners from five Arab countries in addition to the US and UK. Given that my own doctoral work in Middle Eastern history has been inspired by time I spent working with a women’s rights organization in Syria, I was particularly eager to see what this combination of practical expertise and scholarly attention might produce. Coming from the US, where much of what I see and hear about “women in the Middle East” revolves around stereotypes, it was a privilege to join this group of experts as they reflected on some of the issues facing women and the study of women and gender in the Middle East in the complicated aftermath of the Arab uprisings.

Over the course of an intense weekend in Amman, these scholars and practitioners listened carefully to one another across political, strategic, and theoretical divides. They discussed, on the basis of their close knowledge of the histories and present circumstances of gender politics in particular countries, a set of big questions: How best can women fight for better lives and livelihoods under dire conditions, faced with the intransigence of state power, neoliberal restructuring, and colonial violence in both its historical and contemporary forms? How do discursive traditions or resources, like the languages of human rights, Islam, and shari’a law, enable and constrain women and those who advocate on their behalf?

One striking development is that a debate over the “woman question” itself emerged. How, many asked, does it serve us to pose questions and build alliances in terms of “women” and “men,” rather than in terms of class, race, sexuality, or one of the many other kinds of difference that divide human experience? For example, if thinking only in terms of “women” prevents middle-class feminists in Jordan from supporting the demands for a living wage articulated by working-class women as well as men, might it serve us to think more broadly in our scholarship as well as in our political work?

Focusing on women’s experiences, however, did open up an important conversation around the role of law in securing better lives for women. While many had successfully deployed legal strategies and means to further their political and feminist agendas (for example, taking on torture in Egyptian prisons or advocating for women’s concerns to be reflected in the text of the Egyptian Constitution), others were more critical of the law as a panacea. For example, a legal scholar from Palestine argued that, surprisingly, the transition from shari’a courts to civil courts, while presented as a victory for “women’s rights,” may have actually made it more difficult for women to access justice in the courts.

The conversation about the advantages and unexpected consequences of relying on legal strategies and the language of  “women’s rights” started out as a conversation about feminist strategy—when and under what circumstances to deploy the language and practice of the law. It became, however, a much larger conversation about the nature of political intervention. Who intervenes, on behalf of whom, and on what grounds? This question elicited a range of responses, but each was grounded in a particular set of political struggles and ethical commitments--making clear that while it is possible and indeed productive to talk about regional transformations, specific knowledges of embodied realities, political dynamics, and historical contexts are key to the questions which motivate and emerge from feminist scholarship and practice.

The workshop convinced me that it these specific knowledges and the conversations they enable that will allow us to move past the stereotypes which so often characterize—and hamper—our approach to the “woman question” in the Middle East.

--Susanna Ferguson

For more information about the workshop and working group, please visit: http://socialdifference.columbia.edu/projects/gender-religion-and-law-muslim-societies

NY TIMES OP-ED: "The Trouble with Too Much T"

In 2009, the South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya was barred from competition and obliged to undergo intrusive and humiliating “sex testing” after fellow athletes at the Berlin World Championships questioned her sex. Ms. Semenya was eventually allowed to compete again, but the incident opened the world’s eyes to the process of sex testing and the distress it could bring to an athlete who had lived her whole life as a girl. When an endocrinologist, a gynecologist and a psychologist were brought in to determine whether the teenager was really a woman, she simply asserted, “I know who I am.”

From 2011, major sports governing bodies, including the International Olympic Committee, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association and the International Association of Athletics Federations, instituted new eligibility rules that were intended to quell the outrage over the handling of the Semenya case. Instead, as recent cases attest, they may have made things worse.

Rather than trying to decide whether an athlete is “really” female, as decades of mandatory sex tests did, the current policy targets women whose bodies produce more testosterone than is typical. If a female athlete’s T level is deemed too high, a medical team selected by the sport’s governing bodies develops a “therapeutic proposal.” This involves either surgery or drugs to lower the hormone level. If doctors can lower the athlete’s testosterone to what the governing bodies consider an appropriate level, she may return to competition. If she refuses to cooperate with the investigation or the medical procedures, she is placed under a permanent ban from elite women’s sports.

The first evidence of this new policy in action was published last year in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. Four female athletes, ages 18 to 21, all from developing countries, were investigated for high testosterone. Three were identified as having atypically high testosterone after undergoing universal doping tests. (They were not suspected of doping: Tests clearly distinguish between doping and naturally occurring testosterone.)

Sports officials (the report does not identify their governing-body affiliation) sent the young women to a medical center in France, where they were put through examinations that included blood tests, genital inspections, magnetic resonance imaging, X-rays and psychosexual history — many of the same invasive procedures Ms. Semenya endured. Since the athletes were all born as girls but also had internal testes that produce unusually high levels of testosterone for a woman, doctors proposed removing the women’s gonads and partially removing their clitorises. All four agreed to undergo both procedures; a year later, they were allowed to return to competition.

The doctors who performed the surgeries and wrote the report acknowledged that there was no medical reason for the procedures. Quite simply, these young female athletes were required to have drastic, unnecessary and irreversible medical interventions if they wished to continue in their sports.

Many conditions can lead to naturally high testosterone, including polycystic ovarian syndrome or an ovarian tumor during pregnancy, but women with intersex traits tend to have the highest T levels. And it is these intersex traits that sports authorities want “corrected.”

Sports authorities argue that screening for high T levels is needed to keep women’s athletics fair, reasoning that testosterone improves performance. Elite male athletes generally outperform women, and this difference has been attributed to men’s higher testosterone levels. Ergo, women with naturally high testosterone are thought to have an unfair advantage over other women.

But these assumptions do not match the science. A new study in Clinical Endocrinology fits with other emerging research on the relationship between natural testosterone and performance, especially in elite athletes, which shows that T levels can’t predict who will run faster, lift more weight or fight harder to win. The study, of a sample of 693 elite athletes, revealed a significant overlap in testosterone levels among men and women: 16.5 percent of the elite male athletes had testosterone in the so-called female range; nearly 14 percent of the women were above the “female” range.

This finding undermines the idea that sex-linked performance differences are mainly because of testosterone. The authors suggest that lean body mass, rather than hormone levels, may better explain the performance gap. They also conclude that their research makes the I.O.C.’s testosterone-guided eligibility policy for women “untenable.”

Some might argue that the procedures used to lower T levels are simply part of the price athletes must pay to compete at the elite level. But these choices aren’t temporary hardships like training far from home or following a rigorous diet. The required drug and surgical treatments are irreversible and medically unjustifiable. Clitoral surgery impairs sexual function and sensation; gonadectomy causes sterility; and hormone-suppressive drugs have side effects with potentially lifelong health risks.

Moreover, the policy places a disproportionate burden on poor women who may have limited career opportunities and are likely to face enormous pressure to submit to these interventions in order to continue their athletic careers. Under the current policies, more and more female athletes with naturally high T levels will be confronted with these harsh choices — and not just at the elite level. The I.O.C. requires that each country’s Olympic committee investigate cases of female athletes with high T levels before naming them to national teams. Some countries, like India, now apply such policies to all female athletes, not just those competing internationally.

Barring female athletes with high testosterone levels from competition is a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Worse, it is pushing young women into a choice they shouldn’t have to make: either to accept medically unnecessary interventions with harmful side effects or to give up their future in sports.

--Rebecca Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis

Katrina Karkazis is a senior research scholar at the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University.  Rebecca Jordan-Young is project director of the Science and Social Difference working group and Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College.  This op-ed first appeared in the NY Times on April 10, 2014.