Word: infantalizing
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...infant twin boys when, in 1963, his penis was damaged beyond repair by a circumcision that went awry. After seeking expert advice at Johns Hopkins Medical School, the parents decided that the child's best shot at a normal life was as an anatomically correct woman. The baby was castrated, and surgeons fashioned a kind of vagina out of the remaining tissue. When "she" grew older, hormone treatments would complete the transformation from boy to girl...
...when Scottish researchers cloned a sheep named Dolly and commentators started writing about virgin births and Frankenstein. But then one week later, researchers at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center let it be known that they had cloned a pair of rhesus monkeys, named Neti (for nuclear embryo transfer infant) and Ditto, that squinted in the glare of the TV lights and clung to each other for dear life...
...propagation of this truism begins even when we are in the womb of our Harvard careers. Pre-frosh are told to expect four years of near monastic conditions. In a scene that can be likened to a weaning infant bidding farewell to his final bottle, first-years watch mournfully as they learn how to unroll a condom on a wooden penis. Lamenting Eros' death at Harvard is like watching the State of the Union address; it's not at all revealing, but still important enough to ruin a night of TV. In truth, the weighty miasma of chastity that hangs...
Compelling as the story o f John/Joan may be, the boy whose penis was accidentally severed by a surgeon when he was an infant and who was raised as a girl cannot be held up as the iconographic case that defines the natural pull of human sexual identity. In John's case, des pite extensive surgery to fit him with female genitalia and long socialization by a family that raised him as a girl, he always felt and acted like a boy. When he finally learned the truth about his identity in his teens, he was overjoyed, sought...
Harrison's preacher father was kicked out of the house by her mother and grandparents when she was tiny, and she had almost no contact with him until she was 20. The household was grim. Grandmother would scream like a "scalded infant"; mother, who lived elsewhere most of the time, beat her daughter with a hairbrush. The child herself was unlikable. There is an unintentionally risible passage where she pries open the eyes of newborn kittens. The teenage years are marked by anorexia ("the dizzy rapture of starving") and bulimia ("I never taste what I eat. Sometimes...