Episode 40: A Brief History of Protest Against Anti-LGBTQ Science
Hosts: Anna Reser, Leila McNeill, and Rebecca Ortenberg
Producer: Leila McNeill
Music: Fall asleep under a million stars by Springtide
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In this episode, the hosts reflect on the first Pride Parade as a commemoration and celebration of the Stonewall protests by discussing the long history of the fight against anti-LGBTQ science from the 19th century to today.
Show notes
“Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in 20th-Century America” by by Lillian Faderman
Homosexuality and Sexual Orientation Disturbance: Proposed Change in DMS-II
The vote that ‘coured’ millions.
(In)validating Transgender Identities: Progress and Trouble in the DSM-5 by Kayley Whalen, Task Force
Transcript
Transcription by Julia Pass
Rebecca: It did not connect in my head that the word "degenerate" literally refers to genes until I was putting together this episode 'cause I'm a dum-dum.
Rebecca: Welcome to episode 40 of the Lady Science Podcast. This podcast is a monthly deep dive on topics centered on women and gender in the history and popular culture of science. I'm Rebecca Ortenberg, Lady Science's managing editor.
Anna: I'm Anna Reser, co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of Lady Science.
Leila: And I'm Leila McNeill, the other co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of Lady Science.
Leila: And before we get into the great episode that Rebecca has researched and prepared for Pride Month, I want to thank everyone who joined us for our first livestream show back in April. It was lots of fun, at least it was for the three of us. If you missed it or weren't able to come, we did release it on our feed in May so you can still listen to it. If you like the livestream and want us to do it again in the future, please tweet us at @ladyxscience or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and let us know.
Leila: We have picked up some new listeners lately, so I do want to tell new listeners that we are on Patreon at patreon.com/ladyscience, and we're always in need of new patrons to keep the lights on and to keep paying our writers and editors over at the magazine. And you can pick annual or monthly pledges depending on what you're able to commit to or most comfortable with.
Leila: And also just so this isn't a surprise, 'cause some people have pulled pledges because they say that we're not as active on Patreon as they'd like us to be or expected us to be, so I just wanna be clear. All of the action and magic happens over on our website, ladyscience.com, and on the podcast. We don't really post to Patreon. We just use that as our crowdfunding. We are doing stuff with your money, creating content and paying people and such. It's just not happening on Patreon. So just so you know.
Anna: Yeah. You're not paying me two grand every month to make one really bad video of stop-motion plastic dinosaurs. That's not what we're spending your money on, I promise.
Rebecca: Though the videos are great and always delight me.
Leila: Anyway, I'm done.
Rebecca: Cool. Well, now let's get into things. It's June, and that means that today we're bringing you a Pride Month episode, which is something that's become a bit of an annual tradition. Yay.
Rebecca: For most of our Pride Month episodes we've done so far, we've looked at different aspects of queer history through the lens of LGBTQ scientists. And you can check our archive for stories about 19th-century trans doctor James Barry; the polyamorous relationship among physicians Sara Josephine Baker, Louise Pearce, and writer Ida A. R. Wylie; and the romantic friendships of queer women scientists throughout history. But for this year's episode, we are embracing the fact that the first Pride parade was, of course, in commemoration of a protest. And that's something I feel like that's really come to the fore this year and in recent years, particularly as debates have raged about banning uniformed cops from Pride festivals, which police do.
Leila: Hell, yeah.
Anna: Yeah. No cops at Pride.
Rebecca: That seems like a no-brainer, but this is the world we live in. And also discussions continue, as they always do, about things like who is Pride really for? And so this seems like a good moment to talk about these kinds of issues.
Anna: So as many of you probably know because we've told you many times, Science with a capital S has not always been a friend to queer people. In fact, since the 19th century, the scientific establishment has sought to discredit and pathologize people with non-normative desires and gender identities.
Anna: And even today you see science used by those trying to quash the rights of transgender people. Transphobes of all stripes point to "the science" that supposedly clearly states that gender is binary or reference really, really badly designed studies claiming that the majority of transgender children detransition in adulthood, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Anna: So today we're gonna talk about a couple of the ways that queer people both inside and outside the scientific profession have fought against the so-called science that casts them as mentally ill, genetically impaired, and otherwise sick. And the truth is that scientific consensus about queer people has never changed on its own, and it has always required protest to overturn this bunk science.
Leila: And to get things started, we do have to talk a little bit about where scientific ideas of queerness came from in the first place, and that means talking about our very favorite historical cameos, European medical men of the mid-19th century.
Anna: Here they are, ladies! Eat 'em up.
Leila: As we've discussed before, this was a moment when a lot of thinkers were trying to science-ify everything. And while they made a lot of important discoveries about the world along the way, those discoveries were often tied up in some incredibly problematic ideas, many of which we have talked about on this podcast, and now we're gonna talk about some more. This is the era of Darwin and germ theory, but it's also the era of eugenics and hysteria as a medical diagnosis.
Leila: And as part of that, thinkers were trying to find a scientific explanation for homosexuality. They were mostly interested in finding a scientific explanation for why some men were attracted to other men, and they were at this time much less concerned about why women were attracted to other women, though ideas about queer women did end up getting folded into their theories about men. There were two prevailing theories, and interestingly they were both at first not presented in a way that inherently condemned homosexuality.
Leila: The first idea was that people who were attracted to the same gender constituted a, quote-unquote, "third sex." This idea was espoused by a number of German writers who, interesting enough, used the theory as a way to protest Prussia's anti-sodomy laws. One of the major proponents was a man named Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who hypothesized that some men were born with a woman's spirit trapped in their body and some women were born with a man's spirit trapped in their body. And more importantly, he treated that as totally fine and normal and gained the support of a lot of gay German intellectuals. Now today we see this as a pretty problematic conflation of sexuality, gender representation, and gender identity, but that was pretty common at the time, and it remained common through the 19th and 20th century.
Rebecca: The other main theory was a little more straightforward and did not involve spirits, and this is one that we are pretty familiar with today. The theory said there aren't spirits, but homosexuality is a genetic variant like any other genetic variant. This is the time when people are finding out about genes and all that kinda stuff, and they're excited about sticking that label on everything, in fact. And that sounds pretty good, especially when we see it through the lens of how that language is used today.
Rebecca: And, well, it was first proposed, like the third sex theory, as a reason to get rid of anti-sodomy laws, but this one was very quickly taken up by eugenicists because they were the ones who were super interested about genetics. And once geneticists get ahold of idea, you know things are just gonna get real bad. There's no uphill from there.
Rebecca: So today we tend to think of the idea that queer people are, as the song goes, born this way as a progressive statement. But in the 19th and early 20th century, scientists who espoused this theory basically said, "Sure, homosexuality is genetic. It's a genetic disease. And like all genetic diseases, it should be treated and should be removed from the gene pool." So according to them, homosexuals are like poor people or like disabled people or like non-white people. They have bad genes. You might even say that they were, in fact, degenerate.
Anna: Eugenicists were particularly concerned with the idea that homosexuality among men and women, when they finally started talking about women instead of just "They were roommates," they were particularly concerned that this is going to halt procreation. They also conflated mannish women and effeminate men with homosexual genetics. And wouldn't you know it, they claimed that those characteristics tended to show up in populations that eugenicists were already working to suppress, like poor people and non-white people. Thus according to American doctor William Lee Howard, queer people were only born to parents of degenerate classes who already lacked, quote, "strong sex characteristics." Yeah.
Rebecca: I don't know. There's so much out there about medicalization of things, and this just falls in so many ways directly in line with this idea of medicalizing things that were either negative or positive characteristics in the past, but for other reasons.
Leila: One of the things I find interesting about the idea of homosexuality and genetics is that unlike in the 19th century, progressive scientists now are trying to find a gay gene in the sense to push back against the idea that it's a lifestyle and people choose to live this way and that they can look at the science and be like, "See, people are born this way. It's not a lifestyle. We need to stop saying that it's a lifestyle and that it's a choice. People are born this way."
Leila: And it's still going back to the genes, differently than in the 19th century, but also still propping up this idea that something has to have some sort of scientific basis for it to be valid and for us to see gay people as people. You know what I mean? And I don't know. The way that, since the 19th century, using genetics to talk about the causes or origins or whatever of homosexuality has changed, and it's really interesting. And usually even though the attention is good right now to try to give it a scientific underpinning, I don't think it really gets past the fact that gay people are people and they don't need to be legitimized through genetics to be people.
Anna: Yeah. And I think the other really important lesson from this is that, yeah, there are differences in the way that the genetics of this are being pursued in the 19th century versus now, but also I think there is a very straightforward, one-to-one lesson to learn here about who's going to co-opt that and what are they gonna do with it. It's like you said, Rebecca. When the eugenicists get their hands on stuff, it just never goes well. And we do have a resurgent problem with eugenics right now that we're dealing with, and it's scary.
Anna: So all of that said, there were almost immediately queer men and women who subversively celebrated this idea of being, quote, "degenerate."
Leila: Of course there were.
Rebecca: Yeah. Of course there were.
Anna: Who were comforted by the idea that they were in fact born that way. As American playwright Natalie Barney wrote in her autobiography, quote, "I considered myself without shame. Albinos aren't reproached for having pink eyes and whitish hair. Why should they hold it against me for being a lesbian?"
Leila: In the book Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, a favorite here on this podcast, it seems—
Rebecca: Yes. It's what I always turn to when I'm doing a gay episode. Let's be real.
Leila: It's a good one. Lillian Faderman, the author, talks about some of the ways that queer women found freedom in this idea that they were unnaturally mannish. It gave them a way to explain their ambition or the fact that they enjoyed sex or even that they preferred to wear men's clothes.
Leila: Faderman includes this quote from a woman who lived in Austin, Texas, in the early 20th century. Quote, "I'm a lesbian because of genetics. I'm sure my great-grandmother and grandmother were lesbians even though they never came out. They rebelled against playing traditional roles. They smoked, hunted, did carpentry at home, and they let me know that it was okay for a young girl to do those things." Even though that is a pretty narrow way, I think, of describing queerness that didn't reflect the experiences of all women, it's really neat to see how some women were able to turn their degeneracy on its head.
Anna: I think that's also a theme of this podcast, is finding those places where women were like, "Oh, okay. Well, I'll just turn whatever that is on its head and make it work for me."
Rebecca: Hey, like the name of our podcast and magazine, in fact.
Leila: Yeah. Please stop getting on to us about the name of our podcast and magazine.
Rebecca: Come on. We're Millennials. We're doing it ironically, guys. You should know how this goes.
Leila: Yeah. I mean, in an age where there's Bitch magazine, you should understand irony and stuff.
Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah. This embracing of degeneracy, a eugenicist idea, really became part of queer protest. You see examples in the book Queer London, where historian Matt Houlbrook talks about how effeminate gay men and what we'd now call trans women in the 1920s would play up their femininity in public in order to make straight cis people uncomfortable.
Rebecca: There's also stories about the Stonewall uprising where, for example, patrons of the Stonewall Inn not only fought with police but also danced with each other and just generally had a grand old time being themselves in public. I think one of the great things about the Stonewall story is that not only was it a three-day protest, but it was a three-day dance party as far as it seems like from various people's descriptions.
Leila: Okay, but Rebecca, who threw the first brick?
Anna: Oh, no. Oh, no.
Rebecca: I’m going to start weeping.
So for folks like these, performing their sexuality, their so-called degeneracy, was in and of itself a protest. And you do see this in debates today over whether Pride festivals should be family friendly and what that even means. Part of the spirit of queer protest is using this idea that queer folks are degenerate to make people uncomfortable. And while we usually think of this kind of protest as based in resisting anti-queer religious morality, which is how it's used, I think, a lot today, it's also a part of this history of resisting anti-queer science, I think.
Leila: Yeah. Just this morning the debate about kink being allowed at Pride was trending on Twitter. I don't care, but it feels like by saying what kinds of gay people can come to Pride is tryin' to perform some sort of politics of respectability for straight cis people rather than making it a celebration for all LBGTQ people, if that makes sense. That's my view on it. Don't tweet at me.
Rebecca: I do think, yeah, it's interesting 'cause some of the debate has sometimes bubbled up among younger queer people, and then some of the pushback has been from older queer people who are like, "No, the whole point of Pride parades was to make everyone really uncomfortable." And even acknowledging that maybe that has changed somewhat, I think there's a value to a lotta people who grew up in the era of performing degeneracy was one of the main tools folks had to protest on a day-to-day basis. Holding on to that in some form is still important.
Leila: Yeah. I find that to be a fascinating switcheroo of generational roles as well. It's not usually the older people in a group that wants to let the freak flag fly. They're usually the ones that are clutching their pearls about something. It's usually the younger ones that are all like, "Aah!" So I find that to be a really interesting switch that not really used to. But when we are talking about who Pride is for, it is not for cops.
Anna: No. It's not for cops.
Rebecca: No. No. No.
Anna: I think we can all agree on that.
Rebecca: I think, yes, 100%.
Anna: This like, "What about the gay cops?" I don't care. They're still cops. They can't go to Pride.
Leila: Unless the kink is dressing up like a kinky cop.
Rebecca: Oh, yeah, no, that's fine.
Anna: Just that you can't say that your kink is being an actual cop employed at a police department. That's not a kink.
Rebecca: No. Not allowed.
Anna: So by the middle of the 20th century, eugenics had, well, sort of fallen out of fashion, at least in the mainstream, and with it so had the idea that homosexuality was a genetic disease. But don't worry because the scientific community will always find ways to condemn things like this as an illness.
Anna: So if it's not a genetic disease and all of the classification of it coming from genetics, the anti-queer sentiment instead began to come from the new fields of psychology and psychiatry. And queer people still found ways to fight back. So inspired by our old buddy Sigmund Freud—what's up, bro? How you been?
Leila: It's been a minute.
Anna: It has been a minute. Psychoanalysts of the mid-20th century treated homosexuality and gender nonconformity as symptoms of deeper neuroses that needed to be treated or even eliminated. Instead of being a genetic disease, it was now a mental illness.
Anna: And by the 1950s, the idea that homosexuality could be cured with psychotherapy had come very much into vogue, something that it should be noted that Freud didn't actually believe. But why ruin a good time being a Freudian by actually doing what Freud advocated for?
Anna: So here's Lillian Faderman again writing about one such psychoanalyst in Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers. Quote, "Edmund Bergler actually promised his patients that same-sex love was reversible, but only through psychoanalytical treatment by a psychiatrist for one or two years with a minimum of three appointments each week at the cost of as much as $60,000, calculated in present dollars."
Rebecca: And that was present dollars in the early 1990s, btdubs, when this book was published.
Anna: Yeah, when she wrote that book.
Leila: Eeh. So that's just conversion therapy, basically.
Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah. Very expensive conversion therapy.
Leila: I know. Why do that when you can get it for free from a church? And so it is no surprise that when the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, commonly called the DSM, was published in 1952, homosexuality was listed as a type of, quote, "sociopathic personality disturbance." When the DSM-II was published in 1968, homosexuality and transvestism were both classified as, quote, "sexual deviations along with pedophilia, exhibitionism, and necrophilia." Yeah. All those were the same.
Leila: So the wild thing is, if none of this is wild enough, by 1968 gay rights groups like the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society had been around for almost two decades. The Stonewall uprising would happen a year later, and the first Pride parade a year after that. In 1968, the United States was on the cusp of what people tend to consider the modern gay rights movement, and the American Psychiatric Association was doubling down on the idea that homosexuality was a sickness. And in fact it was only five years later, in 1973, when homosexuality was more or less removed from the DSM.
Rebecca: So the whole story of how this happened is pretty fascinating. And if you're interested in learning particularly about the role of gay psychiatrists in the effort, I highly recommend the older This American Life episode 81 Words. Yeah. I think it's fascinating. We're gonna focus here, though, on the efforts of one activist in particular who played a pivotal role in removing homosexuality from the DSM, Barbara Gittings.
Rebecca: So by the 1970s, Gittings had been an activist for many years. And she'd served as the editor of the lesbian magazine The Ladder, which was the magazine of the Daughters of Bilitis, and had led protests in the 1960s in Philadelphia against laws that allowed people to be fired for being gay. There's a Barbara Gittings Way in Philly, which always makes me happy.
Rebecca: She saw psychiatry's opinion of homosexuality to be a serious roadblock to equal rights. So in a 2006 speech she said, quote, "It's difficult to explain to anyone who didn't live through that time the extent to which homosexuality was under the thumb of psychiatry. The sickness label was an albatross around the neck of our early gay rights groups. It infected all our work on other issues. Anything we said on our own behalf could be dismissed with, quote, 'That's just your sickness talking.' The sickness label was used to justify discrimination, especially in employment and particularly by our own government." And so she, along with her friend and collaborator Frank Kameny and her partner Kay Lahusen, sought to get the DSM changed.
Anna: One of the interesting things about Gittings is that while she was part of a white, middle-class tradition of gay protest that was really into respectability politics, she also wasn't afraid to make a scene. In 1970, she helped organize a major protest at the APA's annual convention, which that year was held in San Francisco. Activists infiltrated the convention and disrupted panels on conversion therapy, at one point managing to take the microphone away from a speaker to demand a voice. They also stormed the halls looking for Irving Bieber, the psychiatrist who came up with the theory that men became gay because of overbearing mothers. This sounds amazing.
Rebecca: Yeah. I just love the idea of them like, "You know what? You put your name on this paper, and we know you're here, so we're gonna find you."
Anna: "We just wanna talk. We just wanna talk."
Anna: So the APA gave in to these demands to be heard, and the 1971 convention included a panel titled "Lifestyles of Non-Patient Homosexuals," which Gittings and company jokingly called "The Lifestyles of Impatient Homosexuals." Which is great. Of course there were still plenty of anti-gay panels to disrupt, and both Gittings and Kameny took the opportunity to protest sessions on aversion therapy and harass psychiatrists touting gay cures. Gittings and Kameny also organized a panel at the 1972 convention that featured a psychiatrist who was gay. Knowing that he would lose his job if he was out, Dr. John Fryer agreed to appear under the name "Dr. H. Anonymous" and took part in the panel wearing a rubber mask to protect his identity.
Leila: And there will be a photo to that in the show notes.
Rebecca: Yes. Yes. It's great. It's one of those weird Halloween rubber masks. I don't think it's actually a Nixon rubber mask, but that's what you gotta picture when you look at this photo. It's the whole face, weird. Yeah.
Anna: Oh, man. I'm gonna go to AHA in a Nixon mask and just cause trouble.
Anna: Thanks to their efforts and that of so many other people, the APA removed homosexuality from the DSM in 1973, replacing it with the diagnosis ego-dystonic homosexuality, which essentially says that gay people could be treated if they were unhappy being gay. Ego-dystonic homosexuality was then removed from the DSM in the 1980s.
Leila: But obviously that didn't mean that the fight against anti-queer science is over. It was only in 2013 that gender identity disorder was removed from the DSM and was replaced with gender dysphoria, which is probably a term a lotta people have heard at this point. While the goal of that change was to provide trans people with a path to receiving psychological care during transition, many activists say that the framing will still lead to stigmatization for trans people.
Leila: And you can see transphobes today, I see them all the time on Twitter, for instance, leaning on, quote-unquote, "the science" to support their hateful views. Here is that line from Barbara Gittings that we shared earlier: "The sickness label was an albatross around the neck of our early gay rights groups. It infected all our work on other issues. Anything we said on our own behalf could be dismissed with 'That's just your sickness talking.' The sickness label was used to justify discrimination, especially in employment and particularly by our own government." And so I think you could probably say the exact same thing about the fight for trans rights today.
Anna: Yep. I think the discourse about trans rights has become so poisoned by the discourse about science that is entwined with it, and purposefully so by transphobes, in very cynical and very disingenuous ways. A lot of just outright lying about the science. It's really bad, y'all.
Leila: It's really bad out there.
Rebecca: Yeah, it is. We mentioned earlier at the top of the episode studies that are like, "Oh, everyone detransitions." There are so many bad-faith studies out there that are still cited by people, both transphobes and people who should know better. It's considered peer-reviewed science in some instances. Or there are things where it was just an idea that was posed, like what is it? The rapid-onset gender dysphoria? Whatever it was. The whole theory that if kids have trans friends, that they'll become trans overnight.
Anna: That's social contagion theory, and it's very problematic.
Rebecca: Yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah. Even things like a transphobic scientist will just vaguely propose an idea like that, and then everyone's so excited to be able to say, "Oh, well, a scientist said this." Even if it's a scientist who doesn't know anything about shit, it must be true.
Anna: Yeah. I think obviously this is something that we talk about and around and through on the podcast all the time, but the discourse about science in the Western world right now and about objectivity and expertise and authority is so toxic and so distorted and so invested in scoring political points and warping our perception of marginalized people that it is just a morass.
Anna: And I think one of the things that we try to do as often as we possibly can is talk about that, that there is no such thing as objectivity in the way that you mean it. That is a construction of science and of the social structures of science. And it's important to talk about that because it isn't just a matter of like, "Oh, well, we're all just a bunch of liberal cultural relativists and nothing means anything and everything's a postmodern whatever." What it means in this context is that it's being weaponized against really vulnerable people, and people are getting hurt.
Leila: Yeah. Well, and it's like a lotta people seem to choose when science is objective and when it's not. I guess science is objective when—like I watched a video of a antivax nurse who was tryin' to stick metal to her body to show that the COVID vaccine makes you magnetic. But she's a nurse. She knows because she's a nurse, and she knows all about how vaccines work. But it's somehow not objective for people who don't think climate science is legitimate and that climate change is real.
Leila: So, I mean, there's a lot of bad-faith people out there who throw science being objective around only when it suits their own needs and their own ends and their own worldview. And so that's not objective, either. It's not objective at any point in the turtles all the way down. At no point.
Rebecca: And another tragically fascinating thing about the lack of objectivity in the particular case of the DSM, which is obviously a wildly problematic document in general, but part of the argument from trans health experts to keep gender dysphoria in the DSM, which is actually an argument that I understand, but it's awful that it has to be made, and that's that that's how you can make sure that health insurance will cover therapy for people who are in vulnerable situations, is that that means that someone who's trans and therefore because of all of this stuff happening in the world—and even if not. You know what? There are trans people who are extremely privileged who are still like, "I am making a major life decision. I would like to talk to someone about that." And the only way to then get that paid for is to have a therapist be able to check a box on a form.
Rebecca: And it's also tied into this idea that I think folks aren't willing to let go of the idea that there's something weird about folks with non-normative gender identities, which is why it was only in 2013 that gender identity disorder was taken out. But there's also this weird practical reason that's swept up in the way the economics of how health care works in the US, which no one asked for.
Leila: Okay. So we have to somehow describe this as an illness in some sense in order for trans people to access the resources that they need to transition. So in that sense, we have decided that that is health care, right? But then that doesn't apply for trans people in prison who want to continue their transition through hormone therapy or whatever. But now it's in that context denied to them because now it's not health care anymore.
Leila: Now it's an excess or cosmetic or something like that. So I guess we also get to pick and choose when trans people get to access the health care that we're saying that they can have because it's an illness, but it only applies to certain trans people in certain contexts.
Anna: Yeah. And just to bring it around to what we were talking about earlier with the resurgence of eugenic thinking, particularly in the United States, picking and choosing when people get to have health care because of your political or ideological views about their bodies or their desires or whatever? That's eugenics.
Leila: "Hi, that's eugenics."
Anna: Yeah. "Hi, it's your old friend eugenics here again." That's how you wipe out classes of people that you don't like.
Leila: "Hi, God. It's me, Eugenics. You up, bro? I'm back."
Leila: Oh, my God. I don't wanna talk about this in any extent to detract from what we're talking about. Me and Anna did a book event last week, and someone in the audience asked us a question about how does the scientific community and then everyday people in the world and institutions move away from antiquidated things that don't work anymore like bloodletting, and she also mentioned eugenics. And I was like, "Oh."
Rebecca: "Oh, honey."
Leila: I was like, "Eugenics is still here, still amongst us." And there was a weird feeling that went out. And we had already said some pretty radical stuff, I think, at that point.
Anna: It was a little spicy.
Leila: It was a little spicy. So it was strange that me just saying the E word out loud, like the effect that that caused on the crowd. It was really strange. So I think that it's still just something super uncomfortable for people to confront and deal with and to think about how maybe they participate not in the actual practicing of eugenics on other people but entertain eugenic ideas. And I think that that's really uncomfortable for people.
Anna: Yeah. I don't know. I feel like just really driving this point home. When you say things like "Stupid people shouldn't be allowed to vote," that's what we're talking about. Or that you should have to take an IQ test to vote or something, or you should have to take an IQ test to have kids.
Rebecca: That literally was used as eugenics. Yeah.
Anna: That's classic, Grade-A, uncut eugenics. So maybe think about what you're actually saying when you say stuff like that.
Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that unfortunately most people have expressed opinions about who they think should or should not have children because of some category they belong to. It's so much in so much of the world. The ocean we swim in, the air we breathe. Yeah. I don't actually have somewhere to go with that.
Rebecca: But just it's good to remember that there are so many ideas that we still cling on to in all of these random ways. And it doesn't mean that you're a monster because you once had a thought that is related to this, but you gotta be aware of where all this stuff is coming from and that it's coming from the same places that you would think were obviously horrifying.
Anna: Yeah. I didn't mean to be like, "If you've ever had this thought, you're a monster." Just that it's very insidious and it's very much a part of American culture, I think, these kinds of ideas.
Leila: Yeah. And it has been used by maybe not the big bad eugenicists that we've talked about on this show before, but it has been used by progressive groups to advocate for various kinds of social change. And so there are ways that eugenics has and can sound good. And so if you have thought about that, you're not the only one. And it just takes being aware and thinking critically about these types of things. But, yeah, I mean, since the early 20th century, progressive groups have been trafficking in eugenics a lot and eugenic practice.
Anna: Oh, yeah. And it's worth remembering that eugenics was a progressive project. It wasn't a conservative project.
Anna: So a lotta eugenics talk.
Leila: Okay. Okay. What can we end on that's not eugenics?
Rebecca: Oh, you know what? Since we're ending talking about transgender folks fighting bad science, let's throw out that we have a couple of really fabulous pieces on the Lady Science website that are by trans scientists about their experiences. And these pieces, I think, really demonstrate the way that folks' gender identities have informed the way that they practice science. And they have been open about that, and that's, I think, really cool.
Anna: Yeah. We'll put links in the show notes.
Leila: And didn't you say that Barbara Gittings's partner recently passed? That was Kay Lahusen, right?
Rebecca: Yes. Yes. She recently passed away. Yes. Yeah. And Making Gay History, the podcast, did an episode about the two of them in particular that includes interviews. We'll include that in the show notes. These two are adorable. If you read the two of them chit-chatting with each other about causing all this trouble, it's amazing. So also highly recommend that.
Leila: Well, RIP, Kay Lahusen. I think that's a good place to end.
Leila: So if you liked our episode today, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts so that new listeners can find us. If you have questions for us about any of the topics we discussed, tweet us at @ladyxscience or #ladyscipod. For show notes, episode transcripts, to sign up for our monthly newsletter, read articles and essays, pitch us an idea, and more, visit ladyscience.com.
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Image credit: Pride Parade in NYC, June 26, 2016, Steven Pisano (Wikimedia Commons | CC BY 2.0)
