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Thank you to everyone who voted. We are all supportive of screen writer and DES daughter, Caitlin McCarthy in her quest for Wonder DRUG to make it to the big screen. With this, there is hope the film will be shown Australia and further raise consciousness of drug disasters. And yes, drug disasters look set to continue with the now usage of dexamethasone in pregnant women to prevent intersex, tomboys and lesbians ( http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2012/08/dreger-fetal-engineering.html ). This report shows NOTHING has been learned from the horrors of the DES and thalidomide experience - thus making WONDER DRUG all the more important for viewing audiences world-wide.
2 comments:
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I agree, there are lessons that still haven't been learned from the DES disaster. One aspect of DES that doesn't get talked about a lot is that it has feminizing effects on males. Many DES sons were born with intersex conditions such as undescended testes, hypospadias or micropenis. A lot of them have gender identity issues too, e.g.:
http://www.crossdressers.com/forums/showthread.php?165045-DES-sons
http://www.crossdressers.com/forums/showthread.php?161718-DES-and-Transgender
http://www.susans.org/forums/index.php?topic=84224.0
http://www.lauras-playground.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=26870
DES is such a powerful estrogenic drug that everyone looking at the DES disaster seems to assumed that any harm it caused was due to its estrogenic properties, but I've discovered that DES is also a very effective chemical castration agent, and the doses being used for prevention of miscarriage were more than sufficient to fully chemically castrate an adult man. Male development in the unborn child is driven by hormones produced in the testicles, and if you shut down production of those hormones, development occurs as female instead.
In humans, the reproductive organs that define a person's physical sex develop during the first trimester, while nearly all the sexually dimorphic brain development takes place during the second and third trimester of the pregnancy. Under the standard "Smith and Smith" protocol for prevention of miscarriage, a typical DES son would have spent the entire second and third trimester being exposed to more than enough DES to induce full chemical castration and completely shut down his testosterone production. In effect, through chemical castration, I think DES has made the DES sons into people with the body of a man (albeit intersexed in many cases), but with the brain of a woman inside that body.
In animals like rats or sheep, when you create an animal with a female brain in a male body through castration at the appropriate stage of development, the later adult behaviour makes it obvious that something is wrong. Humans are far more complex and adaptable creatures though, and that gives us the ability to cover up for all sorts of abnormalities. People (especially adolescents) tend to react very badly to feminine behaviour in a male body. Bullied as a teenager, I quickly learned to hide what was really there and create a fake persona, pretending to everyone around me and even to myself that I was a man just like any other. That seems to be a near-universal thing among the DES sons I've spoken to as well. I've set up a web page explaining what I think happened to my brain as a result of my own hormonal exposure, and how I think DES and other artificial hormonal drugs given to pregnant women can affect "brain sex" in the unborn child. Here's the link:
http://2012hermaphrodite.wordpress.com/hermaphrodism-caused-by-hormonal-medication-given-during-pregnancy/
I appreciate it sounds like an incredibly tall story, but check the facts yourself if you don't believe me. The dose of DES required to induce full chemical castration in adult men is 3mg per day, and the dose the DES mothers were typically started on was 5mg per day.
Hugh
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