Gary Matsumoto's Vaccine A: The Covert Government Experiment That's Killing Our Soldiers and Why GI's Are Only The First Victims is scary. But scary in a way that outrages a person, because of the events in the stories it tells. Matsumoto asrgues for a connection between an experimental anthrax vaccine used on U.S. military (plus those of a few of our 1991 Gulf War allies) and many cases among the military of autoimmune diseases such as lupus, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, and Lou Gehrig's Disease (ALS). Those soldiers who chose to join the military were not given a choice about taking "Vaccine A" (as it was recorded in people medical records in the few cases where it was recorded at all), and they didn't have a choice about the medical consequences of this experimental vaccine. This group of autoimmune diseases affecting military personnel was labeled "Gulf War Syndrome" in the 1990s, even though it affected some who'd never left the U.S. But for years the U.S. government tried to blame it on Iraqi chemical or biological weapons -- denying that the U.S. itself, in an attempt to protect soldiers from biological warfare, had given a vaccine not licensed for use on people; denying that this vaccine they gave contained an ingredient called squalene that was intended to boost the vaccine's effectiveness; denying that squalene could affect the immune system negatively, making it turn on itself and causing these autoimmune diseases.

Evidence mounted throughout the 1990s, but some U.S. military were still being given the shots. Those who had heard about the risks from other sources sometimes chose to leave the military rather than recieve this mandatory vaccine with substances that might hurt or kill them. Government spokespeople have contradicted themselves and each other in trying to deny the unethical use of these experimental vaccine without the recipients' consent and the effect the vaccines have had on some. Their unwillingness to back down from the lie, be it for the sake of scientific theories unsupported by real-life facts, or refusal to suffer the consequences of using members of the American military as guinea pigs without asking them, is holding back the progress of medicine and undermining the U.S. government's reputation as much as any other issue. The book goes into great detail that non-medical people can understand, and additional information is available at vaccine-a.com.

Another two from the accumulated stack:

David Livingstone Smith's Why We Lie: the Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind is fascinating in that "I don't know if I believe it but it's interesting" way. I've read a lot of evolutionary psychology books, but Smith's explanation of why it would be useful for survival to be able to deceive both other people and one's own conscious mind is something none of the others dealt with. The stuff about conscious deception is not too hard to swallow, but the idea that the unconscious mind is churning out behavior that deceives the conscious mind about its own reasons for the behavior can sometimes be difficult to accept. In some situations it makes sense; it's easier to apply to the people you see on daytime talk shows whose behavior defies the viewer's logic than it is to apply to oneself. Definitely food for thought, though.

And a different sort of science of humanity is chronicled in Serita Stevens' Forensic Nurse: The New Role of the Nurse in Law Enforcement. Lots of people still think of nurses as ladies who deal with bedpans and bandages only, even though these days that role is more given to the nurse's assistant and the nurse is a medical figure nearly up to the level of the doctor in hospitals, nursing homes, and any other setting where the doctors are spread too thin to always be there. Stevens shows nurses whose training lets them provide a massively helpful liaison service between the medical and crime/law communities, examining victims of violence not just to heal their hurts but to find evidence to convict their injurers. Tracing the stories of rape victims, child abuse victims, domestic violence victims, the mentally ill, Alzheimer's and other dementia patients, and people too badly injured to tell what has happened to them requires medical, psychological, and criminal investigation training, and not enough people have all those different areas covered. Hence crimes can go uninvestigated, or things which look bad can mistakenly be attributed to crimes commited by others when they were not (such as the homeless man who appeared to have been assaulted, but who turned out to have been attempting suicide) -- unless someone has the training to put all the pieces together. Forensic nurses also save the time of those thinly-spread doctors by testifying in court and serving as legal consultants for lawyers and judges unfamiliar with medical situations. (Perhaps more of these forensic nurses could help in the malpractice cases so common throughout America and thus end up decreasing health care costs by decreasing doctors' insurance rates, a cost passed on to patients.) The popularity of TV shows like "CSI" makes it seem like this book would be of interest to a large audience, since it depicts the same kind of mysteries. I hope so, because the importance of nurses, even those with standard training, can't be overstated.

The books I wanted to blog have really piled up over the holidays. Here's the top of the pile of six: Don't Cramp My Style: Stories About That Time Of The Month, edited by Lisa Rowe Faustino. My local library has this marked as a young adult (i.e., teenager) book, and the stories do largely center on teenage/college-age characters (though the one about the guy whose girlfriend sends him out to buy her tampons could apply to a large range of ages). Anyway, I'm a just-turned-32-year-old who has 20 years of menstruation behind her, but reading this book on my lunch break made me forget I had to go back to work. In a society where most men and many women think of any reference to menstruation as automatically "too much information," these stories of what starting one's period meant in various times and places, and different situations in the modern Western world, fascinated me because they felt familiar even as they dealt with completely different lives from mine. I wish this kind of thing had been available in middle school for my friends who couldn't even manage to say the word "period" aloud when asking if I'd had my first one already. I hope middle schoolers like my little (half-) sister have the guts to take this one up to the library counter. And now for something completely different (and yet kind of the same): Lisa Gee's Friends: Why Men And Women Are From The Same Planet. The belief is so common that, as the movie When Harry Met Sally put it, " What I'm saying is -- and this is not a come-on in any way, shape, or form -- is that men and women can't be friends, because the sex part always gets in the way." (Gee notes that during the writing of the book, that line was repeated to her more often than I care to remember.") My own personal experience is that men and women can be friends just fine without sex, actual or desired, interfering (even when there is unrequited romantic interest, it doesn't have to mess up friendship). So I'm pleased to see that the people she interviewed, brother-sister pairs and unrelated cross-sex friends both, no matter what their age, have very deep friendships that don't seem to involve sex at all. "A soul-mate doesn't have to be a sex-mate," she points out in the introduction, but that the lack of dramatic incidents in such friendships means that it doesn't stick in the mind the way the great love stories of our culture do. Many of the people in the friend pairs are married to others or otherwise involved with someone who is not their cross-sex friend, and this is another point that seems ignored by modern Western people -- that the person you love in a romantic and sexual way does not have to be (probably should not be) the only deep connection in your life, and that friends, whether they are of the gender you are attracted to or not, provide deep, emotionally intimate connections that are different but just as important. Gee's interviewees are mostly British but her conclusions make sense to an American like me, and her book is badly needed to counteract the limited and stereotypical views of human relations in best-selling books that draw men and women as so different that they might as well have evolved on different planets.

It was a difficult book to find time to read -- not the sort of thing you'd choose to read right before bed or first thing in the morning. But difficult topics still need to be addressed, and for many people Michael Scarce's Male on Male Rape: The Hidden Toll of Stigma and Shame covers one of the most difficult. I want to be a voice against sexual violence, and not just that against children (which I've spent more time collecting resources on because of my own experience.) So I took Male on Male Rape out of the library and, as the due date neared, read it. I hope some things have changed since its 1997 publication, but I know many of the issues in it still need to be addressed. (And if I hadn't known, the Abu Ghraib prisoner mistreatment would have made it clear.)

It's hard for a woman to deal with having been raped; it's probably harder for a man because of the stereotypes that exist about men -- that they are all able to defend themselves in any situation; that having been raped would make them less of a man -- in addition to the stereotypes anyone who has been raped encounters -- that they must somehow have wanted, enabled, or deserved it; that they just changed their mind after consensual sex; that it's no big deal for anyone who has had a lot of sex. Some people don't even believe that it's possible for a man to be raped. In fact, in some jurisdictions it technically isn't, because "rape" is legally defined in some U.S. states and other countries as something that happens to a woman. Male-on-male sexual assault is given some other name, such as "aggravated sodomy" or "criminal deviate conduct." Indeed, in some places where male-to-male sex acts are illegal, it may be the man reporting that he has been raped who is accused of a crime for having had sexual contact with another man -- never mind that it was forced on him. (However, Searce points out that repealing laws against same-sex sex in jurisdictions with male-rapist, female-victim-only rape laws can end up removing any laws against same-sex rape.)

In addition to these ridiculous laws, most societies put up further barriers for men who have been raped. Hospitals, law enforcement, counselors, may not know how to deal with the situation. Even things as seemingly inconsequential as what clothes are available in the hospital rape kit to replace those which are taken for evidence can make the rare male victim who reports the crime feel more isolated, because the kit is not likely to include men's clothing. AIDS testing and counseling may assume that all male-male sexual contact was consensual and talk about making good choices, even though having been raped is one of the things likely to make a person want to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases. Men who have been raped by men might wonder if they have "become" gay because of it (this is a worry seen in sexually abused children also). And there just isn't a lot of information easily available for men in these situations. I've seen it myself in reading books for adult survivors of child sexual abuse; there's a tendency to default to "she" and "her" when talking about the survivor and "he" and "him" for the abuser.

Certain environments, most notoriously prisons but also the military, athletics, fraternities, and even single-sex colleges/boarding schools can allow a scary number of opportunities for male-male rape and still allow talk about it to be squelched. Organizations such as Stop Prisoner Rape try to work against perceptions that people in prison somehow deserve to be raped, that indeed it's a subject for humor (Scarce notes that several movies before the publication date have included "Don't drop the soap" type of jokes). A former president of Stop Prisoner Rape said in a 1993 New York Times editorial that "The fight against rape in our communities is doomed to failure as long as it ignores the network of training grounds for rapists: our prisons, jails, and reform schools." Perhaps this approach might help in making people understand that since rape is not just about sex but about a rapist asserting power and violence, those who learn it as everyday behavior in prison have a distinct possibility of taking that learning outside and continuing with it, even though they are no longer as limited in the people they can have sex with. People who learn about "hazing" that includes sexual assault in any other environment may also include that kind of behavior in the other parts of their lives (and it doesn't have to be penis-in-anus-or-mouth sexual assault; forcing people to strip and similar things still send the message that forcing sexual behavior from others is OK). This idea that events from one setting spread to the world at large is certainly not the only reason that male-male rape is just as wrong as that with any other combination of genders, but it may be an argument that will make the world at large pay more attention.

Men who commit rape on other men do not necessarily consider themselves to be homosexual. And men who are gay are certainly not all rapists. These two things seem to be the hardest for many people to believe. Many arguments against letting gay people into the military or other organizations, and even several murder defenses, have relied on the idea that straight guys are freaked out by the idea of gay men desiring them, even panicked enough to murder the man who was making an advance. (Hey, guys -- would you consider it justified if a woman killed a man, or for that matter a woman, for making an advance at her? Me neither. We women get used to saying "no" to advances in relative calm, and so should men.) And, rather oddly considering the "homosexual panic" defense, a fair number of male rapes of men seem to happen as a result of gay-bashing, an odd sort of "we hate you so much we'll do one of the worst things we can imagine to you, even if it means we will actually be doing the acts we feel disgusted by your doing." Or perhaps "we'll prove we're more manly and powerful than you by treating you this badly, even if (etc.)." Or both. There's no logic to any kind of gay-bashing and particularly not violent kinds.

Scarce's book provides not only an examination of how male-male rape happens and what its survivors go through but also a list of things that can help reduce it, which can be summarized under the headings of education, providing services for men who have been raped, more research and writing, legal reform, change in popular culture, and increased work toward prevention. He also provides a list of resources for men who have been raped (though given the publication date, it doesn't list which ones have websites, but at least the list could provide the names of organizations to search online for, in case phone numbers have changed since the book's publication). Still, it is a much-needed resource on an often-overlooked subject.

Hell yeah. This is the way you want tragic stories to work out in real life. And yet nothing in Kate Niles' The Basket Maker seems contrived, even though she manages an upbeat ending for Sarah Graves, molested by her father; Trent McIntosh, burned by scalding water in a manhole; Barbara McIntosh, Trent's mother; Maddy Oodegard, widowed when her husband hanged himself in their basement; and Chief Ouray, the unquiet spirit of an Ute chief dead for decades. Sarah, Barbara, Maddy, Ouray, and even the Colorado mountains get to tell their part of the story, but I was never confused by the changes in narrator, and once I got started I didn't want to stop. The different voices in the novel are particularly fascinating -- ancient peaks or elementary school girl, they all sound right and believable. And the ending was somehow satisfying, heartwarming without being sappy -- there was hope even for those who had not deserved it, while the victims seemed on their way to healing.

Wow. It's not easy for transgendered people to live the life and change to the body that matches their mind even now. Reading Christine Jorgensen's autobiography (Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography) makes it clear how much more so it was fifty years ago.

George Jorgensen was born in 1926 in Manhattan and had a quite normal upbringing, but was somewhat unusual from the earliest years -- the incident in which the teacher puts him down in front of his class and his mother for keeping a piece of needlepoint in his desk is the most evident example, but George had enough other characteristics that were considered "feminine" that his older sister Dolly wrote a college thesis on him. (On the other hand, a girl would probably not have been encouraged as much in photography by his parents, who took out a loan to pay for his tuition at the Photography Institute. It's interesting to speculate how Christine's later life would have been different if she'd been female from birth.)

The young adult years are the most fascinating time to read about George's inner life. Modern readers may wonder if he would have considered himself a homosexual man if he'd been born in a more accepting time -- he admits to having been in love with a man on at least two occasions before his transition, but still reacts with revulsion to being propositioned by a homosexual man. However, during his time doing clerical work in the U.S. Army, just after World War II, he noted that "During the months in service, I had seen a few practicing homosexuals, those whom the other men had called 'queer.' I couldn't condemn them, but I also knew that I certainly couldn't become like them. It was a thing deeply alien to my religious attitudes ... furthermore, I had seen enough to know that homosexuality brought with it a social segregation and ostracism that I couldn't add to my own deep feeling of not belonging." And later, "I always wanted the things girls wanted, because somehow I felt they just naturally belonged to me."

The first few doctors George consulted with in the U.S. seemed to think he needed psychiatric help, but his own library research revealed works such as Paul de Kruif's The Male Hormone and other information on the hormonal differences between men and women. Having used the G.I. Bill to start at the Manhattan Medical and Dental Assistant's School, he was able to get hold of estradiol tablets (a form of estrogen) and dose himself with this female hormone to find that "the great feeling of listlessness and fatigue, which often seemed to be with me even after a full night's sleep, had disappeared. I was refreshed and alive...At that point, I believed I had stumbled on the first step toward a solution that would allow me to live the life my heart and mind had told me I was intended to live."

Advice from some more open-minded medical men led George to Denmark, where he had relatives, with the hopes of going to Stockholm, Sweden, where some cases of sex-reassignment surgery were rumored to have been done. As it turned out, Copenhagen, Denmark, also had similar research going on. George became the subject of many tests -- comparing how he felt with and without his estrogen dosage, among others. Dr. Christian Hamburger, in charge of George's situation, "impressed upon me that no irreversible step, such as surgical removal of the male glands, could even be considered until all of the experts involved had thoroughly examined every possible avenue of knowledge." (Perhaps it is the era in which Jorgensen wrote the book, or a wish to gloss over male/female differences, but specifically male or female body parts are almost never named in this book -- just male or female "glands," and other terms that play down the physical differences most people think of as the most obvious determining factor in gender.)

Finally, the first of three operations took place, this one to remove the testicles. (Later, a second operation would be a penectomy, which required greater care because of the necessity to keep the urethra functioning to remove urine; the third operation was the plastic surgery to create a vulva and vagina.) It was after the first operation that George started dressing in female clothes, applied to the U.S. government for a passport with the new gender and the name of Christine Jorgensen, and first wrote to his family in the U.S. about his transition. His family were surprised, naturally, given that this was the first they'd heard of the existance of any sex-change operation, much less their child's desire to have one; but eventually they were accepting. "They still don't understand this, Chris," [Aunt] Augusta said, "but you are their child, and if this will bring you happiness, they're all for it." Would that all parents were so accepting.

During the recovery period from the second operation in December 1952 is when the news broke in America; exactly who among his parents' friends talked to the media was unknown to Christine until much later. But Christine began receiving calls in a Denmark hospital room, asking how she felt, "how tall I was, what my waist, hip, and bust measurements were and whether I slept in pajamas or a nightgown...or what?" The tendencies of the media, then as now, were for the titillating, and Jorgensen notes that "it seems to me now a shocking commentary on the press of our time that I pushed the hydrogen-bomb tests on Eniwetok right off the front pages." Since Christine was in Denmark, the Jorgensen family in America were badgered by the press even more than they normally would have been. Christine's absence, and then her agreement to an exclusive story for one magazine, encouraged the press to print the flimsiest rumors. While the decision to have a series of interviews with one journalist, who was also given information by Christine's doctors, probably did lead to a more accurate, less sensational series in the one publication (American Weekly), its short-term results were that a lot of junk appeared in other venues.

Jorgensen's account of her new fame, the reaction to her return to the U.S., and her realization that being a photographer and filmmaker would probably not work as a career when what people wanted from her was more exposure to her as a woman (and this being the 1950s, that meant making public appearances, eventually as a singer and dancer) occupy the rest of the book, written 15 years after her Denmark operations. Some people believed Jorgensen was a cross-dresser whose operations were fakes; others were far more accepting (and both Christine and her doctors received hundreds of letters from people wanting to go through sex-change operations themselves). Clubs who originally booked her nightclub act changed their mind and refused to have her appear on ground of "immorality" (despite the fact that apparently her act was far cleaner than many nightclub performers'). The City Council of Boston banned her from performing at clubs in the city, and she was blacklisted from entering New York's Stork Club as a patron. And when she was briefly engaged to a man, New York's Marriage License Bureau refused to grant her a license to marry a man, despite an American passport and New York driver's license identifying her as a woman.

The reprint of the book contains some photographs and information in the preface from after the original publication date, but Christine's own story is the most fascinating part. It is a book that would probably be more comprehensible to a person who does not understand the transgendered than someone's more recent experience would be, because it is so grounded in the mainstream culture of the past, familiar to people of conservative social views. But it also provides the history and background for a lot of current transgender/transsexual and even other "genderqueer" culture because Jorgenson's case forced the U.S. to confront the possibilities.

As I start this entry, my brain is singing a song used in Spunk, a stage adaptation of some of Zora Neale Hurston's stories I saw years ago. I only heard the song once, at the one-time-only performance, but the tribute to Zora Neale Hurston at the end of Marita Golden's Don't Play in the Sun: One Woman's Journey Through the Color Complex has put it back in my head.

I'm white. (At least as far as I know -- three of my four grandparents are from the South, after all, which is where most American black people were until around World War II. And Golden does say that as many as 40% of white people in the U.S may have black ancestors they don't know about or don't acknowledge.) And I've read many books about women in society, women's self-image, the influence of the media on what women think they should look like and how they should act -- all by white authors. Most of them mention that black (and Latina) girls grow up with less pressure on them to be rib-countingly thin, and generally I thought "That's cool; at least there are some sub-cultures in this country that don't drive women toward anorexia."

Some of the books did mention that among black Americans, the lightness or darkness of one's skin can be a social issue, determining one's acceptance in some groups. (If the subject got half a page in those books on women in general, it was a lot.) Don't Play in the Sun helped remedy my ignorance. Its title comes from the author's mother calling her indoors as a child with the words, "Come on in the house -- it's too hot to be playing out here. I've told you -- don't play in the sun. You're going to have to get a light-skinned husband for the sake of your children as it is." Words that struck Golden, and words that struck me -- a mother speaking with complete frankness for her child's best interest as she sees it, the way my mother did when she told me I had no common sense. And boy, when such frank words stick in your memory, the urge to prove them wrong lodges just as firmly in your head. I'm not surprised that Golden says she became a great adherent of the "Black is Beautiful" and Black Power movements which coincided with her college years. I am surprised to see her uncover so many examples of color prejudice within not only Golden's generation, but her children's age group. The European standard of beauty remains dominant, which is harsh to the darker-skinned or those with African-looking features. The girls in the tight dresses in the videos on BET are light-skinned blacks if they're not Latina or Asian, and they have longer hair than I do. Successful black men marry lighter-skinned women, but when Golden discussed this with her husband and castigated the men for their choices, he came back with, "The really dark-skinned brother . . . how many dark-skinned women do you think would give him any play?" People still worried about what their kids would look like (a concept foreign to me -- the closest I ever came was idly wondering whose eye color would be dominant). But I know how it is to feel you're not reflected in your world. I know not feeling attractive. I'm not skinny, I'm not blonde, I wear glasses and read all the time. I once wrote an essay called "A Doll Like Me" about the comparative rareness of brown-haired dolls in a world of blonde baby dolls and Barbies. How much harder must it be when it's not just a hair color you're looking to see reflected? In high school, we read Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, about a little black girl, Pecola Breedlove, who wants blonde hair and blue eyes -- and feels maybe she wouldn't be abused in her life if she had them. The book didn't make as much impression on me then as Morrison's Beloved, perhaps because Pecola's mental escape method was so different from mine. Maybe it would make a bigger impression now.

After discussing the disadvantages that the lighter-skinned black person can experience in the U.S., such as exclusion by darker-skinned people for being "too white" and sexual pressure and exploitation because of their perceived "beauty," Golden looks at the situation in other countries. Even in Africa, the Western media have influence -- the idea that women in Nigeria would use chemical creams to bleach their skin boggles the mind. But it goes to show the spread of ideas to places where they are even more ridiculous than where they originated.

The book ends with dark-skinned female role models -- India.Arie, Venus and Serena Williams, and the aforementioned Zora Neale Hurston. I hope that role models like these help everyone accept that beauty, talent, and strength can be found in any place on the range of colors of humanity, and that books like this make people, white, black, or any other tone, think about how they view skin color and features instead of resting blindly on old prejudices.