If one Y (male) chromosome is bad two must be worse, right? Well, no, but it's taken a while for the once very-popular notion to fall out of favor. I've argued frequently allegedly "man hating" beliefs attributed to "radical feminism" generally pre-date feminism. Here's a great example, from a sympathetic post by genetics researcher Ricki Lewis (emphasis mine)
A battered paperback entitled The XYY Man, by Kenneth Royce, leans in a corner of my bookshelf. It’s a spy novel that chronicles the adventures of “Spider” Scott, an ex-felon who wants to become law-abiding, but finds that he is genetically predisposed to criminality because he has an extra chromosome. Unlike most men whose XY sex karyotype imparts their maleness, Scott has been endowed with an XYY karyotype by his novelist creator.
This condition is not fanciful.
...
In 1970 geneticist H. Bentley Glass advocated the relaxation of abortion laws to allow women to end pregnancies if the fetus was XYY. Speculation even ran that Richard Speck, the infamous murderer of eight student nurses in Chicago in 1966, owed his propensity to violence to an extra Y chromosome. That proved untrue. In one notorious case of the mid-1970s, a British court wrongfully convicted Stefan Kiszko of the murder of an 11-year-old girl largely because of his XYY karyotype, and it took more than 15 years for him to win release from prison. For further historical takes on the misunderstood extra chromosome see Y Envy.
Source: PLOS DNA Science Blog
Kennith Royce (born in 1920) was not a stalwart feminist when he wrote his gender-determinist spy novel. Nor was Hiram Bentley Glass (born in 1906) when he issued his prejudgment of "excessively male" infants.
Again, it's trendy in some circles to say there's no such thing as misandry. It's even trendier in even more circles to say there is such a thing as misandry but it's all feminism's fault. Both trendy circles are wrong: there is such a thing, and it's roots lie not in feminism but in the same bullshit culture that motivated feminists in the first place.
Oh and speaking of bullshit, while it turns out that about 1/1000 boys and men really do have an extra Y chromosome the modern scientific consensus is that the impact is minimal. As Lewis puts it in her concluding paragraph
Slowly, as the suppositions of the 1960s give way to current research, the public is changing its thinking on XYY syndrome. Few people today believe that an extra Y chromosome condemns its owner to a life of violent crime. Genetic counselors explain the condition to families and teach ways to nurture XYY boys. Men like the fictional “Spider” Scott can exercise their free will without fear that a sex chromosome has turned them bad.
I would have called it "the superstitions of the 1960s" but close enough. Good riddance.
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Dr. John Money (of the
Submitted by Irene (not verified) on Sun, 2012-12-09 00:02.Dr. John Money (of the infamous David Reimer case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer) also had a go at therapy for troubled boys and men with XXY syndrome: he tried giving them Depo-Provera, i.e., chemical castration. Well, it worked on sex offenders, kinda, and obviously these guys must have too many androgens, stands to reason, so try the antiandrogens, why not.
I'm not feeling very happy with Dr. Money today. I just found out he also said that there was nothing pathological about "affectional pedophilia." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Money#On_pedophilia
Sorry, I mean XYY, obviously.
Submitted by Irene (not verified) on Sun, 2012-12-09 12:18.Sorry, I mean XYY, obviously.