Although my public health training focused on infectious diseases, I care about a wide range of public health issues. My job cuts across domains, and also personally I want people to be comprehensively healthy and not merely free from contagions. So when I saw that health-improving and potentially life-saving interventions were being labeled as child abuse and used as the sole grounds for investigating parents, I was baffled and dismayed. I don’t understand how providing treatments which have demonstrated health benefits can be considered abuse. And now some states want to make providing those treatments a felony.
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transgender
Science Corner: You Are More than Your Karyotype
The United States Congress has once again taken up the Equality Act, which would explicitly extend civil rights protections to classes defined in terms of sexual orientation and gender identity. While there may be legitimate discourse on some of the finer points of the legislation, what troubles me most is how often an overly simplistic and reductive understanding of biology is dragged out in an attempt to refute the validity of some of these categories. My first instinct is to correct and clarify the science, but in all likelihood the science isn’t actually at the root of the issue so much as an attractive rhetorical option. So before I share some of the biological details, allow me to explore some theological thoughts towards an expansive acceptance of human diversity.
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