News of a tent city dedicated to holding children in harsh conditions should evoke alarm, not least because child detention has a long and nasty history. For centuries, children have been used as pawns by governments seeking to control their parents or their leaders. And children have been forcibly relocated in the United States before. Under slavery they were separated from their parents to extort labor and build wealth, while Native American children were taken from their families for re-schooling and to foster the expropriation of land.

But the idea of holding whole groups of children in detention on a widespread basis—not as labor in a rapacious economic system or to steal land, but with detention itself as the point—is part of a newer phenomenon. And this more recent form of detention, the version that the Trump administration has embraced for now, sits cleanly within the tradition of concentration camps.

While writing a book on camp history, I defined concentration camps as the mass detention of civilians without trial, usually on the basis of race, religion, national origin, citizenship, or political party, rather than anything a given individual has done. By this definition, the new child camp established in Tornillo, Texas, is a concentration camp. While tragic, this is hardly surprising, since the innovation of concentration camps rose in part out of the willingness to detain children.

Women and children, together, constituted the overwhelming majority of the populations in the first detention sites publicly referred to as “concentration camps,” which appeared near the turn of the 20th century in Cuba and southern Africa. During a rebellion in Cuba, hundreds of thousands of women and children were driven off their land by Spanish soldiers, who destroyed their homes and crops, forcing them into miserable conditions behind barbed wire beginning in 1896.

American reporter Richard Harding Davis visited camps in three Cuban cities, finding detainees—known as reconcentrados—infected with smallpox and yellow fever in squalid temporary housing. He met babies whose “bones showed through as plainly as the rings under a glove.” Well over 100,000 Cuban civilians died as a result of conditions in these camps, a significant percentage of them children.

Concentration camps appeared again when the British forced families of rebel Boer fighters into tent cities in brutal conditions in southern Africa. It was understood at the time that the noncombatants were effectively hostages meant to get the men to surrender. A November 1901 letter to The New York Times about the British camps laid out the dynamic: “England, unable to conquer the Boer men, is striking at the women and children.” From the beginning, concentration camps targeted the most vulnerable.

Historian Peter Warwick records that in all, more than 27,000 Boer internees died, in the range of double the total number of combat casualties on both sides. Nearly 80 percent of the deaths in the camps were children. Segregated camps for black Africans had even worse conditions and less food, and ended up killing more than 14,000 detainees. In camps in both Cuba and southern Africa, atrocious death rates came not from massacres or gas chambers but from disease and starvation. Yet in these early camps, lethal as they were, most children remained with siblings and their mothers.

Later camps would break with that precedent in shocking ways. In the last years of the World War II, Germans took children from non-Jewish foreign parents upon arrival in the regular concentration camp system, the Konzentrationslager, sending them for denationalization and integration into German society. The children of Jewish parents were more often sent to the subset of Nazi death camps dedicated to extermination of Jews as a people; typically, they were murdered on arrival.

Jewish twins kept alive to be used in Mengele’s medical experiments. These children were liberated from Auschwitz by the Red Army in January 1945. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

In the wake of the death of millions and the abomination that Auschwitz and other death camps represent, classifying any other type of detention facility as a concentration camp can now seem obscene. But it is a mistake to avoid the term. The phrase “concentration camp” was used for sites of mass detention of civilians for nearly four decades before the Nazis came to power. Even their gentler incarnations, such as the internment of military-age males during World War I, harmed internees, and helped to rehabilitate and institutionalize the idea of camps, setting the stage for more lethal models.

Even after World War II’s end exposed concentration camps’ horrors, the mass detention of children continued and evolved. Between 1976 and 1983, officials of Argentina’s military dictatorship detained thousands of adults and stole their children. Some detainees gave birth in a room of the torture center in the officers’ residence at the Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada in Buenos Aires, where detainees were interrogated and most of them executed, with hundreds of their children raised by pro-dictatorship families.

In Cambodia during the same era, the Khmer Rouge put children into forced labor camps, creating dedicated children’s work brigades. Elizabeth Becker, reporting from Phnom Penh, noted the shuttered schools and suspected some clandestine horror was underway when she caught a lone glimpse of “thin children, barefoot and in rags” carrying firewood near the highway. As a nine-year-old, Sopheline Cheam Shapiro had to dig in rice fields from dawn to dusk after losing her father, two brothers, and a grandmother, along with uncles and cousins. “I am no different,” she later wrote, “from most of my generation.”

Camps have often emerged at moments of crisis or in response to a social challenge, when societies are vulnerable to fear or division. Just as detention of children was meant to wear down Boer guerrillas resisting imperial rule a century ago, the detention of children today is meant to deter parents from seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.

These shelters may seem like a temporary solution, but irregular detention tends to persist and warp over time. The torture and extrajudicial detention that began at Guantanamo, Cuba, during America’s 21st-century “War on Terror” had roots in the treatment of Haitian asylum-seekers who were intercepted at sea and imprisoned on the base in the 1990s. HIV-positive detainees were segregated and held in such grotesque conditions (without access to adequate medical or legal assistance) that U.S. courts intervened.

Mrs. Shigeho Kitamoto and her four children, along with other Japanese Americans, were forced from their homes on Bainbridge Island, Wash., to an inland internment site, March 30, 1942. Image courtesy of Associated Press.

Concentration camps rose out of aggressive strategies intended for use in fighting guerrilla insurgencies. Today neither a war on the border nor even a civil conflict can serve as an excuse for this policy. Though there is plenty of military rhetoric, what we really have is a concentration camp policy wielded against refugees, which has devolved into a war on children. The American Academy of Pediatrics has already announced that the policy of separation alone is enough to do significant harm to children. This shift in policy has been sprung on a complex, already overburdened asylum and immigration system with a history of abuse. Under the best of leadership, the surge in children detained would mean overcrowding, sanitation problems, and physical and mental health issues. We do not yet know how many children will be unable to reunite with family members as a result of bureaucratic mix-ups, language barriers, and other issues. And things are unlikely to get better without intervention that ends the policy of separation. History shows that problematic detention practices become normal, and then they get worse.

We can already see the background demonization of refugee children in the pamphlet titled “Unaccompanied Alien Frequently Asked Questions” available through the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement. It reveals both how strongly fears of foreigners have taken root in the United States today, and how the process of locking up children is turning them into targets. The first three questions cover what impact shelters will have on the community, whether kids are carriers of infectious diseases, and whether they are involved with violent gangs.

What is likely to come next? The historical parallels are already evident. As in the era of the Boer War, politicians are saying that detainees locked up by the government against their will are burdening American taxpayers. Asylum-seekers are blamed for bringing detention upon themselves, and more reprehensibly, on their children.

During the two-year existence of the Boer camps, mothers were blamed by British military officials and unsympathetic members of the public alike for the deaths of their children, said to be largely due to the ignorance and unsanitary habits of the mothers themselves. There was little acknowledgment of their involuntary confinement in dangerous conditions without enough food. And yet, it was obvious to early observers that this would not end well. In November 1901, an editorial in The New York Times cited the rising death toll in the camps, explaining that at current levels, “the Boer reconcentrados would be exterminated in less than four years.”

There is no need to see how much history is willing to repeat itself before stopping the current experiment.

The post Why the Tent City for Children Is a Concentration Camp appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Mary Turner, the marker’s named victim, was eight months pregnant. The mob targeted her because she spoke out against the lynching of her husband Hayes. A crowd of several hundred watched the men hang, burn, and shoot Turner, then cut out her fetus and stomp it into the ground.

From 1998 to 2011, I researched and wrote a book about Mary Turner’s lynching. I examined the responses of activists, artists, writers, and local residents to this appalling act. Turner’s story has had a long, complex afterlife: a tangled mixture of shock, outrage, grief, shame, and, too often, silence. The ways we remember, forget, and erase the history of this lynching is an inescapable part of its story: Even the monument to Mary Turner’s death contains bullet holes from a Winchester .270, normally used for killing deer.

The horror of Turner’s lynching did not stay secret. During the late 1910s and early 1920s, the incident galvanized anti-lynching protest around the country. Writers and artists including Angelina Weld Grimké, Meta Warrick Fuller, Anne Spencer, and Jean Toomer saw the lynching as an example of how racial violence traumatizes individuals, families, and communities. Organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC) used Turner’s death in magazine exposés and informational pamphlets as evidence that lynching was less about punishment for black male criminality and more about the public performance of white supremacy.

The Anti-Lynching Crusaders, arguing that lynching was an attack on women as well as men, featured Turner as the centerpiece of a campaign to support federal legislation against mob violence. The Crusaders raised money and awareness for the 1922 Dyer Bill, sponsored by Leonidas C. Dyer, a Republican Representative from Missouri, which proposed to make lynching a felony. The bill passed the House but stalled in the Senate when Southern Democrats threatened a filibuster. Although Turner’s lynching was barbaric, more conventional excuses for mob violence—what Ida B. Wells called the “rape myth”—remained intractable.

In time Turner’s name became a historical footnote, as stories like those of the Scottsboro Boys, in 1931, and Emmett Till, in 1955, dominated headlines.

It was not until the late 20th century that writers and artists began to recover Turner as an example of how mainstream history marginalizes black women. The title of Freida High Tesfagiorgis’s 1985 painting about Turner, “Hidden Memories,” captures the sense of erasure that many others find in her story.

Since then, author Honorée Fanonne Jeffers has published short fiction and poetry about Turner, most notably the poem “dirty south moon” in her 2007 volume Red Clay Suite. Playwright Lekethia Dalcoe’s depiction of the incident, A Small Oak Tree Runs Red, was produced in Chicago (2016) and New York (2018). This February, artist Rachel Marie-Crane Williams brought original images from her graphic narrative in progress, Mary Turner and the Lynching Rampage, to Valdosta State University (VSU)—about 20 miles from where Turner died—for a monthlong display.

The historical marker is by the side of State Road 122 in Lowndes County, Georgia. Photo courtesy of Julie Buckner Armstrong.

For some locals, however, Turner’s story remains taboo—and an open wound. The “Lynching Rampage of 1918” occurred during a single week in mid-May and was spread out over two Georgia counties—Brooks and Lowndes. 11 victims were confirmed. Other bodies of African-American males were found but not identified, and others disappeared, never to be heard from again.

Walter White, who investigated the lynchings for the NAACP, publicly named 16 local mob ringleaders, but in fact a large swath of the population likely saw or took part in the events. Hundreds—from Brooks, Lowndes, and surrounding counties—witnessed Mary Turner’s murder, as well as those of Will Head and Will Thompson, two men accused of complicity in the death of the white farmer Hampton Smith. Hayes Turner’s body hung on a main road, just outside the town of Quitman, for a day before it was cut down. When Sidney Johnson, who killed Smith during a wage dispute, was finally captured and shot, the mob dragged his body the 20-plus miles from Valdosta to the small town of Barney, near the site of the present-day historical marker. How many people watched this terrible parade is unclear.

There is no question that the week’s violence affected victims, families, perpetrators, witnesses—and their descendants. Yet when I began researching Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching in 1998, records were almost impossible to locate. People rarely, if ever, spoke publicly about what happened. Keepers of official civic memory claimed a history of positive race relations, even though Georgia had the second-highest rate of lynchings nationally (following Mississippi). Brooks and Lowndes Counties, because of the 1918 incident, had some of state’s highest numbers.

In the early 2000s, the Mary Turner Project, a small but dedicated group based out of Valdosta State, spearheaded a coalition to erect the historical marker, hoping to end the silence. The marker went up in 2010. Within a year, someone shot a bullet right through its middle.

The approaching 100th anniversary of “Lynching Rampage of 1918” prompts me to consider what I have learned since writing about Mary Turner.

And so much of my knowledge rides on that bullet.

My son found the casing. He was 10 at the time, an eagle-eyed hunter of lizards and bugs. We drove up from our Florida home via I-75, took Exit 29 to Highway 122 heading west, and pulled onto the gravel embankment of the Little River. The book had just come out, and I wanted to make peace with an emotionally difficult project that I had carried around for more than a decade.

I already had heard about the bullet hole. A graduate student passing through for a conference had put a flower in it and snapped a picture, to show me. When the marker went up, the area was nicely landscaped with perennials and mulch. By the time I visited, the flowers were dead. I poked my finger through the bullet hole; my son wandered around in the weeds that were taking over. “Hey Mom,” he said, holding up the casing. “Is this what you’re looking for?

Since then, the marker has been shot at least three more times.

The marker’s text was the result of negotiation between the local Mary Turner Project and the Georgia State Historical Society. Photo courtesy of Julie Buckner Armstrong.

Other historical markers for racial violence have met similar fates. In Florida, the marker depicting the 1923 Rosewood massacre has been repaired multiple times. On my last visit several years ago, chunks were blown out of its protective concrete frame. In 2017, two different Mississippi markers for the 1955 Emmett Till murder were defaced—one by bullets, another by a blunt object. The marker for the 1964 murders of Mississippi Freedom Summer workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner was vandalized multiple times and eventually stolen.

Some people actively try to destroy the past. Some erase more passively, waiting for amnesia’s weeds to take over.

Others refuse to let memory die. For the scholars, filmmakers, artists, and writers who continue producing work about Mary Turner, she symbolizes a double injustice. On one level is her brutal death. On another is the way that she ebbs and flows from historical memory.

One might see artist and activist response to Turner as a forerunner of the recent Say Her Name campaign, which attempts to make sure that women are included in public discussions of violence. Decades before the social media hashtag #SayHerName, Mary Talbert’s band of Anti-Lynching Crusaders circulated pamphlets featuring Turner’s story, trying to move women from the margins to the center of a male-dominated narrative.

Turner’s lynching, although gruesome and shocking, was hardly an isolated incident. While statistics vary, a recent attempt by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) to quantify racial violence in the American South documented 4,075 lynchings between 1877 and 1950. The EJI’s report does not separate victims by gender, but University of North Carolina Wilmington criminologist David Victor Baker has confirmed there were 179 female victims. At least three pregnant women other than Turner were lynched. These numbers may be small, but they are significant.

The temptation, when reading stories such as Turner’s, is to think, “down there, back then, not me.” But that impulse is really the desire to silence: the need to place protective distance between our ideal selves and the reality that anyone can be witness, victim, or perpetrator.

Attacking pregnant women has a long and telling history. The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies documents multiple occurrences—from the Holocaust to more recent incidents in Bosnia, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)—of perpetrators singling out pregnant women for torture, mutilation, and removal of fetuses. The practice goes back to Biblical times. The book of Amos mentions God punishing Ammonites for cutting open pregnant women in Gilead during a border war. An Assyrian poem from c. 1100 B.C. glorifies a military battle where the victor “slits the wombs of pregnant women.”

Looking at Mary Turner within this long, international context reminds us that such violence can take place anytime, anywhere. The sudden ease with which a community can become a mob, or a society can degrade into political violence, is a frightening but sad fact of our shared humanity.

Shooting a hole in a marker does not change the history of Brooks and Lowndes Counties, or the long history of humanity either. Only by confronting—as individuals, communities, and societies—the truth of how we came to be the way we are today, can we make the world better for ourselves and for our children.

My son agrees. As our family drove away from the “Lynching Rampage of 1918,” he told me he hoped the shooter would one day feel remorse and try to make amends.

He said, “You don’t have to like the marker, but you should respect it.”

The post A Hundred Years After Her Lynching, Mary Turner’s Memorial Remains a Battleground appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The earliest modern experiment in detaining groups of civilians without trial was launched by two generals: one who refused to bring camps into the world, and one who did not.

Battles had raged off and on for decades over Cuba’s desire for independence from Spain. After years of fighting with Cuban rebels, Arsenio Martínez Campos, the governor-general of the island, wrote to the Spanish prime minister in 1895 to say that he believed the only path to victory lay in inflicting new cruelties on civilians and fighters alike. To isolate rebels from the peasants who sometimes fed or sheltered them, he thought, it would be necessary to relocate hundreds of thousands of rural inhabitants into Spanish-held cities behind barbed wire, a strategy he called reconcentración.

But the rebels had shown mercy to the Spanish wounded and had returned prisoners of war unharmed. And so Martínez Campos could not bring himself to launch the process of reconcentración against an enemy he saw as honorable. He wrote to Spain and offered to surrender his post rather than impose the measures he had laid out as necessary. “I cannot,” he wrote, “as the representative of a civilized nation, be the first to give the example of cruelty and intransigence.”

Spain recalled Martínez Campos, and in his place sent general Valeriano Weyler, nicknamed “the Butcher.” There was little doubt about what the results would be. “If he cannot make successful war upon the insurgents,” wrote The New York Times in 1896, “he can make war upon the unarmed population of Cuba.”

Civilians were forced, on penalty of death, to move into these encampments, and within a year the island held tens of thousands of dead or dying reconcentrados, who were lionized as martyrs in U.S. newspapers. No mass executions were necessary; horrific living conditions and lack of food eventually took the lives of some 150,000 people.

These camps did not rise out of nowhere. Forced labor had existed for centuries around the world, and the parallel institutions of Native American reservations and Spanish missions set the stage for relocating vulnerable residents away from their homes and forcing them to stay elsewhere. But it was not until the technology of barbed wire and automatic weapons that a small guard force could impose mass detention. With that shift, a new institution came into being, and the phrase “concentration camps” entered the world.

When U.S. newspapers reported on Spain’s brutality, Americans shipped millions of pounds of cornmeal, potatoes, peas, rice, beans, quinine, condensed milk, and other staples to the starving peasants, with railways offering to carry the goods to coastal ports free of charge. By the time the USS Maine sank in Havana harbor in February 1898, the United States was already primed to go to war. Making a call to arms before Congress, President William McKinley said of the policy of reconcentración: “It was not civilized warfare. It was extermination. The only peace it could beget was that of the wilderness and the grave.”

But official rejection of the camps was short-lived. After defeating Spain in Cuba in a matter of months, the United States took possession of several Spanish colonies, including the Philippines, where another rebellion was underway. By the end of 1901, U.S. generals fighting in the most recalcitrant regions of the islands had likewise turned to concentration camps. The military recorded this turn officially as an orderly application of measured tactics, but that did not reflect the view on the ground. Upon seeing one camp, an Army officer wrote, “It seems way out of the world without a sight of the sea,—in fact, more like some suburb of hell.”

In southern Africa, the concept of concentration camps had simultaneously taken root. In 1900, during the Boer War, the British began relocating more than 200,000 civilians, mostly women and children, behind barbed wire into bell tents or improvised huts. Again, the idea of punishing civilians evoked horror among those who saw themselves as representatives of a civilized nation. “When is a war not a war?” asked British Member of Parliament Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman in June 1901. “When it is carried on by methods of barbarism in South Africa.”

Far more people died in the camps than in combat. Polluted water supplies, lack of food, and infectious diseases ended up killing tens of thousands of detainees. Even though the Boers were often portrayed as crude people undeserving of sympathy, the treatment of European descendants in this fashion was shocking to the British public. Less notice was taken of British camps for black Africans who had even more squalid living conditions and, at times, only half the rations allotted to white detainees.

The Boer War ended in 1902, but camps soon appeared elsewhere. In 1904, in the neighboring German colony of South-West Africa—now Namibia—German general Lothar von Trotha issued an extermination order for the rebellious Herero people, writing “Every Herero, with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot.”

The order was rescinded soon after, but the damage inflicted on indigenous peoples did not stop. The surviving Herero—and later the Nama people as well—were herded into concentration camps to face forced labor, inadequate rations, and lethal diseases. Before the camps were fully disbanded in 1907, German policies managed to kill some 70,000 Namibians in all, nearly exterminating the Herero.

It took just a decade for concentration camps to be established in wars on three continents. They were used to exterminate undesirable populations through labor, to clear contested areas, to punish suspected rebel sympathizers, and as a cudgel against guerrilla fighters whose wives and children were interned. Most of all, concentration camps made civilians into proxies in order to get at combatants who had dared defy the ruling power.

While these camps were widely viewed as a disgrace to modern society, this disgust was not sufficient to preclude their future use.

During the First World War, the camps evolved to address new circumstances. Widespread conscription meant that any military-age male German deported from England would soon return in a uniform to fight, with the reverse also being true. So Britain initially focused on locking up foreigners against whom it claimed to have well-grounded suspicions.

British home secretary Reginald McKenna batted away calls for universal internment, protesting that the public had no more to fear from the great majority of enemy aliens than they did from “from the ordinary bad Englishman.” But with the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 by a German submarine and the deaths of more than a thousand civilians, British prime minister Herbert Henry Asquith took revenge, locking up tens of thousands of German and Austro-Hungarian “enemy aliens” in England.

Tanauan reconcentrado camp, Batangas, the Philippines, circa 1901. Image courtesy of University of Michigan Digital Library Collection.

The same year, the British Empire extended internment to its colonies and possessions. The Germans responded with mass arrests of aliens from not only Britain but Australia, Canada, and South Africa as well. Concentration camps soon flourished around the globe: in France, Russia, Turkey, Austro-Hungary, Brazil, Japan, China, India, Haiti, Cuba, Singapore, Siam, New Zealand, and many other locations. Over time, concentration camps would become a tool in the arsenal of nearly every country.

In the United States, more than two thousand prisoners were held in camps during the war. German-born conductor Karl Muck, a Swiss national, wound up in detention in Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia after false rumors that he had refused to conduct “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Unlike earlier colonial camps, many camps during the First World War were hundreds or thousands of miles from the front lines, and life in them developed a strange normalcy. Prisoners were assigned numbers that traveled with them as they moved from camp to camp. Letters could be sent to detainees, and packages received. In some cases, money was transferred and accounts kept. A bureaucracy of detention emerged, with Red Cross inspectors visiting and making reports.

By the end of the war, more than 800,000 civilians had been held in concentration camps, with hundreds of thousands more forced into exile in remote regions. Mental illness and shattered minority communities were just two of the tolls this long-term internment exacted from detainees.

Nevertheless, this more “civilized” approach toward enemy aliens during the First World War managed to rehabilitate the sullied image of concentration camps. People accepted the notion that a targeted group might turn itself in and be detained during a crisis, with a reasonable expectation to one day be released without permanent harm. Later in the century, this expectation would have tragic consequences.

Yet even as the First World War raged, the camps’ bitter roots survived. The Ottoman government made use of a less-visible system of concentration camps with inadequate food and shelter to deport Armenians into the Syrian desert as part of an orchestrated genocide.

And after the war ended, the evolution of concentration camps took another grim turn. Where internment camps of the First World War had focused on foreigners, the camps that followed—the Soviet Gulag, the Nazi Konzentrationslager—used the same methods on their own citizens.

In the first Cuban camps, fatalities had resulted from neglect. Half a century later, camps would be industrialized using the power of a modern state. The concept of the concentration camp would reach its apotheosis in the death camps of Nazi Germany, where prisoners were reduced not just to a number, but to nothing.

The 20th century made General Martínez Campos into a dark visionary. Refusing to institute concentration camps on Cuba, he had said, “The conditions of hunger and misery in these centers would be incalculable.” And once they were unleashed on the world, concentration camps proved impossible to eradicate.

The post The Invention and Evolution of the Concentration Camp appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Now, both my daughter and I understand that genetics determined her sex months earlier, but it’s fun for us to have a story that imagines the universe magically speaking to me. When I found out that she was a girl during an ultrasound, and an amniocentesis confirmed the result, the confirmation wasn’t exciting. And that’s a story she never asks me to repeat.

So I am not surprised at the appeal of gender reveal parties, at which expectant parents deliver the doctor’s pronouncement—no peeking—to a bakery, with instructions to make a pink or blue cake or cupcakes. During the party, they cut the cake or give out the cupcakes, and the color hidden under the frosting reveals to everyone whether the couple is expecting a boy or a girl. The party is suspenseful (revealing a secret), egalitarian (everyone finds out at once), and delicious (cake!)—a perfect afternoon. Unheard of a decade or two ago, gender reveal parties are the latest manifestation of the conflict between modern technological pregnancy and its ancient legacy of mystery. That this all plays out through pink and blue cake speaks to the peculiar anxieties and ironies of our time.

Now that almost every detail about pregnancy can be known, it’s hard to imagine a time when carrying a child was a hidden, and private, affair. Prior to the 19th century, the only way to be sure a woman was pregnant was at the quickening, when she could feel movement in her belly. This moment was the woman’s alone to experience, and she had the power to share her news or not. Women could withhold this information or adjust its timing in order to protect information about who the father was.

Gender reveal parties rely on a confusion over sex and gender. Photo courtesy of Kristin Ausk/Flickr.

In the Middle Ages, piss prophets used a combination of appeals to the divine and examination of a woman’s urine to create a precursor to the pregnancy test. But before there were ultrasounds and genetic testing, the sex of the baby was revealed only at birth. Of course, once people knew they were pregnant, they attempted to predict sex. Even today old wives’ tales endure, focusing on the position of the belly bump (low: boy) or the cravings a woman has (sweet things: girl) or how much morning sickness a woman experiences (more sick: girl).

Mystery accompanied fault-finding. Until recently women had limited legal power or autonomy over their bodies and shouldered blame for their child not meeting social expectations. During the Renaissance, the theory of maternal impressions warned that every thought a woman had affected an unborn baby. If a child was born with abnormalities, those were thought to have been caused by the mother’s thoughts. Some cultures believed that women were able to control the baby’s sex. Even today, women are still blamed for birthing the wrong gender, though we now understand that the baby’s sex is determined by the sperm.

The moment of birth for women often was—and still might be—a frightening reckoning with others’ expectations as well as a moment in which mysteries were solved. Would she produce the required heir? Would she produce the required sex? Would she even survive childbirth?

With scientific advances of the 20th century, the puzzling, worrisome, and solitary experience of pregnancy gave way to a glut of information, advice, images, and a new set of expectations. Some developments gave women control. The history of the pregnancy test shows how this technology allowed women to confirm pregnancy earlier than ever before and privately make decisions about it.

Scientific advances also meant more opportunities to connect with an unborn child. Fetal ultrasounds, originally used only to diagnose problem pregnancies, have become emotional occasions during which parents bond with their fetus and even discover its sex. Some parents pay for private 3D-ultrasound viewings solely so that they can look at their baby.

But the medicalization of pregnancy, which Robbie Davis-Floyd refers to as the technocratic model of birth, led to power shifts. Women actually lost control over their bodies as the people around them became fixated on the growth of their fetus. Machines and tests used by doctors replaced instinct and feedback from mothers to assess the progress of pregnancy.

Furthermore, expectant parents are expected to share ultrasound pictures with the rest of the world, even to upload them to social media sites like Facebook or to post online videos. Television programs use ultrasounds as a form of entertainment. Social pressures on women ask them to examine the air they breathe, monitor what they eat, and measure their levels of stress, all in the name of having a healthier fetus. While some of this research may lead to healthier babies, it also brings increased judgment of, and restrictions on, pregnant women.

The medicalized pregnancy has also become a commoditized one. Outside experts have come to dominate pregnancy advice. Hotels sell baby-making packages, gyms offer pregnancy yoga and massages, and an entire market is devoted to products supposedly educating the fetus in the womb.

Amidst all these pressures there has arisen a greater desire for rituals, like belly-bump photo sessions, belly tattoos, and elaborate baby showers. The months of pregnancy are now divided into smaller and smaller segments, each filled with invented customs.

The gender reveal party has become yet another ritual, and a way to retrieve the mysteries of pregnancy. If, during the age of the mysterious pregnancy, a pregnant woman had little power but much knowledge about her body—knowledge that others depended on her to reveal—gender reveal parties reclaim the privilege of revelation, along with some control. Parents can orchestrate these parties, choose their rituals, and plan for the future with the knowledge that they are likely to survive childbirth. The ritual includes birth partners, allowing them to share in this womb time, just as they expect to be involved in egalitarian parenting after the birth.

But the logic behind gender reveal parties contradicts many of our current sensibilities about gender. First, there’s the name: It should really be called a sex reveal party, since sex is a function of one’s DNA. These parties conflate sex and gender. As the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir said, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” A person’s gender identity may not match the sex they were assigned at birth, and gender roles are culturally constructed notions.

Gender reveal parties thus contrast with recent progress in the United States, including more rights for transgender people and those who are gender-nonconforming. Many families today wish for unlimited possibilities for their children, regardless of sex or gender. Some parents intentionally choose names that do not signal male or female. They cheered when McDonald’s announced that it would stop asking children if they wanted a boy or girl toy with their Happy Meal. Some parents buy from fashion lines that market gender-neutral clothing for infants. A ritual that emphasizes the importance of sex or gender seems to go against such progress, especially with oddly anachronistic themes like “Little Man or Little Miss” and “Bows or Bowties.”

Moreover, the new ritual of the gender reveal party might offer women only pseudo-power. When others are brought into pregnancy—not only doctors and friends and relatives but also cake decorators and party planners—women cede control over what’s happening in their bodies. Projecting human attributes onto the fetus makes it easier to imagine that it is a baby at an earlier stage, which also shifts power away from a woman’s control of her own body.

Still, the desire to create new rituals surrounding birth makes sense to me. When we have constant information at our fingertips and share our innermost thoughts with others, the idea of having one aspect of life where we control the mystery and create suspense for others is seductive. The birth story I share with my daughter is special in part because it provides us with an origin story of our own. Humans need stories, myths, and rituals along with our neonatal vitamins and ultrasounds.

Once we’ve cut the cut the cake and publicly declared “It’s a girl” or “It’s a boy”—what do we want that to mean? What’s troubling about the gender reveal party is that it’s a new ritual that doesn’t take us forward. Rituals that recreate the mysteries of the past must remember the history of struggles for the hard-won freedoms and empowerment that came with them. A ritual that sexes and genders a person before they are born places limits rather than offers possibilities on who they may become.

The post What the Gender Reveal Fad Says About Modern Pregnancy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The feature that made his plan so innovative—and therefore risky? It included rooms that had no windows.

A windowless room hardly seems daringly innovative nowadays, but in the 1940s it was a shocking proposal for a patient wing. It violated a long-lived understanding of what, exactly, the role of the hospital building should be in terms of promoting health.

For nearly two centuries, hospital designers had based their layouts on a fundamental assumption: In order to remain disease-free and health-giving, hospital spaces required direct access to sunlight and fresh air. This rule was the product of a centuries-old belief that disease could be spread by, or perhaps even directly caused by, dark, stagnant spaces where bad air—smelly, vitiated, stagnant, particulate-laden air—accumulated.

In the late 18th century, this correlation was statistically certain. Epidemics always hit the tenants of crowded, impoverished urban districts harder than the inhabitants of airier, wealthier neighborhoods. Patients in large urban hospitals suffered cross-infections and secondary infections far more frequently than patients in rural or small-town hospitals. It was common knowledge that if windowless rooms didn’t directly breed disease, they bred the conditions that led to disease.

Given this correlation, before the 20th century, every single room within a hospital typically had access to the outdoors. Corridors had windows. Linen closets had windows. In some hospitals, even the ventilation ducts and enclosures for plumbing pipes and risers had windows. Windows in patient rooms and operating rooms were so large that the glare caused problems—keeping patients awake and causing momentary blindness in surgeons during operations.

Late 19th-century and early 20th-century advances in medical theories and practices altered, but did not erase, a faith in windows. With the development of germ theory, sunlight and fresh air had new purposes. Experiments proved that ultraviolet light was germicidal. So windows of clear glass, or even of special “vita-glass” that did not block the UV rays, were a means of surface decontamination.

Similarly, tuberculosis sanatoria records proved that simple exposure to fresh air could be curative. The hospital building itself was a form of therapy. In a 1940 issue of the architectural journal Pencil Points, Talbot F. Hamlin confidently noted that “the quality of the surroundings of the sick person may be as important in the cure as the specific therapeutic measures themselves.”

But surroundings were important, partly, because of who went to hospitals in the first place. Indeed, until the late 19th century, medical treatment was not the reason to go to a hospital—poverty was. The vast majority of 19th-century hospital patients were charity cases—sick people who could not afford a doctor’s house call, had no family to care for them, and had no place else to go. A patient would occupy the same bed in a hospital ward—which housed anywhere from half a dozen to 30 patients—for weeks, sometimes even months. The doctor made rounds once a day. Nurses provided food, changed bandages, cleaned, and changed linens—but provided very little in terms of hands-on treatment. The hospital’s scrupulously clean, bright, airy rooms were an environmental antidote to the tenement surroundings from which impoverished patients came.

But the population of hospitals changed in the first decades of the 20th century. Medical advances, urban growth, and philanthropic transformations turned hospitals into a new kind of institution—where persons of all classes went to get cutting-edge treatment. Anesthesia and asepsis made hospital surgeries not only safer but also more bearable. New equipment like X-ray machines, ophthalmoscopes, and cardiographs improved diagnostic and therapeutic options. Bacteriological lab technicians could identify pathogens with a certainty undreamed of during the preceding era of symptomatic diagnosis. By the early 20th century, what happened in hospitals was increasingly about medical procedures and efficient workflow, not the ostensible healthiness of the environment in itself.

These changes made the limitations of the earlier “therapeutic” hospital designs glaringly apparent. In order to provide a window in every room, buildings could not be wider than two rooms deep; this inevitably required multiple long narrow wings. Such rambling structures were expensive to build, prohibitively expensive to heat, light, and supply with water, and inefficient and labor-intensive to operate. Food reached the patients cold after being trucked from a distant central kitchen; patients requiring operations were wheeled through numerous buildings to the surgical suite.

Hospital designers thus began to arrange practitioners, spaces, and equipment into a more effective layout. Catchwords changed from “light” and “air” to “efficiency” and “flexibility.” An emphasis on efficiency rapidly took over the utilitarian areas of the hospital; time and motion studies determined layouts and locations of kitchens, laundry, and central sterile supplies. Diagnostic and treatment spaces were re-designed to establish efficient, but aseptically safe, paths for the movement of patients, nurses, technicians, and supplies.

But, initially, it left the design of inpatient departments unaltered.

Hospital designers and practitioners worried that patient areas designed for efficiency, not healthiness, would prolong treatment, impede recovery, or even cause deaths. In a 1942 issue of Modern Hospital, Lt. Wilber C. McLin considered it “unthinkable even to consider the possibilities of applying time and motion studies to the methods of direct patient care.” Inpatient departments remained sacrosanct temples of light and air.

By the 1940s, therefore, most hospital buildings were odd mixtures of efficiently arranged medical treatment spaces and inefficiently arranged nursing units. Nurses trudged up and down long, open wards that held 20 or more patients, or long, double-loaded corridors that connected smaller (six-, four- or two-bed) wards and private rooms. Service areas were at the far end of that walk; getting even basic supplies was a long hike. Pedometers proved that the daily distance was best counted in miles; some nurses averaged eight to 10 per shift. In 1939, prominent Philadelphia doctor Joseph C. Doane drily observed that “some hospitals are apparently planned on the erroneous theory that nurses wing their way from distant service rooms to far off beds without incurring fatigue.”

This was the design dilemma that confronted Neergaard, an iconoclastic rising star in the brand-new profession of “hospital consultant” (doctors who advised building committees and architects on best practices). He proposed streamlining nursing unit design, keeping windows in the inviolable patient rooms, but prioritizing efficiency over direct access to sunlight and fresh air in the adjacent service rooms. His plan allowed two different nursing units (groups of patients overseen by one head nurse) to share the same windowless central service rooms, reducing spatial redundancy.

Neergaard calculated that this “double pavilion plan” required only two-thirds of the floor area of a traditional nursing unit layout. It also moved the service rooms closer to the patient rooms, drastically reducing a nurse’s daily travels. His design was a first foray into treating the hospital as if it were any other building. The structure was a tool, facilitating the delivery of medical care, not a therapy in itself.

Neergaard knew his ideas would be contentious. In 1937, his presentation at an American Hospital Association convention prompted the prominent hospital architects Carl A. Erickson and Edward F. Stevens to resign from a committee rather than be seen as supporting Neergaard’s proposals. One prominent hospital architect called the double pavilion plan “essentially a slum.”

Neergaard’s ideas, however, won out. Rising costs and decreasing revenue sources made reduction of hospital construction and operational budgets a fiscal imperative. Centralized design reduced the amount of expensive exterior wall construction, facilitated centralization of services, and minimized nurse staffing requirements by reducing travel distances. By the 1950s, with the advent of antibiotics and improved aseptic practices, the medical establishment also believed that patient healthiness could be maintained regardless of room design. Some doctors even preferred the total environmental control offered by air conditioning, central heating, and electric lighting. Windows were no longer necessary to healthy hospitals, and by the 1960s and 1970s even windowless patient rooms appeared.

The efficient, inhuman, and monotonous buildings of the second half of the 20th century bear witness to the extent to which hospital design became a tool to facilitate medicine rather than a therapy in itself. Today, a stay in a hospital room is endured, not enjoyed.

The pendulum, however, is still swinging. In 1984, hospital architect Roger Ulrich published an article that had one clear and influential finding: Patients in hospital rooms with windows improved at a faster rate and at greater percentage than did patients in windowless rooms.

The post How Hospital Rooms Went from Airy Temples to “Inhuman” Machines appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

How are Californians going to save Spanish?

Yes, I know that a call to preserve the Spanish language might seem ludicrous in a state whose very name comes from a Spanish romance novel. Nearly half of us are either from the Spanish-speaking world, or trace our heritage there. We constantly hear Spanish—in our neighborhoods, our workplaces, and in our media; an estimated 38 percent of Californians speak Spanish (the second highest percentage after New Mexico). In the U.S. more than 37 million people now speak Spanish, up from 11 million in 1980.

And yes, my question about saving Spanish may seem daft now, as America’s deranged politics pit Trumpian xenophobia, with its fear of being overrun by foreigners and their languages, against liberal triumphalism about growing diversity.

But—and I speak to that small, hardy tribe of Americans who still prefer to be ruled by facts and not fears—the realities of immigration, education, and language acquisition put the lie to the notion that Spanish has nowhere to go but up. To the contrary, there are clear signs that the Spanish language has already begun its decline. Which is why Californians, who have long benefited from our state’s bilingualism, should think now about how we are going to preserve it.

Spanish is confronting what might be called the “Three Generation Death” law of non-English languages here. German, Italian, and Polish all but disappeared after three generations—a first, immigrant generation that learned some English, a second, U.S.-born bilingual generation that lost its proficiency in the non-English language over time, and a third generation that grew up speaking English only, and knew the old language only by studying it.

It’s possible that Spanish in 21st century California may prove to be a little more durable, given the undeniable cultural power of the language and the geographic (and now digital) proximity of the Spanish-speaking world. But it’s far more likely that Spanish will simply become the latest and largest tombstone in the language graveyard that is America.

Census statistics and Pew Research Center analysis tell the tale. While nearly 80 percent of all people who identify as Hispanic (and are age 5 and older) spoke Spanish in the previous decade, that number is expected to fall to about two-thirds by 2020. While 25 percent of Hispanics spoke only English at home in 2010, that figure is estimated to reach 34 percent in 2020. Here in California, the trend is most evident in our schools, where the numbers of English-language learners who speak Spanish has fallen to 1.1 million, from nearly 1.4 million a decade ago.

Spanish’s decline is likely to accelerate even as the percentage of people who trace their heritage to the Spanish-language world accelerates. To a great extent, this reflects the law of the three generations. While 61 percent of first-generation Latino arrivals to this country are Spanish-dominant and 33 percent are bilingual, some 69 percent of third-generation Latinos are English-dominant, and 29 percent are bilingual.

Other trends also will hurt Spanish. Even before the U.S. elected a Mexican-slurring bigot threatening a border wall, immigration to the U.S. from Mexico was at or below net zero, and immigration from Latin America was in deep decline. That’s unlikely to change, given growing middle-class prosperity, lower birth rates and higher education levels across much of Latin America. In this country, the U.S.-born constitute a rapidly increasing percentage of people of Spanish-speaking heritage. Greater integration of families is another factor; more than a quarter of Latino babies have a non-Latino parent.

The Spanish-language media are already grappling with the pressures of this change. Univision helped create Fusion, an English-language network, to woo the rising generations of English-speaking Latinos. (More recently, the network has repositioned itself to focus on millennials of all backgrounds). But there is likely to be considerable carnage among U.S.-based Spanish-language broadcasters and newspapers, which have been losing audiences as more Latino adults consume their news in English. Also troubling for such media: Surveys suggest that the percentage of Latino adults who get their news in both languages is also declining.

At root, this is less the story of the decline of Spanish than it is the familiar tale of immigrants and their descendants integrating enthusiastically into American life. Another branch of the story involves the unrivaled and growing power of English as our planet’s dominant tongue. English proficiency is on the rise in every corner of the earth—as the language of global commerce, culture, and technology. It’s also a wonderfully democratic language, without the divisive gender or class distinctions of Romance and other languages, without the tricky tones of Asian languages, and without the complex grammatical constructions that make German and Russian such slogs.

Californians should welcome the trend. Our more homegrown, more English-speaking population should be more cohesive, and thus have a greater chance of better governing itself. But English’s rise also poses important questions for California, because of our state’s special interest in the Spanish language. It would be good for the Golden State if we found ways to stop the decline, and preserve Spanish in our state.

The reasons for such preservation go far beyond the desire to honor the heritage of those Californians of Spanish-speaking ancestry. Spanish is at the heart of the history of California. It’s not merely that we were a Spanish colony founded by Spanish missionaries. Our state itself was founded in Spanish, as you’ll see if you look up the records of California’s original 1849 constitutional convention in Monterey and realize that was a bilingual event, with translation by W.E.P. Hartnell. (Fittingly, one of California’s greatest community colleges, a Salinas school that’s good at educating native Spanish speakers, today bears his name). For the first 30 years of our state, the constitution required that all laws be published in Spanish and English. (The San Francisco anti-immigrant forces that wrote the openly racist 1879 constitution changed that).

Preserving Spanish would serve the present and the future as well. There’s big money to be made if we can increase trade with a Spanish-speaking world on the rise. And it would be a huge step-up for our education system to make Spanish a core requirement. Right now, you can graduate from a California high school without taking even one course in a foreign language. And the UC and Cal State systems require only two years of foreign language for admission. That borders on the criminally negligent, given all we know about the good that learning another language does for our brains.

In November, California voters approved Prop 58, but that modest measure merely removed some bureaucratic barriers to teaching California students in languages other than English. Spanish needs much more, including state requirements and investment so that instruction is available to all. Your columnist is very grateful to have attended Pasadena private schools that made Spanish a full academic subject, with the same number of class hours as math and science and English, from grades six to 12. California would be much better off if that was the standard statewide.

If we preserve Spanish, we’ll have a comparative advantage over the rest of the country, where the language doesn’t have the same history and is more likely to die out. Indeed, if we do this right, Spanish could become a special force in California, distinguishing us and binding us together.

And with that happy thought, I wish you Feliz Navidad y Prospero Año Nuevo.

The post Is California Losing Its Ability to Hablar Español? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Nearly 20 years ago, neuroscientist Simon LeVay helped pioneer the study of the science of sexual orientation. Observing the brains of gay and straight men and women, he discovered slight structural differences that seemed to occur on the basis of sexuality — with some brain structures of gay men resembling those of women more than those of straight men. “It got a lot of media attention back then,” said LeVay. Below, the author of Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation, chats with Zócalo about where the field has gone, the biological differences between gay and straight men and women, how bisexuality differs among men and women, and what his research means for political and religious beliefs about homosexuality.

Q. Where has the study of sexual orientation gone since your study?

A. There are a number of different lines of evidence. One is the evidence that genes play a significant role. That is particularly true for men. We know from family studies and twin studies that genes account for about half the reason why a man has the sexual orientation he does. In women, it’s probably a bit lower – it’s maybe only a quarter of the reason, if you like, why a woman is heterosexual or a lesbian. There’s a significant effect in both sexes, though certainly not a complete effect. For example, you can have identical twins who share all the same genes but have different sexual orientations. It’s not the whole story, but it is significant. No one has gotten those genes in a bottle yet. No one has identified specific genes that contribute to a person’s being gay or straight. So that is something, hopefully, for the future.

There are also other biological factors that may not be under genetic control. One is hormone levels during fetal life, specifically the level of testosterone, which seems to be the key player in sexual differentiation before birth. High levels of testosterone, typically seen in male fetuses, tend to drive the development of the brain in a more masculine direction. Low levels of testosterone more typically seen in female fetuses allow the brain to follow its own endogenous, independent program of development, which tends to go in a more female direction. There is a lot of evidence now from animal experiments that those levels of hormones can influence the ultimate sexual preference of animals when they’re adults. So you can produce animals of a particular orientation by manipulating levels of testosterone during the early period of brain development.

Observations in humans suggest something similar is true. There are certain syndromes in which the levels of testosterone that a fetus experiences are not typical for that sex. There is, for instance, a syndrome called congenital adrenal hyperplasia, where female fetuses exposed to higher levels of testosterone than would usually be the case. Women who have this condition are more likely to experience same-sex attraction and engage in same-sex relationships than comparison groups of women, such as their unaffected sisters, who were brought up in a similar way but without the unusual hormonal experience.

Q. What are some of the physical ways these genes or conditions manifest?

Conditions like that are not common, so the question is, is that relevant to the great majority of gays and lesbians who don’t have an obvious medical condition? There does seem to be growing evidence that prenatal hormones really do influence the rest of us, too. One way people have looked at this is by looking for anatomical markers that say something about our early development. One is finger-length ratios. There has been quite a lot of media coverage of this. This basic difference seems to reflect differences in hormone exposure during early development. What has been found is that lesbians’ finger-length ratios are shifted in a more masculine direction.

It is important to emphasize that this is very much a statistical thing. You can’t diagnose sexual orientation by looking at different fingers. But if you look at large numbers of people, then these differences do emerge. The markers tell you something was different in early development between those women who eventually become lesbians and those who don’t. In some studies they’ve gone further and divided lesbians – to some extent, lesbians have called themselves “butch” or “femme,” those are the slang terms to describe lesbians who feel more masculine or more feminine. According to one study a few years ago, these finger length differences are particularly relevant to those who identify as “butch.” Butch lesbians may be under greater biological influence to become lesbians. That’s just one study, and it may turn out to be wrong, but that’s the direction we are moving, to look at finer distinctions rather than lumping all gay people together.

For men, the finger-length ratio doesn’t show any great difference, but other anatomical features, like arm lengths, do suggest the same sort of conclusion. These studies, as well as cognitive psychological studies, point to the fact that gay people are not just different because they are interested in same-sex partners. They also differ in other ways. Gay men tend to have better verbal abilities than heterosexual men. Lesbians tend to have better special abilities than heterosexual women. These are part of a package of traits that flow out of this process of sexual differentiation that happens very early in life, probably before birth. These lines of evidence collectively point rather strongly toward a biological interpretation of sexual orientation.

Q. Where does bisexuality fit into this picture – how do bisexuals differ from, say, straight people or gay people?

A. It’s very interesting because there is a major difference between the sexes. Bisexuality seems pretty uncommon in men. There are quite a few young men who go through a phase of calling themselves bisexual before identifying as gay. The number of men who throughout their lives feel they are equally or roughly equally attracted to both sexes is quite small, much smaller than the number of people who are gay.

For women, the opposite is true. There are many more bisexual women than there are lesbian women. Some researchers, depending on how you measure it, assert that almost all women are bisexual, based on studies of genital responses. You can measure a person’s physiological arousal to erotic images. With that kind of test, men fall very readily into two groups:. it is hard to find any men who will respond equally strongly to both men and women. Women, on the other hand, regardless of whether they identify as straight or bisexual or lesbian, respond about equally to all erotic imagery. At that level it is hard to define women as being lesbian or straight at all. We really don’t know why there is that basic sexual difference. I speculate toward the end of the book about the way inhibitory circuits work in the hypothalamus. There are inhibitory loops that set up a sort of winner-take-all circuit, whereby the synaptic mechanisms responsible for sexual orientation become very polarized during development. In women, this loop may be less active. But this is speculative, based on observations of animals.

Q. Are there any factors after birth that can have an impact on sexual orientation?

A. We don’t know of factors later in life that influence our sexual orientation. There may be such factors, but evidence points rather strongly to early phases of life. Certainly in animals, you can manipulate sexual orientation with hormones in the early phases. But you can take an adult rat and mess with its hormones all you like, but you’ll never change its sexual orientation. Still, we can’t rule out that something might happen during childhood or puberty that might be relevant.

There is a lot more fluidity of sexual orientation in women than men. Women may change how they describe themselves over their life spans, and they may become aware of same-sex attraction later in life, often in a way that is a complete surprise to them. Men may also come out as gay later in life, but it’s generally not a surprise. It’s a matter of being open about something they knew all their lives. There’s something different going on in women. They can acquire a new sexual orientation later in life. They may say it was a certain woman they met, or molestation or assault they suffered. I don’t want to rule out the possibility of these causal factors, but still, you have to remember that genes operate throughout life. The fact that I’m bald, for example – I’m bald because bald genes run in my family. But I had a full head of hair for three decades before that trait showed itself. The same could be true for psychological traits and sexual orientation. As geneticists say, we become more and more the victims of our genes the older we get. In childhood, we see nongenetic effects because parental influence is so strong. After we branch out on our own, we show our true colors, if you like. I wouldn’t rule out the idea that genes are influencing a sexual trait just because it doesn’t emerge until you’re 30 or 40 or 50.

Q. Genes have been shown to be remarkably similar for people of different races. How “different” are gay people from straight people?

A. There have always been stereotypes about gay people, mostly around their gender nonconformist attitude, the ‘effeminate’ gay men or ‘mannish’ lesbians. These are the descriptions you hear. That has been around a long time and it has not been helpful in terms of acceptance of gay people, particularly the idea that gay men are unmasculine. When you think about, for example, all of the gay teens who have taken their lives recently, a lot of it may have to do with their coming out as gay, but there is also clearly the notion that it is their unmasculinity that people pick up on. Often times, people see this long before these kids are old enough to have a sexual orientation. “Pre-gay” children are already notably different. That gets picked up on and kids are victimized. There are stereotypes, and there is a kernel of truth to them. Sometimes it is subtle, a slight difference in verbal or spatial ability, but sometimes it’s striking and flamboyant. In that case, you may be able to recognize gay people by using ‘gaydar’ – that is, by picking up on unconscious behavioral traits that are gender-atypical.

There are so many studies looking at so many different traits where gay people tend to be shifted in the direction of the female sex. It’s hard to say how that compares to a racial difference. There are so many conceptual differences between race and sexual orientation, but I do think there is a lot more to being gay than simply who you’re sexually attracted to. Science really supports that. Being gay is part of a package of traits that are gender variant or gender nonconformist that varies a lot from one person to another. It’s what makes gay people interesting. It’s what allows them to make unique contributions to culture. It makes them worthwhile, as having something specific to offer, rather than just saying, “Be attracted to whoever you want, I don’t care.”

Q. What have been the political implications of your research, particularly in terms of discrimination against gay people?

A. Generally it’s quite positive. I speak from my perspective as a gay man who thinks gay people should be welcomed in the world and protected from discrimination and allowed to marry. There are people, particularly some Christian conservatives, who tend to see homosexuality as a chosen lifestyle. It’s the idea that there is really nothing more to homosexuality than straight people saying, “I think I’ll try that gay thing this weekend.” Having that point of view allows people to not like gay people, or not want to give them fair protection. I think this is why most of the opposition I’ve gotten is from conservative Christians, who say my research is wrong or biased. And of course not all churches take that point of view at all, I’m not labeling Christians generally as anti-gay.

There has been, in some quarters, a sense that this kind of research might be dangerous. Some have feared it might bring us back to a time when people thought of homosexuality as some kind of disorder, and that we need to get into the hypothalamus and replace cells and check genes of fetuses so you can abort the ones that were likely to be gay. I think we need to work together to create a world where people don’t feel it necessary to take that view. This is part of the whole trend in human biology – that we will get this power over our own lives and the lives of our children that preceding generations never had. What we do with that power is going to be a major dilemma in this century.

Q. Where do genes that influence sexual orientation fit into evolution?

A. The short answer is, we don’t know. The long answer is in my book. So here is a short version of the long answer. If we assume there are genes influencing sexual orientation, it is very likely that those genes are reducing the reproductive success of gay people. After all, both gay men and lesbians have fewer offspring by virtue of being gay. There are plenty of genes that have the effect of reducing people’s reproductive success. And when I say reproductive success, I don’t mean it’s great to have tons of children – it’s just the technical term for how many children you have.

The usual interpretation is that such genes are kept in circulation because they have effects that also increase the reproductive success of other people who have the genes. To give a more specific example, there may be a gene that, for example, makes a man more likely to be gay. But if that gene is present in that man’s sister, it might make her more attracted to men than she otherwise might have been. This might be a gene for being attracted to men operating in both sexes. Female relatives of gay men might have more children than they otherwise would. There is evidence to support that – a couple of Italian studies that show that female relatives of gay men do have more offspring, even making up for the offspring that the gay men did not have. On balance it was a net benefit to the gene because of the extra offspring.

There are a number of models like that, which would say that the genes are kept going in the whole population because they influence the reproductive success of the relatives of gay people. I know that kind of model, in a sense, portrays gay people as the losers because the genes had a “bad” effect on them and a “good” effect on their sisters, let’s say. But what’s good or bad for a gene is not what’s good or bad for a person. We don’t judge our goodness or success or happiness based on genes in our cells. It’s much more complicated than that. So anyway, there are models that explain how ‘gay genes’ might persist in the population, but we won’t really know until the genes have been identified and studied.

*Photo courtesy Kevin Wong.

The post How Genes Shape Our Sexual Orientation appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Comfortable furniture, soft lighting, art, and gardens aren’t usually the stuff of hospitals.

“There’s a new generation of hospitals and clinics on the rise,” said Dana Dubbs, a health care journalist and owner of Dana Dubbs Communications. “They’re often compared to hotels.”

Healthcare providers, administrators, architects and designers are embracing the idea that health care design helps patients heal. In an event sponsored by the California HealthCare Foundation, Dubbs joined Childrens Hospital Los Angeles vice president for patient care services and chief nursing officer Mary Dee Hacker, healthcare consultant Robin Orr, and architect James Theimer to find out what hospitals are doing differently, what makes for good design, and how it helps patients and staff.

Far from Florence Nightingale

As Hacker explained, hospitals haven’t always been about healing. “Forty years ago the purpose of a hospital was to cure disease,” she said. “Over time we began to look at the fact that health is more than just physiology and biology.” The noise, clutter, and bleakness of old hospital rooms can inhibit healing, family visits, and make it harder for patients to go back home knowing what to do. “The old Florence Nightingale ward rooms are inadequate to create a healing environment,” Hacker said.

But research into the notion of healthy design is relatively new. Orr, a member of the board of the Center for Health Design, noted that the center starting to bring together architects, planners, providers, and administrators in 1994 to think about the issue.”What we remember of the hospital is from when we had our tonsils out, and it’s a dark, scary place,” Orr said. “We began to use words like healing and patient-centered and people thought, ‘Whoa, you must be from California.'”

As Hacker and Theimer agreed, for years architects and nurses didn’t talk about what patients needed. “You find their expectations are artificially low,” Theimer said of patients. “You say, ‘What would you like if you could have anything?’ And they say, ‘I’d love if they closed the door to the exam room.’” Theimer added that architects “have to create rules that raise expectations.”

Concrete changes

As the executive sponsor through the planning and design of a new 317-bed, $600 million tower at the Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, Hacker explained some components the hospital used to create healthy design. The most immediately visible one is the hospital’s playground. “That is what children do – play,” she said. “As you pull onto the campus the first thing a child will see is a playground.” The playground not only serves children of all abilities, but supports the child’s recovery and reminds “that someday this child will be healthy and happy again,” she said. The tower will also include easy-to-clean rooms, and a new cafeteria, moved from the basement to an upper floor with full windows and outdoor seating.

Hacker’s hospital also took something of a gamble after focus groups with parents suggested that children shouldn’t always be in private rooms, though that’s what research in the health care design field suggests. Children, she noted, “are only in rooms alone if they’re sleeping or if they’ve misbehaved.” When parents expressed reluctance to leave kids in single rooms, Hacker’s team decided to build 80 percent private rooms and 20 percent semi-private, and to monitor what works. Of course, as Orr noted, for grown-ups, single rooms still are ideal. “It was terrible having a roommate,” she said of her hospital experience. “One of my roommates died in the middle of the night. The other one was having lots of problems breathing and making all sorts of noises. I could not sleep.”

Theimer’s firm took inspiration from outside the world of health care to create a rural health clinic that also served as a community center. The clinic featured a restaurant and café, conference rooms, and event space. “It was wellness design instead of health design,” he said. “We want to create spaces that promote health as opposed to treat sickness.” It’s what Orr called the “hospital without walls,” which transforms hospitals into places of learning, interaction, and community. Part of what’s making that possible, Hacker emphasized, is the consumer. “My mother never questioned her doctor,” she said. “I tend to be an interactive client.”

For hospitals still waiting for the funds to remodel, Orr noted in Q&A, there are some quick fixes that could be made by watching operations, or simply using common sense. “If the shelf is in the wrong place, so patients can’t see the flowers, we moved the shelves,” she said.

Space for staff

Some hospitals, Orr noted, manage patient satisfaction but forget about staff. “You’ll see the beautiful lobby, all marble, and then you go behind the scenes,” she said, “and the kinds of environments they’re in were dreadful, bleak.” Research shows, she said, that staff do better in environments where they feel they have more control – they require places to go for quiet. “Where’s their playground?” she asked.

Hacker agreed. “Our current environment is horrible. We’ve got a bathroom, a locker room, and a couch in the same space,” she said. The new design she discussed includes large and beautiful staff lounges, along with quiet rooms to accommodate a staff that spans generations. “I don’t want to hear about their party last night, and they don’t want to hear about my grandchildren,” she said.

Theimer added that the staff, too, can have low expectations when it comes to natural lighting and white walls. “They’re used to being in the center of the buildings, in dark spaces with artificial lighting,” he said. As for the paint, he noted, “Why do buildings have to be white? Because that’s antiseptic, that’s what we learned? Now, color is a good thing, and I hope that’s not just a trend,” he said. He also uses rubber flooring which makes it easier for staff that stands and move all day.

Culture changes

But as the panelists noted, design isn’t everything. When it comes to creating better atmospheres for sleep – though materials and private rooms go a long way – a hospital’s culture has to change as well. “We might talk a little softer,” Orr said, adding, “Hospital cultures are so powerful… they can shoot you down so fast.” The cultural change should happen at the same time as the design change, Orr noted. And as Hacker said, “The work is never done. The architects may leave, the contractors may leave, and yet the culture change is an ongoing process.”

Hacker noted that her hospital is creating best practices and guiding principles for creating a healthy environment – including reducing noise – just as they would for treating disease. Such follow-up is also crucial to making sure the changes work. While Hacker emphasized the importance of following up with health outcomes and patient satisfaction, Theimer suggested that architects visit their old projects. “When we get into commercial or institutional architecture, it’s not as passionate. For some of the people, it’s, ‘I gotta get this built and I have this much money,’” he said.

What’s green, what’s good

Still, there isn’t always a consensus on what makes good design, or where to find it. Theimer noted that it requires clients to have a certain experimental mindset of “wanting to do something more.”

“You go and talk about a building, and people have to think, ‘I’ve been somewhere I really liked,’ and they couldn’t think of a clinic they really liked,” he said, referring to one of his past projects. Theimer asked his clients instead to think about schools, libraries, and homes. He transformed what was to be a 4,000-square-foot dental office expansion into a 12,000-square-foot full remodel that boasted a community feel and green architecture. Once pushed, Theimer noted, the clients were asking his firm, “How green can we be? Are we green enough?”

But even if how green to go and how to make good design is unclear, Theimer noted, one thing is obvious. As he put it, “I would tell you that marble floors in a lobby doesn’t make good design. In fact, don’t use marble.”

Watch the video here.
See more photos here.
Read five experts discussing healthy design at hospitals and beyond here.
Read In The Green Room Q&As with Dana Dubbs, Mary Dee Hacker, Robin Orr and James Theimer.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

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The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive?

None of the apocalyptic disasters and villains Hollywood has imagined can compare to what Peter Ward argues is the real killer. “[T]here is a killer on the loose capable of planetary-scale catastrophe,” he writes. “The killer is life itself. If left unchecked, it will hasten the ultimate death of all life on Earth.”

Ward’s Medea Hypothesis presents what he acknowledges is a minority view, a counter to the Gaian theory that has gained credence over the last several decades. Ward argues that life, left alone, triggers disasters that in turn extinguish life. Building his case like a scaffold, he begins by explaining what life is, what evolution is, and why evolution is an inherent property of life, even as it leads to the destruction of life. He takes time to list and describe the various branches within Gaia theory, and offers his hypothesis as an alternative to Gaia.

Ward also starts by turning a key element of Gaia theory on its head. Gaia argues that the Earth maintains several regulatory systems that keep temperature and atmospheric gases at just the right levels to let life flourish. But Ward points out that some of those systems also contribute to what could lead to a massive loss of life on Earth, long before the Sun grows hotter and larger. “The Earth will lose one resource without which the main trophic level of life itself – photosynthetic organisms, from microbes to higher plants – can no longer survive,” Ward writes. “This dwindling resource, ironically, (in this time when human society worries about too much of it), is atmospheric carbon dioxide.” Carbon dioxide, today’s villain, has in fact been declining steadily for the last 200 million years, Ward notes. If we manage to avoid over-polluting the Earth, that is, we could suffer from a lack of CO2, and we’ll have land plants to blame.

In fact, life on Earth has tended toward its own destruction since the dawn of life, Ward argues. The crux of the Medea hypothesis is the Earth’s declining biomass; even as life has grown more complex and evolved, biomass has declined. It started early on with the evolution of our form of DNA-based life, which Ward says likely defeated other forms of life in the Earth’s “greatest mass extinction.” Early Earth’s methane atmosphere nearly destroyed that early life, in any case. It’s a result that, Ward says, cannot be predicted by the Gaia theory. The rise of oxygen in the atmosphere, while a happy event for future human life, also caused massive extinction. Life was also responsible for two “snowball Earth” episodes and the rise of toxicity in oceans. Ward argues also that the “Cambrian Explosion” – the flourishing of complex plant and animal life – decreased the Earth’s biomass. And even extinctions spurred by extraterrestrial events, Ward says, were exacerbated by life.

The trend is set to keep going: what makes for a successful species – particularly, the overwhelming or dominating of other species – doesn’t necessarily make for a successful biosphere, Ward claims. Humans are, perhaps, the most successful species, and the most damaging to the biosphere. Our deforestation of the Earth has led to rates of extinction far beyond what’s natural. But, as the top-of-the-heap species, only we can manage and save life on Earth. Here, it seems, Ward agrees with those Gaia proponents who advocate massive human involvement in managing the Earth. Ward suggests major and planetary engineering, beginning with reducing carbon dioxide now, and increasing it in the future.

Excerpt: Radiation poisoning through fission or fusion bomb attacks would be the greatest human Medean effect, and the current arming of the Muslim world, whose regions show the highest rate of population growth on the planet, is the greatest threat.
The way to stop warfare is to increase the standard of living all over the world. This will only happen through even higher rates of Medean activity by humanity–burning more coal and oil, building more nuclear power plants that produce plutonium wastes, building more ‘infrastructure’ such as continent-spanning highways where none now exists. None of this will help take us back to ‘nature,’ and in some cases it will further reduce biomass and diversity over the next few centuries. There is no stopping this, but the alternative seems to be long-term privation of some societies…. Though we should save as much of nature as we can, of course, it will probably not be much. Yet, lots of golf courses and game preserves are still better than a radioactive world.

Further Reading: The Life and Death of Planet Earth: How the New Science of Astrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of Our World and Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet

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