Doctor Connects Gender and Religion
By Alice E. M. Underwood, CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
Published: Thursday, November 04, 2010
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2010/11/4/gender-jewish-religious-people/With the aim of addressing the intersection of religious and queer identities, Harvard Jewish Law Students Association and BAGELS, the undergraduate Jewish LGBT group, teamed up to host a talk last night given by Doctor Norman P. Spack, who works with transgender children.
A pediatric endocrinologist at Children's Hospital Boston, Spack described his work as co-director of the Gender Management Service Clinic, which administers puberty blockers to gender-questioning pre-adolescents in order to delay the onset of puberty. This process provides those children who affirm a gender different from their biological sex the time to be certain of their desire to continue pubertal development with the sexual characteristics of the gender with which they identify. Once they reach a certain age—after the medication has prevented the onset of bodily developments for several years—they can be administered hormones specific to their identified gender.
Throughout his talk, Spack invoked religious notions of helping others as central to motivating his work, citing the 12th century Jewish physician and philosopher Maimonides as saying, "If one is able to rescue and does not, he transgresses the injunction from Leviticus: though shalt not stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor."
