From the On The Issues Print Archive

Summer 1998

Designing Sex
Playing God, Have Doctors Gone Too Far?
by Mahin Hassibi, M.D.

On The Issues Magazine
Summer 1998

My name is Michael Ross. I'm a condemned man on Connecticut's death row," began the unsolicited manuscript entitled "Reflections from Death Row" in On The Issues' mail. "I'm the worst of the worst, a serial killer and sexual sadist," it continued, "who is responsible for the rape and murder of eight women in three different states, who has assaulted several other women, and who has stalked and frightened many more. I have never denied what I did, and fully confessed to my crimes. The only issue in my case, from the beginning, has been my mental condition. For years I have been trying to prove that I am suffering from a mental illness that drove me to rape and kill, and that this mental illness made me physically unable to control my actions. I have met with little success."

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From Our Files:
Gender Always On The Agenda

The question of gender has been an ongoing theme in On the Issues Magazine – Gender roles, gender identity and self-identity, societal and personal gender expectations.

In an article published 11 years ago, The Tyranny of the Esthetic: Surgery's Most Intimate Violation (Summer 1998), Martha Coventry describes her devastating personal experience in having her clitoris cut as a child so she would look “normal." Interviewing others also forced at the point of a knife to conform to so-called societal standards of what “boys" and “girls" must look like, Coventry discusses the deep psychological problems often accompanying such surgery and concludes: “It is not the bodies of these children that are wrong, it is the way people see them." Thea Hillman reviews Coventry’s material in this edition of On The Issues Magazine and finds it surprisingly relevant, even as new issues about language and Intersex identity are causing waves.

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