Heh, I have the perfect Cold War-era joke for this thread. I got it from, IIRC, a Polish film, but I don’t remember the title. Anyway, it goes like this:
Two female swimmers in the East German Olympic program are in conversation, when one says, “I think I’ll have to stop taking our ‘special medicine’.”
“Oh? Why?” says the other.
“Well, I’m starting to grow hair.”
“Where? On your face?”
“No…” says the first.
“On your chest?”
“No…”
“Then, where?”
“On my balls.”
All joking aside, I’m with the OP on this one, even though his playing on the name thing wasn’t the smoothest take on the subject. His tone may be a tad jejune, but his thread serves as an alarmist wake-up call to those who might be ignorant or dismissive of the hazards of steroids and HGH.
I only wish more obvious steroid and HGH cases, both male and female, were singled out for public ridicule and censure – for the Cro-Magnon-ish brows, the prognathous jawlines, and the cranial gigantism of the HGH abusers; and for the steroid abusers, their adult-onset prediliction for acne, their “'roid rage,” their shrunken testes and testicular cancer risk, their increased hirsuteness, and, yes, for the female steroid cheats, a certain blurring of the ol’ gender lines in their general, clothed, appearance. These athletes’ freakish aspects are unnatural and are the direct result of their unethical and generally illegal willingness to cheat. They cheated their sports and the record books; they cheated their competitors; they cheated Mother Nature; and in their greed for what a chemical firm once called “better living through chemistry,” they cheated themselves and mortgaged their future.
To be clear, I feel the performance-enhancing drugs issue is the only context in which the ridiculing of a person’s gender-appearance ambiguity (along with the other symptoms) is okay – precisely because the freakish aspects in question are the result of such cheating.
This form of ridicule has nothing to do with singling out transgendered people, women with PCO syndrome, women with certain rare chromosomal disorders, or any others on a long laundry list of, shall we say, people with gender-nonconformist appearances, or even striking ugliness. It rather reminds me of the finger-pointing that is occasionally directed at other categories of physical degradation – as exposed in the ongoing freakshow of police arrest photos and paparazzi photos – which also derive from unwise or illegal behavior. In this sad parade we find the long-term cocaine users who’ve completely burned away their nasal septums; persons with eating-disorders who resemble walking skeletons; the malnourished alcoholics of florid nose, bloodshot eyes, and distended abdomen; the emaciated heroin addicts whose bodies look like they’ve been tattooed in Morse Code; and the crackheads and tweakers who just generally look like hell. The sort of alarm and ridicule which sometimes arise in connection with famous individuals who fall into these categories is all about, as the song put it, “the needle and the damage done”.
When the tabloids wax hysterically about, say, Nicole Ritchie’s emaciated appearance, they’re not making fun of starving people in developing nations or sufferers of Crohn’s Disease. They’re making a fuss because the silly twit is famous for being famous and because she’s starved herself to be more glamorous, period. If the hand-wringing “concern” displayed by mass media (or private mockery by teenagers on the internet on, say, MySpace) helps highlight or stigmatize the effects of eating disorders and encourage others to reach out for help, then so much the better. But the eating disorder comparison, while timely and sharing a freakshow aspect with the female bicyclist, is flawed insofar as it’s not a “victimless” crime but a crime-free victimization. Nope, I think our chemically (and physiologically) altered athletes have more in common with the criminal narcotics cases… I’ll bring up one more example.
Re. the cokeheads, there was an internet flurry a year or two back in which recent photos of a minor, washed-up British “actress” (or was she a model or just a socialite party girl?) turned up. These photos revealed a ravaged face whose beauty (and septum) were long gone. The finger-pointing “omigod, look at this ugly freak”-emails and links were, AFAIK, not met with a self-righteous PC blizzard of protests by the small community of persons who’d suffered congenital deformation/absence of, or traumatic mutilation to, their noses. It was rightly understood that this was just another freakshow attraction on the internet: fugly photos of a former B-lister (or C-lister) whose drug habit resulted in a facial deformity. In a cautionary tale that, however inadvertently, might serve to scare straight others currently on her path, the only person being mocked was that woman; the only category stigmatized by association, hard-core coke addicts.
And that sort of finger-pointing, like that in the OP, is fine by me.