By David Futrelle
Cis woman are much more likely to survive coronavirus than their male counterparts, and we don’t know why. Could if be differences in lifestyle? (Men are more prone to smoke and less prone to wash their hands.) Or could it be something more basic — like the sex hormones estrogen and progesterone — that offer cis women special protection from the deadly virus?
The New York Times reported yesterday that scientists in New York and California are testing the latter proposition, giving (consenting) male patients with coronavirus doses of estrogen or progesterone to see if this helps them survive. In the giant game of telephone that is the internet, this news quickly turned into “doctors are giving men estrogen to protest them from coronavirus,” as if this had suddenly become some sort of widespread practice.
And the people who are already obsessed with the alleged dangers of estrogen to manly men started to lose their shit.
On 4Chan’s /pol/ board, the news quickly became “Jews are injecting you with estrogen now. They don’t even hide it any more.” One anon charged that
They want [to] trivialize HRT usage, make it a regular medicine and low key put in the mind of people that masculinity is a disease. It’s no coincidence that a jewish woman is behind this.
Responding to a photo of one of the researchers, another anon wrote:
Just look at her fce, she’s a dyke who have been fantasing about feminizing men for a while and this is just an excuse.
On Twitter, meanwhile, assorted conspiracy theorists put forth similar, er, hypotheses.
You know, Q Jim, I would be surprised if that was the case. Very surprised.
It’s no shock that a Qanon conspiracist has glommed onto this news. I’m just waiting for the incels and MGTOWs to discover the story.
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If the study involved injecting testosterone into women, the conspiracy idjits would find reasons to hate that, too.
And here is one you didn’t mention David, https://twitter.com/beta420/status/1255114066651222021
Yes “of course” this is all a plot to destroy men, not at worst a desperate attempt to fend off a deadly virus that’s ravaging the country.
@ Victorious Parasol
Femoids are making women stronger so they can beta up men…
Sorry, that felt gross to type.
“beta” is a typo for “beat” that I’ve decided to keep.
Well, boys, if you want to die of coronavirus you can feel free to avoid treatment.
I heard this story and my first thoughts were:
1. That might work, but since it seems the increased survival rate still applies to post-menopausal women, it seems like it would maybe make more sense to use testosterone blockers to reduce T rather than boosting estrogen. Conspiracy theories would run wild still though.
2. Wait, so trans* women have to jump through hoops to get estrogen in most of the world but cis men get it instantly? That’s cishet male supremacy for you.
3. Soon we’re going to have dozens of op-eds by cis men about how they totally know what gender dysphoria is now that they had estrogen patches for a few days and/or op-eds from TERFs and right-wingers about how the “trans* agenda” has run wild.
This thread by Julia Serano basically sums up my thoughts better than I could (and has some interesting thoughts re: boosting estrogen vs reducing testosterone).
@KindaSortaHarmless
That typo actually sounds more like something the right-wing babies would say.
@Victorious Parasol
Maybe they’d hate it less because they’d like the idea of women dying?
I guess it depends how much they hate trans* men (yes, I know that trans* men are not the same as cis women on testosterone, but the misogynistic transphobes probably don’t know that and would conflate the two). I mostly hear them hating on trans* women.
I’ll just rinse this bleach out of my syringe and give it a try.
@Naglfar
Maybe, but some of them would probably claim it’s a conspiracy to “spoil” women for them. Kinda akin to accusations of poisoning the water supply, y’know?
@Alan Robertshaw
[Infomercial voice]:
Do you find yourself unsure of whether to inject cleaning products or experimental sex hormone treatments? Well, you no longer have to choose!
Announcing…estro-bleach! The only product made from bleach with 4mg of estrogen per syringe. Now you too can enjoy the best of both worlds.
Disclaimer: side effects may include breast growth, burning in mouth, throat pain, stomach pain, bloody stools, vomiting, and death. If death occurs, stop taking estro-bleach.
@Victorious Parasol
Seeing as testosterone can cause beard growth and masculinization of figure, they probably would see it as “spoiling” the women which they see as their property.
Times like this I wish the medical community as a whole gave more of a shit about us trans folk, because trans men would be a good control for whether we’re at higher risk due to using testosterone (and I’d love to know, personally.)
Seriously, they’d already probably have some preliminary data on this, if they didn’t treat us like subhumans and have us in fear of our lives from staff refusing us treatment at hospitals. If we could trust we’d be treated well, a lot of us would be forthcoming about our experiences.
What a wasted opportunity. Too bad nothing’s going to come of it.
@ naglfar
When I was a kid it was all “Don’t drink bleach!”. Now it’s good for you. It’s the red wine thing all over again.
@Alan Robertshaw
Just don’t forget to rinse your syringe out with… actually, I guess you are fine there.
@ Naglfar:
Can it be used as a dessert topping and a floor wax?!
I was so confused by the last one that I had to look up “female adrenochrome-drained blood”. Damn, I’m sorry I did. To save anyone else from having to do so:
The short version is that “adrenochrome”, a breakdown product of epinephrine in the body, is supposedly enjoyed as an illegal drug. Of course, rather than, I dunno, raising the donors’ blood adrenaline levels by allowing them to watch scary movies or ride rollercoasters, the method of producing and acquiring it involves inflicting terror, torture, and then exsanguination… Blech, blech, blech.
Then, I guess the logic is that once you’ve harvested the adrenochrome for your primary evil purposes, you can isolate the estrogen to use it to feminize unwilling cis dudes? Waste not, want not, I suppose? Argh.
These people have truly horrifying imaginations…
Can we take the lightbulbs out of our asses , now?
@ moon custafer
Well everything is edible; once.
@Brassica
To the alt-right, adrenochrome is now just a buzzword. They believe that Democrats are satanic pedophiles that harvest it from children and/or aborted fetuses and use it to boost their power and improve themselves. This ties into all the QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theories as well.
It’s also used sometimes as a modern variant of antisemitic blood libel when they claim that “globalists” are taking it from your children.
Setting aside for a minute that there’s no way this guy can tell the sexual orientation of this doctor by looking at her face, what would be in it for her? A lesbian is not going to be suddenly attracted to a man just because he got a couple of estrogen shots.
Whelp people are going full bore into malls and beaches. Whelp there is another spike of infected cases.
@WWTH
Maybe he’s been reading too much force-feminization erotica?
This is going to lead to shootings of medical staff, isn’t it? Some armed Q cultist or other reality-challenged individual is going to try “investigating” a hospital or clinic.
Mutter. Giving me estrogens and progesterone would just increase the chance of me throwing a blood clot, no thanks to my Factor V Leiden. But then again I’m a woman anyways… with an increased chance of throwing a pulmonary embolism combined with a novel virus that attacks the respiratory system amongst other things. Gosh! I wonder where my survival chances stand? The calculus! …it makes my brain hurt.
Moggie: they’re way ahead of you.
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/02/825897966/train-engineer-says-he-crashed-in-attempt-to-attack-navy-hospital-ship-in-l-a
numerobis
Does it appear to others that the more the US shifts culturally & politically Right, the more unhooked from reality people on the Right are becoming?
As conspiracy theories go, the old classics of UFO’s & BigFoot, while lacking any scientific evidence, are looking positively reasonable & plausible.
It must be true that reality has a liberal bias, seeing the extremes that conservatives have to go to deny it.
No mention of the 40-year-long Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which black men thought they were being treated for syphilis, but their symptoms were simply observed, not treated?
And no mention of how the Pill was tested on Puerto Rican women at high doses before it was reformulated and put on the entire US market?
None at all?
It’s almost as if these guys understand that sometimes the US government gives money to fund (in the case of Puerto Rico) a problematic study or to fund (in the case of Tuskegee) an unconscionable study on people of color and women. It’s almost as if these guys are really, really worried that next time it might be them!
Kind of like how batterers worry that their victims might turn on them.
OT: something I found while looking through David’s twitter feed. It’s an interesting theory about what really happened to the currently-vanished North Korean leader over the last couple of weeks:
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
On the off-chance that doesn’t embed correctly, it compares a statement noting Kim Jong-un hasn’t been seen since April 11 with a statement that the Final Fantasy VII remake was released April 10.
Hmmmmmmm…..
😀
@Kat
One would think anyone who actually cared about men’s rights (or human rights in general) would know about it. Though because the men were black, MRAs don’t give a fuck.
(Though I’m sure if you told them they’d find a way to spin it to blame feminists and/or women in general).
@Redsilkphoenix
I do somewhat wonder if Kim does consume western media as one of the only people in the country to have access to it. IIRC Alexis Filth of the Violet Wanderers says her podcast got a few streams from North Korea, so maybe Kim is listening to podcasts.