Sex And Violence on the Brain!

[elfs]

Close My Eyes! It's All Pink!

I'm just gonna link to it because Hilzoy deals with it better than I could. NPR has been running a series on Gender Identity Disorder (the predisposition to identify personally with the sex your body is not), and it's been hard to listen to the anti-trans side argue that children with "mild" GID should not be allowed to choose their own clothing, their own toys, their own peers, but should instead be forced to live a "gender appropriate" life.

It was heartbreaking to listen to the family that chose anti-trans therapy describing just how unhappy their kid still was, how much he was still fighting who he was. It's moving and terribly sad stuff and I hope the world for these kids and their families.

Hilzoy brings us really bad news. 35 years ago, the APA decided that homosexuality was not pathological. They would stop trying to "cure" homosexuality. Now comes word that the APA is revising the DSM, and the chairman of the sexual and Gender Identity Disorders Work Group will be the leader of the anti-trans kid movement.

WUSTL to honor Phyllis Schafly

This Phyllis Schafly:

• "What I am defending is the real rights of women. A woman should have the right to be in the home as a wife and mother."
• "Sexual harassment on the job is not a problem for virtuous women."
• "Sex education classes are like in-home sales parties for abortions."
• "It's very healthy for a young girl to be deterred from promiscuity by fear of contracting a painful, incurable disease, or cervical cancer, or sterility, or the likelihood of giving birth to a dead, blind, or brain-damage baby even ten years later."
• "Men should stop treating feminists like ladies, and instead treat them like the men they say they want to be."
• "It is long overdue for parents to realize they have the right and duty to protect our children against the intolerant evolutionists."
• "By getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don't think you can call it rape."
• "They [women] are too emotional to handle intellectual or scientific debate."

(via a lot of different people)

How Does Hillary Say This Without Being Branded Racist?

I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.

I heard this yesterday on NPR. If McCain said that whites would vote for him over Obama, the press would be all over him!

The Religious Rights' Unreal Understanding of Homosexuality

Jonathan Rowe does a great take-down of the anti-gay arguments of the Religious Right. A quick refresher course in answering the "gays don't need or deserve civil rights" types.

Vito Fossella: Defending Marriage

Yay! Another Republican who did everything he could to keep marriage pure and honorable and gay-free! Who has done everything he can to prevent gays from adopting! With a whole second extramarital family, now revealed because of a drunk driving arrest.

Why many MCSEs won' t learn Linux

Bingo:

Put a Solaris guy who' s never used Linux in front of SuSe 10 with a list of complex tasks and he'll complain bitterly about missing pieces, primitive storage management tools, idiosyncratic pathing, misplaced or missing command syntax, and a host of other annoyances - but he won't be either intimidated or deterred; and the job will get done because he knows how the tools he needs should work, and trusts that SuSe's versions do in fact work.

In contrast, if you take a guy who's grown up entirely on Windows 2003/XP and put him in front of a rack of NT 4.0 machines with a similar task list, the chances are good that he'll feel comfortable with the product but won't get the job done - because NT 4.0 isn't 2003/XP Server and he'll end up rationalizing that it simply doesn't do the things he doesn't know how to do.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

...

That transgender link is the worst news I've heard in a while.

[bikerwalla.livejournal.com]

I hope that we hear more about this. I want to hear about the people who resign from the board in protest, or otherwise send ripples through the psychology community.

[hydrolagus.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the info on the DSM revisions. I have linked to the articles in my journal and the CSPC forum.

I heard that story, and thought it was tremendously sad

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

The little boy on the east coast was being essentially tortured. I don't think he'll ever have a normal life.

What will happen to "Jonah", though, at adolescence? Will he be going through surgery at that point? Will he be a possible victim of anti-trans violence? How can his family protect him enough? And what happens before that, when he's the little girl in the locker room with the funny bumps in her bikini bottom?

I do wonder, though. Do any small children actually change their minds? Can a child go through a phase of gender uncertainty and then decide to either return to a more traditional gender role or something in between? I used to pretend to be a little boy a lot myself, without actually thinking that I was one. I do understand the distinction between an imaginative child an a transgendered one, but I hope that somewhere the two sorts of children aren't being confused with each other.

Re: I heard that story, and thought it was tremendously sad

[kengr]

There are drugs that delay puberty. And they are used in some cases to help gain time to determine if a kid is trans or not.

Good news, once they take the kid off them puberty takes off as normal.
Bad news they are *hugely* expensive.

As for the locker room bit, there are problems like that with even *non*-trans kids. Intersex kids are the extreme end of that, but there are a lot of other things that a lot of kids wouldn't want seen in a locker room.

BTW, even in places with anti-discrimination laws that protect gender identity, a pre-op TS is not allowed to use locker rooms of the sex they ID as.

Bathrooms, yes, locker rooms and other "nude among others" areas, no.

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

If McCain said that, the media would say almost nothing. Look at how much they've said about his suggestion that we boot Russia from the G8, or about his claims of running a clean campaign while simultaneously implying that Hamas is endorsing Obama, or his ongoing flagrant breakage of campaign finance laws - not to mention his repeated flip-flops.

I have actually seen some articles about the divisive, racial nature of Clinton's comments. Here's one:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/09/opinion/09fri1.html

[(Anonymous)]

Well given that as a kid I had a lot of trouble just from having a little tissue on my chest that didn't really look anything like breasts, of course the boys in the changing room didn't care because it was all just ammunition...

and what the f*ck?
"or the likelihood of giving birth to a dead, blind, or brain-damage baby even ten years later."
So now it's a sin not just to be promiscuous and gay, but to be blind? I've been blind for about 8 years now and while it is regrettable I'm no less human for it. I've a good mind to ram my cane up the arse of anyone who says otherwise, and almost 5 feet of aliminum tube isn't something you want inserted rectally I can tell you.