elfs | Sex And Violence on the Brain! (Reply)

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.