A.E.Brain

The Best Laid Plans

2012-01-11T20:11:00.001+11:00

My mother-in-law is gravely ill at the moment. I've been too busy at the hospital to blog - or do much of anything else. More later when things aren't so uncertain.

Yes, such people exist

2012-01-02T22:06:00.000+11:00

From a comment on gay marriage:

You should be changed completely to the gender in which you have more chemicals in your body. So if you have 60% male and 40% female chemicals, you should be changed totally to a male.

Transsexuals do not count as people.

Other gems from the same "person" :

...you have no right to talk. If you do not believe in a superior being in some capacity, then you are completely retarded.
...
The government should have the power to enforce common religious dogma on its citizens.
...

Prejudice and Reality

2012-01-01T22:33:00.002+11:00

From MassResistance: Barney Frank's Transsexual in 2008.

Our Massachusetts horror, Rep. Barney Frank, doesn't stop at homosexual activism. He's long been pushing for a federal ENDA law banning discrimination on the basis of "gender identity or expression". Now he's appointed this woman...

...transsexual Diego Sanchez, to his Washington staff. Sanchez made news in 2008 as the first transsexual to serve on the Democrat Party platform committee.

This guy has to be female you see, to conform to their version of Reality.

This is the first post of the new year. I have over 100 draft articles, mostly from the last 2 months, that I haven't had time to polish up and post. So I'm going through them (this one's 3 years old) and those that only need a little work will get published, one every day. Hopefully I'll be able to get back to regular blogging in about a month.

Meanwhile - Happy New Year.

For Andrew

2011-11-30T00:48:00.001+11:00

I was only a little older than he is now, when I was at this concert.

It's time.

2011-11-27T09:08:00.001+11:00

This makes the case far clearer than mere words can. It's time.

The Meaning of Christmas

2011-11-25T18:57:00.003+11:00

From a mailing list I'm on.

In the last 24-36 hours, I've seen our community come together from different parts of the world to help one of our own, and I am truly thankful.

Long story short, an 18 year old trans girl, kicked out by her parents, was unsafe and on the streets of a small town in Kentucky. No food, no money, no phone, no friends. She was able to borrow a computer long enough to contact me through email, and what I can only call a blessing began to unfold.

Through the power of Facebook and online networking, people from all over, including the UK & Mexico, came together to get this young gal onto a Greyhound bus, and enough food & beverages at various bus stops along the way to make it through to Phoenix where she will arrive in the early morning hours tonight to live at H.O.P.E. House.

This is not the first time we've brought someone to Phoenix on a Greyhound, nor even the first time we've had people help us; in the past it was with donations to pay for her bus ticket. This time, however, people stepped up and gave their time and energy to continue networking until contact could be made with the girl to get her something to eat during the trip at stops along the way.

So many of us lose our families and friends simply because we are trans. We reach out to our only true family, our "Chosen Family" - other trans men and women who are there to help support us and give us faith.

Thank you to everyone who has been, and continues to be through today, involved in making this journey to Phoenix a very special one. Thank you for stepping up and being there for someone in need. You are ALL AWESOME!

TransMentors International will continue to help trans men, women and youth for as long as there's a need. We provide emergency assistance, safe housing, mentoring, support, and resource referrals/connections. Your donations help make it possible. You can donate through our Cause page, our website, or even monthly through your checking account.

Contact me if you want to become involved in TransMentors International at michaelb@transmentors.org

TransMentors International Inc.
2942 N. 24th Street, Suite #114-337
Phoenix, AZ 85018
Phone: 877-366-3888
Fax: 866-755-2514

Facebook Page

OK, so Christmas has come a little early this year. And you don't have to be Christian to take part. Nor Trans for that matter. Merely Human. Moving the mountain one teaspoonful at a time.

Urogenital sinus

2011-11-21T00:59:00.003+11:00

Adrenogenital syndrome showing masculinization of the lower urogenital tract as seen on VCUG.

Urogenital sinus, the most common appearance of the lower urogenital tract in adrenogenital syndrome. A well-developed vagina with a well-defined impression of the uterine cervix on the vaginal vault (arrow) joins the distal end of the urethra to form a long common sinus tract (urogenital sinus) that ends in the perineum at the base of a prominent phallus. Barium paste was applied on the perineum to show the distance between the vagina and perineum.

Source

Might explain a few things. Anomalous events when I was 14. Or might not - the ultrasounds are invonclusive.

Oh, USA

2011-11-20T01:51:00.003+11:00

UC Davis, California, 2011

Birmingham, Alabama, 1963

TDOR 2011

2011-11-19T19:25:00.002+11:00

The Transgender Day Of Remembrance, November 20th.

I have been so very, very fortunate. Looking back on the TS and IS people around the world I have corresponded with - some of them on TDOR lists of the slain - I'm reminded that I've had it so much easier than every one of them that I can think of.

From those to who much is given, much is expected. Amidst the tears of grief - muted this year for, unlike some past years, I don't know any of the victims personally - I dedicate myself to continuing the battle, in blogs, in newspapers, in articles, on TV programs, on political and religious and academic and social sites, on the scatological UK Army Rumour Service NAAFI bar and the genteel Catholic Quarterly, in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Nashua Telegraph, in the Malta Times and UK Guardian, everywhere I can.

It's not much. But it's something.

The full list for this year is over 200 names in length.

Evolution, Gravity, Maths and Miss America 2011

2011-11-09T02:57:00.004+11:00

Just Because

2011-11-06T21:13:00.000+11:00

Another Step in the Long March to the Moon - and Beyond

2011-11-06T00:44:00.003+11:00

From Popular Mechanics : China’s Space Docking: What Does It Mean?:

On Tuesday, Nov. 1., China launched the Shenzhou-8 space capsule into the same orbital plane as its Tiangong-1 prototype space station. Over the course of several Earth orbits, the capsule performed a rendezvous maneuver and slowly caught up to the space station. Eventually, when it got close enough, Shenzhou-8 made some final burns to precisely match its velocity and location with the Tiangong-1, and the two spacecraft docked, temporarily becoming one. It was the first successful space docking in China’s history.

As milestones go, this could be seen as a small one. After all, China merely performed a feat that Americans achieved more than 45 years earlier (and its space station is about the size of the Salyut 1 Russia flew about 40 years ago). There was a key difference, though: While the first American docking was with a manned Gemini capsule and an unmanned Agena upper stage, the Chinese performed the entire operation with unmanned spacecraft—a feat that the U.S. had never actually performed until recently, and a tribute to the intervening decades of technological development. The question now is: What does China’s recent success say about its goals in space?

Read the whole thing for their answer, but I think it's pretty obvious. This was the next step to a lunar colony. There are many more. Progress isn't being rushed, this isn't a botched job, it's a firm foundation.

As I wrote this time last year about the "Chinese Tortoise" :

Not a new species; a description of the robust and long-term space program that China is quietly executing. One that means that the next human to land on the Moon will speak Mandarin - as will the first Lunar colonists.
...
This isn't a space exploration program for prestige purposes.

It's about sustainability.
It's about the long term.
It involves a commitment.
It refuses to take short cuts to meet artificial deadlines.

All the things that are lacking in the US space program.

As for the Chinese? They're right on schedule.

OII(Australia) on Homophobia

2011-11-03T23:38:00.003+11:00

OII Australia (Organisation Intersex International - Australia) nails it with a very perceptive comment:

The fear of homosexuality, homophobia, is the prime motivation for the worldwide persecution of intersex people. In a remarkable feat of fact-free magical thinking, we are perceived as somehow being born intrinsically homosexual. We are not, but popular belief is seldom trumped by reality and so the intersex fetus abortions, intersex infanticides, intersex genital mutilations (IGM) and refusal of fundamental human rights continue unabated.

I've been accused of being a gay man, and a lesbian woman - sometimes at the same time - by the same people. The contradiction escapes them, logic tends not to be the strong suit of homophobes. Many don't know what "Intersex" means, even if you patiently explain it to them, with references. A few don't believe it can exist, that like Evil-ution, it's all a giant anti-Christian conspiracy by (quite possibly demonically possessed) "scientists", who they view as The Adversary. Well, in some ways they're right, as Rationality is contrary to their beliefs. "Fact-free magical thinking" describes their superstitions perfectly. Others of course, the majority, are merely religious. Their beliefs are based on faith, yet not impervious to facts and rational argument. They, not being Fanatics, often have their voices of reason drowned out by the True Believers - those so sure that God is on their side, that they don't think it's necessary to ask themselves whether they're on His. Whether God is a literal Deity, or the mystical "Forces of History".

Belief in an invisible Sky Policeman is not in itself a bad or harmful thing. It all too often leads to beliefs in whole pantheons of supernatural beings though, demons and devils and evil spirits.

Here's an example:

In other words, the scientific evidence of how same-sex attraction most likely may be created provides a credible basis for a spiritual explanation that indicts the devil. Any time natural disasters occur, we as people of faith look back to Scripture's account of those angels who rebelled and fell from grace. In their anger against God, these malcontents prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. They continue to do all they can to mar, distort and destroy God's handiwork.

Therefore, whenever natural causes disturb otherwise typical biological development, leading to the personally unchosen beginnings of same-sex attraction, the ultimate responsibility, on a theological level, is and should be imputed to the evil one, not God. Applying this aspect of Catholic belief to interpret the scientific data makes more sense because it does not place God in the awkward position of blessing two mutually incompatible realities -- sexual difference and same-sex attraction.

Trying to reconcile Catholic Belief with Scientific Evidence often gets people into trouble - just ask Galileo. He's since been forced to retract his article and issue a Mea Culpa.

"Statements made in my column, 'Some fundamental questions on same-sex attraction' of October 28, do not represent the position of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the column was not authorized for publication as is required policy for staff of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The teaching of Sacred Scripture and of the Catechism of the Catholic Church make it clear that all persons are created in the image and likeness of God and have inviolable dignity. Likewise, the Church proclaims the sanctity of marriage as the permanent, faithful, fruitful union of one man and one woman. The Church opposes, as I do too, all unjust discrimination and the violence against persons that unjust discrimination inspires. I deeply apologize for the hurt and confusion that this column has caused."

Just (as opposed to Unjust) discrimination is fine though - and the USCCB have decided that discrimination against Trans and Intersex people is just fine. As they've stated in writing.

At least he made a Good Faith attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable; superstition and reality. The problem is, by invoking the Work of the Devil as being responsible, the next step is all too easy. Inevitable really. The belief that some are possessed, or the spawn of the Devil, not really human at all. Thus witchsmelling and charlatanry, persecution of the different, and all manner of barbarities.

The USCCB appear to have recognised that, and pulled him up short. At least, I hope that's what they did. I try to think the best of people.

The Journal of Chemical Physics

2011-11-02T23:41:00.000+11:00

Not to be confused with the Journal of Physical Chemistry of course..
Optimization of a genetic algorithm for searching molecular conformer space Zoe E. Brain and Matthew A. Addicoat J. Chem. Phys. 135, 174106 (2011)

We present two sets of tunings that are broadly applicable to conformer searches of isolated molecules using a genetic algorithm (GA). In order to find the most efficient tunings for the GA, a second GA – a meta-genetic algorithm – was used to tune the first genetic algorithm to reliably find the already known a priori correct answer with minimum computational resources. It is shown that these tunings are appropriate for a variety of molecules with different characteristics, and most importantly that the tunings are independent of the underlying model chemistry but that the tunings for rigid and relaxed surfaces differ slightly. It is shown that for the problem of molecular conformational search, the most efficient GA actually reduces to an evolutionary algorithm.

Dr. Matt Addicoat's the Chemist; I'm the Computer Scientist. But he knows more about Computer Science than I do about Chemistry. He should do - he was one of my CompSci students at ADFA.

"When I left you, I was but the learner. Now I am the master"

Just call me Zobie-wan.

The Submarines of October

2011-11-01T23:03:00.001+11:00

From The Submarines of October, how close we came to Nuclear war in 1962.

Very close. Very close indeed.

Soviet submarine commanders were highly disciplined and unlikely to use nuclear weapons by design, but the unstable conditions on board raised the spectre of an accident. Orlov himself believes that the major danger was not from the unauthorized use of a nuclear weapon but from an accident caused by the interaction of men and machines under the most trying of circumstances. Captain Joseph Bouchard, the author of a major study on Naval operations during the missile crisis, supports this point when he suggests that the "biggest danger" was not from "deliberate acts" but from accidents, such as an accidental torpedo launch.
...
Possibly even more dangerous was an incident on submarine B-59 recalled by Vadim Orlov, who served as a communications intelligence officer. In an account published by Mozgovoi (see document 16), Orlov recounted the tense and stressful situation on 27 October when U.S. destroyers lobbed PDCs (practice depth charges - they make a loud noise, but that's all) at B-59. According to Orlov, a "totally exhausted" Captain Valentin Savitsky, unable to establish communications with Moscow, "became furious" and ordered the nuclear torpedo to be assembled for battle readiness. Savitsky roared "We're going to blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all." Deputy brigade commander Second Captain Vasili Archipov calmed Savitsky down and they made the decision to surface the submarine.
...
While the four Soviet Foxtrot submarines did not have combat orders, the Soviet Navy sent two submarines, B-75 and B-88, to the Caribbean and the Pacific respectively, with specific combat orders. B-75, a "Zulu" class diesel submarine, commanded by Captain Nikolai Natnenkov, carried two nuclear torpedoes. It left Russian waters at the end of September with instructions to defend Soviet transport ships en route to Cuba with any weapons if the ships came under attack.
...
Another submarine, B-88, left a base at Kamchatka peninsula, on 28 October, with orders to sail to Pearl Harbor and attack the base if the crisis over Cuba escalated into U.S.-Soviet war. Commanded by Captain Konstatine Kireev, B-88 arrived near Pearl Harbor on 10 November and patrolled the area until 14 November when it received orders to return to base, orders that were rescinded that same day, a sign that Moscow believed that the crisis was not over. B-88 did not return to Kamchatka under the very end of December.

The weapons to be used in the attack? Nuclear-tipped torpedos to be fired into the harbour. 15kt yield each, about the same as the weapon used in Nagasaki.

If that had happened... if nuclear torpedos would have been used by the Russians - and what the USA didn't know was that nuclear-tipped anti-ship missiles were operational in Cuba, and would have been used in such a case... then if Pearl Harbor got nuked as well....

Russki would be a dead language. The US had bombs big enough to not just vapourise a city, but make vast areas lethally radioactive. They had delivery systems too, while the USSR had very few rockets, and even fewer bombers capable of attacking the USA. The US SIOP - Single Intergrated Operational Plan - involved everything from unreliable missiles, through to inaccurate cruise missiles with miss distances in miles (but with a 5 Megaton warhead, that didn't matter), down to propellor-driven Skyraider aircraft launched from carriers to attack port cities in semi-suicide attacks "lobbing" small nukes nearly vertically in a half-loop, and hoping to escape before what went up came down. And lots and lots of B-52s, each with two 5-megaton warheads.

The quote from Dr Strangelove is accurate regarding US likely losses:

President Merkin Muffley: You're talking about mass murder, General, not war!
General "Buck" Turgidson: Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.

Sounds about right.

The Cold War sucked. I was 4 years old at the time, and with the high-priority targets we knew about (a nuclear weapon manufacturing & storage facility, a regional centre of government, and a US bomber base) all within 10 km... the fireballs would have overlapped where I lived. The USSR had plenty of weapons capable of hitting the UK, just not many that could reach the US.

We didn't know about the ROC secret bunker buried deep under the fields behind our house. That would have been a target too: we would have been in the crater for that one.

So think about it: no matter how bad things are, if the Many-worlds explanation of quantum mechanics is correct, there's quite a few high-probability universes not far from here where things are a heck of a lot worse. And take comfort from the fact that we dodged that particular bullet in this one.

The Argument against Monocultures

2011-10-31T21:27:00.002+11:00

No matter whether you're Left or Right, please bear in mind the words of Oliver Cromwell (not my favourite person BTW):

"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken."

Try to see why others think the way they do. Try to think about whether some of what they're saying might actually be justified, to however small an extent. Try to look for weaknesses and flaws in your own beliefs.

Then go out and do the best you can. Don't let doubt deter you from doing what you see is right, just be prepared to refine and improve your judgement there. If you demonise all your opponents, you won't recognise the real nasties on the opposite side - or on yours. You can bank on it that in matters great and small, both exist.

The Biology of Sexual Orientation

2011-10-29T18:49:00.004+11:00

My family health issues have subsided, though I'm still swamped with teaching and compiling my thesis.

It's been a month without blogging - the longest gap so far. All I can say is that writing up a PhD thesis will do that to you.

Blogging will continue to be light, but at least won't be non-existent. Hopefully things will be back to normal before Christmas.

In the meantime, for your edification and enjoyment, The Biology of Sexual Orientation - a presentation in 9 parts.

Part I: Introduction:

Part II: Biological Concepts

Part III: A Scientific Approach

Part IV: Family Studies and Birth Order

Part V: Molecular Studies

Part VI: A Neurohormonal Model

Part VII: Functional Cerebral Asymmetry

Part VIII: Hypothalamic Activation

Part IX: Conclusion

Blogging will be light for a while

2011-09-27T21:34:00.001+10:00

Family Emergency I'm afraid - my Mother in Law just got released from hospital today after collapsing last week.

Plus PhD plus teaching. Hopefully I'll be back to my usual daily blogging soon.

Freaks and Perverts

2011-09-15T20:54:00.003+10:00

As a follow-up to the previous post, from Yahoo News: 'X' now a gender option in Australian passports - Yahoo! News

The comments (nearly all from US readers) are instructive. Here's some of the more popular ones, those "upvoted".

And the world draws closer to the end of times.

Why is it the world bends over backwards for these broken people? Let them adjust to the mainstream. A tiny percentage of confused nutters shouldn't get to modify any aspects of society.

Male or female, that's it! Don't confuse yourself with another!

Oh this is just ridiculous!!!!!! What really surprises me though is that America with all it's Gay lovers didn't do this first.

God that just makes me sick. A very small amount of people in the world are actually born with this problem then there's way more people who just THINK they're not the right gender. Well guess what, if you were born a girl or a guy THAT'S WHAT YOU ARE stop trying to change yourself. Leave the doctors open to the people who actually need the help.

I do love how people try to explain trannies away using "psychology" as a crutch when genetic science already has a way to determine your gender. Sewing on or inverting an appendage makes you another gender as much as stitching in whiskers and sewing on a tail makes you feline. Or if you'd prefer I use a psychological backdrop... Believing you are another gender does not make you that gender anymore than believing you are Napoleon makes you a late 18th century French military strategist emperor. If psychologists played into any other delusion as much as they did with "gender identity" they'd rightfully lose their license to practice.

"Intersex people, who are biologically not entirely male or female, will be able to list their gender on passports as "X."" DNA can't be changed. It also identifies the sex of the individual.

You geneticly inferior filth.

Male, Female, Sodomist, this covers everybody

They should only have three options on any passport in the world: "Male" for human beings born male and currently male, "Female" for human beings born female and currently female, and "Freak" as a catch-all for pretty much everyone else who does not fall into the first two categories. This approach has the value of being the most accurate representation possible.

Well there goes Australia!! Stupid fu---ing libs another gov't. of disgusting minds!!

Every cell in you body has DNA which dictates whether you are male or female. External appearance or mood or DENIAL does not. You can complain about how you are a "Woman in a man's body", and even mutilate yourself with surgery and get implants and pump yourself up with hormones, for what? To look like some sad caricature abomination of a woman. Don't expect people to respect you as something that you can never be. It is like a white person who DEMANDS to be recognized as black, even to the point that they get nose surgery and wear black face all day. Should they be recognized as being a respectable black person, or some joke of a freak in denial?

God says homosexuals are sinning and homosexuals say they are not ....think I'll side with God and this one. That would be the God of Love , not their god of lust

toleranceis not a virtue, it is a cowardly vice , no one has to tolerate this homosexual maggot infested garbage

Why does the world continue to conform to the freaks and not the other way around

Now they can travel to Gaysrael without any problem

Come Jesus Come quickly, Soddom and Gomorrah all over again. And what followed....read about it in the Holy Bible.

The government down under is F()KING nuts. Why not an A for asexual people that have sex with them selfs and reproduce that way too.OH OH OH and and why not an N for nosesexual people that stick their fingers up there noses for sex and reproduction. LOL Geee

The world is coming to an end that is what's happening. For people to say things like this does not bother them or will not affect them is living in great deceit. You will see... inthe end how it will affect you. The world system is crumbling and Jesus is waiting for that trumpet to sound before he ride up in here and take us believers home and leave all the the people who chose to do their own agenda and own will in life. Then you will see how it will affect you!!! I thank God I will not be here to see it. I will always be repentant and live according to God's way not man sinful ways. By the way we (belivers) do have a right to judge according to God's Word not our own.

They've gone too far. If you want to be a freak, don't broadcast it to the rest of the world and expect us to accept it. These PC idiots are crying for "trans-species" rights now. As far as I'm concerned, if you don't feel like you are the gender or species you were born as --you're delusional and suffering from a mental disorder.

We wouldnt want to anger the freaks. They might genetically alter a hissy fit and call it a natural state of being!

there shouldnt be any thing on the passport other than ,,, m,,, or ,,, f,,,, all homosexuals, trannys, cross dressers, pedophiles, homosexual pedophiles, beast lovers, dead body part lovers, and sexual freaks should be branded on their foreheads with a big x

Transgender freaks should be shunned by society.

gays are defects in biology evil to god there is no other gender period aussies tend to be loons

JEWS and ZIONISM will destroy all cultures. We need the great father once again to take care of those SOBs

homosexual are the ignorant hating bigots they are complaing about, they cant stand themselves, live in shame and are the morally disgusting freaks that want to destroy your children by infecting them with perverted propaganda , protect your children at all cost

A bunch of jewish professors who are bent on destroying western culture convinced a bunch of high school drop outs that "it's the right thing to do".

I bet JEWS pushed the issue, since their goal is to destroy western civilization. Read the zionist manifesto.

tolerance, political correctness and sensitivity are not virtues they are cowardly vices,,, stand up for who you are and what you believe, being tolerant does not mean respecting rights, they are not the same thing, condemning people who accept and exercise homosexual behavior is an act of justice and morally mandatory ,,, flush the gay bowel movement down the toilet were it belongs

In the animal kingdom and the universe, there are only 2 sexes. Those liberal left wing influenced by the Jews just invented a third sex which does not exist.

Sorry. Their are only two genders, male and female. Period. No debate. Deal with it.

Stop trying to rationalize your perversion of nature by pretending it is 'normal'. You are freaks. The only ones that don't think so are other freaks.

Sorry. Their are only two genders, male and female. Period. No debate. Deal with it.

This is what happens when Jewish Harvard school influence the academics of another country. The world should boycott any liberal freakish jewish made unnatural notions of sexes

it should be , m = normal male , f = normal female, hmp = homosexual male pervert, hfp = homosexual female pervert, txp = transsexual pervert, cxp = confused sexual pervert cdf = cross dressing freak or just an x, x= sick freaks,,, , it is not normal to lick toilets or put something in your mouth...

God created man and woman...not deformed freaks of nature

Deviates will not inherit the Kingdom of God!

This is ridiculous!. Western societies are replacing common sense with politcal correctness. You're just man (XY) or woman (XX). Period.

I have to remind myself that this is the country that put a human on the moon.

Meanwhile, what the policy actually means... with grateful thanks to Kathy Noble for passing this on.

If you quote this information on your website, could you please attribute it to a spokesperson for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

"This new policy makes it easier for members of the sex and gender diverse community to obtain a passport in their preferred gender. Sex reassignment surgery is no longer a prerequisite to the issue of a passport in a new gender.

The passport will show the person as either female (f) male (m) or intersex, indeterminate, unspecified (x) to reflect their preferred gender identity.

Applicants will have to provide a statement from a medical practitioner registered with the Medical Board of Australia, or equivalent overseas authority, certifying that they have undergone, or are receiving, appropriate clinical treatment for gender transition; that they are intersex and live in a particular gender; or are of indeterminate sex.

The policy also applies to intersex applicants who do not accept the sex assigned to them at birth and who live in a different gender, as well as those who wish to have ‘x’ appear in their passport to identify their sex as indeterminate.

Applicants must meet all other normal passport requirements, such as providing proof of identity documents to support their identity in the wider community.

The policy removes unnecessary obstacles to recording a person’s preferred gender in their passport. It has been developed in close consultation with the sex and gender diverse community.

This initiative is in line with the Australian Government’s commitment to remove discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation or sexual identity. "

This information will soon be available on the passports website. They are just in the process of updating the information.

Kind regards,
Dana
Dana Robertson
Media Liaison Officer
Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
tel: + 61 2 6261 1555
fax: +61 2 6261 1325
media@dfat.gov.au

I need such a refreshing dose of sanity after writing the first part of this post. The Hatred is just so unremitting, and from so very many people, a distinct majority of the commenters. And of course, the perpetual canary in the coalmine, Anti-Semitism is there.

Passports - The Final Chapter ?

2011-09-14T23:47:00.003+10:00

MINISTER FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS The Hon Kevin Rudd MP ATTORNEY-GENERAL The Hon Robert McClelland MP GETTING A PASSPORT MADE EASIER FOR SEX AND GENDER DIVERSE PEOPLE Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd and Attorney-General Robert McClelland today announced new guidelines to make it easier for sex and gender diverse people to get a passport in their preferred gender. Under the guidelines, sex reassignment surgery will no longer be a prerequisite to issue a passport in a person’s preferred gender. “Sex and gender diverse people now have the option of presenting a statement from a medical practitioner supporting their preferred gender,” said Mr Rudd. “This amendment makes life easier and significantly reduces the administrative burden for sex and gender diverse people who want a passport that reflects their gender and physical appearance.” The initiative is in line with the Australian Government’s commitment to remove discrimination on the grounds of gender identity and sexual orientation. “Most people take for granted the ability to travel freely and without fear of discrimination,” Mr McClelland said. “This measure will extend the same freedoms to sex and gender diverse Australians. “While it’s expected this change will only affect a handful of Australians, it’s an important step in removing discrimination for sex and gender diverse people. “Importantly, this policy addresses a number of the recommendations contained in the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Sex Files report.” CANBERRA 14 SEPTEMBER 2011 UNCLASSIFIED

The Capability Im-Maturity Model (CIMM)

2011-09-13T23:18:00.002+10:00

The Capability Im-Maturity Model (CIMM)

The Capability Maturity Model - CMM - is a powerful tool in process improvement, in Software and in organisations generally. Although replaced by its successor, CMMI, it's still valuable in most cases "out of the box".

From Wiki :

There are five levels defined along the continuum of the CMM and, according to the SEI: "Predictability, effectiveness, and control of an organization's software processes are believed to improve as the organization moves up these five levels. While not rigorous, the empirical evidence to date supports this belief."

Initial (chaotic, ad hoc, individual heroics) - the starting point for use of a new or undocumented repeat process.
Repeatable - the process is at least documented sufficiently such that repeating the same steps may be attempted.
Defined - the process is defined/confirmed as a standard business process, and decomposed to levels 0, 1 and 2 (the latter being Work Instructions).
Managed - the process is quantitatively managed in accordance with agreed-upon metrics.
Optimizing - process management includes deliberate process optimization/improvement.

However... as was pointed out as early as 1996, some organisations are worse than level 1. Much worse. the CIMM extends the CMM, downwards, where organisations that reached rock-bottom started to dig.

The four levels of software immaturity.

0. Negligent Indifference - Failure to allow successful development process to succeed. All problems are perceived to be technical problems. Managerial and quality assurance activities are deemed to be overhead and superfluous to the task of software development process. Reliance on silver pellets.
-1. Obstructive Counter Productive - Counterproductive processes are imposed. Processes are rigidly defined and adherence to the form is stressed. Ritualistic ceremonies abound. Collective management precludes assigning responsibility. Status quo ueber alles.
-2. Contemptuous Arrogance - Disregard for good software engineering institutionalized. Complete schism between software development activities and software process improvement activities. Complete lack of a training program.
-3. Undermining Sabotage - Total neglect of own charter, conscious discrediting of peer organizations software process improvement efforts. Rewarding failure and poor performance.

In my observation, the best government bureaucracies are at about level -1. Many though are at -3.

Do Not Bend, Spindle, or Mutilate

2011-09-12T23:15:00.003+10:00

Gordon R Dickson's 1965 story "Computers Don't Argue". Please go and read it to find out how corrupted data entry can cause things to go horribly wrong...Originally published when I was 7, it was reprinted in "creative computing" when I was an undergrad like my students, and still relevant today.

The technology has moved on; we don't use punched cards - we use relational database management systems (RDBMS). But it's now even easier to

INSERT INTO CourtJudgement VALUES amount, statute, address

instead of

INSERT INTO CourtJudgement VALUES statute, amount, address

I'm teaching a course on Databases this semester - and this story is one of the teaching materials I use, in the Ethics section. I don't want any of my students to ever bend, spindle or mutilate someone because of such errors.

An Offensive Post?

2011-09-11T21:40:00.003+10:00

From Dr Michael Brown, on the Einsatzgruppen-style execution of a gender nonconforming child:

A Fair Question for Gay Activists:

Did gay activism play a role in the murder of Lawrence King?

Did "homophobia" kill 15-year-old Lawrence "Larry" King on February 12, 2008, as gay activists allege -- or did gay activism contribute to his death?

Of course, there is only one real killer, Brandon McInerney, just 14 years old at the time of shooting. He confessed to killing Larry in cold blood in full view of his classmates. But there are others who are complicit in Larry's terribly tragic death, and rather than point the finger at a "homophobic" society, they should point it at themselves. I'm speaking of course of gay activists, who have made Larry into a martyr for the cause of gay activism when, in reality, he was more a victim of gay activism.

Here's a slight re-write, exchanging a few semantic tokens, as might be written by another conservative religious group:

A Fair Question for Americans.

Did US Government policy play a role in 9/11.

Did "Islamism" kill 3000 people on September 11th 2001, as Americans allege -- or did US policy contribute to these deaths?

Of course, there is only one real killer, Osama Bin Laden, and his cohort. He confessed to planning the cold blooded attack in full view of the world, and on video. But there are others who are complicit in these terribly tragic deaths, and rather than point the finger at "Islamists", they should point it at themselves. I'm speaking of course of Americans, who have made the 9/11 victims into martyrs for the cause of American policies when, in reality, they were more victims of American policy.

Dr B and I had a spirited discussion on this. His opinion of my re-write:

As for your article, I find no valid comparison between what I wrote and what you wrote.

There's none so blind etc.

Our point of disagreement can be summarised by this exchange:

Michael L Brown

Your second question: You forget that you're dealing with kids! If black activists told us day and night that the neighborhoods were dangerous for black kids and then encouraged those kids to flaunt their blackness by wearing hoods and taunting white kids, and then a white kid killed one of them, the white kid would be 100% guilty, but the black activists would have blood on their hands.

Zoe Ellen Brain :

There we have disagreement. The civilised response to KKK atrocities, lynchings and murders is *not* killings in return, it *is* taunting, and refusing to be cowed into submission.

I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. I do see your point, I just wonder how you reconcile it with your blatant flaunting of your ~~Calvinism~~ Arminianism**, and encouraging others to do the same.

** Sorry, I can never tell these splinter religious groups apart.

What They Believe

2011-09-09T12:33:00.001+10:00

I'm concerned about what appears to be an increase in superstition in the US and elsewhere. A Nehemiah Scudder Presidency, though unlikely, doesn't seem completely impossible these days.

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

A presidential candidate who cuts money for volunteer firefighters, then organises a christian pray-for-rain event as a substitute. (non-christians welcome to hear the word - but not welcome to speak their heathen perversions).

The fact that such things don't work - that can be hidden with sufficient money and application of the "Big Lie". It never happened.

The First Prophet was Nehemiah Scudder, a backwoods preacher turned President (elected in 2012), then dictator (no elections were held in 2016 or later).

How it all happened..

2011-09-08T23:20:00.000+10:00

Where things started going downhill with the US economy. Earlier than you think.

The Australian Christian Lobby Exposed

2011-09-07T22:53:00.000+10:00

From Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear:

The Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) was founded way back in 1995, only it wasn’t called the ACL then, it was known as the Australian Christian Coalition (ACC). The name was derived from its American cousin, the scandal-ridden Christian Coalition of America, established by the rabid, right-wing televangelist, Pat Robertson.

Rabid? Really?
Controversies surrounding Robertson include his earlier work as a faith healer, his claim that some Protestant denominations harbor the spirit of the Antichrist, and his claims of having the power to deflect hurricanes through prayer; he has also denounced Hinduism as "demonic" and Islam as "Satanic." Robertson has issued multiple condemnations of feminism, homosexuality, abortion and liberal college professors. Robertson also had financial ties to former presidents Charles Taylor of Liberia and Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, both internationally denounced for their human rights violations. Robertson was criticized worldwide for his call for Hugo Chavez’s assassination and for his remarks concerning Ariel Sharon's health as an act of God.

The week of September 11, 2001, Robertson discussed the terror attacks with Jerry Falwell, who said that "the ACLU has to take a lot of blame for this" in addition to "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays, and the lesbians [who have] helped [the terror attacks of September 11th] happen." Robertson replied, "I totally concur."

OK, Rabid. Moving on...

At first, it seems, there was little attempt to hide the ACC’s dominionist agenda. In fact, one of the organisation’s early journals was called Mandate – an allusion to the belief “that Christians alone are Biblically mandated to occupy all secular institutions until Christ returns”. That’s right, folks, the long-term goal for these people looks a lot like TOTAL WORLD DOMINATION.

The aims of the ACC could not have been clearer: “to reclaim our society and our government for God and to have the Christian voice heard”. Did you hear that, non-religious and secular Australians? You’ve got their country and they want it back.

Not surprisingly, the ACC soon found its dominionist theology and fundamentalist lunacy simply wasn’t going to fly in the Australian political landscape. If it wanted to appeal to ‘middle Australia’ it needed a little cosmetic surgery.

Of course, this didn’t mean the ACC planned to abandon its Christian nationalist agenda and ditsy dogma. God forbid! No! It simply meant that a shiny new veneer was added to make it seem … well … somewhat less batshit crazy.

The veneer slipped a bit recently, with some of the American invitees to a conference on same-sex marriage not having been sufficiently well briefed.

More on Seven Mountains Dominionism etc over at Christian Psychologist Warren Throckmorton's place. Some of them even scare the Theocrats...

The X Factor

2011-09-06T23:05:00.001+10:00

Proving once more that chromosomes have nothing to do with masculinity.

For those in the Northern Hemisphere...

2011-09-05T23:36:00.001+10:00

The brightest supernova in the last 25 years.

For those of us in the southern latitudes, Ursa Major's not visible. Darnit.

Depressing

2011-09-02T21:33:00.005+10:00

From KTLA:

The judge in the Brandon McInerney murder trial has declared a mistrial after jurors said they were hopelessly deadlocked.

The vote was 7 to 5 in favor of finding Brandon McInerney guilty of voluntary manslaughter.
...
Deputy Dist. Atty. Maeve Fox told jurors that King was "executed" for who he was, and that the crime was therefore first-degree murder.

"No amount of revisionist history and attempts to paint Larry King as some kind of predator can ever change the fact of what occurred in this case," Fox said. "That is: Larry King was executed for who he was."

Prosecutors have described the shooting as a premeditated murder carried out by a classmate who was a proponent of "racist skinhead philosophy."

According to prosecutors, McInerney sat behind King in the computer lab class on Feb. 12, 2008, didn't do anything for 20 minutes, and then, without saying a word, fired one shot into the back of King's head.

As the teen collapsed to the floor, McInerney stood up, looked around at his astonished classmates and delivered a "second, coup de grâce" shot into King's head, prosecutors allege.

The defense has argued that King taunted and flirted with McInerney, ultimately sparking the fatal confrontation.

Student witnesses have said King had expressed a romantic interest in McInerney, who was humiliated by the attention.

But, when asked by McInerney's lawyer Scott Wipert if he had seen King "chasing boys around," A student identified as 17-year-old Cristian G. answered no.

One of King's friends told the court that King did not aggressively flirt with other boys at the school.
...
Prosecutors say McInerney carefully planned and carried out murder of his eighth-grade classmate.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

During opening statements, the defense argued that McInerney was a troubled boy from a violent home and killed King in the "heat-of-the-moment."

Fox countered that McInerney had threatened to shoot King, who was openly gay, the day before the incident after the two were involved in an argument in science class.

McInerney had just turned 14 when he allegedly shot King with a .22-caliber handgun.

In California, the "Gay/Trans Panic Defence" was supposed to have been excluded after the murder of Gwen Araujo.

A transgender variation of the gay panic defense was also used in 2004–2005 by the three defendants in the Gwen Araujo homicide case, who claimed that they were enraged by the discovery that Araujo, a transgender teenager with whom they had engaged in sex, had male genitalia. The first trial resulted in a jury deadlock; in the second, defendants Mike Magidson and Jose Merél were convicted of second-degree murder, while the jury again deadlocked in the case of Jason Cazares. Cazares later entered a plea of no contest to charges of voluntary manslaughter.

But it seems not. The Judge can advise the Jury to disregard it, but they don't have to obey.

All a defence lawyer has to do is assert that the victim "came on" to the suspect - no witnesses or other evidence is necessary - and deadlock, or even acquittal - is likely, regardless of the other facts.

Closer to home...

From the Melbourne Age

A transgender woman yesterday told how she was attacked while in a motorised wheelchair and hit about 70 times with a garden spade.

“I thought I was going to die,” Donna Macklan said in Albury Local Court when describing the attack on her in January.

She said she was knocked from her wheelchair as she tried to leave a house in North Albury, after a confrontation, the Border Mail reports.

The blows were mainly to her lower back. She also suffered a broken elbow.

Christie Keighran yesterday pleaded guilty to assault occasioning actual bodily harm, malicious damage, offensive behaviour and resisting arrest.
...
The court was told Ms Macklan had lived as a woman for four years.

She became a partial paraplegic in a car crash several years ago with fractures to her right side and back injuries.

She can walk only a few steps.

There was an argument when she went to a Kentucky Avenue house about 3.25pm on January 15.

Keighran, 22, of Turner Street, Lavington, called her a (her)maphrodite and fetched a spade from the yard.

Ms Macklan tried to leave, but Keighran began hitting her motorised chair, causing damage to either side, the computer box and tyres.

“She was trying to hit me, but luckily she was hitting the wheelchair,” Ms Macklan said.

She was knocked from the wheelchair and hit several times to the head and face.

So a paraplegic gets attacked by a 22 year old woman with a shovel she specifically goes and gets to complete the attack with. Fortunately, there was no serious attempt to murder the victim. I guess we have to be thankful for small mercies.

Sometimes it's difficult not to give in to paranoia. Yes, there's risks, these should not be underestimated, even in a relatively sane place such as Canberra, Australia. But we can't go around living our lives dominated by fears, even well-grounded ones. After all, we have police to protect us.

The off-duty Metropolitan Police Department officer, Kenneth Furr, who allegedly shot two transgender women seated in a car early Friday, Aug. 26, at First and Pierce Streets NW, appeared for a preliminary hearing at D.C. Superior Court on Tuesday, Aug. 30, where his lawyer withdrew from the case and was replaced by another. Furr's new attorney, Harold Martin, asked for a postponement of the preliminary hearing, which was granted and moved to Friday, Sept. 2. Furr is being held without bond.

According to charging documents made public Aug. 27 at Furr's arraignment, Furr approached one of the transgender women at a CVS at 400 Massachusetts Ave. NW early Friday morning. That led to a second exchange with both women and a male outside the store, where Furr allegedly pulled out a handgun and pointed it at the group, who fled into the CVS. Afterward, the three who encountered Furr joined two others and trailed Furr, both parties in vehicles, in hopes of gleaning enough information to report him to authorities.

The charging document reports that Furr stopped his car near First and Pierce Streets NW, exited and pointed a handgun at the vehicle trailing him. The driver ducked to avoid getting shot, and the two vehicles collided. Furr then allegedly climbed onto the hood of the vehicle and continued shooting. At least one of the women who was shot said she heard Furr say, ''Ima kill all of you.''

One male victim was shot and taken to George Washington University Hospital in serious condition, while the two transgender women who were shot were taken to Howard University Hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

Hmmm... maybe not.

My son told me in the car yesterday that he tells others at school that I'm his aunt, rather than his father. To avoid "issues".

He was worried that I'd be upset. Naturally, I approved of his action, anything to keep my boy out of danger, hurt feelings be darned. I'm proud of him, that he had the sense to do this, even at age 10. That he had the personal courage and responsibility not to ask me, but to tell me, as he judged (rightly) that he knew his own situation best. And not least, that he thought of my feelings too, and wanted to make sure that I knew, and hoped I understood.

I told him that as long as he knew I was his Daddy, and always would be, the rest of the world didn't need to know. That I approved of his action, and was proud of him.

He's a far better and more mature man at 10 than the killer of Larry King was at 14, or ever will be. I'm sorry that he has to do this, to be tested this way, but that is the world he and I live in.

Depressing, isn't it?

Personal names around the world

2011-09-01T22:31:00.001+10:00

It's been a long time since I've done a post on Software. Time for this one, and the difficulties faced in making a database about something as simple as a name...

Personal names around the world

In many parts of the world, parts of names are derived from titles, locations, genealogical information, caste, religious references, and so on. Here are a few examples:

the Indian name Kogaddu Birappa Timappa Nair follows the order villageName-fathersName-givenName-lastName.

the Rajasthani name Aditya Pratap Singh Chauhan is composed of givenName-fathersName-surname-casteName.

in another part of India the name Madurai Mani Iyer represents townName-givenName-casteName.

the Arabic Abu Karim Muhammad al-Jamil ibn Nidal ibn Abdulaziz al-Filistini translates as "Father of Karim, Muhammad (given name), The beautiful, Son of Nidal, Son of Abdulaziz, the Palestinian". Karim is Muhammad's first-born son.

ISS Alert: Astronauts May Have to Abandon Station this Fall

2011-08-31T01:14:00.002+10:00

This is where screwing up the US space program gets you.

ISS Alert: Astronauts May Have to Abandon Station this Fall

Astronauts may need to temporarily abandon the International Space Station if last week's Russian launch accident prevents new crews from flying there this fall. Until officials figure out what went wrong with Russia's essential Soyuz rockets, there will be no way to launch any more astronauts before the current residents have to leave in mid-November. The predicament comes just weeks after NASA's final space shuttle flight.
...
Suffredini said flight controllers could keep a deserted space station operating indefinitely, as long as all major systems are working properly. The risk to the station goes up, however, if no one is on board to fix equipment breakdowns.

As long as nothing goes wrong, all is well. Or well-ish. But once you trim things down too much... things fall apart. The centre cannot hold.

Unclear on the Concept of Meteorology

2011-08-30T22:37:00.002+10:00

25 Idiots That Blamed Hurricane Irene On Gay Marriage

And more.

Christian Attitudes to Atheism in America

2011-08-29T22:32:00.000+10:00

From Fox News Facebook Page Gets 8,000 Death Threats

From the Tennessee Sheriff's Handbook

2011-08-26T23:53:00.000+10:00

Without comment.

Nevertheless, the Eighth Amendment does not require the separate placement of inmates based on sex. Galvan v. Carothers, 855 F.Supp. 285 (D. Alaska 1994) (The placement of a female inmate in an all-male prison wing did not constitute cruel and unusual punishment.); Dimarco v. Wyoming Department of Corrections, 300 F.Supp.2d 1183, 1192-1194 (D. Wyo. 2004) (The placement of an intersexual inmate, who was of alleged female gender but was anatomically situated as a male due to the presence of a penis, in segregated confinement for a period of 438 days, with concomitant severely limited privileges, solely because of the condition and status of ambiguous gender was not a violation of the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment where the safety of the inmate and other inmates was secured by placing the inmate in administrative segregation, and the inmate was provided the basic necessities of food, shelter, clothing and medical treatment.); Lucrecia v. Samples, 1995 WL 630016 (N.D. Cal. 1995) (The transfer of a transsexual inmate to an all-male facility and her housing in an all-male cell did not violate the due process clause where the inmate failed to demonstrate the infringement of a liberty interest.).

Source

From Breaking Out of the Prison Hierarchy: Transgender Prisoners, Rape, and The Eighth Amendment

On December 17, 2002, Kelly McAllister filed a claim against Sacramento County, its district attorney, and the sheriff’s department, alleging threats and slurs based on her transgender status, battery, and an assault that culminated in rape.

McAllister is a five-foot seven-inch, 135-pound pre-operative transsexual in her mid-thirties, who has lived as a woman for several years.

She was arrested in connection with a reported public disturbance.

After McAllister’s court appearance, she was placed in a cell with a larger male in-mate who brutally raped her.

Her attorney claims that the sheriff’s department knew of McAllister’s transgender status,but still placed her in a cell with a man.

McAllister’s ordeal typifies the risk faced by male-to-female (MTF) transgender persons incarcerated in jails and prisons across the country.

Note that they don't have to be convicted - just arrested. And the alleged crime need not be serious - being too near a disturbance for example, or asking why you're being detained. You don't have to be actually guilty of any crime at all, it does you no good if the judge dismisses all charges as ridiculous if you've been pack-raped and infected with HiV. Or murdered in jail.

I know one trans woman who was arrested on suspicion of being an "English Spy" in Orange County, California, due to her accent. Fortunately the desk sergeant dealt with the matter before she was put in jail awaiting trial for it. Not all police are quite so thick, nor quite so bigoted.

Riots and Responsibility

2011-08-25T23:18:00.001+10:00

From the UK Telegraph

What real people know – and have known for quite a long time – is that the great tacit agreement which once held civic life together has been deliberately blown apart. There was a time within living memory when all reasonable grown-ups were considered to be on the same side. Parents, teachers, police, judges, politicians – decent citizens of every station and calling – formed an unspoken confederacy to uphold standards of behaviour within their own communities.

Exactly.

One thing though: what kind of example is being set by many who are in the “Upper Class” these days? It used to be that there was some kind of noblesse oblige. Bankers were expected to be reputable and honest, with the exceptions few and far between, and (this is the important point) punished severely when found out. The same with financial institutions - engage in irresponsible financial shenanigans, and they go bankrupt.

Now MPs caught en flagrante delicto fiddling their expenses get light taps on the wrist, except in the most egregious cases. Financial institutions are “too big to fail”, their corruption rewarded by public bailouts. And in the US, the head of the IRS suffers no penalty for rorting the tax system, engaging in not just quasi-legal but blatantly illegal conduct, and gets let off.

“Laws are for the little people”.

The scum at the top., like the dregs at the bottom

“will behave badly just because they can, because no one is stopping them, or has ever inculcated in them the conscientious discipline that would make them stop themselves.”

They do this because they can, and because they know they will get away with it. And because everyone else is doing it too.

The indispensable tools of social stigma and moral judgment that communities used to have at their disposal for this purpose have been stripped away, and the result – the fearless defiance of helpless authority – is what we saw in its terrifying logical conclusion...

But enough about the bailout of the bankers, the "Friends of Angelo", the misuse of "sovereign immunity" that allows some police in the USA to get away with murder, and I do mean that literally.

Let's talk about the London Riots.

Except we have been doing. What's the damage, 5 lives lost? Perhaps half a billion dollars in property damage? Fear of chaos and lawlessness in the community?

That's small beer against the cost of the financial malfeasance and misfeasance that has put the world economy on the skids. But it's the same thing at a local, rather than global, level. And we can no longer go about things the same old way.

Sex Dimorphism of the Brain in Male-to-Female Transsexuals

2011-08-24T22:45:00.001+10:00

Another part of the puzzle:

Sex Dimorphism of the Brain in Male-to-Female Transsexuals by Savic I, Arver S Cereb. Cortex (2011)

Our group recently employed in vivo investigations and found that smelling of 2 putative pheromones, which in heterosexual subjects normally leads to a sex differentiated activation of the hypothalamus, causes a sex atypical activation in estrogen naïve MtF-TR (Berglund et al. 2008). This observation corroborated with previous anatomical findings in transsexuals but provided no information as to whether and how the hypothalamic networks, which in animal studies are shown to be involved in “sexual behavior,” would be also engaged in the perception of “sexual identity.” Understanding the biology of gender dysphoria requires consideration of additional cerebral networks identified as sexually dimorphic than the hypothalamus. Considering that the sense of discomfort with sex characteristics of the own body is the main feature of gender dysphoria, it is important to also investigate the cerebral networks reported to be involved in own body perception and perception of self. Luders et al. recently addressed some of these issues by an explorative voxel-based morphological (VBM) analysis of the gray matter (GM) fractions. They found that GM volume in the putamen was more pronounced in MtF-TR than in male and female controls, particularly on the right side (Luders, Sanchez, et al. 2009). While the GM in the putamen did not differ significantly between male and female controls, these data, nevertheless, emphasized the possibility that gender dysphoria could be associated with an altered anatomy also in brain regions located outside the hypothalamus.

So far, so good.

Only nonhomosexual, transsexual subjects were included. The rationale was the following; Although there is still an ongoing discussion about the classification of transsexual individuals (Blanchard et al. 1987, 1989; Lawrence 2005; Smith et al. 2005), the general view is that there are 2 fundamentally different types of transsexualism: homosexual and nonhomosexual (Blanchard et al. 1987). Homosexual MtF-TR are erotically attracted to the same biological sex and denoted as “androphilic” MtF-TR in the literature. They differ from those attracted to the opposite biological sex (“gynephillic” MtF-TR) and those who are not sexually attracted to other persons; The 2 latter groups are referred to as autogynephillic by the so called Blanchard’s classification (Blanchard 1989; Smith et al. 2005). Blanchard reported that homosexual transsexuals as usually younger at initial presentation and with more pronounced and frequent childhood femininity (Blanchard 1989). Homosexual transsexuals have also been found to be shorter, lighter, and lighter in proportion to their height, also in relation to men in the general population, whereas nonhomosexual transsexuals have been found to be similar in height as controls (Blanchard et al. 1995).

*SIGH* In other words, they assume that Transsexual women are actually men. So if attracted to men, must be homosexual. *SIGH* again. Why not just use "androphillic" and "gynephillic"? That way you don't beg the question, especially when dealing with Intersex people.

Group differences in regional GM volume. Colored clusters were calculated from the following group comparisons: (A) HeW-HeM (left), HeM-HeW (right). (B) MtF-TR-HeW (left), HeW-MtF-TR (right). (C) MtF-TR—HeM (left), HeM-MtF-TR (right). Contrast calculated at T corresponding to P = 0.001 at pixel level, P < 0.05 corrected, minimum cluster size 0.4 cm3. Clusters are superimposed on the standard brain, SPM5. The scale is arbitrary showing T-values between 0 and 6.5. The lines indicate the 3 regions in which the gray matter fraction differed between transsexuals and controls. Notably, these regions were similar independently of whether the controls were men or women.

Only right-handed (Oldfield 1971), unmedicated, and healthy subjects were included. Exclusion criteria were history of severe systemic disease, any psychiatric (other than gender dysphoria), or neurological disorder, drug abuse including anabolic steroids or psychiatric medication, and use of hormonal contraceptives in women and hormone supplement in MtF-TR.

OK, so we've only included straight women with straight trans women, and are looking at trans women who have had no hormonal therapy. And cut out a lot of trans women, as they have a higher rate of non-right-handedness than the general population as part of the syndrome.

That seems to have shackled a lot of the variables. Sure, the trans women are unrepresentative of trans women as a whole, but with the hormonal balance of males, and the sexual orientation of (straight)females, and the winnowing out so only the least different from the norm regarding handedness are included, that really means that if any neural atypicality is found, we can't look to explanations other than transsexuality for it.

So let's look at what was found in detail:

MR volumetry outside the hypothalamus has, to the best of our knowledge, hitherto not been reported in transsexuals, and the presently observed reductions of the thalamus and putamen volumes in MtF-TR have no precedents. Neither have increases of GM volumes in the temporoparietal junction, and the insular and inferior frontal cortex been described earlier.

1. We're looking at areas outside the ones that have been looked at before. Differences have been found that match neither a male nor female stereotype.

It should be emphasized that the present data, being focused on extra hypothalamic structures, do not disapprove previous reports about sex-atypical hypothalamic dimorphism in transsexuals (Swaab et al. 1992; Zhou et al. 1995). Furthermore, they were generated exclusively from investigations of nonhomosexual, gynephillic MtF-TR.

2. The results are consistent with previous ones about lesbian trans women having (in some sense) "female brains", though in other senses, not. It's not that simple.

3. That Trans people have brains whose structure in some areas matches neither a Male nor Female stereotype. The differences extend beyond the hypothalamus.

The issue of possible cerebral difference between gynephillic and androphillic (homosexual) MtF-TR and also between androphillic MtF-TR and homosexual healthy men is of special interest and needs to be addressed separately in future studies. Additional studies of the relationship between brain structure and function in transsexual persons and also extending the material to female to male transsexuals are necessary to more precisely interpret the present observations.

4. We're only looking at a small subset of Trans people, and we need to sort out what bits are to do with sexual orientation, and what bits are to do with gender identity. And finally, the bottom line:

The observed differences between MtF-TR and controls raise the question as to whether gender dysphoria may be associated with changes in multiple structures and involve a network (rather than a single nodal area).

5. It's not simple! The whole is different from the sum of its parts.

Marriage, Change, and Eternal Commitment

2011-08-23T22:20:00.000+10:00

From the New York Times: Modern Love - My Husband Is Now My Wife

I’d wept without warning after dinner because I would not see his face again, his perfectly average face with a sizable nose and weak chin, the face I’d held and kissed and been happy to greet for eight years.

“Do you still have your wedding ring on?” I asked. “They said to take it off.”
...
It wasn’t until we were married that my husband, finally feeling loved, admitted to himself that he was transsexual. That he was, inside, a woman. That he did not want to be the man I married.

Stunned and wounded, I located a therapist, read transgender books, found support online and confided in the lone friend I entrusted with my secret. My husband and I continued to talk, to love.

Over time I came to believe that my husband, as my wife, would be in most ways the same person: intelligent, compassionate, mature, with the same slim build. I’d had a relationship with a woman in my early 20s, so living as a lesbian was agreeable enough, though I mourned the societal ease we would lose.
...
WHEN we reached the house, I asked if she minded staying in the car while I tended to the pets, knowing our entrance would be chaotic otherwise. She nodded yes.

The house was warm, but I turned the heat up to make it toasty. I imagined my life if the person in the car didn’t exist. Easier, but empty.

I returned and roused my dozing partner, spouse, wife. We shuffled inside and into our bedroom, which I’d stocked with her medications, ice bags and gauze. I maneuvered her under the covers and fluffed her pillows. I took her wedding band from the beaded box and slipped it over her finger.
...
We’d been in bed almost 12 hours when a gray light filled the room. Still under our covers, we were warm and safe. Soon enough, we would face the world. I pulled my right arm from the sleeping bag and took my partner’s hand. We stayed like that, side by side, until the sun rose on our first day in this foreign land.

I teared up a bit when I read that.

I didn't require skull reconstruction - for that is what aggressive Facial Feminisation Surgery is. My Face may not be my fortune, but it's mine, and never was terribly masculine anyway. Similarly, I've had no breast augmentation, no prosthesis, even though with my barrel chest my breasts get a bit lost in the shuffle.

Genital reconstruction though was needed due to the mess that was left after the change hit. It was important to me psychologically too.

I was never much of a husband, and never thought of myself as one of those - and I don't think of myself as a wife - but I was, and am a partner.

I wish this couple well, and I hope both can settle down into a common or garden lesbian relationship. My partner and I are both straight, so that wasn't our fate, but our love remains eternal. We no longer have intimacy, but we do have physical affection. Our marriage hasn't changed at all there, we love each other just as much as we did over 30 years ago.

Australian Human Rights Consultation

2011-08-22T23:22:00.002+10:00

Consultation on draft Baseline Study

The Australian Government has committed to developing a National Human Rights Action Plan in consultation with civil society. An effective and forward looking Action Plan needs to balance areas of need and take an evidence-based approach to setting priorities.

The Baseline Study aims to assist with that. The Baseline Study builds on the findings of the 2009 human rights consultations to present a picture of the status of human rights in Australia by:

outlining relevant statistics and other research on key human rights issues
noting relevant recommendations from Australia’s recent Universal Periodic Review (UPR) at the United Nations
highlighting major government initiatives already in place, and
proposing issues that a National Action Plan could address.

In doing so, the Baseline Study importantly recognises potential gaps and negative human rights experiences which could be addressed in the National Human Rights Action Plan. We hope this consultation on the draft Baseline Study will prompt thoughts and suggestions of actions to address human rights issues in the National Human Rights Action Plan.

So now you have the opportunity to stick your oar in, to change the direction of the Ship of State.

3.5.3 Freedom from discrimination

According to the Australian Coalition for Equality, gay, lesbian, bisexual and sex or gender diverse people continue to report experiencing higher incidents of discrimination, prejudice and violence over a life time than the rest of the population in Australia.[1] All State and Territory anti-discrimination laws prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender expression, sex or gender identity, or the identity of a partner. However, some participants in the National Consultation were of the view that the legal protections are inconsistent.[2] The Australian Government has committed to introducing legislation to prohibit discrimination on the basis of a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. That legislation would apply consistently across Australia.

3.5.4 Sex and/or gender diverse people

The concluding paper of the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Sex and Gender Diversity Project identified ongoing issues of discrimination for the sex and/or gender diverse community within the realm of legal recognition of sex in documents and government records. The following key issues were raised in the paper:
Under most State and Territory legislation, a married person cannot apply to have their sex changed on their birth certificate.[3]
A person cannot apply to have their birth certificate changed to note their sex identity if they have not undergone sex affirmation surgery.[4]
Gender identification in records is largely binary (male/female). Passports can be issued with ‘X’ but only if the person’s birth certificate notes their sex as indeterminate.[5]
Requirements to record any previous name can divulge information about a person’s previous legal identity because the name is gender specific.[6]
The Federal Attorney-General has tasked his Department with coordinating a review of how and why the Australian Government collects sex and gender data. The Department will also work with relevant Australian Government agencies and State and Territory governments to consider developing a nationally consistent approach to legally changing sex.

References

[1]Australian Coalition for Equality, Submission to the National Human Rights Consultation, 2009, pp 121-122.
[2] Ibid p 123-124
[3]Australian Human Rights Commission, Sex Files: the legal recognition of sex in documents and government records – Concluding paper of the sex and gender diversity project, 2009, p 23.
[4] Ibid p 24
[5] Ibid p 27
[6] Ibid p 28

Not to "develop" a consistent approach, certainly not to "implement" a consistent approach, but to "consider developing" a consistent approach. One day. In the Fullness of Time.

So it's up to us, the voters, to hurry them up a little.

Closing date for submissions is the 31st - so we better hurry too. Submissions may be via the online form, or via e-mail.

We might start with this issue:

Ever since I transitioned from male to female the Passport Office has been acting strangely. When I wanted to change my passport I had to produce evidence that I had really changed my name, that I had really had irreversible genital surgery and that I was no longer married.

Then I was eligible for a passport that said “F” where it used to say “M”, but it still arrived with a testy note telling me this was all so that I could travel without embarrassment and that if I tried to use my passport to marry a male I would be liable to a fine of $5000.00 or six months in prison, or both. So it wasn’t intended to identify me as a woman but simply to allow me to pass myself off as a woman.

For a time the Passport Office would issue a temporary passport in a person’s target gender, but only if they were travelling in order to have the mandatory irreversible surgery required before documentation could be amended.

Then Border Security, under Lord Downer of Baghdad, rescinded even this tiny concession and stated that everyone had to travel on passports that matched their birth assignment, or on a Document of Identity, which showed no gender and was therefore liable to attract undue attention. Nor did a Document of Identity guarantee re-entry into Australia.

Grace Abrams took the Passport Office to the Supreme Court because she was denied a female passport unless she was willing to divorce her wife. She wasn’t, and she won her case.

Stefanie Imbruglio, on her way to have gender affirmation surgery in Thailand, travelled on a passport that showed her gender as male and encountered discrimination and harassment from various gatekeeper authorities. She took them on in the courts after she returned and won her case.

Recently Marcelle (who prefers not to give her surname) gained a female passport without surgery as a pre-requisite, since her profession requires her to travel and she will not travel on the highly questionable Document of Identity. It took seven months of negotiation but after going to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal she won her case.

When another transgendered woman tried to use Marcelle’s case as a precedent she was refused because the AAT decision was “a settlement on mutually agreed terms”, not binding on other cases.

Bloody-mindedness.

Air Sharks - and Clownfish too

2011-08-19T23:08:00.001+10:00

Available via Hobby-On.com - when they're back in stock, and their servers are getting hammered pretty hard too. The manufacturers, x-zylo, have a fascinating range of other aerial toys too.

When I was young, I would definitely have preferred a Shark rather than a Fairy. Not exactly terribly feminine, I know. I had an inflatable shark bought in Italy when I was 6. Named "Cutty", as in "Cutty Shark".

I used to cuddle Cutty in bed, along with Neberick Moledewarp, my plush aerodynamic mole. OK, I'm weird. But my readers already know that.

More, Please, and Faster

2011-08-18T23:22:00.003+10:00

From FierceBiotechResearch: Stanford researchers separate tumor-causing stem cells from therapeutic ones

A major obstacle to widespread therapeutic use of human embryonic stem cells is this nasty tendency for a few of them to turn "Frankenstein" on us. Out of the tens of millions of pluripotent cells used in therapy, cells that have been "programmed" by scientists to become any type of specified adult tissue, a few go rogue and become dangerous tumors called teratomas when transplanted into patients. So, researchers at Stanford University, writing in the journal Nature Biotechnology, describe a method to get rid of the cells that can become teratomas before they are used in humans.

"The ability to do regenerative medicine requires the complete removal of tumor-forming cells from any culture that began with pluripotent cells," Stanford's Irving Weissman said in a release. "We've used a combination of antibodies to weed out the few undifferentiated cells that could be left in the 10 or 100 million differentiated cells that make up a therapeutic dose."

This deals with a recently detected problem: the fact that stem cells have far more mutations on them than we'd like a problem first detected in March:

The article mentions a couple of studies into the genome of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, which are adult cells that have been reprogrammed into stem cells. They, in turn, could be transformed into any type of tissue. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, sequenced the gene-coding portion of the genome in 22 iPS cell lines that had been reprogrammed. "Every cell line we looked at, we found single [genetic-letter] mutations in the protein-coding region, an average of six mutations per cell line," Zhang told Technology Review. A disproportionate number of the mutations appeared in genes involved in cell growth or in genes that have been previously linked to cancer.

This is a Big Deal, as the use of stem cells promises many breakthroughs in reconstructive medicine.

Basically, in a mature body, these unprogrammed cells migrate to a place where a cell is needed, and based on the local environment, are programmed to become the type of cell needed. This is the mechanism by which patients who have had bone-marrow transplants gradually become genetically identical to the donor - as described in an earlier post.

Our bodies are not so much objects, as processes. We are performance art, rather than a static display, changing slightly from day to day. And our somatic identity is not determined by our genes, it's a construct where genes are part of the process, not the whole story.

I've had to write an extensive chapter on this issue (amongst the many others involved in Evolution), and the distinction between Genotype and Phenotype for my PhD thesis. It's the Phenotype that determines the "Fitness" of an entity in a population, but the Genotype that determines what characteristics are transmitted to the next generation. The Phenotypes of the next generation are influenced by more than just genes, but the environment too. Many phenotypes can result from a single genotype - just ask any pair of Identical Twins. They comprise a clone, genetically identical, yet the bodies have subtle differences. Genes don't so much define the body, as define the range of possible bodies, and the chances of various characteristics manifesting, depending on foetal environment. Two genetically identical foetusses in two different host mothers may differ considerably.

Push for reform on gender law confusion

2011-08-17T23:07:00.000+10:00

From the Canberra Times : Push for reform on gender law confusion

Transgender Canberrans have had unwanted hysterectomies, been detained at airports and suffered workplace discrimination, submissions into a Law Reform Advisory Council inquiry reveal.

Responses to the council's inquiry into the legal recognition of transgender and intersex people in the ACT call for sweeping reforms to the territory's laws to ensure the protection of human rights.

ACT Human Rights and Discrimination Commissioner Helen Watchirs said the Birth, Deaths and Marriage Registration Act needs to be amended to remove requirements for a person to have sexual reassignment surgery before they can change their sex on the birth register. She said current requirements breach an individual's right to privacy, movement and freedom of expression.
...
The commissioner recommended laws be amended to include a definition of ''non-binary gender'' and said unnecessary genital surgery on an intersex child should be delayed until they are old enough to provide consent.

In a joint submission, A Gender Agenda and the Women's Legal Centre said changing a person's legal sex should be based on self-identification.

They said genital and reproductive organ surgery should only be performed on children who are old enough to make an informed decision.
...
ACT Law Reform Advisory Council chair Simon Rice said the submissions highlighted the bravery of the local transgender and intersex community.

''Through a lack of awareness of difference they experience instances of direct discrimination,'' he said.

I've had a small input to this process as part of the Australian National University's panel of experts on the issue, advising the ACT Law Reform Council. No guarantees, the report will be delivered in November, but there is considerable bipartisan support for humane legal reforms in this area. The aim is to provide a "best practice" legal template for other states and territories to follow.

Doorbell

2011-08-16T23:16:00.000+10:00

How deep a hole is the US economy in?

That deep. And they're still digging.

Sex on the brain

2011-08-16T22:08:00.000+10:00

From New Scientist : Sex on the brain: What turns women on, mapped out

It's what women have been telling men for decades: stimulating the vagina is not the same as stimulating the clitoris. Now brain scan data has added weight to their argument.

The precise locations that correspond to the vagina, cervix and female nipples on the brain's sensory cortex have been mapped for the first time, proving that vaginal stimulation activates different brain regions to stimulation of the clitoris. The study also found a direct link between the nipples and the genitals, which may explain why some women can orgasm through nipple stimulation alone.
...
Some have argued that women who derive pleasure from vaginal stimulation do so because their clitoris is being indirectly stimulated, but the current findings contradict this. "They support the reports of women that they experience orgasm from various forms of stimulation," says Beverly Whipple, also of Rutgers University, who was not involved in the current study.

Komisaruk also checked what happened when women's nipples were stimulated, and was surprised to find that in addition to the chest area of the cortex lighting up, the genital area was also activated. "When I tell my male neuroscientist colleagues about this, they say: 'Wow, that's an exception to the classical homunculus,'" he says. "But when I tell the women they say: 'Well, yeah?'" It may help explain why a lot of women claim that nipple stimulation is erotic, he adds.

Something that tends to cheese women off : having male doctors tell them what they must be feeling, when said male doctors have no actual evidence to back up what they say.

Next time, believe her, OK doc? Because the MRI images show that your arrogant ideas aren't actually true, as any woman could have told you - and female medical professionals probably did, you just ignored them.

On a personal note, it's obvious my neural anatomy (in this area at least) is strongly female, and always has been. It's good to have the peripherals match the device drivers at last. That's all I'm saying on the subject.

Catching Up

2011-08-15T21:54:00.000+10:00

I'm in the middle of publishing all the draft posts for the last week that I wrote but didn't finalise.

The reason why I got behind is because my PhD thesis, and a whole heap of family health issues meant that something had to be put on the back burner for a while.

However, today, my thesis-writing-up went well, and I now have a reasonable expectation that I'll have it completed, peer-reviewed by my supervisory panel, checked and revised before the deadline, despite the problems I've encountered with converting Open Office documents to PDFs. It's all in my head now, just a matter of expressing the concepts in written form, concisely and clearly.

Gender change from female to male in classical CAH

2011-08-13T21:17:00.001+10:00

One for the reference library, from 1996; Gender change from female to male in classical congenital adrenal hyperplasia. by Meyer-Bahlburg et al, Horm Behav. 1996 Dec;30(4):319-32.

The psychoendocrinology of the development of normal gender identity and its variations is poorly understood. Studies of gender development in individuals born with endocrinologically well-characterized intersex conditions are heuristically valuable for the disaggregation of factors that are acting in concert during normal development. Four 46,XX individuals with classical congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) and atypical gender identity entered a comprehensive research protocol including systematic interviews and self-report inventories on gender role behavior and identity, sexual history, and psychiatric history. Some of the data on gender variables were compared to data from 12 CAH women with the salt-wasting variant (CAH-SW) with female gender identity. The four patients (ages 28, 35, 38, and 30 years) represented three different subtypes of classical early-onset CAH: 21-OH deficiency, simple virilizing (CAH-SV); 21-OH deficiency, salt-wasting (CAH-SW); and 11-beta-OH deficiency. Their medical histories were characterized by delay beyond infancy or lack of surgical feminization of the external genitalia and progressive virilization with inconsistent or absent glucocorticoid replacement therapy. Although three patients had undergone one or more genital surgeries, all had retained at least some orgasmic capacity. In regard to childhood gender-role behavior, the four gender-change patients tended to be more masculine or less feminine than (behaviorally masculinized) CAH-SW controls. All patients were sexually attracted to females only. The process of gender change was gradual and extended well into adulthood. The most plausible factors contributing to cross-gender identity development in these patients appeared to be neither a particular genotype or endocrinotype nor a sex-typing bias on the part of the parents but a combination of a gender-atypical behavioral self-image, a gender-atypical body image, and the development of erotic attraction to women. Implications for psychosocial management are also discussed.

Like everything else, this study suffers from small sample size. Nonetheless, one for the reference library. I'm sure those wedded to the idea that atypical Gender Identity (not to say sexual orientation) is caused by absent fathers etc will continue to ignore such evidence anyway.

The London Riots

2011-08-12T23:22:00.000+10:00

From the BBC : Showing the rich we do what we want

Please listen to some of the rioters express the reason for their actions in their own words. It's the Rich people's fault, you see. Those that own small businesses, or their own cars for that matter. They're just showing them that the law doesn't apply to the rioters, they can do anything they want. It's good fun.

An Alternate Universe

2011-08-11T13:33:00.000+10:00

From the MightyGodKing blog, a what-if. Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where The Beatles Accepted Lorne Michaels’ Generous Offer

April 24, 1976. Lorne Michaels offers the Beatles $3,000 to appear on Saturday Night Live, as a gag mocking the full-page ads taken out in the New York Times offering the Beatles millions of dollars to reunite and play in Shea Stadium. Unbeknownst to Michaels, both John Lennon and Paul McCartney are in New York City at the time, and see the sketch airing live. They consider actually going to the studio, but decide they are too tired.

That much is history. Now go to the MightyGodKing site and read on to find out what happened next in a Universe next door...

Oh Dear

2011-08-10T21:35:00.000+10:00

A 2009 article from the Pew Research Centre that if it doesn't scare you, should. On Darwin's 200th Birthday, Americans Still Divided About Evolution - Pew Research Center

I'm scared to ask how many think the Earth is Flat, as the Good Book says.

Just The Facts, Ma'am

2011-08-09T23:42:00.000+10:00

From Business Week, an article by Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto explaining why things are in such a mess economically. The Destruction of Economic Facts

The importance of economic facts may not be obvious to Americans. "What does the fish know about the water in which it swims?" asked Albert Einstein. But it's easy to grasp from the perspective of the developing and former communist countries where I live and work. In these countries, most of our assets and relationships are in the informal sector, outside the legal economy. Because they're not recorded in public memory systems, they cannot be written up as facts and are, in effect, invisible. All we have are shadow markets.

Without standardization, the values of assets and relationships are so variable that they can't be used to guarantee credit, to generate mortgages and bundle them into securities, to represent them in shares to raise capital. Nor do they fit the standard slots required to enter global markets. That's why credit crunches and massive unemployment are chronic conditions for most people forced to operate in the informal economy. These are the ones you see protesting in the streets of Arab countries or living in tents surrounding Port-au-Prince. We know only too well that facts don't speak for themselves: They have to be constructed through legal processes and kept transparent. They have to be defended, too.

When then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson initiated his Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in September 2008, I assumed the objective was to restore trust in the market by identifying and weeding out the "troubled assets" held by the world's financial institutions. Three weeks later, when I asked American friends why Paulson had switched strategies and was injecting hundreds of billions of dollars into struggling financial institutions, I was told that there were so many idiosyncratic types of paper scattered around the world that no one had any clear idea of how many there were, where they were, how to value them, or who was holding the risk. These securities had slipped outside the recorded memory systems and were no longer easy to connect to the assets from which they had originally been derived.

A bit of a worry. But you want to see something really scary?

Oh, and their notional value was somewhere between $600 trillion and $700 trillion dollars, 10 times the annual production of the entire world.

As they say, read the whole thing. It might be an idea buying some silver too - not notes which affirm that you own some in a vault somewhere, but the physical article. No need to get much, but it might make you sleep better at night.

Those were the voyages....

2011-08-08T23:07:00.000+10:00

My political comment on Those were the voyages, a narrative of past glories, faded dreams and the US Space Program, by James Lileks.

There are so many problems the US faces in having a manned space program.

1. Lack of Leadership. President Obama’s attitude towards establishing a lunar base is

“We’ve been there before.”

He sees the manned space program as a series of bigger and better publicity stunts. His speeches are statements of intent for a plan to be made by someone, sometime, in the nebulous future, details to be worked out by future administrations.

“We’ll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history…By the mid-2030s, I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth. And a landing on Mars will follow. And I expect to be around to see it.”

But nothing concrete during his administration.

2. Congressional Pork. The attitude of the POTUS is actually an advabce on the attitude of Congress, The whole space program is seen as a way of buying votes for individual congresscritters, funneling money to their congressional districts. If nothing actually gets accomplished, so much the better, as it means the largesse will continue. The last thing they want is the gravy train to be derailed by premature success.

3. The “Can Do” attitude of NASA administration – along with blatant dishonesty trying to sell their projects by minimising the likely costs, and over-promising performance. Then when they only get 70% of the money actually needed, not having the guts to say “no, we can’t do this, either give us what’s needed or don’t waste money on a project that’s doomed from the start.”

4. Misinformation amongst the general public about the situation. Many people think the US is routinely flying not just Interplanetary manned missions, but Interstellar ones. That we have FTL. They don’t realise that our current capabilities are about the same as they were in 1960.

5. Misinformation amongst the general public about the budget allocated to NASA. Many think it must be 10% or higher. Some think it must be 30%, or more, rivalling HEW or the Dept of Defence. In fact, it’s 0.5c in the dollar. The total amount spent under the Obama administration on space development is far less than was spent to bail out GM.

I expect a Chinese permanent presence on the Moon by 2050. Probably not self-sustaining by then, but lunar exploration being about as routine as Antarctic exploration today (ie not very). And just as with Antarctica, the discovery of lots of resources too, to be developed in the century after that. The Moon is an excellent place to make the “baby steps” needed before tackling Mars and the Belt.

I don’t see the USA participating in this, though US companies may dominate LEO by then.

Stanford Uni - Human Sexual Behaviour

2011-08-05T23:14:00.001+10:00

It gets particularly interesting at 01:23:50. More free lectures available on the Stanford University Youtube channel.

Simon Lewis: Don't take consciousness for granted

2011-08-04T15:36:00.003+10:00

Simon Lewis: Don't take consciousness for granted

After a catastrophic car accident that left him in a coma, Simon Lewis found ways to recover -- physically and mentally -- beyond all expectations. At the INK Conference he tells how this remarkable story led him to concern over all threats to consciousness, and how to overcome them.

Indian man has hysterectomy

2011-08-03T23:34:00.000+10:00

From the UK Telegraph:

An Indian farmer and father of two had a hysterectomy after doctors discovered a "full female reproductive system" in his lower abdomen.
...
The Indian man, identified as Ryalu, was admitted to a hospital near Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, after complaining of severe stomach pains.

Doctors suspected a normal hernia, but when they carried out an exploratory operation they were shocked to discover it had been caused by a female uterus, ovaries, Fallopian tubes, a cervix and underdeveloped vaginal tissue.

I wonder what his scar looks like? One from bikini line to breastbone perchance? And at least they told him afterwards.

I still don't know what was removed along with my gallbladder back in 1980. Just that it didn't belong in a body that was supposed to be male - but I can't imagine it could have been anything nearly as completely developed.

These things happen. Nature's not quite as tidy as most believe.

US Manufacturing Output

2011-08-02T23:33:00.000+10:00

The Gross Domestic Product, after the multi-trillion dollar "stimulus package", is growing. Just. But failing to keep pace with inflation and population growth - so GDP per capita continues to fall, whereas in every other recession since WWII, it had recovered by now.

Growth in gross domestic product – a measure of all goods and services produced within U.S. borders – rose at a 1.3 percent annual rate, the Commerce Department said. First-quarter output was sharply revised down to a 0.4 percent pace from 1.9 percent.

Economists had expected the economy to expand at a 1.8 percent rate in the second quarter.

Well, some did.

An Australian Pediatric Surgeons view of Intersex

2011-08-01T23:18:00.001+10:00

Results from a pediatric surgical centre justify early intervention in disorders of sex development by Crawford et al, Journal of Pediatric Surgery Volume 44, Issue 2 , Pages 413-416, February 2009

Background

Controversy persists surrounding early management of disorders of sex development. We assessed genital appearance, gender identity, and quality of life in prepubertal children who have had early surgical intervention.

Methods

Children treated for disorders of sex development who were 5 to 10 years of age were eligible (n = 54). Children were scored (modified Creighton scale) for anatomical and cosmetic outcome, and both patients and parents completed PedsQL quality-of-life and gender identity questionnaires, with ethics approval.

Results

Of 54 patients, 41 presented for review. Treatment began at 13.2 (1.8-250.1) months (median; range) and were reviewed at 7.5 ± 2.1 (mean ± SD) years of age. Nineteen were raised as girls and 22 as boys. Girls had good (85%) or satisfactory (15%) anatomical/cosmetic outcome, whereas 52% boys had good, 38% satisfactory, and 10% poor cosmetic outcomes. On gender identity questionnaire, boys scored 3.9 ± 0.4 (mean ± SD) and girls 3.6 ± 0.5; 1 of 19 boys and 3 of 19 girls had lower scores, suggesting risk of gender identity disorder. Quality-of-life scores were 80+ for physical and 65 to 80 for psychosocial scores.

Conclusions

Early intervention is generally associated with positive outcomes for patients and parents. Girls had better anatomical outcomes than boys, and gender dysphoria risks were low in both sexes.

So it's clear: Early Intervention is good, no if's and's or but's.

Let's look a little closer though at the details, by looking at the authors' illuminating reply to critique:

Triea et al suggest that without evaluating sexuality, sexual relationships, and sexual functioning, follow-up studies of DSD patients are meaningless. Although we agree that these are important outcome measures in older patients and should be included in research involving older cohorts, these issues are not yet measurable in our study population aged 5 to 10 years. Furthermore, we do not feel that the age-appropriate assessment of children with DSD should be ignored because of their lack of sexual maturity, and we maintain that the issues of genital appearance, sex identity, and quality of life are important during childhood and not merely in adolescence. In addition, we have already performed a long-term review addressing the issues raised by the authors, and this is cited below [2].
In their letter, the authors have rightly pointed out that a good cosmetic result from feminizing genital surgery does not imply normal sexual functionality, and in our article, we did not suggest anything to the contrary. We acknowledge that achieving sexually functional genitalia for DSD patients through surgery is one of the most integral components of DSD management and deserves attention in follow-up studies of these patients. However, as this is an inappropriate measure in our young pediatric patients, we chose to evaluate cosmesis alone as we believe this independently is still a valuable outcome measure. Normal-appearing genitalia are a key factor in appropriate sex development in children, and early surgery eliminates the shame and secrecy of possessing atypical genitalia. Also, parental anxiety is relieved by normalization of the genitalia of children with DSD, and although this alone is insufficient reasoning to subject these infants to surgery, the resultant promotion of bonding between parent and child is of substantial benefit to children with DSD.

In response to the authors' objections regarding the ability of children to meaningfully answer questions regarding sex identity, we would like to highlight that the questionnaire on sex identity was completed by parents rather than the children themselves, as stated in the methods section of our article.

The authors have also argued that our assessment of sex identity in these patients is meaningless in that sexuality was not taken into account. We acknowledge that sexuality is an exceedingly important issue for adolescent and adult DSD patients and would have been included as an outcome measure had we been studying an older cohort. However, the concept of sex is largely considered to be a triumvirate consisting of sex identity, sex role, and sexuality. The questionnaire completed by parents encompassed the 2 former components, allowing for an assessment of sex development in our young patients. Although we acknowledge that appropriate sex development in this cohort does not preclude issues with sexuality in the future, we maintain that a sex identity and sex role concordant with sex-of-rearing is important across the lifespan of DSD patients, including in childhood.

The concern raised by the authors regarding the stigmatization of patients with DSD as well as unnecessary invasions of their privacy are legitimate...This is also why we decided that the children would answer only one questionnaire (quality of life) that was generic in nature, and the questions regarding sex role and sex identity would be answered by their parents.

[2] G.L. Warne, S. Grover and J.M. Hutson et al., A long-term outcome study of intersex conditions, J Pediatr Endocrinol Metab 18 (6) (2005), pp. 555–567

So to summarise:

Quality of Life was only measured Generically.
The only Success metric for surgery was cosmesis, regardless of the effects of fertility or sensation.
And they didn't measure gender discordance by asking the child - only the parents.

And on that basis, they make the blanket statement that early surgery is justified.
"Normal-appearing genitalia are a key factor in appropriate sex development in children, and early surgery eliminates the shame and secrecy of possessing atypical genitalia."

And if the child isn't properly ashamed of their body, there must be something wrong with the little freak.

It's all about appearances, you see. Not upsetting other people - the reconstructive surgeons themselves. The parents too of course, and society, but really it's all about how the surgeons feel.

The critique? Letter to the Editor Trier et al, Journal of Pediatric Surgery Volume 44, Issue 9, September 2009, Page 1863

Studies such as this are meaningless unless they evaluate children as adolescents and young adults who have reached the age of sexual maturity and attempted to have sexual relationships. The cosmetic appearance of girls' genitals is largely irrelevant in evaluating sexual functionality. This is often overlooked; it may be easier to surgically fashion reasonable-looking external vulvae, but it is difficult to make female genitals that allow comfortable, practical, painless heterosexual sex.

The same is true in this study's evaluations of sex identity, which is essentially a meaningless concept to 5- to 10-year-olds, because it does not take into account the nature of their sexuality. Five to ten-year-old children do not have the experience and perspective to meaningfully answer questions that hinge upon sexuality and adult sociosexual identities.

When these studies are done with adults with disorders of sex development who are living with all of the sociosexual sequelae of their earlier interventions, we find that everything is not quite as rosy as this study claims. What do children do when they are members of these studies, after years of medicalization, probing interviews, exposure to curious medical personnel, and possibly public exhibition of their bodies? They will want to please their parents and tell adults what they have learned that they want to hear.

Kirra Triea

Milton Diamond
University of Hawaii
John A. Burns School of Medicine
Pacific Center for Sex and Society
Honolulu, Hawaii 96822, USA

William G. Reiner
Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center
Oklahoma City, Okla 73104, USA

Falling at the First Hurdle

2011-07-28T22:11:00.000+10:00

From the Australian Bureau of Statistics, a Spotlight on the forthcoming census.

Try it for yourself.

Imagine you are Intersex. Remember, complete each question completely and accurately before proceeding to the next one.

I identify as female. Most Intersex people identify as either male or female. But a significant proportion identify as neither.

One of the main problems we face is that we're effectively invisible, and many people think that we're one in a ...few million, exceptions that the current health care system can deal with on an individual basis.

Nothing could be further from the truth, and there are thousands of us who have to travel interstate or internationally for specialist medical care. When we point this out, then we're told that there's no data available about our numbers, that if we were more than a handful, statistics would surely have been kept by the ABS. According to them, we don't exist, so there's no need for any facilities to be provided to us.

Hence I have to travel interstate every few months for a 15 minute endocrinologist appointment, at great expense, and taking a full day to travel there and back. Medications essential to my health can be and have been withdrawn from the market, because there's no perceived need for them.

Trans people have the same problem. We know from stats kept by the passport office that at least 200 people get passports in a new sex every year - which requires that they provide proof of surgery. There are several thousand in Australia. Yet there are no medications approved for Trans people on Australia on the PBS or off it, and many of the best are either unavailable in this country, or availability can literally change from week to week as customs etc regulations are arbitrarily changed. All are supposedly only for other conditions, and if a better medication for those conditions is found, the old one is withdrawn, regardless of the effect on Intersex or Trans people. They don't count because they're not counted.

The ABS is well aware of this. They have a real problem with compliance though. Their research has shown that if any questions about Intersex or Trans status are included, a large number of religious conscientious objectors will refuse to fill out the forms, as the existence of Intersex people is against their religious beliefs. Worse, many Intersex and Trans people dare not answer such questions accurately, as they face losing their marriages, jobs, family etc if their status is revealed.

That explains it

2011-07-27T22:21:00.002+10:00

It was a Dark and Stormy Night....

2011-07-26T23:22:00.003+10:00

Winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Prize for Fiction, 2011:

Cheryl's mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.

My favourite is a runner-up in the Bad Pun section:

Monroe Mills' innovative new fabric-dyeing technique was a huge improvement over stone-washing: denim apparel was soaked in color and cured in an 800-degree oven, and the company's valued young dye department supervisor was as skilled as they came; yes, no one could say Marilyn was a normal jean baker.

To which I'd add:

Her personal life she lived like the tarnished container that held the dye, cooled and preserved by icy blasts as frigid as the supervisor was not - a can, dull, in the wind.

DMRT1, FOX and SOX

2011-07-25T23:37:00.003+10:00

Following on from a previous post, from DMRT1 prevents female reprogramming in the postnatal mammalian testis by Marson et al, Nature (2011)

Sex in mammals is determined in the fetal gonad by the presence or absence of the Y chromosome gene Sry, which controls whether bipotential precursor cells differentiate into testicular Sertoli cells or ovarian granulosa cells [1]. This pivotal decision in a single gonadal cell type ultimately controls sexual differentiation throughout the body. Sex determination can be viewed as a battle for primacy in the fetal gonad between a male regulatory gene network in which Sry activates Sox9 and a female network involving WNT/β-catenin signalling [2]. In females the primary sex-determining decision is not final: loss of the FOXL2 transcription factor in adult granulosa cells can reprogram granulosa cells into Sertoli cells [2]. Here we show that sexual fate is also surprisingly labile in the testis: loss of the DMRT1 transcription factor [3] in mouse Sertoli cells, even in adults, activates Foxl2 and reprograms Sertoli cells into granulosa cells. In this environment, theca cells form, oestrogen is produced and germ cells appear feminized. Thus Dmrt1 is essential to maintain mammalian testis determination, and competing regulatory networks maintain gonadal sex long after the fetal choice between male and female. Dmrt1 and Foxl2 are conserved throughout vertebrates [4,5] and Dmrt1-related sexual regulators are conserved throughout metazoans [3]. Antagonism between Dmrt1 and Foxl2 for control of gonadal sex may therefore extend beyond mammals. Reprogramming due to loss of Dmrt1 also may help explain the aetiology of human syndromes linked to DMRT1, including disorders of sexual differentiation [6] and testicular cancer [7].

[1] Koopman, P., Gubbay, J., Vivian, N., Goodfellow, P. & Lovell-Badge, R. Male development of chromosomally female mice transgenic for Sry. Nature 351, 117–121 (1991)

[2] Uhlenhaut, N. H. et al. Somatic sex reprogramming of adult ovaries to testes by FOXL2 ablation. Cell 139, 1130–1142 (2009)

[3] Raymond, C. S. et al. Evidence for evolutionary conservation of sex-determining genes. Nature 391, 691–695 (1998)

[4] Loffler, K. A., Zarkower, D. & Koopman, P. Etiology of ovarian failure in blepharophimosis ptosis epicanthus inversus syndrome: FOXL2 is a conserved, early-acting gene in vertebrate ovarian development. Endocrinology 144, 3237–3243 (2003)

[5] Raymond, C. S., Kettlewell, J. R., Hirsch, B., Bardwell, V. J. & Zarkower, D. Expression of Dmrt1 in the genital ridge of mouse and chicken embryos suggests a role in vertebrate sexual development. Dev. Biol. 215, 208–220 (1999)

[6] Tannour-Louet, M. et al. Identification of de novo copy number variants associated with human disorders of sexual development. PLoS ONE 5, e15392 (2010)

[7] Turnbull, C. et al. Variants near DMRT1, TERT and ATF7IP are associated with testicular germ cell cancer. Nature Genet. 42, 604–607 (2010)

This diagram from the body of the article might help explain what was done, and what the effects were. For more details, see the full article, available through library sibscription.

I have a personal interest in such matters of course. In my own case, 3BHDD is a really good explanation of everything except for the rapidity of the change. That remains unexplained. This may have something to do with it, or it might not. More data needed, though activation/deactivation of Foxl9/Sox2 seems likely to play a role. DMRT1? No idea, though I don't see how it could. We're still guessing, but every little bit of information helps. There's one case being looked at by the Mayo clinic - a more complete change than mine - where this genuinely might be the cause, even if it's not involved in my own case. Weird stuff happens.

MIDDLE SEXES

2011-07-22T16:33:00.005+10:00

A Film about Diversity in Sex and Gender. Because of the diversity, it's inevitable that I identify strongly with some, while being bemused and bewildered by others.

If you want to learn something about others, please view this video. I learnt a lot about people very different from myself - while recognising characteristics of my own personality and situation in others. I cried a few tears over some parts, and went "Ewwwwwww" over others. As some people go "Ewwwwww" over me.

Forty-Two Years Ago....

2011-07-21T21:56:00.000+10:00

Apollo 11 was the spaceflight which landed the first humans, Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, Jr, on Earth's Moon on July 20, 1969, at 20:17:39 UTC.

06:17:39 July 21st, Australian Eastern Standard Time.

And today, courtesy of Russian TV, video of another landing. The End of a program that began just 12 years after the Eagle landed. The last voyage of the Atlantis.

Neanderthal Genes

2011-07-20T22:25:00.000+10:00

From An X-Linked Haplotype of Neandertal Origin Is Present Among All Non-African Populations Yotova et al Mol Biol Evol (2011) 28 (7): 1957-1962.

Recent work on the Neandertal genome has raised the possibility of admixture between Neandertals and the expanding population of Homo sapiens who left Africa between 80 and 50 Kya (thousand years ago) to colonize the rest of the world. Here, we provide evidence of a notable presence (9% overall) of a Neandertal-derived X chromosome segment among all contemporary human populations outside Africa. Our analysis of 6,092 X-chromosomes from all inhabited continents supports earlier contentions that a mosaic of lineages of different time depths and different geographic provenance could have contributed to the genetic constitution of modern humans. It indicates a very early admixture between expanding African migrants and Neandertals prior to or very early on the route of the out-of-Africa expansion that led to the successful colonization of the planet.

The only pure Homo Sapiens are in Sub-Saharan Africa. Everyone else on the planet, from Eskimo to Aborigine, is part Homo Neanderthalis.

I've blogged about this before, the first time in 2006.

Transgender History on the Radio

2011-07-19T23:05:00.000+10:00

The Space Shuttle - The Economics

2011-07-18T22:21:00.000+10:00

First, the Justification:
The Space Shuttle Decision Revisited

The variation of cost-effectiveness vs. flight rate is shown in Figure 2.312 – ‘break even’ for the TAOS (Thrust Assisted Orbiter Shuttle) Shuttle configuration was/is around 25 flights ... Obviously the case for the Space Shuttle system was better with additional uses in low earth orbits.
...

One problem: it was all a pack of lies, to put it bluntly. Or rather, it made certain assumptions: that the rate of Shuttle launch would be >25 per year, that the solid rocket boosters would be replaced by cheaper (and safer) liquid-fueled ones, that a "space tug" would be developed to service satellites at geosynchronous orbit...

The last two assumptions were not just reasonable, they were essential. The first one was known to be impossible.

That a space-tug wasn't developed, and the initial solid-fuel boosters were retained, meant that there was no case for a Shuttle any more. It was always about enhanced capability, able to do what would be otherwise impossible, not able to do the same things for less.

Also noteworthy in this context was the fairy tale of the “assumed” $5 million cost for each Shuttle launch. The range of launch costs was clearly identified in ALL reports and testimony to Congress and in three separate GAO ‘in-depth’ reviews in the 1970’s – and was stated as shown in Figure A-2.
· For TAOS with Solid Boosters (the configuration ultimately chosen by NASA) these costs ranged anywhere from $15 million to $30 million (in 1970 dollars – or about $60 to $120 millions in today’s dollars) depending on assumed launch rates of up to 24 per year, with a clearly stated launch risk of 2% (98% success rate).
· In contrast, TAOS with Liquid (Pressure Fed) Boosters would reduce these costs and risks by about half – and would permit the possibility of intact abort throughout launch.

Actual number of launches averaged 4 a year, at a cost of $1.5Bn each. Call it $400 million in 1970 dollars.

Anyway it's too late to think about more shuttle launches now. We can't get the parts any more.

To Anacreon in Heaven

2011-07-17T20:25:00.002+10:00

A drinking song, written circa 1771.

To Anacreon in heaven where he sat in full glee,
A few sons of harmony sent a petition,
That he their inspirer and patron would be,
When this answer arrived from the jolly old Grecian:
Voice, fiddle aud flute, no longer be mute,
I'll lend you my name and inspire you to boot!
And besides I'll instruct you like me to entwine
The myrtle of Venus and Bacchus's vine.

The news through Olympus immediately flew,
When old Thunder pretended to give himself airs,
If these mortals are suffered their scheme to pursue,
The devil a goddess will stay above stairs,
Hark! already they cry, in transports of joy,
A fig for Parnassus, to Rowley’s we'll fly,
And there my good fellows, we'll learn to entwine
The myrtle of Venus and Bacchus's vine.

The yellow-haired god, and his nine fusty maids,
To the hill of old Lud will incontinent flee,
Idalia will boast but of tenantless shades,
And the biforked hill a mere desert will be,
My thunder, no fear on’t, will soon do its errand,
And, damn me I'll swinge the ringleaders, I warrant
I'll trim the young dogs, for thus daring to twine
The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine.

Apollo rose up and said, “Prythee ne'er quarrel,
Good king of the gods, with my votaries below
Your thunder is useless - then showing his laurel,
Cried, Sic evitabile fulmen, you know!
Then over each head my laurels I'll spread,
So my sons from your crackers no mischief shall dread
Whilst snug in their club-room, they jovially twine
The myrtle of Venus and Bacchus's vine.

Some forty years later, the tune was used for an obscure political song of some kind.

Lessons from the Past

2011-07-15T22:33:00.001+10:00

Map of the Earth made in 1893 by Orlando Ferguson of Hot Springs, South Dakota. Credit: Don Homuth

AMA Resolution 122

2011-07-14T11:40:00.000+10:00

For Reference.

Removing Financial Barriers to Care for Transgender Patients

AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION HOUSE OF DELEGATES

Resolution: 122
(A-08)
Introduced by: Resident and Fellow Section
Massachusetts Delegation
California Delegation
New York Delegation

Subject: Removing Financial Barriers to Care for Transgender Patients

Referred to: Reference Committee A
(Linda B. Ford, MD, Chair)

Whereas, Our American Medical Association opposes discrimination on the basis of gender identity [i]; and

Whereas, Gender Identity Disorder (GID) is a serious medical condition recognized as such in both the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th Ed., Text Revision) (DSM-IV-TR) and the International Classification of Diseases (10th Revision) [ii], and is characterized in the DSM-IV-TR as a persistent discomfort with one’s assigned sex and with one’s primary and secondary sex characteristics, which causes intense emotional pain and suffering [iii]; and

Whereas, GID, if left untreated, can result in clinically significant psychological distress, dysfunction, debilitating depression and, for some people without access to appropriate medical care and treatment, suicidality and death [iv]; and

Whereas, The World Professional Association For Transgender Health, Inc. (“WPATH”) is the leading international, interdisciplinary professional organization devoted to the understanding and treatment of gender identity disorders [v], and has established internationally accepted Standards of Carevi for providing medical treatment for people with GID, including mental health care, hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery, which are designed to promote the health and welfare of persons with GID and are recognized within the medical community to be the standard of care for treating people with GID; and

Whereas, An established body of medical research demonstrates the effectiveness and medical necessity of mental health care, hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery as forms of therapeutic treatment for many people diagnosed with GID [vi]; and

Whereas, Health experts in GID, including WPATH, have rejected the myth that such treatments are “cosmetic” or “experimental” and have recognized that these treatments can provide safe and effective treatment for a serious health condition [vii]; and

Whereas, Physicians treating persons with GID must be able to provide the correct treatment necessary for a patient in order to achieve genuine and lasting comfort with his or her gender, based on the person’s individual needs and medical history [viii]; and

Whereas, Our AMA opposes limitations placed on patient care by third-party payers when such care is based upon sound scientific evidence and sound medical opinion [ix,x]; and

Whereas, Many health insurance plans categorically exclude coverage of mental health, medical, and surgical treatments for GID, even though many of these same treatments, such as psychotherapy, hormone therapy, breast augmentation and removal, hysterectomy, oophorectomy, orchiectomy, and salpingectomy, are often covered for other medical conditions; and

Whereas, The denial of these otherwise covered benefits for patients suffering from GID represents discrimination based solely on a patient’s gender identity; and

Whereas, Delaying treatment for GID can cause and/or aggravate additional serious and expensive health problems, such as stress-related physical illnesses, depression, and substance abuse problems, which further endanger patients’ health and strain the health care system; therefore be it

RESOLVED, That our American Medical Association support public and private health insurance coverage for treatment of gender identity disorder (New HOD Policy); and be it further

RESOLVED, That our AMA oppose categorical exclusions of coverage for treatment of gender identity disorder when prescribed by a physician. (Directive to Take Action)

Fiscal Note: Staff cost estimated at less than $500 to implement.

Received: 04/18/08

References

[i]. AMA Policy H-65.983, H-65.992, and H-180.980

[ii]. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.. Text revision) (2000) (“DSM-IV-TR”), 576-82, American Psychiatric Association; International Classification of Diseases (10th Revision) (“ICD-10”), F64, World Health Organization. The ICD further defines transsexualism as “[a] desire to live and be accepted as a member of the opposite sex, usually accompanied by a sense of discomfort with, or inappropriateness of, one’s anatomic sex, and a wish to have surgery and hormonal treatment to make one’s body as congruent as possible with one’s preferred sex.” ICD-10, F64.0.

[iii]. DSM-IV-TR, 575-79

[iv]. Id. at 578-79.

[v]. World Professional Association for Transgender Health: http://www.wpath.org. Formerly known as The Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association.

[vi]. The Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association’s Standards of Care for Gender Identity Disorders, Sixth Version (February, 2001). Available at
http://wpath.org/Documents2/socv6.pdf.

[vii]. Brown G R: A review of clinical approaches to gender dysphoria. J Clin Psychiatry. 51(2):57-64, 1990.
Newfield E, Hart S, Dibble S, Kohler L. Female-to-male transgender quality of life. Qual Life Res. 15(9):1447-57, 2006.
Best L, and Stein K. (1998) “Surgical gender reassignment for male to female transsexual people.” Wessex Institute DEC report 88;
Blanchard R, et al. “Gender dysphoria, gender reorientation, and the clinical management of transsexualism.”J Consulting and
Clinical Psychology. 53(3):295-304. 1985;
Cole C, et al. “Treatment of gender dysphoria (transsexualism).” Texas Medicine. 90(5):68-72. 1994;
Gordon E. “Transsexual healing: Medicaid funding of sex reassignment surgery.” Archives of Sexual Behavior. 20(1):61-74. 1991;
Hunt D, and Hampton J. “Follow-up of 17 biologic male transsexuals after sex-reassignment surgery.” Am J Psychiatry. 137(4):432-428. 1980;
Kockett G, and Fahrner E. “Transsexuals who have not undergone surgery: A follow-up study.” Arch of Sexual Behav. 16(6):511-522. 1987;
Pfafflin F and Junge A. “Sex Reassignment. Thirty Years of International Follow-Up Studies after Sex Reassignment Surgery: A Comprehensive Review, 1961-1991.” IJT Electronic Books, available at http://www.symposion.com/ijt/pfaefflin/1000.htm;
Selvaggi G, et al. "Gender Identity Disorder: General Overview and Surgical Treatment for Vaginoplasty in Male-to-Female Transsexuals." Plast Reconstr Surg. 2005 Nov;116(6):135e-145e;
Smith Y, et al. “Sex reassignment: outcomes and predictors of treatment for adolescent and adult transsexuals.” Psychol Med. 2005 Jan; 35(1):89-99;
Tangpricha V, et al. “Endocrinologic treatment of gender identity disorders. ” Endocr Pract. 9(1):12-21. 2003;
Tsoi W. “Follow-up study of transsexuals after sex reassignment surgery.” Singapore Med J. 34:515-517. 1993;
van Kesteren P, et al. "Mortality and morbidity in transsexual subjects treated with cross-sex hormones." Clin Endocrinol (Oxf). 1997 Sep;47(3):337-42;
World Professional Association for Transgender Health Standards of Care for the Treatment of Gender Identity Disorders v.6 (2001).

[viii]. The Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association’s Standards of Care for Gender Identity Disorders, at 18.

[ix]. Id.

[x]. AMA Policy H-120.988

RELEVANT AMA POLICY
H-65.983 Nondiscrimination Policy
H-65.992 Continued Support of Human Rights and Freedom
H-180.980 Sexual Orientation and/or Gender Identity as Health Insurance Criteria
H-120.988 Patient Access to Treatments Prescribed by Their Physicians

Intersexion

2011-07-13T21:25:00.003+10:00

I identify as female, but biologically I'm Intersex. Atypically so, I looked normally male at birth, didn't develop, and changed to look female with ambiguous genitalia later. Usually such rare changes go the other way when they happen, looking female at birth and looking ambiguous or male later.

Mostly though, the ambuguity is present at birth, and doesn't change. I'm atypical, even for someone IS.

Many of us identify as either male or female. Some identify as neither, others as something of both. And have the bodies to justify that, for those religious fanatics that insist on justification. They - we - are as God made us. Deal with it. Take it up with Him if you have a problem.

Now on to the documentary, in 5 parts: Intersexion.

De-Stressing

2011-07-12T21:18:00.005+10:00

Some women sew, others knit. I paint miniatures to de-stress, though I haven't done so for ages. I recently resumed though, as between medical issues, teaching, and conducting a University course, I needed to give my brain a rest.

That's a 1/144 Sopwith Triplane of "B" flight, No 1 Squadron, Royal Naval Air Service. This Sopwith Triplane, No. N5387 "Peggy", was previously flown by French naval pilots serving with F14 at St. Pol, at one time reportedly being flown by famed French ace Charles Nungesser. It originally had white wheel covers and tailfin (see picture below) as did all of 'B' flight, but a later picture from August 1917 showed the tailfin had been re-painted in olive drab, and squadron markings "II" added. No 17 retained its white fin in this picture.

The coin is an Australian 20c piece, a little larger than a US Quarter, the same size as an old-style UK 10p or 2/- piece.

Model sculptured by Kampfflieger.

End of an Era

2011-07-11T21:56:00.002+10:00

See live updates on NASA TV. While you can.

Brain Surgeon

2011-07-09T14:34:00.001+10:00

Mother Nature is a B*tch.

2011-07-08T22:22:00.000+10:00

An article from National Geographic : "Sex Puppeteers" Force Sex Change, Virgin Birth in Bugs via Genes

Fast-spreading parasite species force sex changes on their victims, induce virgin births, and turn animals into "gross monsters"—among other horrors.

Now a new study has decoded how the bacteria may be able to wreak their havoc: by shutting down immune systems.

The parasites, of the Wolbachia bacteria genus, cause a gene in wasps to stifle the insect's protein-based "alarms" against the bacterial invaders, say researchers who mapped the genomes of three species of Nasonia wasp for the first time.

As a result, the wasps' antibacterial defenses are never deployed, allowing Wolbachia to begin their dirty work.
...
Males are transgendered into fertile females, or killed. Virgin females give birth—no fathers needed. The sperm of infected males is rendered useless in uninfected females.
...
Males get the shaft because Wolbachia can live in eggs but not sperm—only infected females can pass on the bacteria to offspring.

"For the human world this would be science fiction, but in the insect world, it's very much a reality," said Seth Bordenstein, a professor of biology of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.

Funny things happen to humans too, Professor. Just rarely.

Which isn't to say Wolbachia's handiwork is always spot-on. Sometimes the bacteria can't finish the job, resulting in "gross monsters"—part male, part female—Bordenstein said.

Bordenstein and colleagues don't know exactly how Wolbachia work their genetic sabotage. But they do know that the bacteria go a step further and actually transfer some of their own genes into the wasp's genome.

Gross Monsters - yes, Intersex people sometimes get called that, and worse. In scientific jargon, it's not perjorative, but in the context it's usually uttered to humans, it is.

Interesting that Wolbachia can interfere with the host's genome... one of Mother Nature's more disquieting phenomena.

An answer to the Declaration of Independance.

2011-07-07T22:32:00.000+10:00

Sweepings from the dustbin of History : An Answer to the Declaration of the American Congress (Price 2 shillings)

Hormonal contributions to sexually dimorphic behavioral development in humans

2011-07-06T23:05:00.000+10:00

From Science Direct, a paper about the organisational effects of hormones on the pre-natal brain, and what it means to be male or female : Hormonal contributions to sexually dimorphic behavioral development in humans Reinich et al, Psychoneuroendocrinology Volume 16, Issues 1-3, 1991, Pages 213-278

Nineteen studies on the behavioral effects of prenatal exposure to hormones administered for the treatment of at-risk human pregnancy are reviewed. Because the role of prenatal exposure to hormones in the development of human behavioral sex differences is potentially confounded by society's differential treatment of the sexes, comparisons between exposed and unexposed subjects were evaluated and summarized separately for male and female subjects. Therefore, this review focuses on data for individuals whose prenatal hormone environments were atypical relative to what is normal for their own sex.

Overall, it appears that prenatal exposure to androgen-based synthetic progestin exerted a masculinizing and/or defeminizing influence on human behavioral development, whereas prenatal exposure to natural progesterone and progesterone-based synthetic progestin had a feminizing and/or demasculinizing influence, particularly among female subjects. The data on prenatal exposure to synthetic estrogen derive primarily from subjects exposed to diethylstilbestrol (DES). DES-exposed male subjects appeared to be feminized and/or demasculinized, and there is some evidence that exposed female subjects were masculinized.

These findings are discussed in the context of prenatal hormonal contributions to sexually dimorphic behavioral development both within and between the sexes. Recommendations for the conduct of future research in developmental behavioral endocrinology are presented.
...
Three issues that qualify research in the area of human behavioral endocrinology must be considered in order to appropriately interpret the findings (see Reinisch & Gandelman, 1978, for a more detailed discussion).

The first qualifier relates to the inability to implement true experimental design (i.e., random assignment to treatment conditions) in research on human behavioral endocrinology. Because this area of human research is subject to strict ethical, moral, and legal constraints, true experimental design is precluded when studying potentially harmful interventions in humans.

Consequently, interpretation of the relationship between prenatal hormones and human behavioral development is limited to correlative rather than causal explanation. It is only through thoughtful comparison of conclusions derived from human "experiments of nature" or of medical treatmems with those derived from carefully controlled experimems with laboratory animals that confidence in the former can be attained. The role of hormones in organizing the neural substrate for behavior in nonhuman animals has been clearly established with two basic
experimental paradigms: perinatal androgen administration to genetic females, resulting in defeminization and/or masculinization, and perinatal androgen deprivation of genetic males, resulting in demasculinization and/or feminization, of sexually dimorphic behaviors and gonadotropin secretion in adolescence and adulthood. Extensive reviews of the nonhuman animal literature are provided by Ellis (1982), Hines (1982), and Reinisch (1974; 1983).

The second qualifier relates to the fact that the behavioral repertoires of males and females are not mutually exclusive, but rather, are overlapping. It is rare for one sex to display a behavior that is never exhibited by the other sex (menstruation, gestation, lactation, and impregnation being the notable exceptions). Typically, differences between males and females occur in the average frequency with which particular behaviors are exhibited by each sex. Thus, behavioral sex differences reflect quantitative, not qualitative, differences (Goy, 1970).

The third qualifier relates to the fact that masculinity and femininity are multidimensional. Masculinity and femininity are no longer conceptualized as opposite ends of a single, unidimensional, bipolar continuum (Fig. 2a), but are now understood to be a multidimensional matrix of independent or semi-independent factors.

The orthogonal or independent model (Fig. 2b: Constantinople, 1973; Bem, 1974; Whalen, 1974; Spence & Helmreich, 1978; Heilbrun, 1976; Berzins et al., 1978) and the oblique or correlated model (Fig. 2c: Reinisch, 1976; Reinisch & Sanders, 1987) suggest that masculinity and femininity are, with regard to many behavioral dimensions, relatively independent.

These models imply that an increase in the frequency or strength of masculine behavior (masculinization) is not necessarily associated with a decrease in feminine behavior (defeminization). Conversely, feminization is not necessarily concomitant with demasculinization. Thus, an individual may exhibit high frequencies of both masculine and feminine behavior (androgynous), low levels of both kinds of behavior (undifferentiated), or high levels of one type of behavior and low levels of the other (masculine or feminine).

The difference between the orthogonal and oblique models resides in the extent to which masculinity and femininity are considered to be independent. Whereas the orthogonal model proposes total independence, the oblique model suggests that there is some degree of correlation between masculinization and defeminization and between feminization and demasculinization.

OK, so what were the conclusions?

Our review suggests that endogenous hormones present prenatally influence at least some aspects of sexually dimorphic behavioral development in normal male and female subjects, perhaps by establishing particular behavioral predispositions. In general, play-related activities and interests, aggression/assertion, and gender identity/role emerged as the behavioral categories most often affected by prenatal exposure to exogenous hormones. These effects are not simple, however. For example, although prenatally DES-exposed male subjects appear to have been demasculinized in terms of interest in active participation in sports, they were masculinized with regard to interest in passive viewing of sports. Prenatal exposure to some of these hormonal treatments was associated with delayed or diminished sexual maturation and behavior, while in other instances these dimensions were enhanced.

Unfortunately, it's behind a paysite firewall, but if your library has access, you should be able to view it. I'm accessing it at home using my ANU library privileges, as both PhD candidate and lecturer.

Another reason why I want a career in academe.

More Parts of the Puzzle- Grey Matter

2011-07-05T23:04:00.003+10:00

Prenatal Exposure to Female Hormones: Effect on Psychosexual Development in Boys Arch Gen Psychiatry, April 1973, Yalom et al. 28 (4): 554 :

Two groups of boys exposed prenatally to exogenously administered estrogen and progesterone were studied on several parameters of psychosexual development. Subjects were twenty 6-year-olds and twenty 16-year-olds whose diabetic mothers received these hormones to prevent pregnancy complication. Hormone-exposed boys were compared with same-aged boys whose mothers had not received exogenous hormones and matched for age and socioeconomic class.

Sixteen-year-olds exposed to estrogen and progesterone were rated lower on several variables related to general "masculinity," assertiveness and athletic ability. Six-year-olds exposed to estrogen and progesterone were rated lower on aggressivity and athletic ability. There were two cases of hypospadias among experimental subjects. While it was not possible to rule out influences other than hormonal which may have influenced results, data suggest that prenatal sex hormone levels may influence some aspects of postnatal psychosexual development in boys.

From mygenes.co.nz, a non-peer-reviewed religious site, that nonetheless at least gives its references:Are transssexual brains different?:

The answer is probably yes, but not because of innateness. The altered brain microstructure is probably due to years of repetitive thinking, fantasy and preoccupation with body image.

Thereby ignoring the work by Yalom above, and others.

However the results of studies on transsexuals may be better established than those on homosexual people showing somewhat more reproducible differences in the brains, though still with large overlap. This note argues these differences can be explained by preoccupied thinking and imagination alone.

Recently a paper by Savic and Arver (Savic and Arver, 2011) has appeared. Their innovation is to take a study group composed only of male-to-female gynephiles (i.e. those attracted sexually to women). Previous male-to-female studies mixed gynephiles and androphiles. The authors find that the brains in their study group were not feminised. There was no evidence for female brains in a male body; the brains were male-typical. This is contrary to many of the previous research studies on mixed groups, but the study is thorough. They also found that there were differences in the brains of their study groups which were not found in either heterosexual male or female brains. These regions have been identified as those possibly associated with bodily self-perception (they are also enlarged in those who do lots of meditation, focusing partly on body state).

The authors say this is a “highly speculative” interpretation, but it’s possible they are actually underestimating how much support it has. It is very clear that repeated patterns of mental exercise alone, as seen for example in navigation (London taxi drivers) and internet addiction (Maguire et al. 2006; Zhou et al. 2009) changes significantly the microstructure of the brain. Thinking, particularly repeated thinking, changes brain microstructure.

OK, let's look at these papers. First the Macguire paper, London taxi drivers and bus drivers: a structural MRI and neuropsychological analysis. Maguire, E.A., Woollett, K. and Spiers, H.J. (2006) Hippocampus 16, 1091-101.

Licensed London taxi drivers show that humans have a remarkable capacity to acquire and use knowledge of a large complex city to navigate within it. Gray matter volume differences in the hippocampus relative to controls have been reported to accompany this expertise. While these gray matter differences could result from using and updating spatial representations, they might instead be influenced by factors such as self-motion, driving experience, and stress. We examined the contribution of these factors by comparing London taxi drivers with London bus drivers, who were matched for driving experience and levels of stress, but differed in that they follow a constrained set of routes. We found that compared with bus drivers, taxi drivers had greater gray matter volume in mid-posterior hippocampi and less volume in anterior hippocampi. Furthermore, years of navigation experience correlated with hippocampal gray matter volume only in taxi drivers, with right posterior gray matter volume increasing and anterior volume decreasing with more navigation experience. This suggests that spatial knowledge, and not stress, driving, or self-motion, is associated with the pattern of hippocampal gray matter volume in taxi drivers. We then tested for functional differences between the groups and found that the ability to acquire new visuo-spatial information was worse in taxi drivers than in bus drivers. We speculate that a complex spatial representation, which facilitates expert navigation and is associated with greater posterior hippocampal gray matter volume, might come at a cost to new spatial memories and gray matter volume in the anterior hippocampus.

OK, so we're talking about the hippocampus, and only the hippocampus. Furyhermore, we're only looking at grey matter distribution within that particular part of the brain.

Now let's look at the Zhou paper : Gray matter abnormalities in Internet addiction: A voxel-based morphometry study. Zhou et al, Eur J Radiol. 2011 Jul;79(1):92-5. :

BACKGROUND:This study aims to investigate brain gray matter density (GMD) changes in adolescents with Internet addiction (IA) using voxel-based morphometry (VBM) analysis on high-resolution T1-weighted structural magnetic resonance images.

METHODS:Eighteen IA adolescents and 15 age- and gender-matched healthy controls took part in this study. High-resolution T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging scans were performed on the two groups. VBM analysis was used to compare the GMD between the two groups.

RESULTS:Compared with healthy controls, IA adolescents had lower GMD in the left anterior cingulate cortex, left posterior cingulate cortex, left insula, and left lingual gyrus.

CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggested that brain structural changes were present in IA adolescents, and this finding may provide a new insight into the pathogenesis of IA.

This time, we're looking at other parts of the brain : the left anterior cingulate cortex, left posterior cingulate cortex, left insula, and left lingual gyrus. And again, only grey matter distribution.

I've blogged about the Savic paper before, and that post is worth re-visiting.

MtF-TR displayed also singular features and differed from both control groups by having reduced thalamus and putamen volumes and elevated GM volumes in the right insular and inferior frontal cortex and an area covering the right angular gyrus.

I'll add another paper to the mix : Regional gray matter variation in male-to-female transsexualism. by Luders et al Neuroimage. 2009 Jul 15;46(4):904-7.

Results revealed that regional gray matter variation in MTF transsexuals is more similar to the pattern found in men than in women. However, MTF transsexuals show a significantly larger volume of regional gray matter in the right putamen compared to men.

Altogether, females had the largest gray matter volumes in all but two significant clusters, which were located in the left and right putamen. Here, MTF transsexuals had the largest gray matter volumes (see Fig. 1). For the remaining clusters, MTF transsexuals had the smallest gray matter volumes, but their data spectrum largely overlapped with that of males.

OK, let's put this in a table:\

Organ	hippocampus	Left cingulate cortex	Left Insula	Left lingual gyrus	thalamus	putamen	Right insula	Inferior frontal cortex	Right angular gyrus
London Taxi Drivers	+ Posterior - Anterior	no data	no data	no data	no data	no data	no data	no data	no data
Japanese Internet Addicts	no data	-	-	-	no data	no data	no data	no data	no data
MtoF Luders	no data	no data	no data	no data	no data	+	no data	no data	no data
MtoF Savic	no data	no data	no data	no data	no data	no data	+	+	+

What conclusions can we draw from this, in terms of cause and effect? Well, the London Taxi Driver paper is pretty good evidence of neuroplaticity at work. The ratio of grey matter in the hippocampus changes as the result of repeated actions and thoughts. This is only to be expected, as the hippocampus is both one of the simplest neurological structures, and also known to be associated with laying down long-term memory. Total amount doesn't change, but distribution changes.

Regarding the Japanese ~~Intersex~~ Internet Addicts... we can't be sure. Is it that having a particular neurological structure makes one susceptible to Internet Addiction (whatever that may be, the definition isn't agreed upon). Or does Internet Addiction cause neurological changes in distribution of grey matter in specific areas? Moreover, we're talking about a decrease in grey matter, not an increase.

In both these cases, the repetitive physical and mental actions occur for significant periods of the day, totalling half the waking hours or more. It's difficult imagining what repetitive action is involved in being MtoF, male or female for that matter.

In summary, the case for neuroplasticity as regards grey matter distribution is very strong. As regards grey matter total, less strong, but still stronger than I'd thought in certain areas. Regarding the putamen though, very weak or non-existent.

The British Response to Thermonuclear War in 1956

2011-07-04T23:15:00.001+10:00

Report by the Ministry of Food, 1956

Fact Checking in Inhore

2011-07-01T22:15:00.001+10:00

Since my post a few days ago, a number of newspapers have picked up the story. The UK Telegraph. The Week. Pink News. International Business Times. The Hindu.

One comment (grammatical mistakes and mis-spellings in original) on the Telegraph site though struck me.

Vp Goswami

It is totally a failure of media to go in to detail of the issue.I have talked to all the pediatric surgeons of the city and I am confident to say that Nothing like this is going on in Indore,it is a baseless news.As a resposible office bearers of IAP "Indian Academy of Pediatrics" I would like to say categorically that this is the case of negative journalism on the part of HT. is also shocking and surprise for me.We should condemn it as news paper has opened another areas of discussion and need for the parents who are desirous of son , in-turn which will again confuse our society.

Vp Goswami, according to his FB profile, is a Lecturer in medical services for the Government of Madyah Pradesh, in Indore.

It wouldn't be the first time that a newspaper has published a sensationalist beat-up regarding Intersex issues. It also wouldn't be the first time an Indian state government official with an obvious political agenda has tried a cover-up.

More data needed. We may be getting that soon. From The Hindu :

Taking cognisance of a newspaper report about several hospitals and clinics in Indore performing surgeries on baby girls to change their sex, the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) has asked the State government to undertake an investigation with a team of doctors, known for high professional competence and ethical standards.

The Commission has sought a detailed report within 15 days, giving facts, figures and circumstances of the cases, list of doctors/hospitals practising genitoplasty and action taken or contemplated against them.

I could only wish that such a report was in preparation in Australia, the US, the UK and elsewhere.

One thing's clear: what might be acceptable treatment for Intersex children is looked on with shock, horror and indignation when non-Intersex children are involved. The double standard is rarely illustrated with such clarity.

Asimov on Political Statements

2011-06-30T22:35:00.003+10:00

From Isaac Asimov's Foundation:

"But then," interposed Sutt, "how would Mayor Hardin account for Lord Dorwin's assurances of Empire support? They seemed –" He shrugged. "Well, they seemed satisfactory."

Hardin threw himself back in the chair. "You know, that's the most interesting part of the whole business. I'll admit I had thought his Lordship a most consummate donkey when I first met him – but it turned out that he was actually an accomplished diplomat and a most clever man. I took the liberty of recording all his statements."

There was a flurry, and Pirenne opened his mouth in horror.

"What of it?" demanded Hardin. "I realize it was a gross breach of hospitality and a thing no so-called gentleman would do. Also, that if his lordship had caught on, things might have been unpleasant; but he didn't, and I have the record, and that's that. I took that record, had it copied out and sent that to Holk for analysis, also."

Lundin Crast said, "And where is the analysis?"

"That," replied Hardin, "is the interesting thing. The analysis was the most difficult of the three by all odds. When Holk, after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications – in short, all the goo and dribble – he found he had nothing left. Everything canceled out."

"Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn't say one damned thing, and said it so you never noticed. There are the assurances you had from your precious Empire."

Bear that in mind, the next time you hear a political speech. Lay aside the platitudes, the vagaries, the abstract statements of principle, and see what's actually been promised.

There's also this little dig at the Humanities:

Hardin remained silent for a short while. Then he said, "When did Lameth write his book?"

"Oh I should say about eight hundwed yeahs ago. Of cohse, he has based it lahgely on the pwevious wuhk of Gleen."

"Then why rely on him? Why not go to Arcturus and study the remains for yourself?"

Lord Dorwin raised his eyebrows and took a pinch of snuff hurriedly. "Why, whatevah foah, my deah fellow?"

"To get the information firsthand, of course."

"But wheah's the necessity? It seems an uncommonly woundabout and hopelessly wigmawolish method of getting anywheahs. Look heah, now, I've got the wuhks of all the old mastahs the gweat ahchaeologists of the past. I wigh them against each othah, balance the disagweements, analyze the conflicting statements, decide which is pwobably cowwect, and come to a conclusion. That is the scientific method. At least" patronizingly "as I see it. How insuffewably cwude it would be to go to Ahctuwus, oah to Sol, foah instance, and blundah about, when the old mastahs have covahed the gwound so much moah effectually than we could possibly hope to do."

While Meta-studies have their place - it's what I'm engaged in in when it comes to the whole "science of sex and gender" thing - my PhD work is nothing but "insufferably crude" experimentation, plus some analysis.

In the Humanities, Lord Dorwin's "scientific method" appears the norm.

America's Next Great Civil Rights Struggle

2011-06-29T00:12:00.000+10:00

That's the title of an article appearing in the right-wing magazine, The New Republic:

Transgender people are some of the least protected, most persecuted people in the United States.
...
Transgender people are regularly evicted from their homes, fired from their jobs, and denied medical treatment. Last July, emergency room staff in an Indiana hospital refused to help a trans woman who was coughing up blood, referring to her as “it.” More than a quarter of transgender people surveyed say they have lost a job because of discrimination. Transgender people are more likely to become homeless (at an average age of 13, in New York City). And then there is the obstacle course of inconveniences that reminds transgender people every day that they don’t belong. One trans woman told me her company requires her to lock herself in when she uses the restroom—even though it’s multi-occupancy—so she is acutely aware of making other women wait. In some states, a court order is required to change a person’s gender on a driver’s license. Many health insurance plans only cover procedures for one gender, so a person born male who transitions to female can’t get both a prostate check and a mammogram.

For some, these challenges prove insurmountable. Four years ago, Mike Penner, a longtime sports columnist for the Los Angeles Times, came out to the world as Christine Daniels. But, after a year and a half, unable to cope with the scrutiny, she changed her name back to Mike and returned to living as a man. A year later, she killed herself. Daniels’s story was tragically typical: More than one in three transgender people attempt suicide at some point in their lives.

But these are statistics, and people are rarely moved by statistics. In this country, civil rights movements have prevailed when they have convinced enough people that a minority is being treated in a way that is fundamentally un-American. For this to happen, people need to see members of a disadvantaged group as human beings before anything else.

As they say, Read The Whole Thing. The author gets it.

Intersex in the House

2011-06-28T23:08:00.001+10:00

A post in three parts:

Part I: Confronting the Issues:

While this video is fictional, from the TV series "~~House~~ Private Practice" - yes, this happens. In the USA, in England, and in Australia.

When I saw it for the first time, I teared up. Not from my personal experience as a baby, for I looked unambiguously male at birth.

My son... had to have genital reconstruction at 18 months. He was in increasing pain. He's Intersex too, very mildly.

Part II - endocrinology for dummies

11-beta-hydroxylase deficiency is a rare form of Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia.

I'll try to explain things as best I understand them, given that I'm no enocrinologist. You really need to see this diagram first:

That shows the chains by which cholesterol is changed into various hormones, and their precursors. The green and red horizontal and vertical bars show the enzymes necessary to help along the conversion.

To simplify, only cortisol, testosterone (the main male sex hormone), dihydrotestosterone (the super-virilising hormone that causes male-pattern baldness), estrone (a mild female hormone), and both estrodiol and estriol, (main female sex hormones) will be looked at.

For example: 17-beta-hydroxysteroid-dehydrogenase (17BHD) - the long green horizontal bar near the bottom - is needed to convert dehydroepiandrosterone into androstendiol (which then in turn gets converted to testosterone), androstenedione into testosterone, and estrone into estrodiol.

Total 17BHD deficiency means "you can't get there from here" as regards testosterone production. Mildly feminising estrone is the only sex hormone being produced. However, most cases are partial, and once you get some testosterone being produced, as happens in puberty, some gets changed to the super-virilising dihydrotestosterone. So 46XY people born looking like girls because they didn't have much testosterone exposure in the womb virilise to look somewhat male.

5-alpha-reductase deficiency (5ARD) is even more "targeted" if you like, and explains the subtle differences between 5ARD and 17BHDD. Both can cause a "natural sex change" from female looking at birth to male looking later, but the change in 5ARD people is more complete, as it's only the production of dihydrotestosterone that's blocked.

Now see the red vertical bar on the far right. 11-beta-hydroxylase. It's needed to produce corticosterone from deoxycorticosterone, and cortisol from 11-deoxycortisol.

Low cortisol is a life-threatening condition, so in foetal development, the adrenal glands enlarge to compensate by producing more of the precursors to cortisol.

Because 11β-hydroxylase activity is not necessary in the production of sex steroids (androgens and estrogens), the hyperplastic adrenal cortex produces excessive amounts of DHEA, androstenedione, and especially testosterone.

These androgens produce effects that are similar to those of 21-hydroxylase deficient CAH. In the severe forms, XX (genetically female) fetuses can be markedly virilized, with ambiguous genitalia that look more male than female, though internal female organs, including ovaries and uterus develop normally.

If the leftmost vertical bar, 3-beta-hydroxysteroid-dehydrogenase (3BHD), is deficient... pretty much any darn thing can happen, the whole system's out of whack. Mild 3BHD deficiency can cause all sorts of effects. Trust me on that. But I digress...

The point is, 11-beta-hydroxylase deficiency causes virilisation of 46XX people. Some - about 10% - end up with male gender identities.

Part III - Some advice for parents in this position.

1. Pick a sex, any sex. Socially (not surgically) assign your child to that for now. It won't do any harm if it's wrong, sex is in the brain, sex of rearing doesn't matter.

2. Be prepared at any time from age 2 onwards (median is 5) for your child to say that a silly mistake has been made, that she's really a boy, or he's really a girl. Change sex of rearing accordingly.

3. Many people with ambiguous genitalia are happy with things that way. More are not, and desire corrective surgery, one way or the other. Your duty as parents is to bow to the inevitable, and supply resources and options so your child can have, or not have, surgery as they choose.

Docs surgically change baby girls to look like boys in India

2011-06-27T23:31:00.000+10:00

From the Hindustan Times

Girls are being 'converted' into boys in Indore - by the hundreds every year - at ages where they cannot give their consent for this life-changing operation.

This shocking, unprecedented trend, catering to the fetish for a son, is unfolding at conservative Indore's well-known clinics and hospitals on children who are 1-5 years old. The process being used to 'produce' a male child from a female is known as genitoplasty. Each surgery costs Rs 1.5 lakh.

Moreover, these children are pumped with hormonal treatment as part of the sex change procedure that may be irreversible.

The low cost of surgery and the relatively easy and unobtrusive way of getting it done in this city attracts parents from Delhi and Mumbai to get their child surgically 'corrected'.

About 7-8% cases come from the metros, say doctors.

While genitoplasty is relatively common - it is used to correct genital abnormality in fully-grown patients - the procedure is allegedly being misused rampantly to promise parents a male child even though they have a female child.

When there is an Intersex condition involving hormonal anomalies in the womb, about 1 in 3 such children would be mis-assigned - defined as "unable to live with their surgically altered body". But as they're Intersex, "defective", "mis-shapen", then that's considered acceptable. Who cares what the result is, as long as society isn't troubled by the existence of someone "in between"?

When no such condition exists, it's more like 9 in 10 who can't live with it. But that's not the cause of the outrage, for few know those figures. It's because these girls are not mis-shapen, defective, Intersex, but normal. Unlike us, they count as being full humans.

Surgery without consent, absent genuine medical need, is wrong. It's wrong on girls, it's wrong on boys, and it's wrong on those few intersex people who identify as neither and are quite happy that way, thanks very much.

Just wait a few years - and they'll tell you what sex they are!

Fukushima Dai Ichi RADHAZ Update

2011-06-24T23:38:00.000+10:00

Since the Japanese Government has been less than forthcoming about the radioactive contamination from the TEPCO Dai Ichi reactor disaster, and since TEPCO has been somewhat coy about the issue, here's a graphic that details measurements by the public in the affected areas.

Red means 5+ microsieverts per hour. Yellow-Green 1, Yellow 1.5 to 2.

These levels are not dangerous themselves, though long-term exposure would cause just-detectable increases in cancer rates. But they're indicative of where the cesium has gone to, and that, if ingested, really does pose definite increases in cancer.

TLDR version: do not eat any green leafy vegetables from the red area for 120 years, unless the topsoil's been replaced. Yellow - not in the next 30 years. Blues are safe, the rest, not for a few years, and make sure everything's been checked.

Every Home Should Have One

2011-06-23T22:17:00.000+10:00

From UniverseToday : Build Your Own Apollo 11 Landing Computer

Remember the computer on the Apollo 11 Eagle lander that kept reporting “1201″ and “1202″ alarms as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin approached landing on the Moon?

Well, yes, I can. But people under 40 cannot. That's most of the people on the planet...

Well, now you can have one of your very own. Software engineer John Pultorak worked 4 years to build a replica of the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), just so he could have one. And then he wrote a complete manual and put it online so that anyone else with similar aspirations wouldn’t have to go through the same painstaking research as he did. The manual is available free, but Pultorak says he spent about $3,000 for the hardware.

The 1,000 page documentation includes detailed descriptions and all schematics of the computer. You can find them all posted on Galaxiki, downloadable in pdf. format (the files are large).
...
The original Apollo AGC cost over $150,000. It didn’t have a disk drive to store any software, and only 74 kilobytes of memory that had been literally hard-wired, and all of 4 Kb of something that is sort of like RAM.

It was developed by the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory and it a pretty http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifmazing piece of hardware in the 1960s, as it was the first computer to use integrated circuits. The AGC mutlitasking operating system was called the EXEC, it was capable of executing up to 8 jobs at a time. The user interface unit was called the DSKY (display/keyboard, pronounced “disky”); an array of numerals and a calculator-style keyboard used by the astronauts to communicate with the computer.

Each Apollo mission featured two AGC computers – one in the Apollo Command Module and one in the Apollo Lunar Module.

And to feed your inner Space Administrator Geek... there's Race Into Space, a freeware port for Windows of BARIS - "Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space" (1993), itself a port of the Dead-Tree Game "Liftoff" (1989).

Looking at the specs... you could port this onto most mobile phones today.
640k RAM
12 MHz processor
32Mb for the videos
320 x 200 pixel resolution

That's about 500 times as powerful as the actual computers used in the Apollo spacecraft, 24 years earlier.

Australia's Most Trusted Professions

2011-06-22T23:35:00.000+10:00

From the Age : Australia's Most Trusted Professions

This shows both ingrained cynicism, and a touching naivety.

12. Police

15. Scientists

21. Judges

26. Weather forecasters

30. Religious ministers

33. Lawyers

39. Sex workers

42. Real estate agents
43. Car salesmen
44. Politicians
45. Tele-marketers

Nearly a Virgin Birth

2011-06-21T23:06:00.000+10:00

From Nature Genetics, A human parthenogenetic chimaera by Strain et al, Nature Genetics 11, 164 - 169 (1995)

In mice, parthenogenetic embryos die at the early postimplantation stage as a result of developmental requirements for paternally imprinted genes, particularly for formation of extraembryonic tissues. Chimaeric parthenogenetic & normal mice are viable, however, due to non−random differences in distribution of their two cell types. Species differences in imprinting patterns in embryo and extra−embryonic tissues mean that there are uncertainties in extrapolating these experimental studies to humans. Here, however, we demonstrate that parthenogenetic chimaerism can indeed result in viable human offspring, and suggest possible mechanisms of origin for this presumably rare event.

I'll leave it to Melinda Wenner of Slate Magazine to explain:

An egg will only start dividing once it senses a spike in cellular calcium. This normally occurs as a result of a sperm's entry during fertilization. But if the egg happens to experience a spontaneous calcium spike, it will start reacting as if it's been fertilized. A defective sperm that lacks DNA can produce a spurious calcium spike. In the lab, scientists can coax unfertilized eggs into beginning the post-fertilization process by simply injecting them with calcium.

Once fertilization—or faux fertilization—occurs, an egg can complete the final stage of a cell division known as meiosis II, during which it loses half of its genetic material to make room for the sperm's DNA. But if there's no sperm, each half of the divided egg cell will end up short, and both will die. In order for our virgin birth to proceed, the faux-fertilized egg must, therefore, not complete meiosis.

Both of these events—the calcium spike and the division mistake—could occur as the result of random dysfunctions or genetic defects. Assuming they do, the egg cell may then begin the process of "parthenogenesis," or virginal development. When this happens to an egg-precursor cell, it can give rise to a tumor made up of many different types of tissue—liver, teeth, eye, and hair, for example.

Parthenogenesis in humans never produces viable embryos, though, because unfertilized eggs lack specific instructions about gene expression from the sperm.
...
Are there any case reports of virgin births in the medical literature? Sort of. According to a 1995 report in the journal Nature Genetics, a mother brought her infant boy to the doctor after noticing that his head was developing abnormally. When doctors analyzed his blood, they found something truly bizarre: Despite his anatomically male features, the boy's blood cells were entirely female, consisting only of genetic material from his mother. Some of his other cells—such as those found in his urine—were normal, consisting of a combination of both maternal and paternal DNA. No one knows exactly how this occurred, but the best guess is that immediately after being fertilized, one of his mother's eggs fused with a neighboring unfertilized egg that was dividing parthogenetically. This gave rise to a boy who was considered half-parthenogenetic, since approximately half of his cells were derived from a "faux" conception, containing no remnants of his father's DNA.

When it comes to reproduction, genetics, the very definition of sex..It's not that simple. It's complicated. And these are not experimental animals - they're people. We're people.

"Nature loves diversity, society hates it.” (M. Diamond).

Exactly. So we try to educate society about things like this. That often clashes with religious belief, just as did the concept of a round Earth, a Heliocentric Solar System, Evolution...

Passports - The Final Chapter?

2011-06-20T23:44:00.000+10:00

From The Scavenger:

A transsexual woman has won the right to a full, 10-year passport in her transitioned identity, without the need for undergoing sex realignment surgery first.
...
In November 2010 after transitioning full time for just on one month, I consulted with my sex and gender therapist about how I could adjust my passport as I was required to travel overseas for business.

After receiving a letter from her indicating my change, I put together two statutory declarations, one from my business partner indicating my change and that was accepted by all our customers, and the other from myself indicating I was indeed transitioned full time. I then arranged for an appointment with the Passport Office to work with them to make the change.

I was warned ahead of time there might be issues and there were.

I live in Canberra and have been here most of my life. I have spent five years working in the public service and most of the other time contracting or consulting to them. I have friends who work in the public service. What one needs to note is that this isn't a game of chess when dealing with them, it’s much different, and I knew from the beginning that I had to ensure I was tackling their procedures and not the people working there.

As I discovered from my first meeting with them, they were polite, helpful and sincere in their dealings, it was just they were not trained or had any knowledge in what sex and/or gender identity is and how to understand transsexuals and why this was so important to us. What was missing and it was very obvious, was a lack of training and knowledge in anything sex and/or gender diverse.

It took her 7 months. It took me 20. But at least now we've gotten rid of the anomaly that some of those born overseas could qualify for Australian Passports, while those in exactly the same situation but born in Australia could not.

The case only lasted 7 months, about a third of mine. But it involved considerable expense, more even than mine. And the APO fought every step of the way. Count the number of knock-backs:

After my first meeting with the Passport Office, I was given a verbal decline for a full passport stating female in just 30 minutes because I was not booked for and showed no intention of having genital surgery.

That's one.

At this point I started on the paperwork. I knew it was important to keep a paper trail and I ensured everything said and done was documented, catalogued and tracked.

My history of events was going to be more accurate than theirs. So I requested another formal meeting. This time attending with three official letters of procedural complaint and one commendation to the original staff member who was legitimately sincere and polite in her dealings with me. There were two officials in attendance and it was a formal meeting.

The letters of complaint about their procedures related to the Passports Office’s website, which was incorrect and misleading and how my initial dealings with them were incorrectly handled. A couple of weeks later I received an official response denying my request, citing reference to the Passport Act and my birth certificate not matching my passport.

That's two.

I also didn't satisfy the “rare and unique circumstances of a compelling humanitarian nature”, which they said gave them discretion in such decisions on case by case basis.

I appealed the decision immediately citing prior cases and concerns about my safety in having to travel on a passport that did not reflect my gender identity and presentation. I requested an impartial mediator because I didn't believe my case was being heard fairly.

I also pointed out their obvious lack of knowledge and requested information about how I was judged on humanitarian guidelines. I felt confident with the appeal....
...
My appeal was rejected on the same grounds as before.

That's three.

I rang their legal counsel regarding the appeal and realised very quickly that their level of knowledge regarding the sex and/or gender diversity was non-existent. Yet they had made these decisions. They refused to acknowledge risks to my safety when travelling on a passport that did not reflect my gender identity and presentation and insisted I use a Document of Identity (DOI) like other transsexual and transgendered people.

A document that amongst other things, does not allow travel to the USA, and does not guarantee a right of return back to Australia. You can leave the country.... but it could be a one-way trip, and there aren't many places you can go to.

It was then agreed during a phone call that they would answer any further questions I have in writing. Within two hours I submitted four pages, requesting information about their skill set, training and knowledge, what methods they used for determining humanitarian guidelines. I requested detailed reasoning why I needed answers before my appeal.

My questions were never answered and with one week to go I put in the appeal request to the Federal Government Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT). I had to pay a large fee up front and I requested a skilled and impartial person to handle it.

I had the same experience - formal letters requesting reasons for the decision not being answered. They're supposed to, to be compliance with the Administrative Appeals (Judicial Review) Act, if you write a letter like this:

Dear Sir/Madam,

In accordance with ADMINISTRATIVE DECISIONS (JUDICIAL REVIEW) ACT 1977 - SECT 13, please furnish a statement in writing setting out the findings on material questions of fact, referring to the evidence or other material on which those findings were based, and giving the reasons for the decision not to grant my passport application.

Yours Sincerely, etc etc

Getting back to the case in hand:

Realising that if I didn't do this, others would share a similar fate because the precedent was currently in the negative, I lodged the appeal and caught the Passport Office off guard as they referred to me in paperwork as female. I did succeed in getting a further small victory in that the Passport Office admitted in writing they had no procedures for determining what humanitarian guidelines one can be judged against.

Actually... I think that's a pretty big victory, and likely to have considerable legal weight.. but to continue:

At my preliminary hearing there were two lawyers, one a partner, representing the Passport Office. Intimidating – yes, but it worked well for me. I realised my case was more important and warranted more attention than I was led to believe. The Department didn't want to lose and they were using excessive legal muscle to ensure it.

The case went from a simple one of wanting to change one letter on my passport to ensure my safety when I travelled, into one now which looked absurd. Here I was, no legal skill, just fighting for my safety when I travelled, up against a government department sending in two lawyers to push their case.
...
I felt at all times that this case was not about winning or showing up the Passport Office. That wasn't my goal. My aim was to help them understand that the implementation of procedures and guidelines were causing harm to those transitioning.
...
Eventually after the preliminary hearing Passport Office conceded the case and it was settled with them issuing me with my 10-year female passport.

And some advice:

In cases such as mine, I advise people to follow their procedures to the letter, document what happens and let them know when the procedures fail. Focus on the procedures and guidelines, not the individuals. Always look for win/win situations and understand who you are dealing with. Be open and honest, do not be deceitful. Do your best not be bullied by bureaucratic procedures and stay strong because you are not alone.

And don't take "No" for an answer.

Trans women who transition late tend to have a certain stick-to-it-iveness. A certain persistence, sometimes taking that to extraordinary lengths. If they didn't, then they wouldn't have transitioned late, they would have transitioned early or died. That even applies to certain women who are technically Intersex rather than Transsexual...

It's not that it doesn't hurt. Here's what I wrote at the time things like this were happening to me:

It's important to step back, and think about what this whole situation is about.

It's about simply getting a Passport, something that by the Australian Passport Act, every Australian has a right to. I'm no Criminal, nor someone with dodgy citizenship, nor a Passport Trafficker or Terrorist. I already had a UK passport with the same correct details in. I needed to go overseas for surgery, there was a growing risk of cancer. I have a congenital medical problem, nothing particularly unusual, and that's all.

At a time when I was under great stress, when I was most vulnerable, I was treated worse than a Murderer - they can get passports. I was ordered to Divorce before a passport would be granted, something that was a gross abuse of power, and blatantly discriminatory. Had I not recorded it on my blog, as it happened, it would seem unconceivable that anyone could be treated this way.

For many months I faced the possibility that I would not be allowed back in the country to see my little son. The sleepless nights, the vast amounts of time spent writing letters, or waiting (sometimes for hours) at the Passport Office, all that was totally un-necessary. Pain and Suffering is an exact description of what was inflicted on me. I think many in a similar situation would not have coped. I came very close to losing it, as was reflected in my writings.

Now that there may be some light at the end of the tunnel, I can let my outrage at being treated like dirt show. I'm crying now, trying to get rid of the pain, the anguish, the frustration at the unreasonable and unconscionable conduct of some of those who had me at their mercy. HOW DARE THEY DO THIS TO ME? I'm Human.

I'm Human. I'm human. No human being should be treated like that.

I intend to make sure they don't ever do it again. That they never order anyone to Divorce. Victimised, I refuse to be a Victim. They don't have my permission to de-humanise me.

And so thanks to a very brave and persistent woman, who took them to Court - something I didn't have to do - there's been another step forward.

I just hope we don't have to go through this all again. They need some training, this is a systemic problem.

But if we do... then we will, and every single bit of caselaw helps.

Transgender Health Care - The Reality

2011-06-19T15:48:00.002+10:00

From Dallas Voice : Who decides what is "Medically Necessary"?

“Transition-related care” can be divided into two parts, Keisling said: the costs directly related to gender reassignment surgery, and the other treatments and services that are related, things like checking hormone levels, lab tests, and mental health services associated with the transition process.

“Even someone who has fully transitioned probably still needs to get her hormone levels checked on a regular basis. And insurance companies will deny those claims by saying they are ‘transition-related,’” Keisling said.

This is also the issue of sex-specific care, she continued. After transitioning, a trans woman will qualify for regular mammograms, but not for regular prostate exams — which she still needs, too.

And a lot of trans men face similar difficulties, Keisling said. “A trans man might need a pap smear or some other kind of gynecological care, and they are often told no, insurance won’t cover that,” she said.

She described another case in which a trans man was told by his doctors that he was facing serious gynecological problems and needed to have a hysterectomy. Because he was trans, however, insurance wouldn’t pay.

“Insurance said, ‘No. We don’t pay for sex-change operations. The doctors said this is transition surgery. This is a medically-necessary procedure.’ But they wouldn’t pay,” she said.

But in some cases, the discrimination is even more blatant.

“The insurance for federal government employees specifically excludes coverage for the costs of [gender reassignment surgery], but there have been a number of cases where that was used to exclude coverage of any type for transgenders,” Keisling said.

“I know of a federal employee who was told insurance wouldn’t pay for care for her son’s broken arm because she was transgender. Another trans woman who was anemic and needed transfusions was told insurance wouldn’t cover the treatments because she had ‘transsexual blood,’” she said.

“The list goes on and on. I know another trans woman who was playing for a woman’s softball team and broke her arm during a game,” Keisling continued. “She went to the hospital, had the X-rays and got her arm set. Then the insurance company turned around and denied the claim. They said if she weren’t transsexual, she wouldn’t have been out there playing for a women’s team and she wouldn’t have broken her arm.”

When it comes to these “really egregious stories” that are “so clearly wrong,” Keisling said, the victims can hire lawyers and get remedies through the courts. Still, she said, “You have to know what to do, how to get things fixed.” And court cases aren’t cheap, either.

In a car crash and break your leg? That's not covered, as the bones could be weakened from HRT therapy. Or if you don't take hormones, they could be weakened because you don't. In either case, "transition-related" according to some Insurance company's rules. And of course, since the evidence is it's congenital, it's a "pre-existing condition".

That's in the USA. Here in Australia, Medicare just changes the patient's records from M to F and back again as necessary when it comes to Intersexed and Trans people. Yes, it's silly, makes a mockery of the whole system - but a humane work-around to prevent inhuman treatment.

The (Lack of) US Manned Space Program

2011-06-17T23:19:00.000+10:00

From SpaceNews: Memo Marks Official End of Constellation:

A senior NASA official has signed the formal death warrant for the Constellation deep space exploration program even as work proceeds on one of Constellation’s legacy development efforts and agency officials continue to ponder the fate of another.

“I have signed the letter to close out the Constellation Program,” Douglas Cooke, associate administrator for NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, wrote in a June 10 memo.

I've written about the wastage and fiscal mismanagement before, but maybe this graphic shows the situation best:

From another previous post :

NASA has spent more than $9 billion on development of the Constellation project and the Ares rockets over the last six years. President Obama's fiscal 2011 budget would end funding for the Constellation Systems program, initiated by NASA in 2005 to return astronauts to the Moon by 2020 and later to Mars. The administration says the program is behind schedule and cannot achieve its goals without budget increases. Constellation would need an additional $3 billion annually beyond fiscal 2010.

Now Constellation needed mending with a new one. But now it's clear that to Obama, it's all about "US Pride" and "Showing the Flag". Prestige. Basically, one huge publicity stunt. Not about colonisation. Not about using our disabled twin planet as a testing ground for how to live off-Earth.

Why are all concrete plans for further crewed space exploration now cancelled?

Obama sought to explain why he aborted President George W. Bush's return-to-the moon plan in favor of a complicated system of public-and-private flights that would go elsewhere in space, with details still to be worked out.

"We've been there before," Obama said of the nation's moon landings decades ago.

As reported over a year ago.

Constellation needed killing. It was a product of the pork-barrelling "business as usual" that bedevils Congress's financing of space exploration. Split the work so the pork is spread evenly - thus waking everything vastly inefficient. Listen to what the engineers say regarding how much money they will need - then give them half of that. Then spread the payments out over many years, to increase the costs yet more.. and finally kill the project, as it never stood a chance of working anyway without more funding.

Constellation also needed replacing with something more concrete than Unicorns and Rainbows. In one way, it has been, just not a US program - the next man to step foot on the moon will be speaking Mandarin.

Note to Self

2011-06-16T23:08:00.000+10:00

In my experimentation with meta-genetic algorithms to optimise a Pareto set, be careful that I don't end up with suboptimality in other areas not under consideration.

A lot of my work is based on some research I did in making an artificial intelligence for anti-missile defences over 15 years ago. I guess I was lucky, inasmuch as I used a rules-based system and not a neural net.

On the other hand, the fault-tolerance and self-healing properties I put into FedSat, and helped the MESSENGER spacecraft team with, have proven to be useful in space exploration. I skipped over Terminator-I and went straight to Terminator-II, or as I once wrote, skipped the Battleship approach, armoured but brittle, in favour of "Beware of the Blob".

Sexual differentiation of human behavior: Effects of prenatal and pubertal organizational hormones

2011-06-15T22:51:00.004+10:00

Sexual differentiation of human behavior: Effects of prenatal and pubertal organizational hormones Sheri A. Berenbaum, Adriene M. Beltz Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology 32 (2011) 183–200

A key question concerns the extent to which sexual differentiation of human behavior is influenced by sex hormones present during sensitive periods of development (organizational effects), as occurs in other mammalian species. The most important sensitive period has been considered to be prenatal, but there is increasing attention to puberty as another organizational period, with the possibility of decreasing sensitivity to sex hormones across the pubertal transition. In this paper, we review evidence that sex hormones present during the prenatal and pubertal periods produce permanent changes to behavior.
There is good evidence that exposure to high levels of androgens during prenatal development results in masculinization of activity and occupational interests, sexual orientation, and some spatial abilities; prenatal androgens have a smaller effect on gender identity, and there is insufficient information about androgen effects on sex-linked behavior problems. There is little good evidence regarding long-lasting behavioral effects of pubertal hormones, but there is some suggestion that they influence gender identity and perhaps some sex-linked forms of psychopathology, and there are many opportunities to study this issue.

TLDR version - it's complicated. Here, let me give an example:

Sex matters for human behavior as it does for behavior in other species. Human males and females differ in many ways, including their appearance, their social identity, their social partners, the activities that interest them, how they present themselves to others, their aspirations and values, the likelihood of experiencing psychological and physical health problems, and the specific form in which those problems are manifested (reviewed in [20]). A key question concerns the causes of those differences, particularly the ways in which they are shaped by genes, physiology, and socialization.
The focus of this paper – in line with the other papers in this special issue of Frontiers of Neuroendocrinology – concerns the extent to which human behavioral sex differences are influenced by sex hormones present during sensitive periods of development acting to organize the brain.
More than 50 years ago, Phoenix et al. [130] provided an experimental demonstration in female guinea pigs that early exposure to androgens masculinized sexual behavior. This revolutionary work opened a new era in understanding sexual differentiation of behavior and led to thousands of studies in many species showing
unequivocally that sex hormones present early in development affect sexual differentiation of behavior as well as reproductive anatomy and function [166]. These hormones are said to have ‘‘organizational’’ effects because they produce permanent changes to brain structures and the behaviors they subserve. They are contrasted with ‘‘activational’’ effects, that is, hormones acting later in life to produce temporary alterations to the brain and behavior (through ongoing changes to neural circuitry) as the hormones circulate in the body throughout adolescence and adulthood. The main distinctions between organizational and activational effects concern timing and permanence, although these distinctions are not absolute [3].
Organizational effects have generally been considered to occur early in life when the brain is undergoing rapid change, but there has always been consideration of potential other sensitive periods of brain development when sex hormones again act to induce permanent changes [166].
Recent work in nonhuman animals has focused attention on other particular periods when there are substantial – and relatively abrupt – changes in levels of sex hormones, and that might serve as additional opportunities for hormones to sculpt brain structure: puberty and pregnancy (e.g., [91,149]). In this paper, we consider how human psychological sex differences are influenced by organizational hormones during prenatal development and again during puberty. We consider the foundations of the work, the methods used to study the question, the evidence that prenatal and pubertal hormones produce longterm behavioral changes, and directions for future research.

[20] J.E.O. Blakemore, S.A. Berenbaum, L.S. Liben, Gender Development, Psychology Press/Taylor & Francis, New York, 2009.
[91] C.H. Kinsley, L. Madonia, G.W. Gifford, K. Tureski, G.R. Griffin, C. Lowry, J. Williams, J. Collins, H. McLearie, K.G. Lambert, Motherhood improves learning and memory: neural activity in rats is enhanced by pregnancy and the demands of rearing offspring, Nature 402 (1999) 137–138.
[130] C.H. Phoenix, R.W. Goy, A.A. Gerall, W.C. Young, Organizing action of prenatally administered testosterone propionate on the tissues mediating mating behavior in the female guinea pig, Endocrinology 65 (1959) 369–382.
[149] C.L. Sisk, J.L. Zehr, Pubertal hormones organize the adolescent brain and behavior, Front. Neuroendocrinol. 26 (2005) 163–174.
[166] K. Wallen, The organizational hypothesis: reflections on the 50th anniversary of the publication of Phoenix, Goy, Gerall, and Young (1959), Horm. Behav. 55
(2009) 561–565.

So far, so good. Relatively simple. But when you get further into it...

Data confirming the importance of pubertal hormones in gender identity comes from outcome studies of children with gender identity disorder, showing that the majority develop gender typical identity in adolescence and adulthood, although many continue to display sex-atypical characteristics. An early study of extremely feminine boys showed that most developed a homosexual orientation without gender dysphoria [64]. Two recent studies confirm that most children with gender dysphoria do not remain dysphoric after puberty. In one follow-up study of girls with gender identity disorder in childhood, only 12% were found to have gender dysphoria in adulthood; most developed a heterosexual orientation without gender dysphoria, although there were elevated rates of nonheterosexual orientation [48]. In another study of boys and girls with gender dysphoria in childhood, 27% of boys and 64% of girls were still gender dysphoric, and most had nonheterosexual orientation [167]. Both studies showed evidence of a ‘‘dosage’’ effect: children with more childhood cross-sex behavior or gender dysphoria were more likely to be gender dysphoric at follow up.
(This may explain why girls were more likely than boys in the second study to persist in dysphoria; they probably had to be more extreme to receive a diagnosis in the first place.) Additional evidence for the importance of puberty in gender identity comes from data showing reduced plasticity with age: individuals diagnosed with gender identity disorder in adolescence are more likely than those diagnosed in childhood to have persistent dysphoria into adulthood [172].
Nevertheless, testosterone at puberty is not essential for male gender identity. There are cases of male gender identity in individuals with male-typical chromosomes and prenatal androgen exposure who were castrated in early life and reared as girls because of genital defects (such as cloacal exstrophy or penile ablation [44,111,133]). Some typical girls develop gender dysphoria or male identity at puberty without any obvious exposure to testosterone [174].

[44] M. Diamond, H.K. Sigmundson, Sex reassignment at birth: long-term review and clinical implications, Arch. Pediatr. Adolesc. Med. 151 (1997) 298–304
[48] K.D. Drummond, S.J. Bradley, M. Peterson-Badali, K.J. Zucker, A follow-up study of girls with gender identity disorder, Dev. Psychol. 44 (2008) 34–45
[64] R. Green, The ‘‘Sissy Boy Syndrome’’ and the Development of Homosexuality, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1987.
[111] H.F.L. Meyer-Bahlburg, Gender identity outcome in female-raised 46,XY persons with penile agenesis, cloacal exstrophy of the bladder, or penile ablation, Arch. Sex. Behav. 34 (2005) 423–438.
[133] W.G. Reiner, J.P. Gearhart, Discordant sexual identity in some genetic males with cloacal exstrophy assigned to female sex at birth, New Engl. J. Med. 350 (2004) 333–341.
[167] M.S. Wallien, P.T. Cohen-Kettenis, Psychosexual outcome of gender-dysphoric children, J. Am. Acad. Child Adolesc. Psychiat. 47 (2008) 1413–1423.
[172] K.J. Zucker, Gender identity development and issues, Child Adolesc. Psychiat. Clin. N. Am. 13 (2004) 551–568.
[174] K.J. Zucker, S.J. Bradley, Gender Identity Disorder and Psychosexual Problems in Children and Adolescents, Guilford, New York, 1995.

Paper [48] is flawed because the definition of "Gender Dysphoria" was far too relaxed; few met the actual criteria, and many were Intersex. Paper [64] is currently enmeshed in the controversy about the aversion therapy techniques used at UCLA - torturing children, basically - and the revelation that much of George Reckers work there was grossly flawed or even fraudulent. Green seems to have taken a second look at the subject though, to try to report on the actual situation rather than one seen through ultra-conservative fundamentalist eyes.

Doing good Science is hard enough without such complications, especially in an area so complex.

Summary: Post-natal hormones do have an effect on gender identity. Sometimes. Not always. And pre-natal hormones have an effect on gender identity. Sometimes. Possibly always. And it's dosage-dependant, and associated with other neural circuitry (usually) and sexual orientation (sometimes). I'd quote more, but I'm already close to the limits of "fair use" of a copyrighted article.

Yes, I'd like it to be nice and simple, a binary, boy brain or girl brain, always set before birth, not mutable in the slightest afterwards... but that's not what the evidence says.

I suppose this should have been obvious to me. Picking the name "Zoe" at age 10 (establishing gender identity well before puberty). Feeling my brain re-wire, the increased sense of smell, the acquisition of a sexual orientation etc in 2005-2006, some effects long before HRT, and due to a female hormone balance. The male-typical play patterns in my childhood, just to make things even more obscure, I was anything but a "sissy boy" - yet my emotional responses were female, even as a child.

It's complicated.

Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology

2011-06-14T22:04:00.001+10:00

Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology, Volume 32, Issue 2, Pages 109-264 (April 2011)

Special Issue on Sexual Differentiation of Sexual Behavior and Its Orientation.

This has a wealth of articles on the subject, many dealing with animal experiments, but also dealing with the issues in humans too. From the editorial:

In a seminal 1959 paper, William C. Young and his colleagues at the University of Kansas reported that prenatal administration of testosterone to female guinea pigs masculinized their capacity for sexual behavior in adulthood[17]. They concluded that prenatal androgens have an ‘organizing’ effect on the brain circuitry responsible for sexual behavior: high levels of testosterone, such as are typically seen in male fetuses, promote the establishment of neural elements mediating male-typical behaviors, while low levels of androgens, typically seen in female fetuses, permit the establishment of elements mediating female-typical behaviors. The role of androgens and estrogens in adult life is simply to activate these pre-established circuits.

The ‘organizational hypothesis’ became one of the most fruitful ideas in psychobiology. Subsequent research has confirmed the basic truth of the hypothesis and elucidated many of the anatomical structures and molecular processes that underlie it. Yet this research has also highlighted complexities, limitations, exceptions, and species differences that Young (who died in 1966) could hardly have guessed at. The present set of contributions has been selected to highlight some of these complexities, but also to consider the relevance of the organizational hypothesis to two aspects of human sexuality: sexual orientation and gender identity.

[17] C.H. Phoenix, R.W. Goy, A.A. Gerall, W.C. Young, Organizing action of prenatally administered testosterone propionate on the tissues mediating mating behavior in the female guinea pig, Endocrinology 65 (1959) 369–382.

A greater part of this issue is on sexual orientation, and the biological basis thereof:

Melissa Hines provides a masterful survey of the evidence for an influence of prenatal gonadal steroids on human sexual orientation.
A key observation here is that homosexuality is not an isolated trait; rather, it tends to be associated with other gendervariant cognitive and personality traits, both in childhood and in adult life. This is analogous to what has been observed in rodents and other animals subjected to prenatal manipulations of gonadal steroids, and it suggests that atypical levels of these hormones may affect a constellation of gendered traits, including sexual orientation, because many such traits are mediated by hormone-sensitive brain circuits.

Still, gay men and lesbians are not transexuals or complete gender ‘inverts’; rather, they seem to be a patchwork of gender-conformist and gender-nonconformist traits—a patchwork that varies to some extent from individual to individual. Underlying this patchwork may be differences in developmental timing between different brain systems, differences in their sensitivity to gonadal steroids, or differences in causal mechanisms (e.g., hormonal versus direct genetic effects).
It would be unethical to perform in humans the kind of animal experiments that led to the organizational hypothesis and its many subsequent ramifications, but it is possible to approach the same question in less direct ways. One approach is to take advantage of experiments of nature, such as the genetic condition congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), which exposes female fetuses to higher-than-normal levels of androgens. CAH girls do display several gender-atypical childhood traits, as documented by Hines and others, and are more likely than other girls to develop same-sex attraction in adulthood. Still, even among women with the severest
form of CAH, about half are exclusively heterosexual and only a few are exclusively homosexual. Thus the CAH research supports a significant role for prenatal androgens but also leaves plenty of room for other potential factors to play a role, possibly including social ones.

Gender Identity gets relatively scant mention in the editorial, though there are several good papers in the issue.

Gender identity has been the subject of much less biological research than sexual orientation, but even in the absence of strong evidence there is a widespread supposition that transexuality has some biological basis. There have been reports of brain structural differences between transgendered and non-transgendered individuals of the same sex, as described by Bao and Swaab in this volume.
This area of study is made difficult by the relatively small numbers of transexual individuals, by the hormonal treatments that many of them undergo, and by the fact that male-to-female transexuals who are attracted to males and those who are attracted to females seem to have quite different developmental histories [3].

[3] J.M. Bailey, The Man Who would be Queen: the Science of Gender-bending and Transsexualism, Joseph Henry Press, 2003.

It is... unfortunate... that such a junk-science book, largely composed of fiction and anecdote, without references or any of the hallmarks of a scientific publication, should be used as a source here. As bad as using "Moby Dick" as a textbook on cetacean biology, or one on Homeopathy to explain diabetes.

There's also, for the first time I can remember seeing, a mention of the Elephant in the Living Room: the climate that, in the USA at least, makes such research difficult.

As far as the political and social climate permits, researchers interested in the development of sexual orientation and gender identity would do well to take advantage of some of the large-scale longitudinal studies of childhood development now underway.
...
As gay people become more accepted and integrated into mainstream society, public interest in the ‘‘why’’ of sexual orientation will likely wane. Yet this may be a good thing, because it will allow the study of this important aspect of human diversity to be studied in a less contentious and more genuinely scientific atmosphere than has typically been the case in the past. The contributions in the current collection point optimistically in that direction.

Referencing Bailey's debunked book doesn't make me quite so optimistic, but the truth will out in the end. Reality always wins eventually.

Legislative Definitions

2011-06-13T21:01:00.000+10:00

"'STATION MASTER SAY, MUM, AS CATS IS 'DOGS,' AND RABBITS IS 'DOGS,' AND SO'S PARROTS; BUT THIS 'ERE 'TORTIS' IS A INSECT, SO THERE AIN'T NO CHARGE FOR IT!" [Punch, 1869, Vol. 57, p. 96]

A nose by any other name would smell, and while in daily life, labels are important, when it comes to legislation, as long as the definitions are provided unambiguously, there's no problem with cats, rabbits, and parrots being dogs (for the purposes of the act). Or "gender identity" being included under "sexual orientation".

Why I Blog

2011-06-10T23:50:00.000+10:00

A snippet from Reddit

Willblaze wrote:
So Im suppose to be some mystical mind reader? I dont know shit about any of this stuff, Im just an average hetero guy that has no run-ins with any trannsexuals. I never said it was anyones responsibility to teach me anything, I stated I didnt fucking know, and Im a human and make mistakes just like anyone else. Reread my comment and stop being such a fucking child. It has nothing to do with being sheltered, how the fuck do you know what type of surroundings I've grown up in. I live in the south of USA, so I NEVER see people like this.
ZoeBrain wrote:
Um.. I think you probably do - you just don't realise it.

BTW Congrats on admitting you don't know. That shows intelligence and intellectual honesty, and mere lack of knowledge is easily fixed.

OK, I better back up my statement of "you probably do" with some evidence. I know plenty of trans women in the South. Texas, Alabama, Georgia, North and South Carolina... but that doesn't help much.

To see what Trans women actually look like, some pretty, some pretty dreadful, have a look at these URLs.

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TSsuccesses/TSgallery1.html
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TSsuccesses/TSgallery2.html
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TSsuccesses/TSgallery3.html
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TSsuccesses/TSgallery4.html

There are Trans men too. Quite a few.

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TSsuccesses/TransMen.html

OK, now just to expand your horizons a bit... in addition to Trans people, there are some who change sex naturally. In some parts of the world, the mutations that cause that are more common than the CCR1 mutation that causes red hair.

See http://www.usrf.org/news/010308-guevedoces.html

Most such changes are FtoM. Some (not due to 5ARD or 17BHDD but 3BHDD or rarer conditions) are MtoF.

Here's one such woman. No cosmetic surgery. She used to look male.

Now she's not the prettiest - she was 52 when that shot was taken. But I don't think it would have occurred to you that her change from looking male was just 5 years earlier, would it?
WillBlaze wrote:
bannana should take tips from people like you. Thank you for being a mature adult about the situation and also going out of your way to educate me. Im not proud of how I looked and I felt like an asshole about the things I said after they were pointed out to me how it was offensive. I wish I could give you many upvotes. The links really show me how I could see someone and have no idea at all. And the trans-men part? Wow, just wow. If I was talking to one of them at a bar I would have no idea at all, unless maybe the voice gives them away? Another subject I dont know very well... but if I just saw them at a bar I would think "thats a man" without a second thought on the matter.

Again, thank you for helping me understand this whole thing. Its a world I never have had any experience in. So instead of hurling childish insults at me and have the problem unresolved if not worsened, you resolve the problem and educate.

Music to my ears.

The Neurobiology of Sexual Orientation

2011-06-09T23:14:00.000+10:00

A Presentation to the 3rd International Midwifery Conference. One that is all too rare in its approach.

Alas, the slides are not available. Here's the abstract:

Homosexuality is a constantly debated issue as to whether it is determined at birth or a choice (nature vs. nurture). The works of the Kinsey Reports and Dr. Evelyn Hooker published in the 1950s resulted in the removal of homosexuality from the DSM4 in 1973. Since then, it has been mentioned as an illness only in the context of being a putative exacerbating factor in anxiety states. Recent studies reveal a clear cut neurobiology to sexual orientation.

Neurobiologist Simon LeVay conducted a study of brain tissue samples from 41 human autopsies performed at several hospitals in New York and California. He found a significant size difference of the interstitial nuclei of the anterior hypothalamus between homosexual and heterosexual men.

In addition, Dr. Ivanka Savic-Berglund and Dr. Per Lindström of the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, performed fMRI and PET measurements of cerebral blood flow. Using volumetric studies, they found significant cerebral size differences between homosexual and heterosexual subjects; the brains of homosexual men resembled heterosexual women and homosexual women resembled heterosexual men. Extensive controls were performed during testing to exclude analytical variability.

A totally evidence-based medicine presentation will provide current data regarding homosexuality showing differences, or similarities, between the brains of homosexuals and heterosexuals to confirm that sexual orientation is neurobiologic at birth. Scientists and physicians with a keen understanding of the human brain must continue to bring data showing differences- or similarities- between the brains of all sexual orientations- heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual and transgender- to light. Having a good understanding of the natural evolution of sexual orientation is critically important to appropriate and supportive health care and a mature attitude of health care providers in an effort to minimize self blame from parents and to contribute to better patient-care within the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community.

It's based on evidence and not conjecture.

L-5 Dreams

2011-06-08T22:37:00.000+10:00

The Space Review: The god that failed

Asimov’s article, “The Next Frontier?” and illustrated by Pierre Mion, was written as a first-person account of a visit to an L-5 colony in the far-distant future of 2026. The account is mostly description: the National Geographic reporter is met by the colony’s director George Fenton, who shows him around and explains how everything works. Asimov experiences the gradual onset of simulated gravity as he travels from the arrival hub down a spoke to the colony’s rim. The colony is nearly 1,800 meters in diameter and houses 10,000 people.

Fenton shows him the farms and the industrial areas. He introduces the reporter to a rabbit meat hot dog and goat milk shake. He explains how the population is majority male, but they do have women, and families, and even a thousand children on the station. He shows the reporter a residential area and explains that the streets curve back and forth so that you cannot see them end and become disoriented. Fenton explains how the six segments of the torus are separated by airlocks in case of emergency. The colony is not completely self-contained but is working on it. They still import things from Earth, but most of their raw materials come from the Moon. And of course they recycle everything that they can; the reporter declines Fenton’s offer to tour the sewage plant.

That seemed possible in 1976. It still seems possible in 2011, but add a century at least before it comes to pass.

At its best, the space colonization vision was sophisticated daydreaming, not a future that a large number of Americans wanted to make happen. The vision had its shot and never caught on, despite appearing in the pages of a highly reputable magazine and gaining the attention of political decision makers. Gravity, weightlessness, radiation, and economics may all have ultimately made this vision untenable, but its biggest problem was that people didn’t like it.

We are living in the future that National Geographic’s experts speculated about. The cities are all right. World War III is no longer looming overhead. But grand visions of space colonization no longer appear in popular media. They no longer gain attention on news programs or in the halls of Congress. The Future, it was wonderful, but now it survives largely in the pages of faded magazines.

Until we lose a few million, or few thousand million, people from a dirty snowball, showing just how bad an idea it is to have all our eggs in one basket.

Of course some of us would dream the dream anyway, and do whatever we could to see our dreams become reality.

On Post Modernism

2011-06-07T23:58:00.000+10:00

A Post-Modernist critique of itself:Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern by Bruno Latour

I myself have spent sometimes in the past trying to show the "lack of scientific certainty" inherent in the construction of facts. I too made it a "primary issue." But I did not exactly aim at fooling the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argument–or did I? After all, I have been accused of just that sin. Still, I'd like to believe that, on the contrary, I intended to emancipate the public from a prematurely naturalized objectified fact. Was I foolishly mistaken? Have things changed so fast?
In which case the danger would no longer be coming from an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact–as we have learned to combat so efficiently in the past–but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases! While we spent years trying to detect the real prejudices hidden behind the appearance of objective statements, do we have now to reveal the real objective and incontrovertible facts hidden behind the illusion of prejudices?

Yes. Yes, we do.

And yet entire Ph.D programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always the prisoner of language, that we always speak from one standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives. Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies? Is it enough to say that we did not really mean what we meant?

Yes you were, and no it's not.

No, there's no such thing as "natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth", but by trying hard enough, we can get arbitrarily close to it. Facts are, whether we like them or not, and just because our vision is imperfect doesn't mean to say that phantoms, illusions and deliberate fabrications are as equally real as imperfectly seen objects. No, the value of an idea does not depend entirely on how well it confirms your ideology, and the value of a fact is inversely proportionate: it's the exceptions, the inconvenient truths, that teach you the most.

BIID and the Body Map

2011-06-06T23:35:00.001+10:00

From Neurophilosophy:

In BIID, or apotemnophilia, individuals express a strong desire to have a healthy limb amputated at a very specific location. People with this condition usually describe the affected limb as being "intrusive" or "over-present", and report that they have had the desire to remove since early childhood, but do not understand why. This desire can be so strong that sufferers sometimes resort to damaging the affecting limb irreparably, thus forcing doctors to amputate it. The vast majority of BIID sufferers have no other psychological disturbances, and almost always say that they feel much happier when the limb is eventually amputated.

A growing body of literature suggests that body awareness disorders such as BIID occur as a result of abnormal activity in the right parietal lobe, which is known to be essential for constructing a mental representation of the body. Specifically, this body image is constructed in the superior parietal lobule (SPL), which performs a function referred to as multisensory integration, whereby different types of sensory information entering the brain are brought together. Thus, information from the visual parts of the brain and the primary somatosensory cortex, which processes tactile sensations and proprioceptive information relating to the position of the body within space, is sent to the superior parietal lobule. There, it is combined with information from the motor cortex, which controls movement, and all is processed further to generate an internal model of the body. If these processes are perturbed, the body image is compromised.
...
In BIID, the situation is apparently reversed: the body image is missing a representation of the affected limb. But the body image distortion seen in BIID is almost certainly congenital. Children born with missing arms or legs sometimes experience phantom limb syndrome, suggesting that there is a representation of the limb in the brain, even though it has never existed. The body image is, therefore, probably "hard wired" during development. The experience of BIID sufferers is consistent with this, as they typically report that they have had the desire to have a limb amputated since early on in their lives. It seems the brains of apotemnophiles fail to generate a representation of the affected limb, because of some aberrant developmental mechanism. The limb has never been a component of the body image, so the afflicted person grows up believing that it feels "wrong", but cannot explain why.

I hypothesise that the difference between non-op and pre- or post-op transsexuals is caused by different degrees of masculinisation or feminisation of the superior parietal lobule.

The trouble is - I have no idea how to test this hypothesis. It fits with everything that we know, but that doesn't mean it's true.

All I can say is that when I was 4 years old, long before I had any concept of the differences between girls and boys, that what was "down there" felt... supernumary. Incorrect. Shouldn't be there. Furthermore, after genital reconstruction in 2006, things felt right. Not completely, there still seems something that should be there, in my abdomen, that isn't. But far, far closer to "natural" than before. Even things like urination are effortless, my instincts take over, whereas before I had to concentrate on what I was doing. I had to think, it was neither instinctive nor natural to have somewhat masculine anatomy, even if it didn't resemble the usual kind thereof.

That matches rather closely the description of BIID: but is normal for a woman, just as having a body image that involves external genitalia (and does not involve womb or cervix) is normal for a man.

I hope that one day, we'll be able to point to the areas of the brain that define gender identity more exactly, rather than "in the lymbic nucleus". That we will be able to do the same for sexual orientation, which is probably a very complex phenomenon, certainly involving sense of smell amongst other things, and be more exact than saying "it's in the hypothalamus and elsewhere". That we can do the same for male-vs-female toy preference, which has a strong correlation with sexual orientation amongst "effeminate" gay men and "butch" lesbian women; and finally, the body map in the superior parietal lobule. The latter appears to be more plastic than the others, but "more" here means "not very much".

Research on the latter might find palliative treatments for men who have been castrated, and women who have had vulvectomies, both of whom suffer the same kind of severe distress found in transsexuals. Distress that goes well beyond the problems caused by sexual incompetence. Reconstruction in conjunction with such treatment is the ideal course, but that may not be possible. The brain might need de-programming afterwards to remove the effects of the palliative treatment once reconstruction has been performed, or the patient gets BIID again.

More work needed. And as always, remembering that we're not dealing with machines here, but people, with feelings, emotions, human rights. I know that some researchers, at least, forget that. Maybe it's necessary not to get too involved in order to help people, but in some cases I think it's just pure lack of empathy towards those who are too different from themselves.

Diskworld Wiki

2011-06-03T23:40:00.000+10:00

Time for an "interesting URL". This blog, while it deals with serious matters - even matters of life and death - can get a bit stodgy. We need to live, not just exist.

And so I present : the Main Page - Discworld & Pratchett Wiki

UCSF Transgender Patient Care

2011-06-02T23:41:00.000+10:00

From the University of California, San Francisco: Primary Care Protocol for Transgender Patient Care:

"Published transgender-specific level 1 evidence is essentially non-existent. [...] Long-term, prospective studies for most transgender-specific health issues are lacking, thus resulting in variable preventive care recommendations based primarily on expert opinion. However, by utilizing an increasing body of peer-reviewed, scientific research on transgender health, along with relevant data from the general population, one can develop an evidence-based approach to preventive care for patients who are transgendered or transsexual." -- Jamie Feldman, M.D. (Feldman, J [2007])

So it's not great, but it's the best we've got, and as good (or bad) as many other medical protocols.

Very good in the main, but the hormone dosage of Oestrodiol Valerate is too low by a factor of 2, and should be maintained even after gonadectomy. Otherwise, very good, even if lacking in detail regarding the different options for genital reconstruction procedures, and with nowhere near enough emphasis on checking for Intersex conditions first. An Intersex condition disqualifies a diagnosis of Transsexuality in the ICD-10, and is a significant clinical modifier in the (draft) DSM 5. Doctors should be prepared to deal with the consequences of involuntary genital surgery on Intersexed infants, and cannot rely on the patient to tell them of those. They may not know themselves.

Hmmm.. maybe I should write to them on this...

The Face of Evil

2011-06-01T02:26:00.001+10:00

A follow-up from a previous post.

From the Grauniad:

The founder of a controversial school that treats severely autistic and emotionally disturbed children by shocking them into submission with the use of electrodes has been forced to quit the institution and serve five years' probation.
...
The criminal charges brought against Israel relate to an incident in August 2007 at one of the school's residential homes where students sleep at night. A call came in from someone posing as an authorised supervisor, who informed the carers on duty that two teenagers had misbehaved and should be given shock treatment.

At 2am, the boys were strapped on boards and given multiple shocks. One of the boys, aged 18, was shocked 77 times over a three-hour period and the other boy, aged 16, was shocked 29 times. It was later discovered that the initial call had been a hoax.

The Massachusetts attorney general, Martha Coakley, indicted Israel over allegations that he ordered his staff to destroy video evidence that revealed exactly what happened that night. Prosecutors had previously ordered that the video recordings from the home were preserved.

He knows what he's doing is wrong. He knew that what he did could have landed him in trouble - so like any evildoer, he tried to conceal the evidence.

Anyone who gave him the benefit of the doubt as being merely misguided must now admit that there's no doubt any more.

"I am now almost 78 years old, and it is time for me to move over and let others take the reins," he said in a resignation letter.

But his departure will not materially change the way the school operates, crucially its technique of disciplining children by meting out electric shocks as a form of supposedly therapeutic punishment. Of the school's 225 students, 97 are currently on the electric shock regime.

The terms of the plea deal struck between Israel and the prosecutors require the school to introduce additional monitoring to prevent a similar lapse of security happening again. But the shocks themselves can continue.

The Evil that men do lives after them....