A Most Unpopular Decision

From the Huffington Post : Michelle Kosilek, Inmate Born As Robert Kosilek, Eligible For Legal Fees Reimbursement In Addition To Sex Change Comments that illustrate the popular mood:

So, isn't MURDER cruel and unusual punishment on the victim? I say cut it off and shove it down his throat! 

just ask someone to shank his ass...problem solved ...

Hopefully someone will before the surgery.

It's a credible threat.

Full text of the judgement:http://pacer.mad.uscourts.gov/dc/cgi-bin/recentops.pl?filename=wolf/pdf/kosilek%20eighth%20amendment%20decision.pdf

 It's as sordid a tale of deliberate inhuman cruelty - "wanton cruelty" as the judge put it, as you'll ever find.

 Commentary at the American Bar Association Blog.

Ruling Tuesday in a seven-year-old civil rights suit in which a transgender prison inmate has been seeking to have the state of Massachusetts pay for sex-change surgery, a federal judge in Boston agreed with Michelle Kosilek and prison doctors that the operation needs to be performed. “This fact that sex reassignment surgery is for some people medically necessary has recently become more widely recognized,” wrote Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Wolf in a 129-page landmark opinion (PDF). He based his ruling on Kosilek's argument that her Eighth Amendment rights were violated by the prison system's refusal to provide her with adequate treatment for her severe gender identity disorder. It may be the first time a federal judge anywhere in the country has ordered such surgery for a prison inmate, according to the Associated Press and the Boston Globe. Convicted of first-degree murder as Robert Kosilek for the 1990 slaying of her wife, Kosilek, who has had hormone treatments, is serving a sentence of life without parole in a men's prison. The state is reportedly reviewing Wolf's opinion and considering its appellate options.

My take : There’s an obvious problem here, that convicted murderers can’t be treated like decent, law-abiding transsexuals outside prison, because that treatment amounts to torture, so is forbidden by the 8th amendment. The only solutions are to either repeal the 8th amendment, or put in place legislation so law-abiding transsexuals aren’t treated worse than convicted murderers, Your choice. Given the general attitude of society towards convicted criminals, I think repeal of the 8th amendment would be far more popular, popular enough to pass. The other alternative is a non-starter unless a lot more education on the issue is provided.

"The right to be free of cruel and unusual punishments, like the other guarantees of the Bill of Rights, may not be submitted to vote; it depends on the outcome of no elections. The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts." -- Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238, 269 (1972)

"To incarcerate, society takes from prisoners the means to provide for their own needs. Prisoners are dependent on the State for food, clothing, and necessary medical care. A prison’s failure to provide sustenance for inmates “may actually produce physical ‘torture or a lingering death.’” Just as a prisoner may starve if not fed, he or she may suffer or die if not provided adequate medical care. A prison that deprives prisoners of basic sustenance, including adequate medical care, is incompatible with the concept of human dignity and has no place in civilized society. " - SCOTUS

“Denying adequate medical care because of a fear of controversy or criticism from politicians, the press, and the public serves no legitimate penological purpose,” Wolf wrote. “It is precisely the type of conduct the Eight Amendment prohibits.”

Another part of the puzzle

Increased Cortical Thickness in Male-to-Female Transsexualism Luders et al, Journal of Behavioral and Brain Science, 2011

Abstract:

Background: The degree to which one identifies as male or female has a profound impact on one’s life.
Yet, there is a limited understanding of what contributes to this important characteristic termed gender identity.
In order to reveal factors influencing gender identity, studies have focused on people who report strong feelings of being the opposite sex, such as male-to-female (MTF) transsexuals.

Method: To investigate potential neuroanatomical variations associated with transsexualism, we compared the regional thickness of the cerebral cortex between 24 MTF transsexuals who had not yet been treated with cross-sex hormones and 24 age-matched control males.

Results: Results revealed thicker cortices in MTF transsexuals, both within
regions of the left hemisphere (i.e., frontal and orbito-frontal cortex, central sulcus, perisylvian regions, paracentral gyrus) and right hemisphere (i.e., pre-/post-central gyrus, parietal cortex, temporal cortex, precuneus, fusiform, lingual, and orbito-frontal gyrus).

Conclusion: These findings provide further evidence that brain anatomy is associated with gender identity, where measures in MTF transsexuals appear to be shifted away from gender-congruent men.

From 1691

The Athenian Mercury, number 23, 1691

Curtsy to Cristan Williams

Skepticlawyer » ‘A Plea in Law for Equal Marriage’

Skepticlawyer :‘A Plea in Law for Equal Marriage’

In 2002, A was happily married to her husband, although she was not well. About two years earlier – and although she was only 33 – her periods had stopped, her voice had deepened and her shoulders had broadened. She began to grow facial hair, which she shaved off, obsessively, although she felt very odd doing so. She had always been considered “mannish” as a child and was unusually good at sport, to the point of being invited to play cricket with her high school’s First XI and coach junior rugby. Her husband had always liked “sporty girls”, and they met through a rugby supporters’ association.

    Although she hid the burgeoning changes from her husband, of course he noticed them. Eventually, and in severe distress, she told him that she thought she was turning into a man. Medical tests revealed a huge spike in her testosterone levels and a hitherto undiagnosed genetic disorder that meant she had both male and female characteristics. At the time of the tests, she did not feel properly male or female, but it was clear that she still loved her husband, and he loved her in return.

    The couple waited, and over a further two years – and without, at this stage, any treatment – the masculine characteristics became more dominant.  ‘She’ felt more like ‘he’ and the couple agreed that A would undergo the necessary medical treatment and legal changes to be considered male. The medical process went relatively smoothly, albeit with pain and some adjustment complexities. The law, however, was less amenable. A was told that in order to finalise his transition from female to male, he and his husband would need to get divorced. Only then would his “interim gender recognition certificate” be made a “full” one.(1)

    “But we’ve been married for nine years,” he pointed out. “Can’t we just stay married? Our 10th wedding anniversary is coming up.”

    “No. You have to divorce, and then, if you want, you can form a civil partnership.”(2)

    “But I thought marriage and civil partnership were supposed to be the same!

...

References

(1) Gender Recognition Act 2004, ss 5 and 5A, especially s 5(1)(b) and s 5A(1)(b), the provisions applicable in Scotland. Divorce is necessitated because a marriage can only be formed between opposite sex-couples, and a civil partnership can only be formed between same-sex couples.

(2) This description is a composite based on several case studies, both in Scotland and elsewhere. I am particularly grateful to Zoe Brain (Australian National University, Department of Computer Science) for her exhaustive documentation of situations like this.

In full, this year's winner in the essay competition organised by the Society with the Scottish Parliament: a proposal for a member's bill that is topical and would "make a useful change to Scots law" . Read The Whole Thing

“What I’m most afraid of when I go back, isn’t being killed. What really petrifies me is being attacked and tortured.”

“What I’m most afraid of when I go back, isn’t being killed. What really petrifies me is being attacked and tortured.”

One night several men broke into her room, where they raped her. She fled the camp the same night.
“I didn’t go to the Red Cross and report it. It was them who put me there. Why should I trust people who hadn’t even bothered to listen and who had put me in that situation?”
...
“Basically a transgender woman is likely to be placed in a male dormitory but in a single room. But we would not place her in a women’s dormitory because that is definitely for women, where cannot permit ourselves to place a man.” Says Anne La Coeur.
...
 The two women, who have both fought for transgender rights in Guatemala, say that transgender people have no possibilities other than prostitution. Yet these two both tried another way. Paola enrolled on an educational course and paid a lot of money to be accepted, but on the first day when she showed up and they found that her gender did not match that on her ID, she was thrown out.
“Education was only for men and women and not for people like me.” Says Paola.

"In Guatemala if you are different you are cut off from your family, from society and by the government. You cannot get an education. You cannot get medical treatment because if you arrive at the hospital as a woman and your papers say that you are not, they refuse to treat you even if you are bleeding to death. They would rather let you die than treat you.” Says Fernanda.

The reason, according to Fernanda, is that Guatemala is a Catholic country, where the church has a great deal of power, and its fear spreads out through society and makes people resort to vigilantism. “I know no transgender people in Guatemala over 35,” she says.

“What I’m most afraid of when I go back, isn’t being killed. What really petrifies me is being attacked and tortured.” Says Fernanda.

Translation of an article which appeared in the Danish newspaper Politiken on the 14 August 2012 At the police station, she was told that rape was a consequence of her choice to be transsexual.

Hexagon (Declassified)

Ice Station Zebra, anyone?

From the Daily Fail:

The daring mission to retrieve a top-secret CIA satellite from the bottom of the ocean at the height of the Cold War was kept under wraps for 40 years - until the spy agency decided to lift the lid.
Last week, the mission was declassified, and the report and photos of the effort to recover the Hexagon satellite were made available for public consumption.
...
But as the Hexagon (sic) re-entered earth’s atmosphere, a parachute designed to soften its landing broke, and the craft plummeted into the Pacific Ocean.
For months, the satellite - and its 60 miles of film - were lost on the sea floor.
Space.com reported that two missions to retrieve the satellite in 1971 failed, but the Navy tried again on April 25, 1972.
In the third mission, the Navy used its Trieste II Deep Sea Vehicle – complete with a mechanical arm – to bring the Hexagon to the surface.
There was, however, one setback.
The report said: 'The third attempt was successful in locating and securing the film stacks; however, as the Trieste was surfacing, the film broke into pieces. Twenty-five feet was recovered.'

Fortunately the film was made in 1968, well before the recovery effort. Or some interesting questions would have been asked...

Throwaways

How Norman Spack transformed the way we treat transgender children - Lifestyle Features

"I was naïve," he says now. "I thought that all the kids I saw in the streets were runaways. And I had been told about the rules about runaways, like that they could be housed for three days without calling the parents. But one of the street workers said, 'They call them runaways. These kids are throwaways. Our goals aren't to get the kid home. Home is not a safe place.' "

Irony

Whew!

About 2/3 of the way on the curve... was seriously worried when I read the abstract.

The Same for Thousands of Years...

Marriage, Australian style - Rear Vision - ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Keri Phillips: Today on Rear Vision, we’ll take a look at the story of marriage in Australia since white settlement. It’s a story of ever-increasing state regulation in what was once a more private affair and one that shows how the law and society interact with each other to bring about social change. Our marriage laws have their roots in English common law, as Professor Rebecca Probert, an expert in the history of marriage law from the University of Warwick, explains.

Rebecca Probert: The origins of modern marriage go back to the eleventh century, which is when the Christian Church acquired authority over marriage. We don’t know that much about marriage practices before that. There are some hints that Anglo-Saxon marriage practices were not the same as the Christian Church; for example, in divorce being permitted. But we do also know that there were Christian marriage services being carried out even in the Anglo-Saxon period. How popular they were, we have no means of telling. We don’t have much information on what people actually did in this period, apart from at the very highest levels of society, which we can’t take as representative. So our knowledge of marriage really only dates from the Christian period, from the eleventh century onwards.

Keri Phillips: What do we know about it at this very early period?

Rebecca Probert: The basic idea was that marriage was entered into by the free consent of the parties and it was for life. Now, a marriage could be annulled on the basis there was some impediment to it coming into being; for example, if the parties were too closely related, or didn’t have capacity to consent. But other than that, it was for life. Whether you had marriage being entered into solely on the basis of consent is something of a debated issue, because the church also had legislation on banns and publicity and marriages being celebrated in church, even at this early period.

Keri Phillips: What do we know about how it evolved over the years, centuries, following the earliest evidence that you’ve just told us about?

Rebecca Probert: It really is a matter of evolution. Obviously you have the Reformation in the sixteenth century, so the Catholic Church becomes the Church of England, but not very much changes with that. It’s really only when you get into the seventeenth century you have a brief flirtation with civil marriage under the commonwealth. And then in the 1690s you start to get legislation beginning to define where marriages should take place and fining those that aren’t celebrated in the right place, so that the state is reinforcing the church’s prescriptions.

Unchanging? The last time the Marriage Act was radically changed in Australia was in 2004.

Today's Battle

From the National Catholic Register

Posted by Charles O'Connel on Wednesday, Jul 4, 2012 12:21 PM (EST):

Regarding people who claim to speak with expertise & authority, I have been dismayed to hear, on an extremely prominent Catholic broadcast - one associated with this publication - two of the most major Catholic commentators (you would know their names), venturing very naive opinions on this subject. They should either take the time to become educated, or learn to avoid rash judgment by shutting up about it.

The author of this article is confirmed in her findings by a true expert, Dr. Paul McHugh, formerly psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, in his November 2004, “First Things” article “Surgical Sex”.

The first thing to consider, is that people who seek such extreme remedies, are responding, however incorrectly, to very real problems; they aren’t doing it on a lark, or to conform with fashion.

The whole history of sexual radicalism is one of such people being exploited by professional agitators who haven’t got their best interests at heart. The emphasis on compassion is the most important thing. In time, those who are really loving will be discovered & remembered.

Posted by Zoe Brain on Wednesday, Jul 4, 2012 7:46 PM (EST):

McHugh’s views are based entirely on ideology, not on evidence.

Think about it - his works on the subject are in political/religious journals, not medical/scientific ones. You see his article “Surgical Sex” constantly being quoted. Why? Because it’s the only one of its kind. A distinctly fringe, even crackpot, view. Unique. His tenure as head of psychiatry was “controversial” to say the least.

To repeat:

As Dr Paul McHugh admitted in his book “Psychiatric Misadventures”:

“This interrelationship of cultural antinomianism and a psychiatric misplaced emphasis is seen at its grimmest in the practice known as sex-reassignment surgery. I happen to know about this because Johns Hopkins was one of the places in the United States where this practice was given its start. It was part of my intention, when I arrived in Baltimore in 1975, to help end it. “

Verdict first, trial afterwards.

The bishops recently chose Dr. Paul McHugh, former chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at John Hopkins University School of Medicine, as chief behavioral scientist for their new clergy sex crimes review board. Yet Dr. McHugh once said Johns Hopkins’ Sexual Disorders Clinic, which treats molesters, was justified in concealing multiple incidents of child rape and fondling to police, despite a state law requiring staffers to report them.

“We did what we thought was appropriate,” said Dr. McHugh, then director of Hopkins’ Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, which oversaw the sex clinic. He agreed with his subordinate, clinic head Fred Berlin, who broke the then-new child sexual abuse law on the grounds that it might keep child molesters from seeking treatment.

Dr. Berlin admitted he had covered for the sex criminals, angering legislators, child-advocacy groups and state officials. But his actions were not surprising, because “at least eight men have been convicted of sexually abusing Maryland children while under [Dr. Berlin’s] treatment there,” according to the March 23, 1988, issue of the Capital. Despite a 1990 Government Accounting Office study that found no therapy program that stopped sex offenders, Dr. Berlin said in 1994 that psychiatry can “effectively control” sex criminals.

McHugh still insists that there is no problem with paedophilia in the Church, that it’s all imaginary, and that the problem is under psychiatric control.

“McHugh’s actions…pose the deepest threat to the council’s credibility. McHugh is the only therapist on the lay council. This makes his participation especially significant, because other members may rely on his presumed expertise. Because he frequently testifies on behalf of accused molesters, doubts may be raised about the council’s desire to truly solve the problem.

McHugh…is the man whose report to the court in one case stated that a defendant’s harassing phone calls were not obscene – including the call that detailed a fantasy of a 4-year-old sex slave locked in a dog cage and fed human waste.

At least eight men have been convicted of sexually abusing Maryland children while under treatment at the “sex disorders” clinic McHugh runs at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine – abuse the doctors did not report, citing client confidentiality. When Maryland law was changed to require that doctors report child molestation, the clinic fought it and advised patients on how to get around the law. The memo to patients suggested that molesters report their pedophilic activities to their lawyers, who could in turn tell staff; attorney-client privilege would then protect the molesters from being reported. This memo was fully approved by the boss – Dr. Paul McHugh…

I think that even the most charitable view would call his judgement “questionable” at best. It’s not as if he has any evidence to back up his views.

What matters is not who has said something, but whether it’s true or not. However, if one is to ignore evidence, and rely on an “appeal to authority”, one had better make sure the authority is unimpeachable.

The Vatican, in all good faith, employed McHugh as their advisor on sexual matters. His psychiatric qualifications were impeccable (even if he lacked training in science, as was the fashion in the 50’s), his conservative politics eminently sound. The result of adopting his recommendations we all know about.

He hasn’t been involved with Transsexual treatment for over 30 years, his knowledge of the area firmly rooted in state-of-the-art theories from the 1950’s, and not updated since.

Cost Of Living Comparison Between Two Countries

Cost Of Living Comparison Between Two Countries

Try comparing where you live with where I live - Canberra, Australia.

Tony Abbot - look behind you....

Abstruse Goose

Beyond the Binary: legal recognition of sex and gender diversity in the ACT

LRAC_Report_7_June.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Law Reform Advisory Council recommendations

Beyond the Binary: legal recognition of sex and gender diversity in the ACT
ACT Law Reform Advisory Council

Including input from scientific, medical, and legal experts from the Australian National University - some of whom are Intersex or Trans themselves.

NAB Honesty Shouldn't Go Unrewarded

From the Daily Mail

The shopping centre prank is the latest in a string of NAB stunts. Another experiment involved the bank building a coffee stand on a busy Melbourne street, where the barista deliberately gave all customers $5 too much in change for their coffees.

Every single person immediately returned the money.

The barista then changed tactics and began insulting customers - asking one lactose-intolerant woman when she ‘decided she had that condition’, and telling a smartly dressed young man that he would no longer fit into his suit if he kept drinking moccas.

Despite the obnoxious comments 91 per cent STILL returned the extra change.

Stephen Hawking on Higgs Discovery has lost me $100

Veronica Drantz: The Gender Binary & LGBTI People - Myth and Medical Mal...

An Eccentric Species, we are

Som Sabadell flashmob - YouTube

Not Quite Another One...

Girl is born looking like a Boy. She tries to be a Boy. Fails, but can fake it well. She has to to try to have some kind of normal life. Later, she finds out her body isn't as male as everyone (including her) thought. She's in-between, so can live as the woman she always was, without feeling like some kind of sex pervert. Her partner takes in her stride the fact that she married another girl, the person matters, not the physical shape, and they all live happily ever after, giving thanks that due to an unusual biological situation, two gals could have children together. Rare, but it happens.

From the Denver Post:

Five years ago, when Steve and Debbie Crecelius awaited results of his kidney stone ultrasound, they weren't expecting earth-shattering news. But what the technician told them rocked their world. "She said, 'You're female,' " said Steve, a prominent local photographer who has worked with clients ranging from Harrison Ford to the city of Glendale. The medical discovery that he is intersex — born with a mix of anatomical sex traits, so biological gender cannot be classified as either male or female — led to a flood of revelations that would refine and redefine their 25-year marriage. When they got home, Debbie forced a conversation that Steve feared would cost him his wife and family. "There's something I've always wanted to talk to you about," she said, explaining that she'd always known that he had female traits.....

No change of external appearance, just the revelation that her body wasn't completely male. That was enough. We need to educate people, especially Trans people, to realise that Trans people aren't "sex perverts" as is the popular belief. That whether someone is classically Intersex, with a mixed reproductive anatomy, or classically Transsexual, with a mixed neurological anatomy, or even if they just have a cross-sexed gender identity due to other causes - not that any have been identified - they're who they feel they are. They don't have to pretend.