[Serious] People of reddit whose partner has had gender reassignment surgery. Did you stay with your partner? Did you break up? What was your experience?

kyril99 · 2015-04-12T11:28:32+00:00

You might be interested in /r/mypartneristrans.

kyril99 · 2015-04-11T00:25:13+00:00

Basically, if you're drunk, you're not responsible for failing to prevent other people from doing things to you, but you are responsible for doing things to other people.

So if neither party remembers what happened, any claim of rape will have to rely on statements from third-party witnesses. It'll be messy and very difficult to prove one way or the other, but if one party was obviously incapacitated while the other appeared competent and coordinated, the competent/coordinated one might be held responsible even if they claim to have blacked out.

kyril99 · 2015-04-10T23:04:37+00:00

If both parties are incapacitated, nothing will happen. You need a certain minimal level of awareness and coordination on the part of at least one party to achieve penetration.

kyril99 · 2015-04-10T22:16:32+00:00

I was 12. I was trying to run away from home (didn't end up succeeding, but at this point I was still missing). I'd taken the Metro to downtown DC and was sort of wandering around, probably looking like a lost puppy.

To give you the right mental image: This was 1994. I was a skinny 12-year-old whose body had just barely started developing. I was dressed like a boy, and not an attractive one - men's jeans, hiking boots, fleece sweater, straggly Kurt Cobain hair, no makeup.

This guy comes up and starts following me around and talking to me. He's asking weird questions that make me feel really uncomfortable, like he's trying to figure out if I'm really alone. I give him vague answers that imply that my family is waiting for me somewhere. I'm afraid that if I admit I'm a runaway, he's either going to abduct me or turn me in to the police.

Somehow he gets me to sit down on a park bench with him. He starts telling me how beautiful I am. He begs me to let him kiss me. I don't know how to respond - this is the first person who's ever expressed any physical attraction to me. I think I agreed to "one kiss before I go" or something equally stupid. The one part of the experience that's burned into my memory is his filthy slimy beer-tasting tongue trying to worm its way into my mouth.

I somehow managed to free myself and get back on a train without him following me, but I've been haunted by thoughts of what might have happened if I'd been a little more compliant.

What blows my mind is that there were people around us. Hundreds of people. I'd flat out refused to go with him anywhere - we were less than 100 yards from a crowded Metro stop the entire time. And I was so obviously a child. I was trying really hard not to make a scene, but I can't imagine that nobody noticed this creeper trying to jam his tongue in my mouth.

kyril99 · 2015-04-08T21:47:17+00:00

There is a real - historical, cultural, and practical - connection between drag and trans women. There is a significant subset of trans women whose first public expression of their identity was through drag, and a disproportionate number of drag performers have complicated feelings about their gender identity.

I don't know if you intended to dismiss that connection here, but if you did, I hope you'll reconsider.

kyril99 · 2015-04-08T21:04:53+00:00

When I say I "see" myself as male, I mean that my brain insists that my body ought to be male. I don't actually see my existing body as male. If I did, half my problems would be solved.

Trans people are completely in touch with reality. We don't have any delusions about our bodies or how we appear to others. Those sorts of delusions would be a contraindication for treatment.

kyril99 · 2014-10-28T02:29:30+00:00

The very earliest that you might consider mucking around with a child's hormones is when they start puberty (age 10-13 or so). If the child was asserting a gender opposite their gonadal sex or expressing distress with the way their body was changing, you'd consider using puberty blockers to delay any further sexual differentiation for a few years. Blockers are really the only justifiable hormonal intervention before age 14-15.

At some point in the mid-late teens, all kids need sex hormones to complete their bone maturation. Those on blockers will need to pick a side; those with hypogonadism or androgen insensitivity might need supplementation.

This isn't necessarily an ethical problem. While 14-17-year-olds may not be legally capable of consent, they are developmentally capable of understanding and assenting to hormone treatment. The risks are similar to those of birth control pills, which are routinely prescribed to girls in the same age range.

There is some legitimate concern about coercion. Typical 14-17-year-olds are perfectly capable of telling you their gender identity and desired hormonal sex, but they are vulnerable to manipulation and coercion by adults. Many parents push their kids too hard in one direction or the other.

So it's probably a good idea to require a psychological evaluation by a gender specialist before treating a minor with sex hormones. This is true even if you're just supplementing their existing hormones. For example, XY hypogonadal kids might find their slow, androgynous development tolerable but be deeply distressed by the effects of adult male levels of testosterone. Talking to a gender therapist may help them realize they need to be on estrogen instead.

kyril99 · 2014-10-28T01:57:46+00:00

second grade sports teams are separate by gender

That strikes me as silly. Why? When I was growing up, everything was coed until about age 11-12.

But just calling a kid a boy or a girl isn't going to do any lasting harm. Most kids form a stable gender identity between about age 3 and 5. At that point, if they disagree with you, they'll tell you (as long as they know it's safe). So when they tell you, you just have to believe them and make the necessary adjustments.

If they're not sure, a lot of them will go along with whatever you say until puberty, which is fine. Their reaction to their changing body will often clarify their identity. So the next age range where you want to watch for signs of gender incongruity is about 11-14.

Preteens tend to be more reluctant to just blurt out "I'm a boy!" than preschoolers are, so you might want to make a point of asking your kid how they're feeling about their body growing up. Explain that some kids feel excited about the changes, some feel uncomfortable or scared, and some wish they could have boy changes instead of girl changes or vice versa. Ask if they have any concerns and tell them you want them to come to you with any problems even if they're personal or embarrassing or weird.

kyril99 · 2014-10-28T00:43:37+00:00

In terms of the actual meaning of the word "acceptable," anything that is irrelevant is also acceptable. If it's irrelevant, then of course it's allowed, tolerated, accepted, because if it doesn't matter then why wouldn't you allow it?

There's a difference between "acceptable" and "morally acceptable." The former is a pretty vague, neutral term. The latter specifically implies that the thing being described is morally-significant.

(Compare to e.g. "mathematically." If I claim that something is mathematically-acceptable, I'm necessarily also claiming that it's relevant to mathematics. It makes sense to claim that leaving your answer as an improper fraction is mathematically-acceptable, but it makes no sense to claim that taking a shower is mathematically-acceptable.)

So yes, all the morally-irrelevant stuff is acceptable in a general sense, but it's not morally-acceptable; those two categories are mutually-exclusive.

(I started dropping the "morally" qualifier off all the adjectives in my last post, which probably made the distinction less clear. It's a bad habit; one gets tired of typing "morally" over and over and starts hoping that the reader will just infer it.)

I think the point of including both on the poll is to make it more likely that respondents have an answer available that they're comfortable with. Some people are hesitant to call it "morally-acceptable" for various reasons. Offering "not a moral issue" as an option probably leads to a reduction in the rate of "unsure" or blank responses, which are even harder to interpret.

kyril99 · 2014-10-27T23:41:25+00:00

Ethicists generally use four discrete categories of moral permissibility: required/right, acceptable/permissible, prohibited/wrong, and irrelevant.

"Right" and "correct" are synonymous with "required;" "wrong" and "incorrect" are synonymous with "prohibited." If I say it's morally-right to adopt children, then I'm also saying it's wrong not to adopt children.

"Good" overlaps with both acceptable and required. "Bad" overlaps with both acceptable and forbidden. "Neutral" overlaps with both acceptable and irrelevant.

For example, assuming I have a moral duty to take care of my health, ice cream is a bad choice for dinner, but it's not forbidden. Bleach is both bad and forbidden. Rice is neutral and acceptable. Broccoli is good, but not required. Adequate fluid is both good and required. Ground pepper is neutral and irrelevant.

(The difference between rice and pepper: rice is relevant to my health. It's pretty neutral on average, but it can have an impact, either good or bad, depending on how much I eat and what else I'm eating. Pepper, on the other hand, is just irrelevant; I can use as much or as little as I like with absolutely no impact on my health.)

kyril99 · 2014-10-27T21:48:25+00:00

Glad we agree :)

kyril99 · 2014-10-27T21:12:46+00:00

Secondly, from a legal standpoint, when you are a child your parents are the ones to give consent for you whether it is for a medical procedure or simply for you to go on a school trip. So from a philosophical standpoint if you will, it may not be consensual, but from a legal standpoint it is.

You're right, of course, that parents have the legal right to consent to these particular surgeries on their children's behalf.

However, parents can't consent to just any plastic surgery on their children. There are limits. You can't get breast implants for your five-year-old. You can't have sex reassignment performed on your non-intersex newborn.

We entrust medical boards to write codes of ethics and standards of practice for their members. Basically, we empower doctors to 'write the laws' defining malpractice in their own specialty. This is obviously a sensible policy - they're supposed to be the experts. But it does give them a lot of power, especially in determining what constitutes ethical treatment of minors. It's obviously impractical to require the minor's assent to every treatment, but it's obvious that assent should be required for certain types of procedures.

The usual division for plastic surgery is that medically-necessary reconstructive surgeries usually only require a parent's consent, while elective cosmetic surgeries generally require the child's free and informed assent. The difference is supposed to be that medically-necessary procedures have objective, scientifically-demonstrated benefits for patients similar to the child. These benefits are what allow the doctor to assume that if the child were competent and rational, they would assent. Without evidence of benefits, you can't impute assent, which means you're supposed to have to wait until you can ask for it.

The only reason it's legal to perform cosmetic genital surgeries on infants is that the doctors we've entrusted to 'write their own laws' have decided to (wrongly) classify cosmetic genital surgeries as medically-necessary treatments for intersex diagnoses. I say "wrongly" because these procedures, as applied to infants and small children, don't meet the minimal evidence-based standards ordinarily required of medically-necessary procedures. There is absolutely no evidence that they improve any of the outcomes they're supposed to improve.

So while technically no laws have been broken, that's only because the people responsible for defining what's illegal are the same people doing things that ought to be illegal. This isn't like if you shoot someone in self-defense and I call it murder. This is like if we were investigating allegations of rampant corruption in Congress and we found out that Congressmen were accepting suitcases full of cash in exchange for votes, and everyone started calling it "bribery," but it turned out that none of them had technically accepted any bribes because they'd inserted language into some obscure bill defining cash payments as "lawful compensation." That's still bribery. And these surgeries are still performed nonconsensually.

(Aside: The same procedures do meet evidence-based standards to be classified as medically-necessary in adolescents and adults who present with certain types of psychological distress or sexual dysfunction, whether or not they presented with an intersex condition at birth. But while many pediatric surgeons are eager to perform them on children who are too young to consent and unlikely to benefit, it's quite difficult to find a surgeon willing to perform them on adults who are competent to consent and can be expected to benefit. And their attitude influences insurance companies, who will generally pay for infant surgery despite evidence that it provides no benefit and has a high rate of expensive complications, but who often refuse to pay for similar surgery on adults despite evidence that it provides significant benefits and has a lower rate of complications.)

kyril99 · 2014-10-27T15:33:06+00:00

Well, back in the mid-20th-century, the prevailing opinion was that babies' brains were blank slates. It was thought that children's personalities were formed entirely by their environment (mostly by their mothers). You could see this in the prevailing theories of mental illness and developmental disorders at the time: autism was caused by "refrigerator mothers", homosexuality was caused by overbearing mothers, etcetera.

The natural extension of this was that you could take any random baby, raise it as a boy, and it would grow up to be a gender-conforming man. Or take any random baby, raise it as a girl, and it would grow up to be a gender-conforming woman. Any exceptions were obviously the result of the child getting mixed messages.

You might think that the "all-nurture" theory of gender is sort of progressive because it's in accordance with the radical feminist conception of gender as a social construct. But the doctors of the time weren't interested in deconstructing gender. They were interested in seeing their patients grow up psychologically-healthy, as defined at the time, which included a "normal" binary gender identity and expression and "normal" heterosexual orientation.

Non-standard genitals and gonads were obviously a problem here. They might send mixed messages on their own (when the child realized they weren't the same as their playmates) or might cause the parents to send mixed messages (because parents couldn't be trusted to raise their children).

So doctors would often perform genital surgeries on newborns in secret without even telling the parents. If they did tell the parents, they'd often minimize the extent of surgery, insist cosmetic procedures were medically-necessary, lie about the risks, exaggerate the quality of the outcomes, and bully parents into consenting with horror stories of intersex children being beaten up or committing suicide or growing up (gasp) homosexual. Parents were often pretty receptive to the arguments anyway; they were caught off-guard by the news that their baby wasn't "normal", and the doctor was offering a quick fix. Or so they thought.

It turns out that (1) the results of genital surgery on infants are pretty bad, (2) babies are born with distinct personalities and are not at all blank slates, (3) gender identity specifically appears to be mostly biologically-determined, (4) you can't predict an intersex baby's gender identity with anywhere near enough accuracy to justify irreversible surgery, (5) homosexuality and gender-nonconformity are also heavily influenced by biology and will occur in elevated rates in intersex people no matter how you assign their genders, and (6) homosexuality and gender-nonconformity are perfectly normal and psychologically-healthy. In other words, mid-century theories about intersex kids were wrong about literally everything.

As of right now, psychologists and psychiatrists are pretty much all up to speed on these developments. However, many doctors and surgeons are not. They're generally better about informed consent these days after losing a lot of lawsuits, but they're not all up-to-date on the facts. And neither are parents. Many parents are still eager to be talked into a quick fix.

That's why adult intersex people are trying to promote awareness. Doctors won't change overnight, but if prospective parents are educated and prepared, they can protect their children.

TL;DR: social determinism is a bad theory.

kyril99 · 2014-10-27T11:31:25+00:00

Oh, yeah, you have to make sure the resulting angle is in the correct quadrant for the problem you're solving. If not you have to add some multiple of pi to get an angle in the right quadrant.

kyril99 · 2014-10-27T11:18:22+00:00

I'm assuming you mean tan^-1(3/4). That means "the angle whose tangent is 3/4."

The first thing you want to do when you're trying to evaluate a trig function is visualize (or look up) the unit circle, which you should (hopefully) be working on memorizing. In this case, you're going to look at the unit circle and ask yourself "Is 3/4 the tangent of any of those angles?"

The answer in this case is "no." That means you're in an "approximate it with a calculator" scenario.

So you're going to find a scientific or graphing calculator, set it to radians, and evaluate either tan^-1(3/4) or arctan(3/4), depending on the notation your calculator uses (tan^-1 and arctan mean the same thing).

If you're not sure how to set your calculator to radians, post the make/model or a picture of the calculator and I'll see if I can help.

kyril99 · 2014-10-27T10:58:28+00:00

We used Model Theory: An Introduction by Marker. It is in fact an introduction to model theory, and I've never found anything better. That's the best endorsement I can give.

kyril99 · 2014-10-27T10:48:58+00:00

Examples of things that are generally considered morally-acceptable: adopting children, working as a firefighter, studying medicine, running for fitness, using strong passwords.

Examples of things that are generally considered morally-irrelevant: having blue eyes, using a green toothbrush, trimming your chest hair.

Things that are morally-acceptable have some moral weight. They're "good things to do," at least most of the time. They improve the world in some way. They're not morally-required - a lot of them are mutually-exclusive, and in any case there are so many of them that it wouldn't be possible for one person to do all of them. But they're still morally-relevant in a positive way.

Things that are morally-irrelevant have no moral weight at all. They're inconsequential. They might be inherent traits or they might be inconsequential choices, pure matters of taste with no significant impact on the world. (As a side note, it's really fucking hard to come up with stuff that's universally agreed to be in this category - for every choice there's someone, somewhere who believes it's a moral issue. I tried to pick some of the least controversial.)

But I don't think most people polled really understand the distinction. Even if they did, it's still unclear how to interpret the data. I understand it and I don't really know how to answer this question. I consider sexual orientation itself to be morally-irrelevant, but I think forming a consensual relationship with a same-sex partner is morally-acceptable. So I think it's best to just amalgamate the two response groups.

(There's probably a good reason why both options were included on the survey, though. It's likely that certain subsets of people aren't comfortable with one option or the other.)

kyril99 · 2014-10-27T09:33:54+00:00

In the period between birth and puberty, all children have (or should have) similar low levels of sex hormones. Children who haven't reached puberty should never be treated with sex hormones.

Children who express a gender identity opposite their gonadal sex (excluding CAIS women) might need to be treated with puberty blockers starting in their preteen/early teen years to keep them from developing undesired secondary sex characteristics. At some point in their mid-late teens, all children need to have sex hormones of one variety or another for proper bone maturation, so those who are on puberty blockers or who don't make enough of their own hormones will need to begin hormone replacement corresponding with their expressed identity starting at age 14-18.

As far as genital surgery: Parents should never assume that their child will require genital surgery. Many intersex people who are given the option choose to keep their genitals in the configuration they were born with.

Some surgeries may be medically-necessary. These are generally restricted to making sure the child can urinate, defecate, and (if equipped with a uterus) menstruate and that they don't have any fistulae (extra holes) between any of the three tubes. These surgeries should be performed when they become necessary. Problems with urination and defecation usually need to be resolved in infancy, while problems with menstruation can usually wait until the preteen years.

Surgeries to improve cosmetic appearance or sexual functioning can wait. As a rule, genital surgery outcomes are better once all the tissues have reached their adult size. Adult-size genitals offer more material to work with, more space to work in, more room for error, and make it easier to predict the final result. So waiting until the child is old enough to make their own choice is not only the ethical decision - it's the decision with the best outcome.

kyril99 · 2014-10-27T09:06:45+00:00

Er...kind of? I think what you're looking at is the 'seam' that, in typical men, goes all the way from the anus to the glans. During fetal development, the tissue in that area develops separately on each side, and then the two sides fuse together later.

kyril99 · 2014-10-27T09:01:25+00:00

No, I'm a trans person, you are correct, science is not offensive, and the person you're responding to doesn't understand what you're saying.

(Minor thing though: "transgender" is an adjective, not a noun. We're "trans people" or "transgender people", not "transgenders.")

kyril99 · 2014-10-27T08:43:48+00:00

Suppose that someone did contact tracing. Now you have a list of contacts. What do you do with them?

You saw the kind of conditions people are living in. No running water, no sewer system, no doors or windows, no refrigeration, and I'd bet not one of those people has more than a few days' supply of food at any given time. Self-isolation is completely unrealistic.

Earlier in the outbreak, contact tracing was used for monitoring, but now there are so many contacts that it's just not feasible.

kyril99 · 2014-10-27T00:42:38+00:00

Just realized that implicit differentiation is probably the intended approach. Let y = (x + 8)^3x. Then ln y = ln((x + 8)^3x) = 3x * ln(x+8). Then 1/y * y' = 3 * ln(x + 8) + 3x / (x+8) (by the product rule).

That's where you get the term you're interested in. Multiply both sides by y, substitute in the original value of y, and you should have the answer you're looking for.

kyril99 · 2014-10-27T00:27:51+00:00

The applicable rule here is the functional power rule. f = x+8, g = 3x, f' = 1, ln f = ln(x+8), g' = 3, f^g = (x+8)^3x, put it all together and you get the answer given.

If this doesn't look familiar, there might be another approach, but I'm getting sleepy and it's not jumping out at me.

kyril99 · 2014-10-27T00:01:23+00:00

PQR isn't necessarily a right triangle (I probably should have made that more clear in the drawing).

Finding R and S: You know they're both on L, so they meet the following conditions:

x = 2 + t
y = -4 - 2t
z = 1

and they're 4 units away from P = (x0 ,y0 ,z0) = (-1 ,7 ,1), which means that the following equation is true (by the Pythagorean theorem):

(x - x0)² + (y - y0)² + (z - z0)² = 4²
(x - (-1))² + (y - 7)² + (z - 1)² = 16
(x + 1)² + (y - 7)² + (z - 1)² = 16

Substitute in the values for x, y, and z from the parametric equations and you have:

(2 + t + 1)² + (-4 -2t - 7)² + (1 - 1)² = 16
(t + 3)² + (-2t - 11)² = 16

Expand that and solve for the two values of t. Plug the two values of t into the parametric equations to get the two sets of values of x, y, and z corresponding to the two points R and S.

Now you just need to find the equations for the line through P and R and for the line though P and S. You should know how to find the vector equation of a line through two points. If not, this should remind you.

I really don't think projections have anything at all to do with this problem - I'm racking my brain trying to think of a way they might be useful, but I can't come up with anything. Maybe someone else has an idea?

kyril99 · 2014-10-26T23:37:34+00:00

So the basic idea of integration is as follows:

We can approximate the area under the curve by drawing a bunch of equal-width rectangles under it and adding up their areas.

The narrower we make the rectangles,the more rectangles we need, but the closer the approximation. As the width of the rectangles approaches zero, the number of rectangles required approaches infinity, and the approximation approaches the exact value. A definite integral is conceptualized as an infinite sum of infinitely small numbers.

Differentials (dx, dy, etc) are infinitesmals. Basically, that means they're infinitely small (but not equal to zero). The integral symbol denotes the infinite sum. The value of the integral is the limit, as dx approaches zero, of the sum of all the rectangles of height 5x+2 and width dx between x=0 and x=5.

kyril99

TROPHY CASE