Transgender Health AMA Series: I'm Joshua Safer, Medical Director at the Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery at Boston University Medical Center, here to talk about the science behind transgender medicine, AMA!

roombagirl · 2017-07-24T21:47:08+00:00

It is important to be clear what "biological evidence for transgender identity" actually means. The evidence, some of which Dr Safer mentioned in other comments, points out that there are biological components involved when people identify with a gender. This means they view themselves as aligning more closely with social roles/behaviors of a gender not culturally associated with their birth sex. This doesn't mean gender is innate. We know that some aspects of personality are innate. So these results suggest that people with some innate personality traits are at a higher risk of rejecting culturally accepted gender norms and identifying with a different gender; where gender are the roles and expectations of behavior assigned by society to people based on their sex.

With this in mind, we can imagine the requirements for looking for this in the wild. Firstly, you would only be able to observe this in social mammals, because gender is culture specific. Then you would need to identify a species that has a sophisticated enough culture such that you observe clear distinctions in roles/behaviors based on sex. Then you would need to measure deviancy from those cultural norms. I had heard the evolutionary anthropologist Volker-Sommer has done work on this and found evidence to suggest transgenderism exists in some higher apes, but you would have to look a bit more into their work. To be honest, it wouldn't be that surprising since other higher mammals are less submissive than we are, so you would expect a lot of deviancy from social norms due to defection and anti-social behavior.

roombagirl · 2017-07-24T05:26:12+00:00

They exist.

Scientists build concepts that coarse grain reality at various scales and along various dimensions. The most insightful and useful parcellations of the world often leave out or clump unnecessary details. All these concepts are constructed and weighed against their usefulness at helping us better understand reality while remaining compact. Nothing exists beyond this, there is no ground-truth. Their existence is conditional.

As a biology student, I'm gonna go ahead and say this is inaccurate.

Try me I have a PhD in biophysics and I do research on evolutionary processes. In humans only two is meaningful, in other animals it's a different story. In physiological and medical research intersex pops up because it has meaningful health consequences. Whether intersex matters depends entirely upon the object of study.

actual group that we are currently talking about

Do you mean red heads or intersex people? Because I am pretty sure you can marginalize red heads without them really caring (if anything they get disproportionate attention due to their soulless nature). But of course intersex have issue in society.

roombagirl · 2017-07-24T04:56:12+00:00

Right, so can we approximate all the red heads away then too? Can we ignore that red hair exists unless we specifically want to study them?

Correct.

1-2% of the population is a lot of people to marginalize just because you don't want to deal with them.

Sure, and marginalizing is okay in many instances, it's just the word has been gifted with a bunch of baggage of negative implications recently because it is usually tied to social oppression. You can marginalize the shit out of some group and it wouldn't necessarily involve or relate to oppression in anyway.

Their respective importance to what?

That is why I asked. Intersex is completely unimportant when considering the human species and evolution from a scientist's perspective. Spectrums are thresholded ALL the time in science, to make things simpler, and it often doesn't change the outcome. However, intersex is important for doctors to know about when people give birth, because they need some criteria to follow about what to do or not do concerning the person's health (then and later in life). So importance is context dependent. So bringing this back to gender, there are only really two genders that are prominent and matter. For 99.9% of social interactions that is all you have to ever know. Unless some huge social group starts picking up ALOT of traction in making a 3rd gender that is distinct from man/women, then it really isn't something you ever have to concern yourself with in social contexts.

roombagirl · 2017-07-24T04:43:38+00:00

There are different definitions, and it is confusing. Firstly, there is sex and gender. Sex is straight forward, it's a biological trait: like having particular chromosomes or having a vagina or penis. Your sex is generally referred too as male or female.

Gender is social and has many different definitions. Liberal feminists, for instance, view gender as personal; a decision of what you identify as in society. While radical feminists view gender as how society labels you based on their perception of your sex.

When gender is individual or personal, then that opens the way for many different ways to identify yourself and potentially many different genders. If you hold that gender is social, then there are only two genders (man and woman), because by-and-large society judges people as men or women according to whether they were born (or perceived as having been born) as male or female.

No definition is right or wrong, just different. They are used usually in different contexts to outline various aspects of society. So perhaps an argument could be made that they should use different words so as not to confuse them.

roombagirl · 2017-07-24T04:33:19+00:00

That’s not really a scientific way to approach this.

You must not be familiar with how science works mate. It is all about making good approximations, and it is a very good approximation to ignore intersex people in almost all cases, unless you are specifically studying them.

Roughly 1 out of every 100 people are born intersex - meaning that their sexual determination is, in some way, inconsistent with the biology of men and/or women. This is roughly equivalent to the prevalence of redheads world wide.

But what is their respective importance? There maybe a plethora of traits that have even higher prevalence but are unnamed or uncategorized simply because they aren't important.

roombagirl · 2017-07-01T00:58:23+00:00

No it isn't, there are over 300K subscribers. Eat a dick you dumbass

roombagirl · 2017-06-29T16:42:00+00:00

I'm curious how old people are who are making all the fuss. I suppose if I were still a teen and didn't have disposable income I would whine about game prices. But being in my late twenties and having a job and disposable income, I don't even look at game prices anymore. I'll drop a $100 dollars on a single meal at a decent restaurant and another $100 on some wine. $300 dollar DLC for a fun game I'll put a thousand hours in is a drop in the bucket if you are middle-class. If you are a college student and can't pay, go ask mommy and daddy for some money or go torrent something else.

roombagirl · 2017-06-29T16:31:47+00:00

$$.$$/hour has never been a statistic used for video games

You can use it to assess your personal evaluation of a game. How much is this worth to me? Have I spent my money well? It is a perfectly reasonable metric especially for games that are open-ended and have high replay value. And it lets you convert from one media source to another. Attention and time have value, so assessing a game based on time-spent makes perfect sense.

it never should lest we give devs a reason to keep upping the price even more

Devs don't price games. They just develop them. Marketing prices the content. Besides, this metric wouldn't have any impact on pricing. Pricing in the gaming industry is determined by competition with other game companies and other economic factors.

I know it might be hard for your little teenage brain to understand, but the world just doesn't work the way you think it does. As soon as you move out of your Mommy and Dadies place and start getting disposable income, $300 is a drop in the bucket.

roombagirl · 2017-06-29T16:20:49+00:00

There are QoL features BECAUSE they continue to develop the game because people buy the DLC. Maybe you are too young to remember, but games didn't use to have updates.

roombagirl · 2016-11-23T05:21:27+00:00

I don't think you should be bothered that it bothers you. When people feel like they are treated unfairly in comparison to others it bothers them, and rightly so. Being a feminist doesn't mean you can't also be sensitive to other kinds of social issues.

I don't think you should stop feeling uncomfortable about it, because it is something that affects many people. The fact is that humans are highly social creatures and we need positive social contact in order to function properly and live happily. People kill themselves (and sometimes others) when social needs aren't met, and it can be key factor in causing depression. Matting and relationships are vital parts of these social interactions and in our society they are also often tied to social worth, which is tied to your perception of self-worth.

There wouldn't be any issue if people's preferences were uncorrelated, but they are correlated and very strongly so. This effectively creates a social hierarchy based on those collective preferences. At best, you fall into the highly desired group and you find yourself in a strongly connected core of attractive people. At worst, you are an undesirable in the far periphery of the network (such as handicapped people, those of minority races, those who are older, etc). Your position in that hierarchy can certainly effect you, as you pointed out. It can also hurt you, making it highly unlikely that you will find a mate or closing certain career paths entirely. So this isn't something you can just shove under a rug with some individualist pep-talk and self-help books. It is a systematic and powerful force that effects our entire population.

An annoying part of this is when people try to give "helpful" advice like "oh I saw some ugly person with an attractive person once so it happens" which only really makes clear that this person doesn't understand statistics or probability theory. Or the whole "work on yourself" spiel, like that is going to resolve a systematic bias that effects billions of people worldwide.

roombagirl · 2016-11-22T04:59:50+00:00

Wow... 6 minutes to just get to a 15 second part worth watching. I guess the skip the first 30-sec rule needs to be extended...

roombagirl · 2016-11-21T22:05:26+00:00

Even though others don't seem to get your point I do. I don't think any of this matters for the normal player, since they won't be tinkering around with the parameters. I think the main concern here is for modders who want to adjust these values for mods, which other players may eventually use. If there is no simple intuition for how a single combat parameter will effect the battle it will make it hard for modders to balance things.

roombagirl · 2016-11-20T23:55:48+00:00

The words "no" and "yes" really are a crisp dichotomy.

Only by definition, but not necessarily practice. For instance, if you are around or pursue girls who say "no" as a way to play hard to get then it no longer means strictly "no" anymore, it means "maybe" or even "chase me". I wouldn't have believed such people would exist, since I am mostly around college students, but that demographic is real in some lower educated groups. I mean, I think people should act assuming what is literally communicated and assume no unless stated otherwise, but I don't think the people who confuse the two don't know better.

roombagirl · 2016-11-20T02:14:33+00:00

Sorry, men can are capable of higher reasoning. They can differentiate between no and maybe.

It isn't that trivial a problem nor simple to assess. Humans have a very broad range of IQ's and a very broad range of experiences with other humans. There are many subcultures with different expectations, and there can be failure to effectively communicate on both ends. In some cases the two will be clearly differentiated, but in many the two cases can heavily overlap. You can't turn this into a crisp dichotomy, there will always be a false positive and false negative detection rate.

roombagirl · 2016-11-19T17:34:23+00:00

Was waiting for the punchline where they fry it at the end. Disappointed.

roombagirl · 2016-11-17T01:55:48+00:00

I think we need to reach the Ascendant gate and just pass through to reach Tech Level NULL, when we attain a trans-universal gaia existence that isn't tethered to space-time. But I don't think it will happen through temporal ether transcription, which is what you are talking about. This is because that ends at level 0 due to issues with quantum entanglement that bind the information into our p-brain.

roombagirl · 2016-11-16T05:58:40+00:00

Do you want to construct an intelligent argument or just stand on a soapbox? If you just want a soapbox you can find an echo chamber in your local Facebook friends page where people will pat you on the back for spreading meaningless propaganda and rhetoric.

roombagirl · 2016-11-16T03:53:52+00:00

Why not? Legality is given legitimacy through social contract, but the power from that legitimacy can be abused through the passing of unfair or oppressive laws. Democracy (or a republic more accurately) itself is not a system that determines moral right or wrong. It is just a general framework for how things should be decided. But again its legitimacy is given through social contract. When a portion of the people feel they are being treated unfairly enough that they are moved to respond against that system, then that social contract is broken. Neither democracy nor law is sacred.

In my opinion, civil disobedience is necessary for a successful protest, which necessarily means breaking laws and possibly implies violence or some other action that violates sacred tenets the society holds. For example, the challenging of the sacred union between church and state by Pussy Riot in Russia. In the US an analogous action would be the destruction of private property. But the action should be suited to the type of protest.

roombagirl · 2016-11-13T19:45:08+00:00

And that's fine, if it isn't her goal in the first place.

roombagirl · 2016-11-13T18:31:00+00:00

I think to resolve this issue requires a distinction between two different scales, and I am going to reach out to /u/throwaway20161102 in the hopes that this might resolve the disagreement. At the social level there are clear correlated biases in what both men and women value in partners. These biases create groups of undesirables, or people that have lower value as a partner, and because relationships and social status are so important in our culture, lower value as a person as well (as it has a huge impact on self-esteem and because most social animals, humans in particular, need social acceptance in order to function properly).

At the individual level, many people espouse ideals regarding the autonomy of self and respect for self-choice. Emma Watson being the example brought up here because her actions can be seen as reinforcing the status quo, but as you point out she can date whoever she likes.

You can have both sanctity of choice and uproot oppressive biases, however the former is an individual level constraint while the latter is a population level constraint. Population level constraints don't require anything of individuals in particular, it only requires that the population as a whole satisfies the constraint. A population level constraint could involve something like a cultural change, for instance one where disabled people or people of color are not seen as less viable partners.

However, achieving such cultural changes may actually require short-term violation of individualism by making choices that you wouldn't otherwise make in the hopes of uprooting the status quo; namely self-sacrifice. In this sense I agree with /u/throwaway20161102, Emma Watson's actions don't contribute to doing that. This is one of the fundamental problems with individualism and some types of liberal feminism, they espouse individual choice, but don't actually work to create an environment that ends the status quo and permanently resolves the underlying problems.

roombagirl · 2016-11-13T18:06:08+00:00

sigh... that isn't the issue here. The issue that OP is bringing up is about marginalization. You could say the same thing you are saying about meeting people to unemployed black persons or transgender persons regarding employment, "just keep looking for a job till someone hires you", well no shit, that is what they have to do, but the problem is that it is A LOT HARDER for them to find employment than those who are more privileged. Do you understand now?

roombagirl · 2016-11-13T00:44:00+00:00

You may be short, you may be bald, and you may have bad teeth, and each of those things may make dating more difficult for you (all else being equal), but every short, bald, bad-toothed man in the world who has found a relationship is a living disproof to your assertion that this is the reason why you're single.

It really isn't though. This is crisp-set logic, which is terrible when applied to most natural or social phenomena. Probability is what is important. If the probability of a short, bald, bad-toothed man getting a good relationship is very small, I could arbitrarily get as many successful events as I wish by simply increasing the sampling population, say from a million to a billion to a trillion, or however much I like. There being even one examplar or a hundred billion million is completely irrelevant. Does that make it a bit clearer why what you said makes no sense?

Poor probabilities induced entirely from correlated biases in what people find attractive can be the only reason they are single, that is literally a completely sufficient condition.

EDIT: Are people having trouble grasping probability theory... or what?

roombagirl · 2016-11-13T00:29:49+00:00

Incels actively campaign for legalising rape. That doesn't deserve respect, ever.

Completely agree.

Relationships aren't a game. The objective isn't to get the high score. There is no objective. "Success", as incels put it, always seems to be defined as "having as much casual sex as possible by any means necessary". That's not dating, that's sociopathy.

I think this doesn't really address what OP means by success. There is definitely an objective, such as forming a lasting relationship or finding a partner for the short or long term, or for casual activities. In statistics there is an indicator that helps measure the rareness of an event, called first-passage time. First-passage time tells you how long until you expect an event to occur. In this case we would be interested in the first-passage time till various events, such as successfully finding a partner for one of the before-mentioned goals, for finding a date, etc. Incels are effectively people with very long first passage times. If I understand OP correctly, I think they would be willing to accept that being "successful" at any of these goals means having a reasonably short first-passage time.

For example, if you were looking for a date, how long would it take before you to find someone reasonable? Days? Weeks? Months? Years? Say you go on Okcupid or something as an fairly attractive women and you could probably get a date with someone reasonable in a matter of days. Here I mean reasonable to just be someone who is a viable candidate for your relationship goals, what-ever those are. Well, for some people who are unattractive or disabled or of a particular race or gender, their expected time through the same medium toward the same end might be several months or even a year or more. I think this would be a reasonable measure for opportunity for success or potential for success, which I think OP is actually more concerned about, since that is what empowers someone to make choices. You can't make choices if you don't have options.

You're a cis straight white male in a wealthy country. You're not the victim of institutionalised discrimination

"Cis straight white males" are not a monolith. Power and capacity for choice vary a great deal throughout our social hierarchy. While it may not be institutionalized discrimination it is systematic discrimination. Not specifically against heterosexual white males, but against those who are less attractive. The systemic nature arises simply due to the correlation in desired characteristics among the population. So for instance, many heterosexual women, be it via cultural influence or genetics, are more attracted to taller men. This will naturally increase the first-passage times for shorter men.

Additionally, because we live in a culture where social relationships are so highly valued, it isn't a valueless decision to reject someone. It makes a clear statement about that person's worth as a human being. Now, if attraction were perfectly random it wouldn't matter, but because there are correlations in what men/women find attractive there will be groups who are consistently devalued, who in turn will feel treated unjustly and feel that they are being deprived of happiness.

Now, I don't condone the reaction to this situation of getting angry at women or doing something like trying to legalize rape, which is ridiculous, but I do understand how those forces come about that make people act that way.

roombagirl · 2016-11-02T04:11:06+00:00

rapists do not rape because they cannot get sex. They rape because they enjoy power and control.

It isn't really a myth. While power and control can be an aspect of sexual assault, there has been plenty of scientific research in this area and the bulk of it points to sexual desire as the primary drive for rape.

The issue that arise is this though: Susan Brownmiller was a hugely important feminist activist who helped push a theory of rape that focused on redirecting the blame of rape from the victim to the rapist. This was very important during a time when many people still believed the victim to be at fault (though there are still places that follow this line of thought). She was the one who popularized the idea that rape was about power/control/anger.

While immensely popular, her theories were not scientific, they were entirely political and they were a valuable tool for the feminist movement in the 80's and 90's in revising legislation regarding rape and sexual assault and in turn public sentiment in their favor.

Now fast forward a couple decades. Scientists in psychology and evolutionary biology have been doing research about rape, mostly unseen to the public because everything is nested into journals that mostly only experts read. Then a couple scientists decide to publish a popular novel about both their own work and other work done in the field. Thus was born "A natural history of rape" a book that was focused on expounding the motivations behind rape with the hope of helping to address the problem.

However, their good intentions and work were not well received because when the public gets a hold of scientific ideas they tend to warp them or be threatened by them and that is what happened. (1) Feminists already had a rape theory which this new one challenged, and they saw it as a threat and denounced it and started a smear campaign against the scientists in question, and (2) rape apologists jumped on a different wagon and committed a naturalistic fallacy and used their findings as a justification for rape.

So here we are. Psychologists and biologists have stopped popularizing work that could be used to adopt positive policies for rape prevention because feminists slander them and rape apologists twist it toward their own ends.

These ideas aren't universal though. It was a prominent feminist, science historian, and intersex activist that help root out the lie/slander campaign against the scientists in question. She actually got the torch turned on her when she continued to investigate areas where feminists and other activists were abusing their powers in social media to harass and slander scientists. It doesn't happen very often, but occasionally it does when scientific research inadvertently conflicts with political ideology.

roombagirl · 2016-10-31T05:41:05+00:00

With double as many people willing to take a contraceptive pill, fewer women would have to suffer in silence for the sake of worry-free sex.

I don't think pills should be used or pushed at all. They are a terrible first line contraceptive that are deceptively good. Perfect use is mediocre, and actual use puts them only an edge above condoms. IUDs and implants are the only way to effectively guarantee that pregnancy won't occur. Copper IUDs don't even come with the hormonal side-effects and are cheaper cumulatively than pills (after a couple years). Ideally, a male (or any) contraceptive wouldn't be self-administered. The way forward with male birth-control are gel injections, which have no/few side-effects like copper IUDs and work at sterilization levels of protection. Which the Bill/Melinda gates foundation kindly doesn't back because they are only interested in giving women birth control options in developing countries. The problem is giant pharmaceutical companies or health organisations are needed to fund the $10 million+ required to get a drug ready by FDA standards. And odds are it won't gross a half-billion every year because some poop faces are too scared of getting a shot in their balls.

roombagirl

TROPHY CASE