Women Born Transsexual

From Stroller Derby:   http://blogs.babble.com/strollerderby/2011/07/18/is-it-okay-for-boys-to-wear-pink-kids-dads-discuss-the-color-gender-stereotypes-video/

Posted by wendym
July 18th, 2011

Is it okay for boys to wear pink?

The color and gender stereotypes issue has come up time and time again – see most recently, the J. Crew catalog that included a boy with pink nail polish or the fact that a boy has joined the ranks of the Toddlers & Tiaras pageant circuit.

But what about what young boys think about wearing pink? Or what dads think?

Good Morning America addressed the whole “boys wearing pink” issue (or non-issue, as the case may be) in this video clip.

Dads were asked about their thoughts on their boys wearing pink and then kids were put through some tests to determine their preference for the color pink and their thoughts on wearing the color.

All of the dads in the interview seemed okay with having their son choose to wear pink. One man noted he would prefer blue, but ultimately it’s up to the child.

The boys in the piece were put through a couple of nonscientific tests – first, their choice of scooters to ride when given the choice of green/blue/pink and second, a rack of shirts to try on, where there were only enough shirts as there were kids and two of the shirts were pink.

Continue reading at:  http://blogs.babble.com/strollerderby/2011/07/18/is-it-okay-for-boys-to-wear-pink-kids-dads-discuss-the-color-gender-stereotypes-video/

From Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/notes/britney-austin/my-recommended-revision-to-the-glaad-media-guide/169598223108670

by Britney Austin
Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Reposted with Permission

Christo-Nazi head of the certified Hate Group, The “American Family” Association, Bryan Fischer claims hating LGBT/T people is a core Christian value.

From Right Wing Watch:  http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/fischer-gay-rights-and-religious-liberty-cannot-coexist

Perhaps it is time to require sanity tests for elected officials.

Of course that would end the Republi-Nazi Party.

The scariest thing about this whack job, West is that he used to be a General.

‘War Criminal,’ Tea-Partier Allen West Beats Up on a Woman — Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz

From Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/19/allen-west-debbie-wasserman-schultz_n_904047.html

Allen West: Debbie Wasserman Schultz ‘Vile’, ‘Not A Lady’

July 19, 2011

WASHINGTON — A Republican congressman from Florida turned to email on Tuesday to call a Democratic colleague from the state “vile, despicable and cowardly” after she called into question his stance on Medicare during the debate over a spending cap and balanced budget bill before the House.

Rep. Allen West, a first-term Republican from south Florida, wasn’t shy about his online outburst. He sent his peppery email to numerous lawmakers as well as his target, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee.

The subject line of the email: “Unprofessional and Inappropriate Sophomoric Behavior from Wasserman Schultz.”

The e-mail said: “Look, Debbie, I understand that after I departed the House floor you directed your floor speech comments directly towards me. Let me make myself perfectly clear, you want a personal fight, I am happy to oblige. You are the most vile, unprofessional and despicable member of the US House of Representatives. If you have something to say to me, stop being a coward and say it to my face, otherwise, shut the heck up.”

In her remarks on the House floor, Wasserman Schultz said: “The gentleman from Florida, who represents thousands of Medicare beneficiaries, as do I, is supportive of this plan that would increase costs for Medicare beneficiaries. Unbelievable from a member from south Florida.”

Continue reading at:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/19/allen-west-debbie-wasserman-schultz_n_904047.html

From Environment 360:  http://e360.yale.edu/feature/the_world_at_7_billion_can_we_stop_growing_now/2426/

With global population expected to surpass 7 billion people this year, the staggering impact on an overtaxed planet is becoming more and more evident. A two-pronged response is imperative: empower women to make their own decisions on childbearing and rein in our excessive consumption of resources.

by Robert Engelman
July 18,2011

Demographers aren’t known for their sense of humor, but the ones who work for the United Nations recently announced that the world’s human population will hit 7 billion on Halloween this year. Since censuses and other surveys can scarcely justify such a precise calculation, it’s tempting to imagine that the UN Population Division, the data shop that pinpointed the Day of 7 Billion, is hinting that we should all be afraid, be very afraid.

We have reason to be. The 21st century is not yet a dozen years old, and there are already 1 billion more people than in October 1999 — with the outlook for future energy and food supplies looking bleaker than it has for decades. It took humanity until the early 19th century to gain its first billion people; then another 1.5 billion followed over the next century and a half. In just the last 60 years the world’s population has gained yet another 4.5 billion. Never before have so many animals of one species anything like our size inhabited the planet.

And this species interacts with its surroundings far more intensely than any other ever has. Planet Earth has become Planet Humanity, as we co-opt its carbon, water, and nitrogen cycles so completely that no other force can compare. For the first time in life’s 3-billion-plus-year history, one form of life — ours — condemns to extinction significant proportions of the plants and animals that are our only known companions in the universe.

Did someone just remark that these impacts don’t stem from our population, but from our consumption? Probably, as this assertion emerges often from journals, books, and the blogosphere. It’s as though a geometry text were to propound the axiom that it is not length that determines the area of a rectangle, but width. Would we worry about our individual consumption of energy and natural resources if humanity still had the stable population of roughly 300 million people — less than today’s U.S. number — that the species maintained throughout the first millennium of the current era?

Continue reading at:  http://e360.yale.edu/feature/the_world_at_7_billion_can_we_stop_growing_now/2426/

From The Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/19/obama-defense-of-marriage-gay-rights_n_903680.html

July 19, 2011

President Barack Obama is throwing his support behind a bill that would repeal the federal government’s ban on same-sex marriage.

The president has “long called for a legislative appeal for the so-called Defense of Marriage Act which continues to have a real impact on families,” White House spokesman Jay Carney announced Tuesday.

The president is “proud to support” the Respect for Marriage Act, which would repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, Carney said.

The Obama administration announced in February that it believes the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional and would no longer defend it in court.

Complete article at:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/19/obama-defense-of-marriage-gay-rights_n_903680.html

From Alternet:  http://www.alternet.org/sex/151699/why_are_americans_still_giant_hypocrites_about_sex/

So many Americans object to other people doing it that opposition to sex drives American politics.

By Amanda Marcotte 
July 19, 2011

Understanding Americans requires becoming well-versed in many things: American sports, sitcoms, YouTube cat videos, superhero movies, and the ever-increasing complexity of ordering coffee. But to truly get Americans, you have to really delve deep into the woods of our hypocrisy. Americans tell pollsters they’re in church when they’re sleeping in or watching the game. Politicians don’t dare talk about legalizing drugs, because while Americans are far likelier to use drugs than many other nations, we also reliably vote against anyone who suggests we roll back the legal repercussions. And nowhere is American hypocrisy uglier than when it comes to sex.

Americans are doing it. Yet so many Americans object to doing it, that opposition to other people doing it drives American politics, even in the face of real problems such as a floundering economy, a foreclosure crisis, and a Republican party that is willing to destroy our nation’s credit rating just to stick it to the president. Without the anti-gay and anti-choice movements riling up religious people to vote against their neighbor’s right to use birth control and abortion, or their neighbor’s right to have sex with someone of the same gender, the Republican party as we know it wouldn’t exist.

American prudery means that both our tabloid and actual news media are regularly dominated by sex scandals. These are often conducted as if the entire media infrastructure were run by 19th-century middle-aged spinsters, such as when the entire Beltway press regarded a man taking a picture of his erection as if they were witnessing the same level of perversion as a man in flagrante delicto with a barnyard animal.

You’d think with the springs going out on our fainting couch that we were a nation whose bedsprings got no wear and tear, but you’d be wrong. Americans have sex on average 2.3 times a week, and 19 out of 20 Americans have had premarital sex. Americans like to have sex for pleasure, as indicated by the universal use of contraception. Americans like to mix it up, too, as the rapid rise in Americans admitting to anal sex demonstrates. Needless to say, Americans also love porn, and conservatives who denounce other people’s sexual choices are even more avid consumers of porn than people who take a more live-and-let-live attitude.

Continue reading at:  http://www.alternet.org/sex/151699/why_are_americans_still_giant_hypocrites_about_sex/

I have been skeptical of the Psychiatric Industrial Complex since the late 1960s.  The pathologizing of homosexuality was one thing but also the way they pathologized women who didn’t conform to rigid sexist stereotypes.

Over the years I have watched as the Psychiatric Industrial Complex has turned childhood into reason to push medications on kids, medications that are basically speed.

A few years ago they tried to pathologize abused women and women in general due to first their menstrual and later in life due to menopause.

All this from a “science” with extremely dubious origins.  One that seems more akin to a religion than a science.

From Business Insider:  http://www.businessinsider.com/zyprexa-antipsycotics-top-selling-drugs-in-us-2011-7

Robert Johnson
Jul. 20, 2011

Outselling even common drugs to treat high blood pressure and acid reflux, antipsychotic medications are the single top-selling prescription drug in the United States.

Once reserved for hard-core, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest type of mental illnesses to treat hallucinations, delusions or major thought disorders; today, the drugs are handed out to unruly kids and absent minded elderly.

A recent story in Al Jazeera by James Ridgeway of Mother Jones illuminates the efforts by major pharmaceutical companies to get doctors prescribing medicines like Zyprexa, Seroquel, and Abilify to patients for whom the drugs were never intended.

Focusing on psychiatrists because they rely on subjective diagnoses, the drug reps have been so successful that they’ve changed the criteria for mental illness and disability payments. Ridgeway quotes former New England Journal of Medicine editor Marcia Angell.

“[T]he tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007 – from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling – a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children.” Under the tutelage of Big Pharma, we are “simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one.” Fugh-Berman agrees: In the age of aggressive drug marketing, she says, “Psychiatric diagnoses have expanded to include many perfectly normal people.“

Particularly vulnerable because medication decisions are often out of their hands the old and the young suffer most.

Continue reading at: http://www.businessinsider.com/zyprexa-antipsycotics-top-selling-drugs-in-us-2011-7

From Thom Hartmann:

From The Activist.org: http://theactivist.org/blog/the-global-crisis-of-legitimacy

CHRIS MAISANO
7/18/2011

The world is not simply in the midst of a deep economic slump. This is but one aspect of the crisis of legitimacy that confronts almost all of the political and economic institutions that comprise the capitalist world system today. The ongoing revolt in the Arab world against political corruption and socioeconomic exclusion is unquestionably the most dramatic manifestation of this phenomenon, but the crisis of legitimacy is not confined to that region alone. The grievances that have fueled street protests and revolutionary movements from Morocco to Iran are shared in greater or lesser degrees by people all around the globe – the indignados of Puerta del Sol, the aganaktismenoi of Syntagma Square, students and public sector strikers in the U.K., and the hundreds of thousands of protesters who, for a brief time, turned Madison into a Midwestern version of Tahrir Square.

In her invaluable 2003 book Forces of Labor, Beverly Silver identifies what she calls the “fundamental contradiction of historical capitalism,” the tension between the system’s drive to attain maximum profitability and its need to maintain legitimacy in the eyes of those it oppresses and exploits. She writes:

One type of crisis can be resolved only by measures that eventually bring about the other type of crisis. This alternation creates a tendency for a periodic oscillation between historical phases characterized by a move toward the de-commodification of labor and the establishment of new social compacts and phases characterized by the re-commodification of labor and the breaking of old social compacts.

This passage captures at a somewhat abstract level the transition from the postwar Keynesian settlement between labor and capital to the neoliberal regime that governs the global political economy today. By reorganizing itself politically and smashing the power of the organized working class and its allied political parties in the 1970s, the capitalist class was able to restore profitability and consolidate its political power. But in doing so, it also sowed the seeds of the contemporary economic crisis and the crisis of legitimacy that the slump has triggered. Capital’s attack on the working class has recoiled upon itself. It lost sight of the fact that the system’s stability depends on the existence of a working class with a modicum of power in the workplace, in politics, and in the labor market. In bringing the working class to its present state of abjection, the system has placed barriers in the way of its own growth. And when growth slows to a crawl, the system’s claim to legitimacy is called into question.

Continue reading at:  http://theactivist.org/blog/the-global-crisis-of-legitimacy

From Jim Hightower: http://www.jimhightower.com/node/7502

Posted by Jim Hightower
Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Top executives of such corporate giants as American Airlines, IBM, General Mills, Lowe’s and McDonald’s have a secret, and – shhhhhh – they’re lobbying in Congress to keep it from you and me. What they don’t want us to know is that CEO pay is a whole lot more – mucho mucho more – than the pay these same CEOs dole out to their typical worker.

Oh, you knew that already?

Of course, corporate bosses have not exactly been shy about stuffing their pockets with multimillion-dollar paychecks, bonuses, and other loot, while knocking down the pay and benefits of workers. But what you don’t know are the specifics of just how outrageous the income gap has become between the elites and the rest of us.

A new provision in last year’s financial reform law, however, requires major corporations to start reporting annually on this pay disparity. Having to reveal such a deliberate and dangerous level of inequality will be embarrassing to the corporate chiefs and infuriating to their downsized employees, plus it will be considered immoral by many consumers, investors, and the general public. Hence, their rush to Congress.

As usual, Republican lawmakers have greeted the poor rich executives with open arms, soothing their fevered brows with a hush-up bill to repeal the disclosure provision, letting the execs keep their dirty little secret from us. Rep. Nan Hayworth, the GOP’s point lady on this piece of plutocratic pampering, resorted to absurdity to rationalize the repeal, asserting that comparing paychecks would “confuse investors.”

Continue reading at: http://www.jimhightower.com/node/7502

I’m an old hippie feminist.  I never burned my bra because I’ve rarely ever worn one and when I have it has mostly either been for work or exercise.

I also considered my getting implants to be one of the absolute worst decisions I ever made and wish I had the common sense to have them taken out the first time one collapsed, or the first time one tried to tear its way out.

From The Huffington Post:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hallie-seegal/going-braless_b_901832.html

By Hallie Seegal
7/18/2011

Last January, I stopped wearing a bra. I haven’t put one back on since.

I don’t remember buying my first bra. I just know that at some point around age 12 I started wearing one — long before I “needed” to. There wasn’t much to support, as friends in my 8th grade dance class informed me, joking that they could cut an apple on my chest. It wasn’t funny then, but I suppose I can laugh about it now since I just bought my first cutting board and I don’t see much of a resemblance.

Over the next 10 years, as I graduated from high school and college, I also graduated from a kitchen accessory to a solid A, while clasping a bra around my chest every day in between.

Then, seven months ago, I had a brassiere epiphany. After waiting just a little too long to do my laundry, I ran out of bras. I could have forced myself to head to the laundry room right then, or worn the less than fresh Cosabella number I’d worn the day before, but I realized the only visible difference for me between wearing and not wearing a bra was a bulky bra line. So I didn’t wear one. Yes, I went braless.

Sure, my boobs had a bit more point to them than before, but that’s how they’re made to look, right? Other than that, nothing terrible happened. No chafing, no slips, no perverted stares directed downwards. In fact, when I confided in my friends that I was bra-free, they admitted they couldn’t tell. I suddenly thought, what if I could be this free all the time?

It was as if I had finally opened my eyes. That was that. Since then, it’s just been me and my small boobs, hanging out together. And I’m happy.

Continue reading at:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hallie-seegal/going-braless_b_901832.html

From The Global Post: http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/weird-wide-web/polar-bears-dying-due-longer-swims-arctic-ice-melts

News Desk
July 20, 2011

As the Arctic sea ice habitat retreats, polar bears have to swim longer distances to find stable ice or to reach land, and their cubs are suffering, according to a new study presented Tuesday at the International Bear Association Conference in Ottawa, Canada.

Polar bears, not naturally aquatic animals, hunt, eat and give birth on ice or on land, according to Reuters. Earlier studies have shown that the bears are swimming hundreds of miles to reach solid ice or land, but a new study demonstrates that the longer swims increase cub mortality, compared with cubs that didn’t swim such long distances. According to Reuters:

“Climate change is pulling the sea ice out from under polar bears’ feet, forcing some to swim longer distances to find food and habitat,” said Geoff York of World Wildlife Fund, a co-author of the study.

Between 2004 and 2009, a team of researchers led by Anthony Pagano of the U.S. Geological Survey gathered data from 68 GPS collars that had been put on adult female polar bears, and looked at that data along with satellite imagery of sea ice, in order to isolate episodes where bears swam more than 30 miles at one time, according to a synopsis of the research on PRWeb. (The final report is not yet released but the full abstract is provided with the synopsis at PRWeb.) Researchers identified 50 long-distance swimming events, involving 20 polar bears, over the six years. The bears swam distances of as far as 426 miles, and as many as 12.7 days.

Eleven of the polar bears that swam the long distances had young cubs at the time that they were collared; five of those bears lost their cubs during the swims, which translated to a 45 percent morality rate. Only 18 percent of cubs died when they weren’t swimming the long distances with their mothers.

A big difference.

The long-distance swims took a toll on the cubs partially because young polar bears don’t have much fat and thus can’t be in the cold water for long periods of time, Time said. Steve Amstrup, a former scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey and chief scientist at the conservation group Polar Bears International, said, according to Reuters:

Continue reading at:   http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/weird-wide-web/polar-bears-dying-due-longer-swims-arctic-ice-melts

From Mother Jones:  http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/07/michele-bachmann-home-school-fundraising

The GOP presidential candidate’s secret weapon? Home-school activists.

— By Tim Murphy
Tue Jul. 19, 2011 

Now, as Bachmann sets her sights on the Republican presidential nomination, that same youth brigade could be her secret weapon. Over the last decade, Bachmann, who home-schooled her five biological children, has developed strong ties to state and national home-school organizations. In March, she joined fellow presidential candidates Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and businessman Herman Cain at a conference organized by the Network of Iowa Christian Home Educators (NICHE) in Des Moines. And in 2009, she addressed Generation Joshua’s national iGovern conference in Washington, DC.

Bachmann’s love for home-school organizations is far from unrequited. The Home School Legal Defense Association PAC, a spinoff of Generation Joshua’s parent organization, donated $3,250 to her reelection effort in 2008 and contributed cash and manpower to her successful congressional campaigns in 2006 and 2010.

Continue reading at:  http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/07/michele-bachmann-home-school-fundraising