Women Born Transsexual

Some folks have claimed the Doctors expected transsexuals to go absolutely stealth after they had SRS.

That absolute stealth represented the best possible adjustment  for post-op women in particular.

Dr Benjamin wrote some awfully Pollyanna sort of bullshit during the 1950s.

Actually it might have sort of been possible for a few people in those days to absolutely disappear because records were kept on paper and it was easier for people to build real identification out of some pretty sketchy bits and pieces of paper.

I know because this was still sort of possible in the late 1960s early 1970s.

Credit cards and credit reporting agencies changed all that by the mid-1970s.

By the 1980s business computers were on desks and hooked to LANs and the primitive Internet.

By the 1990s everyone had a freaking computer linked to the internet.

After 2001 those of us in the US had the Department of Homeland Security, TIA and so many private information gathering agencies that Big Brother knew when you went out partying and how many drinks you had.

There are a whole lot of sisters I really look up to, mostly public figures like Andrea James, Jennifer Boylan, Julia Serano.  Not to forget lesser know sisters from the blogosphere like Mercedes Allen.

Most are more or less out, even if they don’t walk down the street wearing a t-shirt.

You kind of have to be if you want to do anything, including speak your mind on issues of public interest.

That aside I’m forced to wonder why so many of the trolls who hide behind aliases to spew hate while touting their own superiority due to their being stealth with perfect lives come off as so mentally ill and maladjusted.

As far as I can tell too many sisters have allowed themselves to be sucked into believing that they are somehow failures if they don’t manage to attain this ideal of absolute stealth.

I’ve been stealth at work and have found I manage it by never getting close to my co-workers.  I don’t socialize with or share my private life with my fellow workers.

Generally they tend to not be interested in the things I’m interested in because I’m kind of a hippie.

My circle of friends mostly know my history, after all I write and Blog about post-transsexual life.

Tonight I found out an old enemy had been asking about me and I thought WTF? My name produces page after page of Google links.  I sign my name to the things I write.  Because I am of the opinion that if you believe strongly in something you should own it by signing your name to it.

I’ve known too many sisters who withdraw from life rather than accepting that which they can not change about themselves and moving on from there.

A friend of mine died a couple of years back.  She was incredibly flamboyant and knew antiques with Road Show Appraiser astuteness.  But she unhappily withdrew from the world nearly 20 years before she passed away.

Stealth doesn’t seem like a mentally healthy way to go about dealing with transsexualism.  It comes off as being ashamed of something one was born.

Not being ashamed doesn’t mean wearing a t-shirt, more just treating it like any other thing one could be born with that makes someone different from the majority of people.

I know Alice Dreger isn’t on any sort of ten most popular list with people who read this Blog, but I’m urging you to follow the link and read this article.

From The Atlantic:   http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/07/the-olympic-struggle-over-sex/259321/

Even as it hopes to clarify the difference between male and female athletes, a new rule from the International Olympic Committee inadvertently stirs the waters.

Alice Dreger
Jul 2 2012

What is sport ultimately for? That fundamental philosophical question lies behind the debate over what to do with women athletes who were raised as girls but whose bodies seem to be unusually masculine. And in that debate, two clear philosophical camps have emerged.

One camp, led by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), believes the line imposed between putative male and putative female athletes must be biological. These folks — let’s call them the Anatomists — fully admit that sex is really complicated. They acknowledge there’s no one magical gene, chromosome, hormone, or body part that can do for us the hard work of sharp division into male and female leagues. Says the IOC in its latest declaration on the problem: “Human biology […] allows for forms of intermediate levels between the conventional categories of male and female, sometimes referred to as intersex.”

But the Anatomists still think we should base our sex division in sports on some sort of biological feature, even if it means we have to just pick one. They point out that sports require us to create all sorts of rules that aren’t simply natural and self-evident, so why not do it here, too?

And so, the IOC has just decided that, for the London Olympic Games, the rule of sex will be based on something called “functional androgens” (or “functional testosterone”). This means that an athlete who was raised a girl and identifies as a woman will be allowed to play as a woman so long as the IOC does not discover that her body makes and responds to high levels of androgens. Androgens, of which testosterone is one type, naturally occur in both male and female bodies, but higher production usually means more male-typical development.

Notice that the IOC won’t just be looking at how much androgens a woman’s body makes, but also how much her cells respond. This is because some women are born with testes that make a lot of testosterone, but they lack androgen-sensitive receptors, so the androgens have little-to-no effect on their cells. This condition is called complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. Those who have it — women like Spanish hurdler Maria Patino — develop essentially as girls and women.

Continue reading at:  http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/07/the-olympic-struggle-over-sex/259321/

From The Dallas Voice:  http://www.dallasvoice.com/arrest-10119663.html

Gay Dallas couple Mark Jiminez, Beau Chandler arrested after being denied marriage license at Clerk’s Office in Independence Day protest

David Taffet
July 5, 2012

Gay couple Mark “Major” Jiminez and Beau Chandler were arrested at the Dallas County Clerk’s Office on Thursday afternoon, July 5, after they were denied a marriage license and refused to leave.

The couple entered the County Records Building at about 3 p.m. with friends, TV crews and friendly police in tow.

“City police, county sheriffs and building security are all here,” Chandler said. “Nice to get their support.”

Although he was joking, most of the people the couple encountered in the building were supportive, even if they were unable to issue the license.

Sr. Cpl. Laura Martin, LGBT liaison officer for the Dallas Police Department, accompanied the group, even though she didn’t have direct jurisdiction since they were in a county building. Lt. Shelley Knight, LGBT liaison for the sheriff’s department, also followed the couple.

Continue reading at:  http://www.dallasvoice.com/arrest-10119663.html

From The New York Times:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/world/asia/fukushima-nuclear-crisis-a-man-made-disaster-report-says.html

By HIROKO TABUCHI
Published: July 5, 2012

TOKYO — The nuclear accident at Fukushima was a preventable disaster rooted in government-industry collusion and the worst conformist conventions of Japanese culture, a parliamentary inquiry concluded Thursday.

The report, released by the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, challenged some of the main story lines that the government and the operator of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant have put forward. Most notably, the report said the plant’s crucial cooling systems might have been damaged in the earthquake on March 11, 2011, not only in the ensuing tsunami. That possibility raises doubts about the safety of all the quake-prone country’s nuclear plants just as they begin to restart after a pause ordered in the wake of the Fukushima crisis.

“It was a profoundly man-made disaster — that could and should have been foreseen and prevented,” said Kiyoshi Kurokawa, the commission’s chairman, in the report’s introduction. “And its effects could have been mitigated by a more effective human response.”

While assigning widespread blame, the report avoids calling for the censure of specific executives or officials. Some citizens’ groups have demanded that executives of the plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, be investigated on charges of criminal negligence, a move that Dr. Kurokawa said Thursday was out of his panel’s purview. But criminal prosecution “is a matter for others to pursue,” he said at a news conference after the report’s release.

The very existence of an independent investigating commission — which avoids reliance on self-examination by bureaucracies that might be clouded by self-defense — is a break with precedent in Japan, but follows the pattern followed in the United States after major failures involving combinations of private companies, government oversight and technology issues. Those cases, which were cited by the panel, include the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979, the Columbia and Challenger space shuttle disasters in 1986 and 2003 and the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Continue reading at:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/world/asia/fukushima-nuclear-crisis-a-man-made-disaster-report-says.html

From Raw Story:   http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/07/03/government-sponsored-study-destroys-deas-classification-of-marijuana/

By Stephen C. Webster
Tuesday, July 3, 2012

A government-sponsored study published recently in The Open Neurology Journal concludes that marijuana provides much-needed relief to some chronic pain sufferers and that more clinical trials are desperately needed, utterly destroying the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency’s (DEA) classification of the drug as having no medical uses.

While numerous prior studies have shown marijuana’s usefulness for a host of medical conditions, none have ever gone directly at the DEA’s placement of marijuana atop the schedule of controlled substances. This study, sponsored by the State of California and conducted at the University of California Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research, does precisely that, driving a stake into the heart of America’s continued war on marijuana users by calling the Schedule I placement simply “not accurate” and “not tenable.”

Reacting to the study, Paul Armentano, director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), told Raw Story that the study clearly proves U.S. drug policy “is neither based upon nor guided by science.”

“In fact, it is hostile to science,” he said. “And despite the Obama Administration’s well publicized 2009 memo stating, ‘Science and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my Administration,’ there is little to no evidence indicating that the federal government’s ‘See no evil; hear no evil’ approach to cannabis policy is not changing any time soon.”

Continue reading at:  http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/07/03/government-sponsored-study-destroys-deas-classification-of-marijuana/

From The Guardian UK:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/04/the-return-of-marxism

Capitalism is in crisis across the globe – but what on earth is the alternative? Well, what about the musings of a certain 19th-century German philosopher? Yes, Karl Marx is going mainstream – and goodness knows where it will end

Stuart Jeffries
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 4 July 2012

Class conflict once seemed so straightforward. Marx and Engels wrote in the second best-selling book of all time, The Communist Manifesto: “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” (The best-selling book of all time, incidentally, is the Bible – it only feels like it’s 50 Shades of Grey.)

Today, 164 years after Marx and Engels wrote about grave-diggers, the truth is almost the exact opposite. The proletariat, far from burying capitalism, are keeping it on life support. Overworked, underpaid workers ostensibly liberated by the largest socialist revolution in history (China’s) are driven to the brink of suicide to keep those in the west playing with their iPads. Chinese money bankrolls an otherwise bankrupt America.

The irony is scarcely wasted on leading Marxist thinkers. “The domination of capitalism globally depends today on the existence of a Chinese Communist party that gives de-localised capitalist enterprises cheap labour to lower prices and deprive workers of the rights of self-organisation,” says Jacques Rancière, the French marxist thinker and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. “Happily, it is possible to hope for a world less absurd and more just than today’s.”

That hope, perhaps, explains another improbable truth of our economically catastrophic times – the revival in interest in Marx and Marxist thought. Sales of Das Kapital, Marx’s masterpiece of political economy, have soared ever since 2008, as have those of The Communist Manifesto and the Grundrisse (or, to give it its English title, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy). Their sales rose as British workers bailed out the banks to keep the degraded system going and the snouts of the rich firmly in their troughs while the rest of us struggle in debt, job insecurity or worse. There’s even a Chinese theatre director called He Nian who capitalised on Das Kapital’s renaissance to create an all-singing, all-dancing musical.

And in perhaps the most lovely reversal of the luxuriantly bearded revolutionary theorist’s fortunes, Karl Marx was recently chosen from a list of 10 contenders to appear on a new issue of MasterCard by customers of German bank Sparkasse in Chemnitz. In communist East Germany from 1953 to 1990, Chemnitz was known as Karl Marx Stadt. Clearly, more than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the former East Germany hasn’t airbrushed its Marxist past. In 2008, Reuters reports, a survey of east Germans found 52% believed the free-market economy was “unsuitable” and 43% said they wanted socialism back. Karl Marx may be dead and buried in Highgate cemetery, but he’s alive and well among credit-hungry Germans. Would Marx have appreciated the irony of his image being deployed on a card to get Germans deeper in debt? You’d think.

Continue reading at:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/04/the-return-of-marxism

From Alternet:  http://www.alternet.org/rights/155942/mass_arrests_likely_at_political_conventions%3A_6_historical_precedents/

Clinton’s law designates political conventions National Special Security Events, a category of state security that virtually dooms the exercise of First Amendment Rights.

By David Rosen
June 19, 2012

The Republican and Democratic Party conventions later this summer will probably witness the mass arrest of many American citizens assembling to exercise their First Amendment rights. Mass arrests accompanied the Republican conventions held in New York in 2004, when 900 people were busted, and in St. Paul in 2008 when 300 were detained, including 30 journalists.

A political convention is designated a National Special Security Event (NSSE), a category of state security originally established by President Clinton through a classified 1998 directive. NSSEs also include the Olympics, the Super Bowl and gatherings of world leaders like the G20 or NATO summits. An event receiving a NSSE designation gives federal and local law enforcement wide discretion, often leading them to treat protesters as potential terrorists and threats to national security.

This attitude was visible in the recent NATO summit held in Chicago at which approximately 70 people were busted over two days, including three for “terrorism,” allegedly planning to fire bomb the Obama campaign headquarters.

Less reported upon but perhaps more illuminating, law enforcement authorities cobbled together a small army to execute the Chicago NSSE campaign. In addition to the estimated 3,100 members of the Chicago Police Dept., ground troops came from near and far. The Illinois State Police contributed 700 troopers, Milwaukee supplied 100 officers, a Philadelphia contingent consisted of 68 officers and still other police personnel came from Charlotte-Mecklenburg.

Federal agents had operational control of the Chicago NATO summit because it was designated a NSSE site. Meanwhile, federal agencies, including Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, played advisory roles with local law enforcement to plan response activities to OWS.

Continue reading at:  http://www.alternet.org/rights/155942/mass_arrests_likely_at_political_conventions%3A_6_historical_precedents/