Women Born Transsexual

From The New York Times:  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/opinion/george-soros-mailbox-bomb.html

Bombs sent to my father, George Soros, and to former President Obama and Hillary Clinton are a result of our politics of demonizing opponents.

By Alexander Soros
Mr. Soros is the deputy chairman of the Open Society Foundations.
Oct. 24, 2018

From Outside Magazine: https://www.outsideonline.com/2354631/erin-parisi-transgender-mountaineering-pioneer

Parisi tackled three of the Seven Summits this year, and now she’s a few steps closer to likely becoming the first publicly transgender person to complete the famous challenge

Katie Coakley
Oct 22, 2018

Erin Parisi’s trek up Mount Kilimanjaro last March wasn’t easy. Recovering from food poisoning and contending with almost continuous rainfall and the aches and fatigue that accompany six days of climbing, she tried to maintain a positive attitude as she sat in her tent at Barafu camp, approximately 15,358 feet above sea level and 36 hours from the summit.

After all, she had done it before. But the first time Parisi ascended the 19,340-foot peak, in 2011, her name was Aron.

In 2017, at age 40, after living as a man her whole life, Parisi came out to the world as a woman, went through a complicated divorce, and underwent facial feminization surgery and larynx reconstruction, the latter of which left her mute for a month. It was during her month of silence, buoyed by the support she received from her family and community, that the Denver resident set herself a new goal. Parisi wanted to complete the Seven Summits, climbing the highest peak on every continent.

Parisi had done her fair share of mountaineering before her transition, summiting fourteeners in Colorado and making winter ascents in Canada. “I don’t consider myself a technical route bagger,” she says. “Being in the mountains is more important to me than keeping a list.”

In March 2018, Parisi also started a nonprofit, TranSending 7, to advance transgender rights and encourage other transgender people in sports. “It’s important for us to show that we have the same goals and aspirations that we had before,” says Emma Shinn, the board chair of TranSending who is also a lawyer, a former infantry leader and judge advocate in the Marine Corps, and a transgender woman. “We may look different, we may sound different, but we’re still the same people underneath.”

The organization will also help fund future summit attempts for Parisi, who works at CenturyLink and has so far self-funded her trips. She summited her first peak in February 2018: the 7,319-foot Mount Kosciuszko, Australia’s highest point. She topped out on Kilimanjaro on March 8, International Women’s Day. In June, Parisi stood atop Europe’s highest peak, the 18,510-foot Mount Elbrus.

Since 1983, when American Dick Bass conceived of the idea, hundreds of people have undertaken the quest for the Seven Summits. According to the most recent list, published in 2016, 416 people have succeeded; of those, 71 have been women. It’s hard to say with 100 percent certainty that Parisi will be the first transgender person to complete the Seven Summits, but it is likely. “One factor that makes my push unique is I am pursuing the Seven Summits under the IOC guidelines for a trans athlete to compete in the female category,” Parisi says. “This means I’ve suppressed testosterone and documented those levels for a year. At these levels, the IOC has determined I have no athletic advantage for being pronounced male at birth.”

When Parisi underwent her transition, some people asked if she would still be able to do what she loved—traveling and climbing—now that she’s out as a woman. “Oftentimes, cisgender friends feel like they didn’t really know you, because you had this identity that wasn’t really public,” Shinn says. “People ascribe all of these gender norms immediately to you and say, ‘Well, girls don’t like hiking or backpacking.’ Those gender norms are part of what we’re fighting against. Not just ‘women can be climbers,’ but ‘trans women can be climbers.’”

Continue reading at:  https://www.outsideonline.com/2354631/erin-parisi-transgender-mountaineering-pioneer

From Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the-idea-of-2-sexes-is-overly-simplistic1/

Biologists now think there is a larger spectrum than just binary female and male<

By Claire Ainsworth
Nature magazine
October 22, 2018

As a clinical geneticist, Paul James is accustomed to discussing some of the most delicate issues with his patients. But in early 2010, he found himself having a particularly awkward conversation about sex.

A 46-year-old pregnant woman had visited his clinic at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia to hear the results of an amniocentesis test to screen her baby’s chromosomes for abnormalities. The baby was fine—but follow-up tests had revealed something astonishing about the mother. Her body was built of cells from two individuals, probably from twin embryos that had merged in her own mother’s womb. And there was more. One set of cells carried two X chromosomes, the complement that typically makes a person female; the other had an X and a Y. Halfway through her fifth decade and pregnant with her third child, the woman learned for the first time that a large part of her body was chromosomally male. “That’s kind of science-fiction material for someone who just came in for an amniocentesis,” says James.

Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary—their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. Parents of children with these kinds of conditions—known as intersex conditions, or differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs)—often face difficult decisions about whether to bring up their child as a boy or a girl. Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of DSD.

When genetics is taken into consideration, the boundary between the sexes becomes even blurrier. Scientists have identified many of the genes involved in the main forms of DSD, and have uncovered variations in these genes that have subtle effects on a person’s anatomical or physiological sex. What’s more, new technologies in DNA sequencing and cell biology are revealing that almost everyone is, to varying degrees, a patchwork of genetically distinct cells, some with a sex that might not match that of the rest of their body. Some studies even suggest that the sex of each cell drives its behaviour, through a complicated network of molecular interactions. “I think there’s much greater diversity within male or female, and there is certainly an area of overlap where some people can’t easily define themselves within the binary structure,” says John Achermann, who studies sex development and endocrinology at University College London’s Institute of Child Health.

Continue reading at:  https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the-idea-of-2-sexes-is-overly-simplistic1/