Being ignorant of transsexuals, I find myself wondering if your initial pain w.r.t. morning wood had any influence on feeling as if your body was wrong for you. From my point of view, it's plausible.
I'm not sure.
That's the trouble and what's got me riled up about male genital mutilation. Because I should be sure! There's a mountain of evidence! Gender identity (i.e. subconscious sex or brain sex) is established probably in the 2nd month of fetal development and is unchangeable! No matter what! Period! End of story! And everything about me indicates that I should be a woman! Men don't take estrogen and develop breasts and are just fine about it! Talk to Alan Turing's ghost!!!...says the mentat computer in my head.
But I'm not sure.
A variety of evidence would suggest that it wouldn't have been a factor. I've not encounterd another trans woman or been exposed to any writings or studies that have suggest that even one other person on the plant has had a similar experience. There are many intact males who undergo gender transition to live female, and from what I understand they have somewhat better results with bottom surgery since there's more tissue to work with (although in the case of mutilated, the results are still pretty amazing in my opinion—the only thing it doesn't do is lubricate itself, and well, anything else it would need the rest of the reproductive system to do).
Perhaps the strongest evidence is some emerging evidence that male and female brains are structurally different. The error bars are ginormous, though. One study found this tidbit based on (iirc) MRI scans. 75% of trans women and womyn-born-womyn will be put in one category and 75% of trans men and born men into another category. The rest are false positives and false negatives, so the there is no useful test here. Additionally, the problem a test like that would present is false negatives for trans women. I'd bet false negatives for trans men, false positives for womyn-born-womyn (indicating that she should take testosterone and start living as a man), and false positives for born men (indicating giving him the Alan Turing treatment, to be a bit morbid) would all be brushed off, even for trans men. Nobody cares if a chick wants to be a dude. For some reason we just have so much angst about letting a man into protected garden of womanhood.
That is also the real reason I'm so critical of feminism and sometimes downright misogynist. As long as the double-standard exists, suddenly the question of what gender I should be becomes a comparative advantage debate. And it's so not like that, and should not be like that. My heart knows I'm female. How could I possibly prove to anybody what's in my heart? Instead it's an issue of "oh, you want it as easy as women have it." You want to get psychologists to make some truly bizarre statements? Ask them critical question about why gender transition should be difficult and why there need to be gatekeepers of gender at every step, challenging, testing the trans woman to make sure she can pass on to the next level.
I don't know if you'll find it interesting, but I recommend reading Whipping Girl to everybody. The book you might find more interesting is The Myth of Male Power if haven't read that already.
As for male genital mutilation, I have my suspicions (and again, will never know for sure, which is a cool trick of doing this to infants and why the UTI argument is critical to these circumfetishists) that mutilated men (excluding myself from that group for a moment) probably believe that what they feel is normal and accept it. Either they're unaware they've been mutilated like I was for the first 20 years of my life, or they're aware they have been, and like our friends at John Hopkins, they become completely obsessed with believing that it must have had some wonderful benefit without any possible drawback at all (again accept
Somebody please mod all of Geekoid's comments down. I have evaluated the evidence as a MAN and I have come to the conclusion that having a foreskin is the best choice for myself. Where do I apply to get my foreskin re-installed? Is there an application fee?
I'm sorry, geekoid, you're missing it. This is entirely a political stunt.
NPR and Comedy Central and all the other cool kids on the left have been going on with this "war on women" thing. One of their points was a recent house (or was it senate?) committee that was looking into contraception being covered by the affordible care act (somebody feel free to correct me).
The point is that this committee was all men. Men only deciding an issue of women's health. An issue of women's health that costs money to address. WE CANT HAVE THIS OMG!
So now, we have Susan Blank of American Academy of Pediatrics talking about men's health.
Oh wait, this is hilarious and not related to what I was going to say. I went back to NPR's article to make sure I got her name right, and, magically, it's changed. It's now talking about Finland and all kinds of crap. Here, have a beer, I've got plenty.
Anyway, so this is a woman talking about men's health, even a men's health issue that would result in a reduction of cost for healthcare costs for a man.
Now that NPR's changed their story I'm sure of it. God-damned political stunt.
You are correct. The analogue is removal of the clitoral hood. The clitoris and glas are analogues, and the proto-clitoral hood is what becomes the foreskin, once all that messy stuff with the urinary tract rerouting itself into the proto-clitoris takes place.
The interesting thing is the female genital mutilation covers such a wide range of things. Some traditions remove the clitoris. Some traditions keep the clitoris intact and remove the clitoral hood. Others just sew the whole thing shut.
Please note, Mr. Dvorkin, that I was not attempting to make a moral assesment of those traditions.
Basically, they took a control group of intact men, and turned them loose on some whorehouses, all expenses paid. And they went wild. Started reporting AIDS and what-have-you from day one.
So, ok, they had their experiment group. Now, since they had just had a surgery performed, they were ordered to a week of bedrest.
Now it gets real interesting what happens when they turn the experiment group loose on the whorehouse. They start reporting AIDS from day one. That's not all. After two weeks, their rate of infection begins approaching the control group's rate of infection.
WHOOOPS! END STUDY! ABORT! ABORT!
So, now we have a published study that PROVES that fewer men in the experiment (fewer, by head count) had AIDS than in the control group. MALE GENITAL MUTILATION CURES AIDS.
I hope I adequately answered your suspicitions. Clearly, circumcision is a cure for AIDS. *sigh* and Gah!
Roughly. You're forgetting that child abuse is something that is often an inter-generational issue.
In countries where females are circumcised, tune out the feminists and jerking knes for a second, tune in reality, and it's females that are passing on the abuse.
In countries where men are circumcised, well, it's men who were abused by routine infant male genital mutilation propogating routine infant male genital mutilation.
Consider a circumcised man presented with evidence that he was mutilate unnecessarily. Of course he'll argue against that. He's been mutilated, and it was necessary by god (else he admit to being a victim) and he'll do it to his son, too.
As for how this all got started, well.... I recently read Born to Run, which has evidence that 40 years of the modern, cushioned sports shoe was based on one very bad but very persuasive podiatrical paper that linked running firmly with sports injuries and some very clever marketing by Nike.
I believe circumcision is similar, but more sinister. Think of all the money hospitals rake in per year as yet another added on charge nobody cares about that men won't argue isn't necessary. Talk about conflict of interest.
Yet, there have been studies showing benefit to amputation of the clitoris in females. Why didn't that catch on? No mutilated Muslim women to crazily back it (lest they admit they were mutilated unnecessarily), and the women over here were wise enough to create the hypnotic knee-jerk reaction to the words "female circumcision" if only because I didn't say "female genital mutilation."
You're forgetting to point out the insignificance of the numbers in question. For UTI, if it's a 90% reduction, well, take the existing incidence rate, 1.5%, add 90%, and it's still less than 3%. And how many babies die from UTI? We're talking/infection/ here of a routine infant condition, not mortality.
It makes me want to throw up.
Then I watch how people react to allowing US hospitals to perform the "clitoral pin-prick" style female circumcision which fulfills certain religious beliefs. Nothing is removed. Read my other comments, and I would gladly trade 10 years of physical pain (possibly) due to a circumcision a bit too tight for a pin-prick. People lose their shit. Really, I had a comment removed from NPR.org just for mentioning that hospitals (and the AAP) had considered creating a protocol for this pin-prick.
If I can be 100% serious for a moment, think about it. Girls every year are trafficked to 3rd world countries to be mutilated. US hospitals are offering to do something that will be done anyway in a less severe, much more sterile manner. And people still lose their shit. So, the girls continue to get trafficked to 3rd world countries to have their clitorises pricked with a bacteria-infested knife, resulting in irritation that requires amputation of the entire clitoris. BUT OMG FGM BRAIN LEAKS OUT EAR. But male circumcision, ok, that's cool.
I was in physical pain for roughly 10 years from when my male puberty started (yay, facial hair, oddly I never got crackly voice) and when my female puberty started (yay, boobs, goodbye morning wood).
When I started HRT, I didn't even know I was circumcised. I thought pain along with wood was the normal thing for a guy. Apparently, my doctor didn't think twice about my reporting feelings that I should have been a different gender with different body parts and experiencing pain at the normal functioning of the male genitalia. It wasn't until I met my intact ex-boyfriend that I learned I had been mutilated. It turns out that the feelings I experience of the skin tearing were abnormal, even for a circumcised man.
Also, no trans woman I've ever asked has once reported the same pain I reported. Therefore, eliminate my doctor's theory that the pain was caused by some mysterious brain-genital mismatch.
The question that digs at me is this: was my doctor right in dismissing circumcision as a cause or am I right in blaming circumcision as the cause? Because of all the disinformation surrounding male genital mutilation, my doctor may not have been aware of a case presented in The Joy of Uncircumcising by Jim Bigelow (an intereting read regardless of standpoint) worse than mine. Instead of just pain because the skin felt like it might tear, there's a story of a man whose skin DID tear, every night.
At any rate, because I can never return to my natural, unmutilated state, I'll never know. And, if I may since this is slashdot, since estrogen HRT solved my problem, the worst part, being a geek, is not knowing lol.
I posted a letter I wrote to NPR (yes, and snail-mailed, signed, dropped subscription, and even printed at Kinkos on some nice beige paper for like $3) to this discussion (new comment) a few minutes ago where I had assumed that the AAP had flip-flopped. Apparently I've been drunk too much lately, because I'd forgotten that when I'd originally heard this report last week (woo slashdot!), it was the usual criticism of anti-male genital mutilation groups who wanted a stronger proscripton from routine mutilation. I should have realized that NPR (and apparently others) were trolling.
If they're trolling, then I think it lends more credence to the theory I put forth in my letter that this is a political stunt as some kind of return fire in the "war on women."
So here's how it goes I guess -> Akins and others make asses out of themselves -> NPR falsely reports news that may put infant boys at risk to complications from unnecessary circumcision.
Sadly, I think if the left is willing to go that low, it really has influenced my vote this November. I had already decided that I wasn't going third party for the first time in my life. Now I'm not sure what to think about a political stunt from the left pressuring me to vote for a party that wants to turn me into a second class citizen for being homosexual and transgendered. I guess all I can think is that my foreskin will never come back, and 10 years I spent with physical, chronic pain until estrogen/anti-androgen HRT "fixed" it (by making me impotent) can't be undone, but maybe if I vote in Republicans and they pull some national DOMA crap or butcher Romney/Obama-care, maybe I can vote Democrat next time, my karma will balance out, and I'll go back to voting Libertarian.
At the risk of conclusive proof of the real life identity behind this UID. It's a bit lengthly. tl;dr: The AAP did this before in 1986. Nobody cares about all the years the AAP has recommended against it. The AAP will likely reverse its position in a few years. There is no new evidence, not any more than there was in 1983 when they recommended against, not any more than in 1986 when they recommended for, not any more in 1992 (iirc, didn't look that one up) through 2005 when.they recommended against, not any more in 2012 when they recommended for.
More tl;dr (it really probably is tl if this is stil tl;dr): Once removed, the foreskin can never be restored. I've been permanently harmed and since slashdot knows I'm already trans, my doctor and I screwed up in thinking that the pain I was feeling was because I was trans. No other trans person I've spoken to has reported the same pain, but I didn't know I was circumcised when I started HRT, so I figured it was related to my gender issue, not a genital mutilation that had been forced on me.
And also even bring up the subject of female genital mutilation when everybody's ready to lop off foreskins for a 0.005 change (1.7% to 1.2% or something like that) in the rate of UTI and watch everybody lose their minds. A comment I made on NPR.org about a position the AAP took in 2010 regarding proposing a protocol for female circumcision was removed for violating their community rules.
So here goes!
And yes, I was in actual physical pain, and I throught that was completely natural and just part of getting wood, and yes, I really did not know I was circumcised until my early twenties. Oh, and before you go diagnosing my aches and pains, note that my doctor didn't even consider it. Either that means that the first person to diagnose me with something is an idiot, or the fact that my doctor didn't even know about it speaks volumes about our ignorance of male genital mutilation and the side-effects.
To whom it may concern,
I'm writing in response to your reporting of the American Academy of Pediatrics' (AAP)
recent flip-flop of their opinion of what body parts men do or don't have the right to keep.
I'm calling it a flip-flop, because that's what it is.
Typically, the AAP releases reports recommending that male infants should not be circumcised.
However, every now and then, they dig up evidence to justify reversing their opinion.
I would not be surprised if within a few years,
they go back to their usual position of opposing the practice of routine infant genital mutilation
for both males and females.
There are two things that discussions of circumcision evoke: jerking knees and giggles.
When it's female genitals we're talking about, it's always jerking knees.
In 2010, the American Academy of Pediatrics came under fire for attempting to put a protocol
in place for satisfying certain parents' desires to have their infant daughter's clitoris poked with a pin.
I referenced this in a post to the comments on the article on your webpage along with their reasoning
for attempting to create a framework for this otherwise barbaric act, and my comment was promptly removed.
Perhaps the moderator thought in some hysterical misreading of my comment that I was in support
of female genital mutilation.
Then there are the giggles and the kink when we're talking about penises.
The word \emph{penis} is a favorite of immature internet humor.
Let's get this out of the way right here, because I am very serious.
Too much of the debate centers on sexual pleasure.
Fortunately, because of a fluke that happened when I was circumcised,
I won't need to worry about knowing even the pleasures of a healthy circumcised man,
because all I know is pain.
Additionally, this is about more than sexual pleasure or giggles at the word \emph{penis}.
This is about my human right to have an intact body.
We seem to be overly sensitive to concerns of female welfare, even purely psychological concerns,
but we are ever so dismi
They didn't go to the end of the solar system to find a Betamax player. They had to go to Earth.
Anyway, I also tend to buy CDs instead of the cloudy web 2.0 DRMed to all crap version. I guess I'm not trendy enough to use iTunes. Then I rip all my CDs to FLAC and also transcode to MP3 for use in mobile devices. Then the CD sits on my shelf and is never opened again unless I want to check something in the lyrics or look at the art.
What GP really ought to do is get one of those USB turntables and record those vinyls to FLAC. And no, you can't tell the difference between a vinyl and a digital recording, and if you can, I have some gold-plated audio cables to sell to you. The only charm vinyls have is that they were before the era of compressing everything to hell and back so instead of the 16 bits of information you're supposed to have on a CD, the recording engineers have made sure that only 5 or 6 of those bits get used.
The point isn't necessarily physical media, but having the data you've purchased in a format that's not DRMed. I would gladly purchase APEs or FLACs along with maybe PDF album art, but nobody wants to sell it to me that way.
It does raise an interesting question, though, if I can put on my tinfoil hat. With all this UEFI stuff going on and the eventuality of moving away from optical media, how will I buy my music in, say, 50 years? Will there even be any kind of non-DRMed option such as the optical discs I buy today?
I also buy paper books because I'm not quite on board with E-books mostly because of DRM. Sometimes, though, I do want a digital version, but again, nobody's selling without DRM. I've already purchased the content, but unless I want to construct a book scanner and attempt to find a good OCR solution or live with a PDF that's all images, I'm out of luck. My ideal would be to have a LaTeX file my reader can render in whatever page size or typeface size I want. So, not nearly as easy as with music there. The only alternative is buy in dead tree format and go to the Pirate Bay.
It's hard to be a viable canidate when you have to fight an uphill battle just to get on the ballot, and then good luck getting any major media coverage. Just look at how the media treats Crazy Uncle Ron.
If the red-colored Republicrats were serious about repealing Romney/Obama-care, Ron Paul has the perfect credentials. It's almost as though the red-colored Republicrats are trying to lose. And just think of all that delicious money medical insurance companies will make with their 10% overhead cap on 100% of the country. Everybody who's been arguing that insurance premiums will come down because of the bigger risk pool is right in theory. I'm not holding my breath for it to actually happen, though. My bet is that magically, the cost of medical care will somehow go through the roof, and combined with some Hollywood accounting, insurance premiums are going to keep on rising at about the same pace while wrecking the budgets of anyone who isn't a single mother with 5 kids and won't qualify for assistance. Romney/Obama-care is just a "what could possibly go wrong" waiting to happen when it kicks all the way in.
This. My ex-parents wanted the family doctor to prescribe me testosterone with the idea that it would make me taller. Of course my doctor shot it down, because that's not how it works. Of course, these days, we know which hormone can affect that.
Three years later, that same doctor wrote me a prescription for estrogen.
If my parents had their way with the testosterone, I might have been unable to pass as a woman, and I probably would have killed myself. If the doctor had suggested human growth hormone to make me taller, same problem. My short height is one of the factors that makes getting strangers to gender me female easier.
The alternative is that they could have used genetic screening to determine that their son was not only homosexual but transgendered and aborted me. Or they could have just had me engineered so that I would be a normal guy. Either way, I might have been spared a gender conflict I still haven't resolved because, well, I kind of need a job to eat and pay the bills, and people go completely hysterical and stupid about gender.
Since I can't mod this discussion anymore having made a similar comment myself to another internet tough guy, will somebody please mod the parent up?
You're spot on. It's called science. It works best when somebody turns out to be wrong (or at least not quite correct). Whoever is modding up these internet tough guys needs to read some Sagan or something and get a clue.
Holy cow. Only on Slashdot can some internet tough guy say "I don't care what people who are actually studying this think. I know better because I can throw words like 'neutrino' and 'plausibility' around." And then get modded up to +5 insightful.
I'm not even going to waste a mod point making this a +4 instead. What's the point? Good grief.
I'm probably too late to the party for anyone to see this comment, but since I've been on the receiving end of sexual harassment multiple times in my current job, I'd like to make an observation.
Sexual harassment happens when one gender is in the majority and is also in a place where that gender is expected to be in the majority. Like my day job for instance.
A medical client requests that we ask women who are setting an appointment for a mammogram if they have breast implants. Why? The radiologists need to take twice as many pictures apparently. However, because I'm the person who needs to program that question in and because I work as a man, I end up getting treated like I'm a pervert, and several older women there offer to show me their boobs if I'm that interested in older women's boobs.
Ladies, I care about as much about seeing your boobs as you do my dick. It's sexual harassment either way.
It goes on like that.
Sexual harassment isn't a geek problem or a male problem. It's a human problem, and pretending it's a male problem only is disingenuous.
At least men know that sometimes it pays off to act like a gentleman around ladies. I've yet to meet the woman who cares about acting like anything less than an obtuse, sexist pig around gentlemen.
I don't know about you, but I would prefer people worship gods who say that global good is God's work
Well, but the trouble is that depending on how you interpret parts of the bible, that might be considered devil worship. For example, according to my ex-parents, free blacks are an abomination before their god because god made their skin dark to mark them as slaves after that incident when Noah got drunk off his hind end.
Superstition ruin much more than just the user's life. It affects the entire family. What is a child supposed to do when their parents uses superstition all day and there's no food on the table? "take responsibility" for their parents' lives?
That being said, some superstitions are socially acceptable in the western world (despite how harmful they are). Christianity and Judiasm are the two main ones. Any superstition that's less harmful and less addictive than these two should be automatically decriminalized, starting with monotheism.
Slashdot Mirror
Being ignorant of transsexuals, I find myself wondering if your initial pain w.r.t. morning wood had any influence on feeling as if your body was wrong for you. From my point of view, it's plausible.
I'm not sure.
That's the trouble and what's got me riled up about male genital mutilation. Because I should be sure! There's a mountain of evidence! Gender identity (i.e. subconscious sex or brain sex) is established probably in the 2nd month of fetal development and is unchangeable! No matter what! Period! End of story! And everything about me indicates that I should be a woman! Men don't take estrogen and develop breasts and are just fine about it! Talk to Alan Turing's ghost!!! ...says the mentat computer in my head.
But I'm not sure.
A variety of evidence would suggest that it wouldn't have been a factor. I've not encounterd another trans woman or been exposed to any writings or studies that have suggest that even one other person on the plant has had a similar experience. There are many intact males who undergo gender transition to live female, and from what I understand they have somewhat better results with bottom surgery since there's more tissue to work with (although in the case of mutilated, the results are still pretty amazing in my opinion—the only thing it doesn't do is lubricate itself, and well, anything else it would need the rest of the reproductive system to do).
Perhaps the strongest evidence is some emerging evidence that male and female brains are structurally different. The error bars are ginormous, though. One study found this tidbit based on (iirc) MRI scans. 75% of trans women and womyn-born-womyn will be put in one category and 75% of trans men and born men into another category. The rest are false positives and false negatives, so the there is no useful test here. Additionally, the problem a test like that would present is false negatives for trans women. I'd bet false negatives for trans men, false positives for womyn-born-womyn (indicating that she should take testosterone and start living as a man), and false positives for born men (indicating giving him the Alan Turing treatment, to be a bit morbid) would all be brushed off, even for trans men. Nobody cares if a chick wants to be a dude. For some reason we just have so much angst about letting a man into protected garden of womanhood.
That is also the real reason I'm so critical of feminism and sometimes downright misogynist. As long as the double-standard exists, suddenly the question of what gender I should be becomes a comparative advantage debate. And it's so not like that, and should not be like that. My heart knows I'm female. How could I possibly prove to anybody what's in my heart? Instead it's an issue of "oh, you want it as easy as women have it." You want to get psychologists to make some truly bizarre statements? Ask them critical question about why gender transition should be difficult and why there need to be gatekeepers of gender at every step, challenging, testing the trans woman to make sure she can pass on to the next level.
I don't know if you'll find it interesting, but I recommend reading Whipping Girl to everybody. The book you might find more interesting is The Myth of Male Power if haven't read that already.
As for male genital mutilation, I have my suspicions (and again, will never know for sure, which is a cool trick of doing this to infants and why the UTI argument is critical to these circumfetishists) that mutilated men (excluding myself from that group for a moment) probably believe that what they feel is normal and accept it. Either they're unaware they've been mutilated like I was for the first 20 years of my life, or they're aware they have been, and like our friends at John Hopkins, they become completely obsessed with believing that it must have had some wonderful benefit without any possible drawback at all (again accept
It's too complicated for Geekoid to understand. He can't figure out how to take a shower or bath, apparently.
Geekoid. E Tu. Is somebody a little butthurt about being curcimcised?
Somebody please mod all of Geekoid's comments down. I have evaluated the evidence as a MAN and I have come to the conclusion that having a foreskin is the best choice for myself. Where do I apply to get my foreskin re-installed? Is there an application fee?
Er, huh, and it's gone again. Maybe I can just save face at this point and blame broken slashdot.
Hey, a big Cresant of the Callas thankya to whoever fixed that enumerated list.
I'm sorry, geekoid, you're missing it. This is entirely a political stunt.
NPR and Comedy Central and all the other cool kids on the left have been going on with this "war on women" thing. One of their points was a recent house (or was it senate?) committee that was looking into contraception being covered by the affordible care act (somebody feel free to correct me).
The point is that this committee was all men. Men only deciding an issue of women's health. An issue of women's health that costs money to address. WE CANT HAVE THIS OMG!
So now, we have Susan Blank of American Academy of Pediatrics talking about men's health.
Oh wait, this is hilarious and not related to what I was going to say. I went back to NPR's article to make sure I got her name right, and, magically, it's changed. It's now talking about Finland and all kinds of crap. Here, have a beer, I've got plenty.
Anyway, so this is a woman talking about men's health, even a men's health issue that would result in a reduction of cost for healthcare costs for a man.
Now that NPR's changed their story I'm sure of it. God-damned political stunt.
You are correct. The analogue is removal of the clitoral hood. The clitoris and glas are analogues, and the proto-clitoral hood is what becomes the foreskin, once all that messy stuff with the urinary tract rerouting itself into the proto-clitoris takes place.
The interesting thing is the female genital mutilation covers such a wide range of things. Some traditions remove the clitoris. Some traditions keep the clitoris intact and remove the clitoral hood. Others just sew the whole thing shut.
Please note, Mr. Dvorkin, that I was not attempting to make a moral assesment of those traditions.
Go read the actual study. It's quite amazing.
Basically, they took a control group of intact men, and turned them loose on some whorehouses, all expenses paid. And they went wild. Started reporting AIDS and what-have-you from day one.
So, ok, they had their experiment group. Now, since they had just had a surgery performed, they were ordered to a week of bedrest.
Now it gets real interesting what happens when they turn the experiment group loose on the whorehouse. They start reporting AIDS from day one. That's not all. After two weeks, their rate of infection begins approaching the control group's rate of infection.
WHOOOPS! END STUDY! ABORT! ABORT!
So, now we have a published study that PROVES that fewer men in the experiment (fewer, by head count) had AIDS than in the control group. MALE GENITAL MUTILATION CURES AIDS.
I hope I adequately answered your suspicitions. Clearly, circumcision is a cure for AIDS. *sigh* and Gah!
Roughly. You're forgetting that child abuse is something that is often an inter-generational issue.
In countries where females are circumcised, tune out the feminists and jerking knes for a second, tune in reality, and it's females that are passing on the abuse.
In countries where men are circumcised, well, it's men who were abused by routine infant male genital mutilation propogating routine infant male genital mutilation.
Consider a circumcised man presented with evidence that he was mutilate unnecessarily. Of course he'll argue against that. He's been mutilated, and it was necessary by god (else he admit to being a victim) and he'll do it to his son, too.
As for how this all got started, well.... I recently read Born to Run, which has evidence that 40 years of the modern, cushioned sports shoe was based on one very bad but very persuasive podiatrical paper that linked running firmly with sports injuries and some very clever marketing by Nike.
I believe circumcision is similar, but more sinister. Think of all the money hospitals rake in per year as yet another added on charge nobody cares about that men won't argue isn't necessary. Talk about conflict of interest.
Yet, there have been studies showing benefit to amputation of the clitoris in females. Why didn't that catch on? No mutilated Muslim women to crazily back it (lest they admit they were mutilated unnecessarily), and the women over here were wise enough to create the hypnotic knee-jerk reaction to the words "female circumcision" if only because I didn't say "female genital mutilation."
You're forgetting to point out the insignificance of the numbers in question. For UTI, if it's a 90% reduction, well, take the existing incidence rate, 1.5%, add 90%, and it's still less than 3%. And how many babies die from UTI? We're talking /infection/ here of a routine infant condition, not mortality.
It makes me want to throw up.
Then I watch how people react to allowing US hospitals to perform the "clitoral pin-prick" style female circumcision which fulfills certain religious beliefs. Nothing is removed. Read my other comments, and I would gladly trade 10 years of physical pain (possibly) due to a circumcision a bit too tight for a pin-prick. People lose their shit. Really, I had a comment removed from NPR.org just for mentioning that hospitals (and the AAP) had considered creating a protocol for this pin-prick.
If I can be 100% serious for a moment, think about it. Girls every year are trafficked to 3rd world countries to be mutilated. US hospitals are offering to do something that will be done anyway in a less severe, much more sterile manner. And people still lose their shit. So, the girls continue to get trafficked to 3rd world countries to have their clitorises pricked with a bacteria-infested knife, resulting in irritation that requires amputation of the entire clitoris. BUT OMG FGM BRAIN LEAKS OUT EAR. But male circumcision, ok, that's cool.
I was in physical pain for roughly 10 years from when my male puberty started (yay, facial hair, oddly I never got crackly voice) and when my female puberty started (yay, boobs, goodbye morning wood).
When I started HRT, I didn't even know I was circumcised. I thought pain along with wood was the normal thing for a guy. Apparently, my doctor didn't think twice about my reporting feelings that I should have been a different gender with different body parts and experiencing pain at the normal functioning of the male genitalia. It wasn't until I met my intact ex-boyfriend that I learned I had been mutilated. It turns out that the feelings I experience of the skin tearing were abnormal, even for a circumcised man.
Also, no trans woman I've ever asked has once reported the same pain I reported. Therefore, eliminate my doctor's theory that the pain was caused by some mysterious brain-genital mismatch.
The question that digs at me is this: was my doctor right in dismissing circumcision as a cause or am I right in blaming circumcision as the cause? Because of all the disinformation surrounding male genital mutilation, my doctor may not have been aware of a case presented in The Joy of Uncircumcising by Jim Bigelow (an intereting read regardless of standpoint) worse than mine. Instead of just pain because the skin felt like it might tear, there's a story of a man whose skin DID tear, every night.
At any rate, because I can never return to my natural, unmutilated state, I'll never know. And, if I may since this is slashdot, since estrogen HRT solved my problem, the worst part, being a geek, is not knowing lol.
Cheers
Thank you for pointing this out.
I posted a letter I wrote to NPR (yes, and snail-mailed, signed, dropped subscription, and even printed at Kinkos on some nice beige paper for like $3) to this discussion (new comment) a few minutes ago where I had assumed that the AAP had flip-flopped. Apparently I've been drunk too much lately, because I'd forgotten that when I'd originally heard this report last week (woo slashdot!), it was the usual criticism of anti-male genital mutilation groups who wanted a stronger proscripton from routine mutilation. I should have realized that NPR (and apparently others) were trolling.
If they're trolling, then I think it lends more credence to the theory I put forth in my letter that this is a political stunt as some kind of return fire in the "war on women."
So here's how it goes I guess -> Akins and others make asses out of themselves -> NPR falsely reports news that may put infant boys at risk to complications from unnecessary circumcision.
Sadly, I think if the left is willing to go that low, it really has influenced my vote this November. I had already decided that I wasn't going third party for the first time in my life. Now I'm not sure what to think about a political stunt from the left pressuring me to vote for a party that wants to turn me into a second class citizen for being homosexual and transgendered. I guess all I can think is that my foreskin will never come back, and 10 years I spent with physical, chronic pain until estrogen/anti-androgen HRT "fixed" it (by making me impotent) can't be undone, but maybe if I vote in Republicans and they pull some national DOMA crap or butcher Romney/Obama-care, maybe I can vote Democrat next time, my karma will balance out, and I'll go back to voting Libertarian.
Hey there! You forgot all the women who won't get cervical cancer now because HPV won't be transmitted to them!
Oops. Please forgive the \LaTeX I left in there. \emph{blah} = blah. Not sure why it gobbled my enumerated/ordinal list (think ol).
At the risk of conclusive proof of the real life identity behind this UID. It's a bit lengthly. tl;dr: The AAP did this before in 1986. Nobody cares about all the years the AAP has recommended against it. The AAP will likely reverse its position in a few years. There is no new evidence, not any more than there was in 1983 when they recommended against, not any more than in 1986 when they recommended for, not any more in 1992 (iirc, didn't look that one up) through 2005 when.they recommended against, not any more in 2012 when they recommended for.
More tl;dr (it really probably is tl if this is stil tl;dr): Once removed, the foreskin can never be restored. I've been permanently harmed and since slashdot knows I'm already trans, my doctor and I screwed up in thinking that the pain I was feeling was because I was trans. No other trans person I've spoken to has reported the same pain, but I didn't know I was circumcised when I started HRT, so I figured it was related to my gender issue, not a genital mutilation that had been forced on me.
And also even bring up the subject of female genital mutilation when everybody's ready to lop off foreskins for a 0.005 change (1.7% to 1.2% or something like that) in the rate of UTI and watch everybody lose their minds. A comment I made on NPR.org about a position the AAP took in 2010 regarding proposing a protocol for female circumcision was removed for violating their community rules.
So here goes!
And yes, I was in actual physical pain, and I throught that was completely natural and just part of getting wood, and yes, I really did not know I was circumcised until my early twenties. Oh, and before you go diagnosing my aches and pains, note that my doctor didn't even consider it. Either that means that the first person to diagnose me with something is an idiot, or the fact that my doctor didn't even know about it speaks volumes about our ignorance of male genital mutilation and the side-effects.
To whom it may concern,
I'm writing in response to your reporting of the American Academy of Pediatrics' (AAP) recent flip-flop of their opinion of what body parts men do or don't have the right to keep. I'm calling it a flip-flop, because that's what it is. Typically, the AAP releases reports recommending that male infants should not be circumcised. However, every now and then, they dig up evidence to justify reversing their opinion. I would not be surprised if within a few years, they go back to their usual position of opposing the practice of routine infant genital mutilation for both males and females.
There are two things that discussions of circumcision evoke: jerking knees and giggles. When it's female genitals we're talking about, it's always jerking knees. In 2010, the American Academy of Pediatrics came under fire for attempting to put a protocol in place for satisfying certain parents' desires to have their infant daughter's clitoris poked with a pin. I referenced this in a post to the comments on the article on your webpage along with their reasoning for attempting to create a framework for this otherwise barbaric act, and my comment was promptly removed. Perhaps the moderator thought in some hysterical misreading of my comment that I was in support of female genital mutilation.
Then there are the giggles and the kink when we're talking about penises. The word \emph{penis} is a favorite of immature internet humor. Let's get this out of the way right here, because I am very serious.
Too much of the debate centers on sexual pleasure. Fortunately, because of a fluke that happened when I was circumcised, I won't need to worry about knowing even the pleasures of a healthy circumcised man, because all I know is pain.
Additionally, this is about more than sexual pleasure or giggles at the word \emph{penis}. This is about my human right to have an intact body. We seem to be overly sensitive to concerns of female welfare, even purely psychological concerns, but we are ever so dismi
They didn't go to the end of the solar system to find a Betamax player. They had to go to Earth.
Anyway, I also tend to buy CDs instead of the cloudy web 2.0 DRMed to all crap version. I guess I'm not trendy enough to use iTunes. Then I rip all my CDs to FLAC and also transcode to MP3 for use in mobile devices. Then the CD sits on my shelf and is never opened again unless I want to check something in the lyrics or look at the art.
What GP really ought to do is get one of those USB turntables and record those vinyls to FLAC. And no, you can't tell the difference between a vinyl and a digital recording, and if you can, I have some gold-plated audio cables to sell to you. The only charm vinyls have is that they were before the era of compressing everything to hell and back so instead of the 16 bits of information you're supposed to have on a CD, the recording engineers have made sure that only 5 or 6 of those bits get used.
The point isn't necessarily physical media, but having the data you've purchased in a format that's not DRMed. I would gladly purchase APEs or FLACs along with maybe PDF album art, but nobody wants to sell it to me that way.
It does raise an interesting question, though, if I can put on my tinfoil hat. With all this UEFI stuff going on and the eventuality of moving away from optical media, how will I buy my music in, say, 50 years? Will there even be any kind of non-DRMed option such as the optical discs I buy today?
I also buy paper books because I'm not quite on board with E-books mostly because of DRM. Sometimes, though, I do want a digital version, but again, nobody's selling without DRM. I've already purchased the content, but unless I want to construct a book scanner and attempt to find a good OCR solution or live with a PDF that's all images, I'm out of luck. My ideal would be to have a LaTeX file my reader can render in whatever page size or typeface size I want. So, not nearly as easy as with music there. The only alternative is buy in dead tree format and go to the Pirate Bay.
Like these guys?
It's hard to be a viable canidate when you have to fight an uphill battle just to get on the ballot, and then good luck getting any major media coverage. Just look at how the media treats Crazy Uncle Ron.
If the red-colored Republicrats were serious about repealing Romney/Obama-care, Ron Paul has the perfect credentials. It's almost as though the red-colored Republicrats are trying to lose. And just think of all that delicious money medical insurance companies will make with their 10% overhead cap on 100% of the country. Everybody who's been arguing that insurance premiums will come down because of the bigger risk pool is right in theory. I'm not holding my breath for it to actually happen, though. My bet is that magically, the cost of medical care will somehow go through the roof, and combined with some Hollywood accounting, insurance premiums are going to keep on rising at about the same pace while wrecking the budgets of anyone who isn't a single mother with 5 kids and won't qualify for assistance. Romney/Obama-care is just a "what could possibly go wrong" waiting to happen when it kicks all the way in.
Now where did I leave my tinfoil hat?
This. My ex-parents wanted the family doctor to prescribe me testosterone with the idea that it would make me taller. Of course my doctor shot it down, because that's not how it works. Of course, these days, we know which hormone can affect that.
Three years later, that same doctor wrote me a prescription for estrogen.
If my parents had their way with the testosterone, I might have been unable to pass as a woman, and I probably would have killed myself. If the doctor had suggested human growth hormone to make me taller, same problem. My short height is one of the factors that makes getting strangers to gender me female easier.
The alternative is that they could have used genetic screening to determine that their son was not only homosexual but transgendered and aborted me. Or they could have just had me engineered so that I would be a normal guy. Either way, I might have been spared a gender conflict I still haven't resolved because, well, I kind of need a job to eat and pay the bills, and people go completely hysterical and stupid about gender.
Dear Ann Druyan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Seth MacFarlane,
How can we speed up the production of Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey? Is there somewhere we can throw more money at it?
Won't somebody think of the children?
Thanks,
A Very Concerned Human Being
Since I can't mod this discussion anymore having made a similar comment myself to another internet tough guy, will somebody please mod the parent up?
You're spot on. It's called science. It works best when somebody turns out to be wrong (or at least not quite correct). Whoever is modding up these internet tough guys needs to read some Sagan or something and get a clue.
Holy cow. Only on Slashdot can some internet tough guy say "I don't care what people who are actually studying this think. I know better because I can throw words like 'neutrino' and 'plausibility' around." And then get modded up to +5 insightful.
I'm not even going to waste a mod point making this a +4 instead. What's the point? Good grief.
I'm probably too late to the party for anyone to see this comment, but since I've been on the receiving end of sexual harassment multiple times in my current job, I'd like to make an observation.
Sexual harassment happens when one gender is in the majority and is also in a place where that gender is expected to be in the majority. Like my day job for instance.
A medical client requests that we ask women who are setting an appointment for a mammogram if they have breast implants. Why? The radiologists need to take twice as many pictures apparently. However, because I'm the person who needs to program that question in and because I work as a man, I end up getting treated like I'm a pervert, and several older women there offer to show me their boobs if I'm that interested in older women's boobs.
Ladies, I care about as much about seeing your boobs as you do my dick. It's sexual harassment either way.
It goes on like that.
Sexual harassment isn't a geek problem or a male problem. It's a human problem, and pretending it's a male problem only is disingenuous.
At least men know that sometimes it pays off to act like a gentleman around ladies. I've yet to meet the woman who cares about acting like anything less than an obtuse, sexist pig around gentlemen.
I don't know about you, but I would prefer people worship gods who say that global good is God's work
Well, but the trouble is that depending on how you interpret parts of the bible, that might be considered devil worship. For example, according to my ex-parents, free blacks are an abomination before their god because god made their skin dark to mark them as slaves after that incident when Noah got drunk off his hind end.
Superstition ruin much more than just the user's life. It affects the entire family. What is a child supposed to do when their parents uses superstition all day and there's no food on the table? "take responsibility" for their parents' lives?
That being said, some superstitions are socially acceptable in the western world (despite how harmful they are). Christianity and Judiasm are the two main ones. Any superstition that's less harmful and less addictive than these two should be automatically decriminalized, starting with monotheism.
FTFY?