Anecdote: flaxseed meal is increasingly used in pet food. When I was feeding my kennel a diet with a significant amount of flaxseed meal, I had a marked increase of certain types of birth defects (mainly some degree of failure of midline closure) AND a 50% miss rate on breedings. Since I've gone to a flax-free diet, the birth defects have gone away, and my conception rate is back to the species norm of 85-90%.
(Credential: I have almost 40 years professional experience in dogs.)
Actually, phytoestrogens are fairly harmless while a female animal is pregnant. Namely, their body is pumping out tons of estrogen to begin with. Thus, it's unlikely to be the cause of the teratogenic effects that you were seeing.
However, phytoestrogens can significantly impact the sperm levels in male animals. This is because estrogens are antagonists for testosterone. If you dump enough estrogenic potential into a male, they won't be able to produce enough testosterone to allow for normal sperm production.
What exactly do you mean by "failure of midline closure"? I'm intrigued in what this refers to... lol God, I'm turning into such a medical geek >_
The 'default' body plan for mammals is female. Left to itself, an embryo will develop (mostly) female unless specific steps are taken at specific times. Developing a male means (a) suppressing female development paths, and (b) initiating male development paths. (And yes, those are two separate steps. Sometimes (a) doesn't happen even though (b) does, and you get hermaphrodism.
It's rare, but you can get things like Swyer syndrome, where an apparently normal girl gets to be around sixteen and has never had a period or other signs of puberty. Examination reveals the girl has no functional ovaries and actually has a Y chromosome.
(This has other implications, so far as I can see. When something's more complicated to make, that means there are more ways for it to go wrong...)
Actually, it's a little different. Since the masculine parts by and in large develop from the same parts as the feminine parts, they are dimorphic... you get one or you get the other. The ovaries and testes are like that. They develop from a common precedent in the body. The same with the labial-scrotal folds, and the clitoral-penile protrusion.
However, there are female parts that are not directly competitive against male counter parts, those would be the Müllerian ducts. A man can have a uterus. Usually, it's not found until they have to go in and do some exploratory surgery or something like that for an appendix, or whatever. Basically, the guy goes in to get his appendix taken out, and is met in post-op with the news "oh, btw, we found a uterus, and removed it for you. It's perfectly normal, don't freak out."
"Hermaphotism" doesn't actually occur, it requires the existence of male and female gonads at the same time. Ok, correction, you can end up with a chimeric individual who develops one testis through one gene line, and an ovary through the other gene line. This is by far even more unlikely than any form of intersexuality.
The most common result of pronounced intersexuality is when the doctor pulls the baby out of the vagina, looks at it, and says, "oh dear... this baby has a very shallow vagina, slightly fused labial-scrotal folds, a urethra that exits at the bases of the penis? which could also just be a really big clitoris..."
Either way, you're _NOT_ going to end up with a penis and a vagina on the same individual without surgical intervention...
He explains to the supermodel and her dad that in the womb, testes are supposed to a) turn into ovaries for woman, b) descend for men. With a certain form of hermaphoroditism neither happens and the body is effectively immune to the effects of testosterone. The result: 'the perfect woman.' As such, she was really a boy, and he had a tumor on one of his testicles.
You were fine and actually accurate all the way up to here. The disease that she suffered from is called "CAIS" (Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome). It is not the testes or the ovaries that turn into the other. Rather germ cells (as in "germination" not the other germ) turn into gonad stripes, which then turn into either testes under the presence of the SRY gene, or ovaries in the event that the SRY gene is not there.
At this point, the SRY gene is irrelevant. The fetus develops folds that are scrotal-labial folds, and a clitoral-penile mound, and has a separate urethra that exits within the scrotal-labial folds. Under the effects of testosterone, the scrotal-labial folds fuse, creating the scrotum, and the clitoral-penile mound lengthens, and grows, as well as integrating the urethra into it. Insufficient testosterone will produce female genitalia.
Internally, the Anti-Müllerian Hormone is responsible for preventing the development of the uterus, fallopian tubes, and upper vagina. In order to have the SRY gene yet end up with a full vagina, uterus, and fallopian tubes would require two entirely random mutations of the fetus, both of which are extremely rare.
The inconsistencies in the story on House in the face of medical fact:
No doctor would ever call that patient a "guy". Of course, House is a very mean spirited person, as well he was trying to keep her Dad from having sexual intercourse with her. Basically, House was being an ass... this is consistent with House.
She would not have been aggressive. That would be a response to the androgens flooding her system from her testes affecting her brain's aggression receptors, the same as if she were on steroids. (Exactly as if she were on steroids.) However, if she had enough androgen response to respond to the testosterone in her brain's aggression centers, she would have had significant muscular improvement.
The second they looked for uterine cancer they would have noticed that she didn't have a uterus... and in fact, screw that, the first time Dr Cameron would have put a septum to her vagina to look for cervical cancer, she would have noticed, there wasn't one! (Unless, again, this person was afflicted with 2 extremely rare diseases resulting from random spontaneous mutations, and cancer)
None of this would ever affect anything with regard to her being a "woman" or a "man". She still would have a natural vagina. She would still be a natural female, and was so her entire life, she would never have been a guy. Her birth certificate would still say she was a woman, and her passport and all documentation from her birth to forever would continue to state that she was a female.
Of course, it makes it much more interesting to have the asshole House walk in and call her a boy... it's provocative, as was intentionally planned by House... it's offensive, it's hostile, it's inflammatory. Again, nothing new for House. However, it's extremely not helpful for people who are actually suffering from these diseases to be told that they're guys.
As well, the Olympics had to make a ruling about as to if these women could compete in the woman's division. When they wanted to do genetic tests, it would mean that these people would be forced to compete in the men's division. Meanwhile, while typical women have less testosterone and thus less ability to develop muscular mass (men are naturally on steroids compared to women) they would be placing these women with an even SMALLER rate of testosterone response to compete with people who are all essentially on steroids.
The OIC eventually settled on, "as long as the individual's hormone levels are consistent with a woman, they are allowed to compete in the women's division."
The exposure to PCBs is only during a critical period in development in the mother's womb. After that critical period, no exposure to PCBs will change anything either way.
So the question is, YOU were practically bathing in PCBs, but what was your mom doing when you were in her womb? Likely not bathing in PCBs...
Those researches are on the same level as : "people that eat x get more of y disease". Correlation is not causation.
Actually, for quite awhile it was well known that "people that eat corn get more pelagra". Sometimes, correlation is causation. The correct statement is "Correlation is not ALWAYS causation."
That serves to demonstrate that the exercise of power is not necessarily sex related. Still, there have been a lot more patriarchal societies than matriarchal.
There is an explanation for this. At the beginning of human societies, men didn't understood their role on reproduction and though women were gifted with the divine power of creating life. Eventually they figured out that reproduction was a two person project and stopped seeing women as magical creatures only because the babies came out from them.
Anyways, I agree that there is some genetic contribution to the kind of stuff we have been talking about. Still, I believe cultural influence is more important.
This idea flies in the face of everything we know about the animal kingdom. Sexual animals are already aware of the male's part in reproduction. It doesn't take rationality to determine "hey, these women aren't magical creatures that just spit out copies of us."
If this were true. Gender roles would not vary from one society to another. And we had both matriarchal and patriarchal societies through history, for example.
As a linguist, I'm aware of the "secret" languages that some cultures have, where men speak a special secret language, and women speak a special secret language, and in mixed company they both speak a mutual language.
Would you claim to know about purses, make up, and all the social culture that is involved with being a woman? No, probably not.
We _do_ have both matriarchal and patriarchal cultures throughout history, as well as mutual shared cultures.
A lot of your post identifies also with language learning in children. The suggestion is, that if you want your kid to speak a foreign language, ALWAYS talk in that foreign language with your child. Your child will pick up the prevailing social language by exposure to everyone outside the home.
It's impossible to shield a child from the prevailing social language of the culture you're in, the same as it is to prevent exposure to cultural sex roles.
However, while the sex roles themselves are cultural, as you mentioned, we're all inbuilt to seek acceptance from the gender that we identify with. We will adopt to the gender roles that are expected of us, or we will be miserable people. So, gender role separation is biological, while gender role specifics are cultural.
This unfortunate story is a very interesting one in the world of gender identity, etc. What I find surprising is that a lot of people from both sides of the aisle on gender identity use this as an example supporting their evidence.
Those stating that transsexuals, the transgendered, and the like are wrong tend to point to this story and say, "see? he knew he was a man, so you know you're a man, and you're just faking it."
Those stating that transsexuals, the transgendered, and the like are nominal tend to point to this story ands ay, "see? gender identity is ingrained, and trying to force someone outside of their gender identity is just going to be met with hostility and anger."
Actually, the more widely accepted theories right now show that there are strong HORMONAL influences for gender-stereotyped behaviors. Genetics gives a very strong likelihood of the levels of hormones in the individual during prenatal development, however ultimately it is the reception of hormones and the activations that they cause that have the most significant influence upon the individual.
Hormone levels naturally fluctuate. The fact that we have individuals born with inconsistent hormone levels indicates that the "silent problem" of an unvirilized brain in a virilized body is a very real reality. This study is just one in a number of studies pointing this out.
I wonder what part of the population would have to be born as transgendered/intersexed before people have to wake up and realize that what you have between your legs shouldn't outweigh what you have in your head.
Truth is, much of this article smacks of the extreme feminist propaganda I've seen in place around the net. It's part of the whole "God is a woman, men are dying out and women will take over the planet" craziness you occasionally see in extreme feminists.
If I remember correctly, the extreme feminists (extreminists? exfeminists? crazy bitches?) have been bandying about similar "statistics" for YEARS now, and they were proven false several times over. I wouldn't be surprised to see these results falsified soon enough as well.
Ummm... not that I have conducted studies... or anything... ummm really... but gay men seem to be above average in the pants. Also, a simple perusal of various "matchmaking" sites, even accounting for exaggeration, also would create the same conclusion.
From the experiences of a friend... I'd say gay men on average are about 1.9" above the (currently shrinking) national average, with a very small percent in the below average range.
In fact, a lot of modern sexologists are of the opinion that gay men are more masculinized than straight men. They certainly seem to be much more attached to their penis, and "being a man" than straight men.
Now, with the caveat as noted above... they're much more secure in their masculinity, and have less to "prove", and thus a much smaller irrational machismo.
As a gay man, I have already done some of this research, and I can tell you without a doubt that gay men are NOT physically more feminine in general than straight men. There are masculine and feminine men in both camps, and I don't see any masculine/feminine bias in either direction. And there is certainly no bias towards a smaller penis size in gay men.
I knew this.
I think the reason gay men act feminine at times has more to do with them letting go of the macho image that straight men try to portray, especially in the United States, which is why European men are often accused of "acting gay"; because they don't worry about acting "macho" as much as American men do. Europeans in general don't have such a deep seated fear of being branded as gay. This hasn't always been the case in the United States either. Watch some old B&W movies and note how much more "gay" the male actors tend to be than they do today.
Wow, that makes so much more sense. Men here really are locked into this homophobic machismo... aren't they? It's really... stupid.
Oh yeah, one more thing.. breast size is determined by genetics, not by sex. Any human under influence of pubescent levels of estrogen will develop breasts to the size that their genetics dictates.
Some women have small breasts, genetics. Some women have large breasts, genetics.
Some men have breasts, exposure to estrogen. The size that they have? Depends on when the exposure occurs. At the same age as puberty, and at levels the same a pubescent girl would receive, they will develop the full size of breasts that their genes express. Wait until the 20's, and you're down to 1-cup size smaller, and past that almost exponential drop-off, as the body loses its response to hormonal fluctuations.
This sounds like a genotype of XX but with the male SRY gene translocated on one X arms. This would give you the above phenotype and infertile with most likely diminished genitalia in all areas. For a lot of slashdot readers this means that there will be smaller breasts. This is bad news for slashdotters everywhere as we will have to try twice as hard to find someone that is a normal female and is not infertile. XY females are also possible but they are caused by androgen insensitivity and lack a uterus.
No, actually, if you look at it, it's more common that it's a form of 5-alpha reductase deficiency. Or, essentially, it's an XY female, however due to decreased levels of dihydrogen-testosterone during genital development, they didn't develop masculine genitalia, and rather developed female genitalia.
None of this implies an XX genotype with SRY translocation, which would be significantly less rare than XY females. In fact, it would cause XX genotype XY phenotype, and likely not result in any infertility at all. In fact, this form of translocation is known to occur fairly often, for instance in kangaroos, the SRY gene is no longer on the "Y chromosome", and has been shown to have moved a few times. Meanwhile, the original Y chromosomes have degenerated so entirely to be entirely vestigial chromosomes essentially. It's the reason why the Y chromosome in humans and primates doesn't carry full information either anymore... the chromosome is only transmitting the SRY gene, anything else can be dropped off, but the SRY must remain there.
No, except for one (nature/hippy girl), were all girly-girls.
Insufficiently virilized "men" such that you could have sex with them and not be aware of the difference (as presumed by your statements that you don't view any of them as under virilized "men") are no less likely to be girly-girls than any other female.
Ok again... if fillRect(x, y, 1, 1) works to draw a single pixel, then there has to be a correct/expected behavior for a single pixel drawing.
This is as retarded as why the C++ stl string library doesn't have a case-insensitive compare. Their reason why? "Because different locales handle capitalization differently" The correct answer? "Because we can't be bothered to make the correct behavior the correct behavior by default, so we're going to push that back to the coder themselves, which is the whole reason why these people are using high-level languages in the first place so that they don't get this stupid push back from libraries of 'oh, to do that, you just do this defined algorithm, which we didn't code into the library even though it would never change.'"
Code reusability and high-level languages are supposed to provide libraries with as much static usability as possible. If there is a single correct way to handle drawing a pixel, or testing two strings for equality with case-insensitivity, even taking into account locale, THAT'S WHAT THE LIBRARY SHOULD DO.
The fact that the function is in a different library/class/whatever than drawRect() is precisely the problem. I expect my libraries and APIs to be more or less complete.
Apples to oranges. raytracer v webserver. Further compounded by the fact that when OS X was running on G3 I ended up abandoning my mcrypt port due to endianess issues.
A webserver in Java is ridiculously easy.
If you weren't accounting for endianness in your code to begin with, then you were shooting yourself in the foot for portability in the first place.
Don't wine about portability, when you can't be bothered to take it into account.
Right, by why have a ton of draw___ but not drawPixel in the java.awt.Graphics class? Hm?
What was I thinking... you know, assuming that their libraries would actually be in the right place.
Also, how much do you use Java? If I just walked into Java, or the professor of my class just walked into Java, or the graphics guru TA for the course just walked into Java... would any of them have any idea of how to do it?
Ok, if you can't see the difference between a real liberal, and what everyone on the USA calls a liberal, then fuck it, you're right.
BTW, fuck you... you have no right to be talking shit about my life. You weren't there, you aren't aware of the facts. Stop trying to armchair quarterback my life just because I called you "stupid" or "retarded".
On top of that, it doesn't take much juggling to get your app to run on multiple platforms.
One would think, right? But it's actually NOT that much easier to get your app running on multiple platforms. I shall describe to you three projects that I wrote in C, Java, and ObjC respectively.
The first app was written in C, it was a webserver. It actually was really easy to port, because I used basic C libraries. About the only problem was that on Solaris, I had to include some libraries that I didn't on the other *nixes. The other *nixes? Linux, OpenBSD, and Mac OSX. It all worked like a charm, no cross platform issues. I have no doubt it would have run just as fine on SFU (services for Unix) on Windows, or if one had the right compiler, like djgpp, it would work just fine as well.
I wrote a raytracer in Java for a graphics course. I already had the vector class, which took care of most of the code, so most of was super easy to write. Just make a vector, cast the ray, just a bunch of math that I had already written into Vector and Matrix libraries. There was just one problem. How do you draw a pixel in Java? Oh yeah, that's right, there is no way to do it. Some implementations allow you to do a drawRect() of size 0,0, but others interpret that as a "draw nothing"... thus in order to actually draw my image correctly across Linux, OSX, Solaris, and OpenBSD, I had to draw 4 times as many pixels as I had to, by doing a drawRect large enough that it would actually draw something on each one of the OSes. And these are all POSIX systems? WTF?
Last, I got sick of the performance of my Java raytracer, as well as the inconsistent undefined behavior of drawRect() with a height/width of 0,0. So, I ported my raytracer to ObjC. I started with the vector library, things went fast, and easy. It also worked perfectly on OSX, Linux, OpenBSD and Solaris. It used SDL for the graphics (which actually has a defined behavior that allows one to draw one and only one pixel). And the standard POSIX thread library to make it multithreaded to draw even faster.
Point of all of this: The LIBRARY SPECIFICATIONS are the most important thing to be defined across the board. Any unspecified behavior in your library results in being able to write code that won't work on a different implementation of that same library. Also, without a Java VM, the java raytracer wouldn't run on that system, which means it is no better than requiring the ObjC library, and SDL library.
You, sir, can't even be bothered to realize that I'm a "ma'am"... I mean, just look at my user name.
Now, I won't presume the fallacy that just because you're stupid enough to ignore the name/gender of your opponent, that you're too stupid to even argue the point you're talking about.
"But some leaders persevered in pressing their cause forward. Americans such as Lyman Beecher, who was a Connecticut minister, had started to lecture his fellow citizens against all use of liquor in 1825. The American Temperance Society was formed in 1826 and benefited from a renewed interest in religion and morality. Within 12 years it claimed more than 8,000 local groups and over 1,500,000 members. By 1839, 18 temperance journals were being published. Simultaneously, many Protestant churches were beginning to promote temperance."
I don't see how religious organizations and a concern for religious morality turns into radical liberals... Look, reactionary conservatives now are pushing the idea that the 1 man, 1 woman marriage is the most common form of marriage in the past, even though ANY anthropologist would tell you, "no, it's polygamy."
Just because they're too retarded to actually look at reality, and what they're debating doesn't mean that they're not pushing for a "return to the values and morality of our past." I think this assertion applies in a lot of cases where someone is looking to paint a particular group of people as "evil" or "wrong". FACT IS: Temperance movements were led by RELIGIOUS organizations, that preached about the EVILS of alcohol and that the world would be better if everyone didn't curse, didn't do anything on the "Sabbath" (which got moved to Sunday from Saturday, because they confused the day that Jesus resurrected for the Sabbath), and didn't drink alcohol. The idea that they would try and bring us to the same kind of ideals of even more reactionary religious groups that ban alcohol, like the Mormons, and Muslims...
Seriously, are you going to open up your eyes and stop being retarded about reality? Or are you going to acknowledge that people preaching for a return to religious piety are reactionary conservatives, and not radical liberals?
However, saying that "liberals" don't want handguns out on the street, is like saying that conservatives didn't want alcohol in the country during the Temperance movement.
I'm going to have to disagree with you there. I'd say that it was the liberals who wanted to prohibition. Conservatives tend to resist change. Liberals want to fix the world's problems by making radical changes.
LK
No, radicals want to make radical changes, liberals want change, moderates want moderate change, conservatives want little change, and the scariest, the REACTIONARIES want change back to a form time.
Prohibition was led by reactionary conservatives, _NOT_ liberals.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhm, you mean antidote? like a rufie or X?
Well, X certainly helps... however me and all of my close friends are all quite interested in sex, and find it very enjoyable.
Look at phytoestrogens instead. The most common sources are soy products and flaxseed meal (which has about twice as much as soy does).
http://www.soyonlineservice.co.nz/04phytoestrogens.htm
http://www.soyonlineservice.co.nz/articles/phyto1.htm
Anecdote: flaxseed meal is increasingly used in pet food. When I was feeding my kennel a diet with a significant amount of flaxseed meal, I had a marked increase of certain types of birth defects (mainly some degree of failure of midline closure) AND a 50% miss rate on breedings. Since I've gone to a flax-free diet, the birth defects have gone away, and my conception rate is back to the species norm of 85-90%.
(Credential: I have almost 40 years professional experience in dogs.)
Actually, phytoestrogens are fairly harmless while a female animal is pregnant. Namely, their body is pumping out tons of estrogen to begin with. Thus, it's unlikely to be the cause of the teratogenic effects that you were seeing.
However, phytoestrogens can significantly impact the sperm levels in male animals. This is because estrogens are antagonists for testosterone. If you dump enough estrogenic potential into a male, they won't be able to produce enough testosterone to allow for normal sperm production.
What exactly do you mean by "failure of midline closure"? I'm intrigued in what this refers to... lol God, I'm turning into such a medical geek >_
The 'default' body plan for mammals is female. Left to itself, an embryo will develop (mostly) female unless specific steps are taken at specific times. Developing a male means (a) suppressing female development paths, and (b) initiating male development paths. (And yes, those are two separate steps. Sometimes (a) doesn't happen even though (b) does, and you get hermaphrodism.
It's rare, but you can get things like Swyer syndrome, where an apparently normal girl gets to be around sixteen and has never had a period or other signs of puberty. Examination reveals the girl has no functional ovaries and actually has a Y chromosome.
(This has other implications, so far as I can see. When something's more complicated to make, that means there are more ways for it to go wrong...)
Actually, it's a little different. Since the masculine parts by and in large develop from the same parts as the feminine parts, they are dimorphic... you get one or you get the other. The ovaries and testes are like that. They develop from a common precedent in the body. The same with the labial-scrotal folds, and the clitoral-penile protrusion.
However, there are female parts that are not directly competitive against male counter parts, those would be the Müllerian ducts. A man can have a uterus. Usually, it's not found until they have to go in and do some exploratory surgery or something like that for an appendix, or whatever. Basically, the guy goes in to get his appendix taken out, and is met in post-op with the news "oh, btw, we found a uterus, and removed it for you. It's perfectly normal, don't freak out."
"Hermaphotism" doesn't actually occur, it requires the existence of male and female gonads at the same time. Ok, correction, you can end up with a chimeric individual who develops one testis through one gene line, and an ovary through the other gene line. This is by far even more unlikely than any form of intersexuality.
The most common result of pronounced intersexuality is when the doctor pulls the baby out of the vagina, looks at it, and says, "oh dear... this baby has a very shallow vagina, slightly fused labial-scrotal folds, a urethra that exits at the bases of the penis? which could also just be a really big clitoris..."
Either way, you're _NOT_ going to end up with a penis and a vagina on the same individual without surgical intervention...
He explains to the supermodel and her dad that in the womb, testes are supposed to a) turn into ovaries for woman, b) descend for men. With a certain form of hermaphoroditism neither happens and the body is effectively immune to the effects of testosterone. The result: 'the perfect woman.' As such, she was really a boy, and he had a tumor on one of his testicles.
You were fine and actually accurate all the way up to here. The disease that she suffered from is called "CAIS" (Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome). It is not the testes or the ovaries that turn into the other. Rather germ cells (as in "germination" not the other germ) turn into gonad stripes, which then turn into either testes under the presence of the SRY gene, or ovaries in the event that the SRY gene is not there.
At this point, the SRY gene is irrelevant. The fetus develops folds that are scrotal-labial folds, and a clitoral-penile mound, and has a separate urethra that exits within the scrotal-labial folds. Under the effects of testosterone, the scrotal-labial folds fuse, creating the scrotum, and the clitoral-penile mound lengthens, and grows, as well as integrating the urethra into it. Insufficient testosterone will produce female genitalia.
Internally, the Anti-Müllerian Hormone is responsible for preventing the development of the uterus, fallopian tubes, and upper vagina. In order to have the SRY gene yet end up with a full vagina, uterus, and fallopian tubes would require two entirely random mutations of the fetus, both of which are extremely rare.
The inconsistencies in the story on House in the face of medical fact:
No doctor would ever call that patient a "guy". Of course, House is a very mean spirited person, as well he was trying to keep her Dad from having sexual intercourse with her. Basically, House was being an ass... this is consistent with House.
She would not have been aggressive. That would be a response to the androgens flooding her system from her testes affecting her brain's aggression receptors, the same as if she were on steroids. (Exactly as if she were on steroids.) However, if she had enough androgen response to respond to the testosterone in her brain's aggression centers, she would have had significant muscular improvement.
The second they looked for uterine cancer they would have noticed that she didn't have a uterus... and in fact, screw that, the first time Dr Cameron would have put a septum to her vagina to look for cervical cancer, she would have noticed, there wasn't one! (Unless, again, this person was afflicted with 2 extremely rare diseases resulting from random spontaneous mutations, and cancer)
None of this would ever affect anything with regard to her being a "woman" or a "man". She still would have a natural vagina. She would still be a natural female, and was so her entire life, she would never have been a guy. Her birth certificate would still say she was a woman, and her passport and all documentation from her birth to forever would continue to state that she was a female.
Of course, it makes it much more interesting to have the asshole House walk in and call her a boy... it's provocative, as was intentionally planned by House... it's offensive, it's hostile, it's inflammatory. Again, nothing new for House. However, it's extremely not helpful for people who are actually suffering from these diseases to be told that they're guys.
As well, the Olympics had to make a ruling about as to if these women could compete in the woman's division. When they wanted to do genetic tests, it would mean that these people would be forced to compete in the men's division. Meanwhile, while typical women have less testosterone and thus less ability to develop muscular mass (men are naturally on steroids compared to women) they would be placing these women with an even SMALLER rate of testosterone response to compete with people who are all essentially on steroids.
The OIC eventually settled on, "as long as the individual's hormone levels are consistent with a woman, they are allowed to compete in the women's division."
The exposure to PCBs is only during a critical period in development in the mother's womb. After that critical period, no exposure to PCBs will change anything either way.
So the question is, YOU were practically bathing in PCBs, but what was your mom doing when you were in her womb? Likely not bathing in PCBs...
Those researches are on the same level as : "people that eat x get more of y disease". Correlation is not causation.
Actually, for quite awhile it was well known that "people that eat corn get more pelagra". Sometimes, correlation is causation. The correct statement is "Correlation is not ALWAYS causation."
That serves to demonstrate that the exercise of power is not necessarily sex related. Still, there have been a lot more patriarchal societies than matriarchal.
There is an explanation for this. At the beginning of human societies, men didn't understood their role on reproduction and though women were gifted with the divine power of creating life. Eventually they figured out that reproduction was a two person project and stopped seeing women as magical creatures only because the babies came out from them.
Anyways, I agree that there is some genetic contribution to the kind of stuff we have been talking about. Still, I believe cultural influence is more important.
This idea flies in the face of everything we know about the animal kingdom. Sexual animals are already aware of the male's part in reproduction. It doesn't take rationality to determine "hey, these women aren't magical creatures that just spit out copies of us."
If this were true. Gender roles would not vary from one society to another. And we had both matriarchal and patriarchal societies through history, for example.
As a linguist, I'm aware of the "secret" languages that some cultures have, where men speak a special secret language, and women speak a special secret language, and in mixed company they both speak a mutual language.
Would you claim to know about purses, make up, and all the social culture that is involved with being a woman? No, probably not.
We _do_ have both matriarchal and patriarchal cultures throughout history, as well as mutual shared cultures.
A lot of your post identifies also with language learning in children. The suggestion is, that if you want your kid to speak a foreign language, ALWAYS talk in that foreign language with your child. Your child will pick up the prevailing social language by exposure to everyone outside the home.
It's impossible to shield a child from the prevailing social language of the culture you're in, the same as it is to prevent exposure to cultural sex roles.
However, while the sex roles themselves are cultural, as you mentioned, we're all inbuilt to seek acceptance from the gender that we identify with. We will adopt to the gender roles that are expected of us, or we will be miserable people. So, gender role separation is biological, while gender role specifics are cultural.
This unfortunate story is a very interesting one in the world of gender identity, etc. What I find surprising is that a lot of people from both sides of the aisle on gender identity use this as an example supporting their evidence.
Those stating that transsexuals, the transgendered, and the like are wrong tend to point to this story and say, "see? he knew he was a man, so you know you're a man, and you're just faking it."
Those stating that transsexuals, the transgendered, and the like are nominal tend to point to this story ands ay, "see? gender identity is ingrained, and trying to force someone outside of their gender identity is just going to be met with hostility and anger."
Actually, the more widely accepted theories right now show that there are strong HORMONAL influences for gender-stereotyped behaviors. Genetics gives a very strong likelihood of the levels of hormones in the individual during prenatal development, however ultimately it is the reception of hormones and the activations that they cause that have the most significant influence upon the individual.
Hormone levels naturally fluctuate. The fact that we have individuals born with inconsistent hormone levels indicates that the "silent problem" of an unvirilized brain in a virilized body is a very real reality. This study is just one in a number of studies pointing this out.
I wonder what part of the population would have to be born as transgendered/intersexed before people have to wake up and realize that what you have between your legs shouldn't outweigh what you have in your head.
I suspect there's very little evidence indeed.
Truth is, much of this article smacks of the extreme feminist propaganda I've seen in place around the net. It's part of the whole "God is a woman, men are dying out and women will take over the planet" craziness you occasionally see in extreme feminists.
If I remember correctly, the extreme feminists (extreminists? exfeminists? crazy bitches?) have been bandying about similar "statistics" for YEARS now, and they were proven false several times over. I wouldn't be surprised to see these results falsified soon enough as well.
Ahem, WHAT THE F***?
Fuck you, too, Mr. Chauvinist Pig.
Ummm... not that I have conducted studies... or anything... ummm really... but gay men seem to be above average in the pants. Also, a simple perusal of various "matchmaking" sites, even accounting for exaggeration, also would create the same conclusion.
From the experiences of a friend... I'd say gay men on average are about 1.9" above the (currently shrinking) national average, with a very small percent in the below average range.
In fact, a lot of modern sexologists are of the opinion that gay men are more masculinized than straight men. They certainly seem to be much more attached to their penis, and "being a man" than straight men.
Now, with the caveat as noted above... they're much more secure in their masculinity, and have less to "prove", and thus a much smaller irrational machismo.
As a gay man, I have already done some of this research, and I can tell you without a doubt that gay men are NOT physically more feminine in general than straight men. There are masculine and feminine men in both camps, and I don't see any masculine/feminine bias in either direction. And there is certainly no bias towards a smaller penis size in gay men.
I knew this.
I think the reason gay men act feminine at times has more to do with them letting go of the macho image that straight men try to portray, especially in the United States, which is why European men are often accused of "acting gay"; because they don't worry about acting "macho" as much as American men do. Europeans in general don't have such a deep seated fear of being branded as gay. This hasn't always been the case in the United States either. Watch some old B&W movies and note how much more "gay" the male actors tend to be than they do today.
Wow, that makes so much more sense. Men here really are locked into this homophobic machismo... aren't they? It's really... stupid.
Oh yeah, one more thing.. breast size is determined by genetics, not by sex. Any human under influence of pubescent levels of estrogen will develop breasts to the size that their genetics dictates.
Some women have small breasts, genetics. Some women have large breasts, genetics.
Some men have breasts, exposure to estrogen. The size that they have? Depends on when the exposure occurs. At the same age as puberty, and at levels the same a pubescent girl would receive, they will develop the full size of breasts that their genes express. Wait until the 20's, and you're down to 1-cup size smaller, and past that almost exponential drop-off, as the body loses its response to hormonal fluctuations.
This sounds like a genotype of XX but with the male SRY gene translocated on one X arms. This would give you the above phenotype and infertile with most likely diminished genitalia in all areas. For a lot of slashdot readers this means that there will be smaller breasts. This is bad news for slashdotters everywhere as we will have to try twice as hard to find someone that is a normal female and is not infertile. XY females are also possible but they are caused by androgen insensitivity and lack a uterus.
No, actually, if you look at it, it's more common that it's a form of 5-alpha reductase deficiency. Or, essentially, it's an XY female, however due to decreased levels of dihydrogen-testosterone during genital development, they didn't develop masculine genitalia, and rather developed female genitalia.
None of this implies an XX genotype with SRY translocation, which would be significantly less rare than XY females. In fact, it would cause XX genotype XY phenotype, and likely not result in any infertility at all. In fact, this form of translocation is known to occur fairly often, for instance in kangaroos, the SRY gene is no longer on the "Y chromosome", and has been shown to have moved a few times. Meanwhile, the original Y chromosomes have degenerated so entirely to be entirely vestigial chromosomes essentially. It's the reason why the Y chromosome in humans and primates doesn't carry full information either anymore... the chromosome is only transmitting the SRY gene, anything else can be dropped off, but the SRY must remain there.
No, except for one (nature/hippy girl), were all girly-girls.
Insufficiently virilized "men" such that you could have sex with them and not be aware of the difference (as presumed by your statements that you don't view any of them as under virilized "men") are no less likely to be girly-girls than any other female.
[Citation Needed]
[Citation Proved by Overwhelming Anecdote]
Ok again... if fillRect(x, y, 1, 1) works to draw a single pixel, then there has to be a correct/expected behavior for a single pixel drawing.
This is as retarded as why the C++ stl string library doesn't have a case-insensitive compare. Their reason why? "Because different locales handle capitalization differently" The correct answer? "Because we can't be bothered to make the correct behavior the correct behavior by default, so we're going to push that back to the coder themselves, which is the whole reason why these people are using high-level languages in the first place so that they don't get this stupid push back from libraries of 'oh, to do that, you just do this defined algorithm, which we didn't code into the library even though it would never change.'"
Code reusability and high-level languages are supposed to provide libraries with as much static usability as possible. If there is a single correct way to handle drawing a pixel, or testing two strings for equality with case-insensitivity, even taking into account locale, THAT'S WHAT THE LIBRARY SHOULD DO.
Think of how many bugs would be avoided with i18n if my app just automatically knew that "école" and "ECOLE" were the same case-insensitive, rather than requiring _me_ to account for locale bullshit?
The fact that the function is in a different library/class/whatever than drawRect() is precisely the problem. I expect my libraries and APIs to be more or less complete.
Apples to oranges. raytracer v webserver. Further compounded by the fact that when OS X was running on G3 I ended up abandoning my mcrypt port due to endianess issues.
A webserver in Java is ridiculously easy.
If you weren't accounting for endianness in your code to begin with, then you were shooting yourself in the foot for portability in the first place.
Don't wine about portability, when you can't be bothered to take it into account.
Right, by why have a ton of draw___ but not drawPixel in the java.awt.Graphics class? Hm?
What was I thinking... you know, assuming that their libraries would actually be in the right place.
Also, how much do you use Java? If I just walked into Java, or the professor of my class just walked into Java, or the graphics guru TA for the course just walked into Java... would any of them have any idea of how to do it?
Ok, if you can't see the difference between a real liberal, and what everyone on the USA calls a liberal, then fuck it, you're right.
BTW, fuck you... you have no right to be talking shit about my life. You weren't there, you aren't aware of the facts. Stop trying to armchair quarterback my life just because I called you "stupid" or "retarded".
On top of that, it doesn't take much juggling to get your app to run on multiple platforms.
One would think, right? But it's actually NOT that much easier to get your app running on multiple platforms. I shall describe to you three projects that I wrote in C, Java, and ObjC respectively.
The first app was written in C, it was a webserver. It actually was really easy to port, because I used basic C libraries. About the only problem was that on Solaris, I had to include some libraries that I didn't on the other *nixes. The other *nixes? Linux, OpenBSD, and Mac OSX. It all worked like a charm, no cross platform issues. I have no doubt it would have run just as fine on SFU (services for Unix) on Windows, or if one had the right compiler, like djgpp, it would work just fine as well.
I wrote a raytracer in Java for a graphics course. I already had the vector class, which took care of most of the code, so most of was super easy to write. Just make a vector, cast the ray, just a bunch of math that I had already written into Vector and Matrix libraries. There was just one problem. How do you draw a pixel in Java? Oh yeah, that's right, there is no way to do it. Some implementations allow you to do a drawRect() of size 0,0, but others interpret that as a "draw nothing"... thus in order to actually draw my image correctly across Linux, OSX, Solaris, and OpenBSD, I had to draw 4 times as many pixels as I had to, by doing a drawRect large enough that it would actually draw something on each one of the OSes. And these are all POSIX systems? WTF?
Last, I got sick of the performance of my Java raytracer, as well as the inconsistent undefined behavior of drawRect() with a height/width of 0,0. So, I ported my raytracer to ObjC. I started with the vector library, things went fast, and easy. It also worked perfectly on OSX, Linux, OpenBSD and Solaris. It used SDL for the graphics (which actually has a defined behavior that allows one to draw one and only one pixel). And the standard POSIX thread library to make it multithreaded to draw even faster.
Point of all of this: The LIBRARY SPECIFICATIONS are the most important thing to be defined across the board. Any unspecified behavior in your library results in being able to write code that won't work on a different implementation of that same library. Also, without a Java VM, the java raytracer wouldn't run on that system, which means it is no better than requiring the ObjC library, and SDL library.
You, sir, can't even be bothered to realize that I'm a "ma'am"... I mean, just look at my user name.
Now, I won't presume the fallacy that just because you're stupid enough to ignore the name/gender of your opponent, that you're too stupid to even argue the point you're talking about.
I don't see how religious organizations and a concern for religious morality turns into radical liberals... Look, reactionary conservatives now are pushing the idea that the 1 man, 1 woman marriage is the most common form of marriage in the past, even though ANY anthropologist would tell you, "no, it's polygamy."
Just because they're too retarded to actually look at reality, and what they're debating doesn't mean that they're not pushing for a "return to the values and morality of our past." I think this assertion applies in a lot of cases where someone is looking to paint a particular group of people as "evil" or "wrong". FACT IS: Temperance movements were led by RELIGIOUS organizations, that preached about the EVILS of alcohol and that the world would be better if everyone didn't curse, didn't do anything on the "Sabbath" (which got moved to Sunday from Saturday, because they confused the day that Jesus resurrected for the Sabbath), and didn't drink alcohol. The idea that they would try and bring us to the same kind of ideals of even more reactionary religious groups that ban alcohol, like the Mormons, and Muslims...
Seriously, are you going to open up your eyes and stop being retarded about reality? Or are you going to acknowledge that people preaching for a return to religious piety are reactionary conservatives, and not radical liberals?
However, saying that "liberals" don't want handguns out on the street, is like saying that conservatives didn't want alcohol in the country during the Temperance movement.
I'm going to have to disagree with you there. I'd say that it was the liberals who wanted to prohibition. Conservatives tend to resist change. Liberals want to fix the world's problems by making radical changes.
LK
No, radicals want to make radical changes, liberals want change, moderates want moderate change, conservatives want little change, and the scariest, the REACTIONARIES want change back to a form time.
Prohibition was led by reactionary conservatives, _NOT_ liberals.