“It’s just a boy mind in a girl body”

Via MeFi, the touching story of a four year old girl who was sure he was actually a four year old boy and whose parents were sensible enough to believe him:

They took Kathryn to a psychologist outside of Philadelphia who specializes in treating the transgendered. Michele Angello confirmed what Jean had long suspected: Kathryn had gender dysphoria. She recommended that Kathryn be allowed to live as a boy, a prospect that filled Stephen with dread but his 4-year-old with elation.

Kathryn wanted to be called “he” right away. And Kathryn wanted to be called Talon, then Isaac, but finally settled on a permanent boy’s name in the fall. (The Post is using Tyler, the name his parents say they would have given him if he’d been born a boy.)

“When we finally let Tyler shop in the boys’ clothing department, it was like the skies opened up,” Jean said.

They switched to saying he/him/his and stopped using the name “Kathryn” at home.

It was a huge upheaval, a change Jean and Stephen had to remind themselves of every day. Then came the next challenge: telling family, friends, teachers and other parents that their daughter had become their son.

Spoiler: their family, friends and wider environment reacted admirably to this change.

Progress is made from stories like this; it wasn’t too long ago that the only newspaper articles you saw about transgendered/genderqueer people were about their horrific murders. In the last decade there seems to have been a decided swing towards acceptance of transgendered and genderqueer people, though of course they’re still some way away from even having the same sort of acceptance as gay people have now. Nevertheless, real progress has been made and one of my pet theories (it could be bunnies) is that the continuing struggle for gay marriage has something to do with this wider acceptance, in that it has kept both queer people and the idea that actually, you know, they’re rather normal people and not horrible horrible freaks leading a deviant lifestyle in front of the public consciousness. Only a committed bigot could’ve seen those pictures of happy gay and lesbian couples getting married and not felt some sympathy.

But while transgendered people are finally getting some acceptance, the idea of transgendered children is still strange for many people. Our gut instincts tell us that four year old children can’t possibly understand gender dysmorphia or being transgender, that “indulging” children in changing their gender is a bad idea, especially when such scary terms as “puberty blockers”, drugs to delay the onset of puberty to make it easier to undergo the full physical transition towards a new gender, are thrown about. That we really feel is wrong; and by we, I mean I and this squirrel in my pocket.

We’re wrong though; in the Metafilter discussion one commenter linked to this scientific study on “clinical management of gender identity disorder in adolescents”. This argues and provides some proof that yes, it is worthwhile to get younger children and adolescents to start transitioning, to put them on puberty suppressing drugs rather than start transitioning when legally and physically adults, as transitioning this way is much more likely to be successful in the short and long term both:

It is conceivable that lowering the age limit increases the incidence of ‘false positives’. However, it most certainly results in high percentages of individuals who more easily pass into the opposite gender role than when treatment commenced well after the development of secondary characteristics. This implies an improvement in the quality of life in these individuals, but may also result in a lower incidence of transsexuals with postoperative regrets or poor postoperative functioning. Clinically, it is known that some patients who were treated in adulthood regret SR because they have never been able to function inconspicuously in the opposite gender role. This holds especially for MFs, because beard growth and voice breaking give so many of them a never disappearing masculine appearance. But, since the number of ‘false positives’ should be kept as small as possible, the diagnostic procedure should be carried out with great care. Until now, no patients who started treatment before 18 years have regretted their choice for SR.

In situations like this we are inclined to treat the probability of a “false positive”, somebody who starts transition when “not really” transgendered as much greater and much more serious than the damages that are done or might be done by not allowing somebody to transition or to transition too late. We worry too much about “man bites dog” to see that “dog bites man” is much more common.

At the Edge of the Solar System — Doressoundiram & Lellouch

Cover of At the Edge of the Solar System


At the Edge of the Solar System
Alain Doressoundiram & Emmanuel Lellouch
205 pages including index
published in 2008

In 2006 the International Astronomical Union demoted Pluto, long the ninth and last planet in our Solar System from being a planet into a socalled dwarf planet, a new category not just meant for Pluto, but also a half dozen other planets that had been recently discovered at the edge of the Solar System. With the number of planets rapidly rising and estimates raging from a 200 to 2,000 more to be discovered as well as the general feeling that Pluto, only one fifth the mass of the Moon just did not fit in with the rest of the classical planets, this new categorisation was needed, halfway between true planets and asteroids or comets, now classified as small Solar System bodies.

Surprisingly for such a dry subject, the reclassification of Pluto led to a huge amount of media coverage and some controversy; many people, including myself, saw the argument as somewhat specious or had a sentimental attachment to the idea of the classical nine planets. They now were confronted with the reality of the Solar System being massively more complex than they had suspected, with our knowledge of the very edges of it having expanded massively since even the late seventies. Which is where At the Edge of the Solar System: Icy New Worlds Unveiled comes in: an introductionary text book about these discoveries and how they were made.

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Keep feeling vaccination

As the number of parents who refuse to vaccinate their children grows in the US, so does the number of pediatricians who refuse to treat them. Over at the inevitable comment thread at Metafilter, one pediatrician explains the realities of vaccination and the risk your children run if they’re not vaccinated:

Sometimes I work with families for whom the reality of the morbidity and mortality of these diseases is extremely limited. In my education, I do focus on morbidity because families will not hear that they are putting their children at risk to die. The injuries from these diseases are often more concrete, even minor injuries like the significant scarring of varicella, or persistent airway disease from pertussis. Refusing MMR exposes male children to infertility risk, all children to acquired heart defects. Refusing HiB, even if your child does not die from meningitis, will surely result in acquired neurological, cognitive, vascular, and extremity injury once heroic efforts have saved the child from meningitis death. In the case of HiB, many currently practicing providers lived through the complete horror of internship and residency in children’s hospitals’ meningitis wards where babies were dying all around them that could not be saved. My current attending talks about the weeks when HiB vaccine was, then, introduced and the wards closed up, one by one. And he gets freaking teary-eyed about it, even now. Refusing pneumococcal vaccines like Prevnar opens all of us up for more of the same–the current Prevnar 13, for example, covers for 48% of invasive meningitis.

Families do not believe they are accountable to their own children–that they answer for their scars and acquired disabilities. But they do. Injury from actual vaccine is an incredibly small and fully reported risk. Any parent can go to the CDC site, at any time, and monitor vaccine injury. But the risk of acquiring a preventable childhood disease by refusing to vaccinate is nearly certain in that child’s lifetime. It’s as if a family made the decision to let their infant lay across the backseat, unbuckled, without a carseat, because they decided they would simply just drive very carefully.

My sympathies all lie with the doctors, though I can spare some pity for those parents who, genuinely wanting the best for their children, are taken in by one of the bullshit merchants preying on their fears and insecurities, their greed masqueraded as concern. But vaccination is not new, not controversial and has been used for a long long time, has slain some of the greatest childhood killers: smallpox is gone completely, polio almost, measles in rich countries is an inconvenient childhood disease, nothing to be worried about. That very same success ironically now makes continuing vaccination programmes vulnerable to indifference as parents wonder what the point is, if these disease are gone or under control. But they are still necessary and not vaccinating doesn’t only put your own child at risk, but other people’s children too…

It’s Charlie’s world, we just live in it

Back when he was writing Halting State Charlie Stross already complained that reality was overtaking his imagined futures and with the sequel, Rule 34 this process only accelerated.

Today The Pirate Bay announced it was going into fab distribution, setting the first steps to making another of Charlie’s predictions come true:

We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.

The benefit to society is huge. No more shipping huge amount of products around the world. No more shipping the broken products back. No more child labour. We’ll be able to print food for hungry people. We’ll be able to share not only a recipe, but the full meal. We’ll be able to actually copy that floppy, if we needed one.

Incidently, one of the things Charlie predicted widespread use of 3-d printers/matter fabbers would be used for is the distribution of particularly nasty, highly illegal sex dolls. Hope this doesn’t come true too…