Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
From a NYT article about a study of pedestrian victims:
And in 80 percent of city accidents that resulted in a pedestrian’s death or serious injury, a male driver was behind the wheel. (Fifty-seven percent of New York City vehicles are registered to men.)
& Another bullshit stereotype mowed down in traffic!
Here’s an article about gender that actually makes sense; I’m looking forward to the book, even.
“If you map the distribution of scores for verbal skills of boys and of girls you get two graphs that overlap so much you would need a very fine pencil indeed to show the difference between them. Yet people ignore this huge similarity between boys and girls and instead exaggerate wildly the tiny difference between them. It drives me wild,” Plomin told the Observer.
Again: there’s more similarity than difference between genders.
Two interesting articles about admissions and LGBT students have come across my desk recently: One is about colleges seeking gay applicants, and the other is about asking students, on the Common Application, what their orientation is.
As much as I’d rather see LGBTQ students at a college that really does welcome them, I hate anything that seems like it might be ghettoizing students. For some, their orientation is barely important; what med school they want to get into is most important.
But at the same time, that anyone’s even asking the questions means there is starting to be more consistent recognition that gender and sexual orienation are important aspects of identity.
Now if we oculd just get them to make the question about gender a blank to fill in instead of a choice that dichotimizes our genders.
Thoughts?
How terrifically sad. That poor family. 17 months old, for fuck’s sake.
He said, “I never struck the kid that hard before.” I’m overwhelmed by this guy admitting he hit the toddler before this incident, and because of why he hit him.
Yep, it sure is. There is no decent legal argument, imho, in preventing citizens from full & equal rights.
“The exclusion (of gays from marriage) exists as an artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage. That time has passed.” – U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker striking down Prop 8.
Yes, it’s an Anna Chapman doll, & it comes in two versions: The Predator, and The Spy I Could Love. (Warning: looking at their page of political action figures may make your brain hurt.)
Definitely not Barbie.
Here’s a cool article against gender essentialism by the author of Pink Brain, Blue Brain
Yes, boys and girls, men and women, are different. But most of those differences are far smaller than the Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus stereotypes suggest. Nor are the reasoning, speaking, computing, empathising, navigating and other cognitive differences fixed in the genetic architecture of our brains. All such skills are learned, and neuro-plasticity – the modification of neurons and their connections in response to experience – trumps hard-wiring every time. If men and women tend towards different strengths and interests, it is due to a complex developmental dance between nature and nurture that leaves ample room to promote non-traditional skills in both sexes.
For the record, this idea is echoed by all sorts of gender types, including myself, but the most interesting evidence is in Hyde’s Gender Similarities Hypothesis (pdf).
Aha! Finally, an explanation that makes sense:
Just as boys were once clothed in dresses, they were also once swaddled in pink. Historically, in many European countries, pink was the dominant color for boys, and blue—the official hue of the Virgin Mary—was the popular girls’ color. (emphasis mine)
which appears in an article by Brian Palmer at Slate about gendered clothing for young children, and whether or not Shiloh isn’t just a trendsetter (or retro, depending).
(Which forces me to admit: I was surprised the author of the article is male. Ah, gendered expectations always bite in the end.)
No, really, in Spain, a race was run by guys in heels who gradually added accoutrements – wigs, dresses, & lipstick – so that they finished the race crossdressed (and sweaty). No scrawny boys either.
(If anyone can translate the voiceover, please do!)
So what do you call it when a female doctor walks into a gene lab & doses all the pregnant mothers with a drug to prevent their daughters from wanting to work in “masculine” careers? Hypocrisy? Insanity? Female chauvinism? Pulling up the ladder under you?
I call it bullshit, but it’s happening. Dr. Maria New, an endocrinologist, is trying to prevent CAH in female infants, but as it turns out, the drug that prevents this masculinizing intersex condition in XX infants seems also seems to decrease incidents of lesbianism and bisexuality while simultaneously decreasing girls’ other “natural” impulses like playing with dolls and fantasizing about pregnancy and childbirth.
(Do little girls fantasize about pregnancy & childbirth? I had no idea. I never did, and I did play with dolls.)
From an article by Alice Dreger and two colleagues:
And it isn’t just that many women with CAH have a lower interest, compared to other women, in having sex with men. In another paper entitled “What Causes Low Rates of Child-Bearing in Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia?” Meyer-Bahlburg writes that “CAH women as a group have a lower interest than controls in getting married and performing the traditional child-care/housewife role. As children, they show an unusually low interest in engaging in maternal play with baby dolls, and their interest in caring for infants, the frequency of daydreams or fantasies of pregnancy and motherhood, or the expressed wish of experiencing pregnancy and having children of their own appear to be relatively low in all age groups.”In the same article, Meyer-Bahlburg suggests that treatments with prenatal dexamethasone might cause these girls’ behavior to be closer to the expectation of heterosexual norms: “Long term follow-up studies of the behavioral outcome will show whether dexamethasone treatment also prevents the effects of prenatal androgens on brain and behavior.”
In a paper published just this year in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, New and her colleague, pediatric endocrinologist Saroj Nimkarn of Weill Cornell Medical College, go further, constructing low interest in babies and men – and even interest in what they consider to be men’s occupations and games – as “abnormal,” and potentially preventable with prenatal dex:
So dex might have prevented Dr. Maria New, which right about now looks like it would have been a good idea.
I’d also like to point out right about here that, for the record, for all the people who pooh-pooh non-trans, gender variant women when we talk about being “third sexed” along with trans women, that it looks like us dykey, tomboy, uppity types are the first on the chopping block.
Still & all, Dan Savage asks an important question:
Gay people have been stressing out about the day arriving when scientists developed treatments to prevent homosexuality . . . Well, here we are—the day appears to have arrived. Now what are we going to do about it?
So what are we going to do about it?