“As an aside I have to say that my doggy LOVES the Tom Ford sample that came in this issue.”
“can your dog teach mine? She much prefers duck poop.”
Nerd that I am, I cannot resist quoting a Baudelaire poem right now. ( sorry to derail.)
THE DOG AND THE SCENT BOTTLE by Charles Baudelaire
Come here , my dear, good, beautiful doggie, and smell this excellent perfume which comes from the best perfumer of Paris.
And the dog, wagging his tail, which, i believe, is that poor creature’s way of laughing and smiling, came up and put his curious nose on the uncorked bottle. Then, suddenly, he backed away in terror, barking at me reproachfully.
“Ah miserable dog, if i had offered you a package of excrement you would have sniffed at it with delight and perhaps gobbled it up. In this you resemble the public, which should never be offered delicate perfumes that infuriate them, but only carefully selected garbage”
Ha! Our dog loves good smells and she counts musky sweet man smell at the top of that list. She is an armpit sniffer and a fresh shampoo sniffer. She marks her boys head after he shampoos after spending a good 5 minutes sniffing his head.
@psych_, I’m the one who asked your age. I had assumed you were a parent-aged person – over age 50 – and I was scratching my head over why you had gender questions at such a late age. Now that I know you’re 27, I’m not scratching my head anymore.
There are universities, public and private, in places where people are very conservative, and attitudes among faculty and students there, in part because they mostly come from the local area, reflect that. The idea that universities are these large bastions of liberalism doesn’t necessarily hold, especially with schools that either recruit from a local area that is pretty conservative, or as with religious universities like Bob Jones University, recruit kids and faculty for their beliefs. Also depends on the department, too, the University of Chicago would generally be considered a pretty liberal school by most accounts, big city school, recruits kids from all over, internationally, is non sectarian, yet its economics department is full of professors and grad students whose economic beliefs are very conservative for the most part. Even schools within a system can vary, University of Wisconsin-madison is pretty liberal, same thing might not hold for another school in the system.
There are also psych departments that are pretty gay and lesbian friendly, who have as chair of the department and more than a few members that are anti trans (Northwestern comes to mind), it all depends on the people in it and how they choose faculty and students.
There are people who end up questioning their gender later in life (50+), the whole narrative of “I always knew” is simply one narrative. A lot of things can keep feelings buried,fear can cause people to bury things,other times it comes out sideways (more than a few M to F transwomen once identified as crossdressers, thought it was just some sidelight to who they were, an alter ego, then later in life figure out it was more, for example). That doesn’t mean that there weren’t signs all along something may not have been right, just that sometimes as people get older it becomes more acute or they feel free to finally let the genie out of the bottle.
“Also depends on the department, too, the University of Chicago would generally be considered a pretty liberal school by most accounts, big city school, recruits kids from all over, internationally, is non sectarian, yet its economics department is full of professors and grad students whose economic beliefs are very conservative for the most part.”
You’re mixing up fiscal conservatism and social conservatism. Being fiscally conservative / holding conservative economic beliefs has little to no bearing on the possibility of holding liberal social beliefs.
Michael Bailey is no longer the chair of the psychology department at Northwestern – I’m pretty sure he was compelled to step down. There are still many, many older, second wave, virulently anti-trans feminists in women’s/gender studies departments around the country, some of whom refuse to put anything in their curriculum written more recently than about 1980.
I didn’t confuse the two,I wasn’t saying that the faculty and students of the University of Chicago school of economics were socially conservative because they were fiscally conservative, I was saying that if you looked at the University of Chicago as a school, a lot of people would assume that the economics department would be fiscally liberal, that is all. It is like the extreme right that complain and moan about how universities are these bastions of liberalism and that the economics departments there are all full of socialists and leftists, anti capitalist, etc and that type of person if you mentioned the University of Chicago would probably knee jerk say that it is full of socialists, too…
I didn’t know that clown finally was forced to resign, I know there was a movement to get him removed, primarily for unethical research methodology (apparently he interviewed transgender folk and didn’t both to tell them why he was doing what he was, among other things). Or was it when he had a sex demo in a class on human sexuality and husband apparently used a sex toy on his partner/wife made from a reciprocating saw? (My bet being this country, that lack of ethics regarding especially transgender subjects was probably trumped by an outrageous display of sex, lot more lurid, the latter one)
@musicprnt, I would never make that assumption about economics at the U of C, since a) who has not heard of Milton Friedman, and b) I was a grad student there.
In addition, I specifically referenced Psych departments. Not Econ, Women’s Studies, or anything else. One expects psychology departments in this day and age–as I specified–to have a more nuanced view of the human experience than your average guy on the street. (And not to be rigidly Freudian or whatever.)
From earlier threads, I understood that @Psych_ was at a reputable public university, with a top grad dept in the field, not a place like Bob Jones.
I think you are operating on a false premise here. Viewing gender expression as a continuum does not deny the existence or validity of ANYONE who is ANYWHERE on that spectrum.
I am at a public university in a very reputable program, with generally nice, relatively progressive faculty and students. Many–but not all–of them are just openly homophobic/transphobic. If you knew where I go to school (which I’m not saying, for obvious reasons), people would probably go “oooh, yeah, that makes sense.” They are good people and excellent scholars, so I don’t begrudge them their beliefs, even if those beliefs do make my life difficult at times. It’s an odd place, but like I said, I’ve had a really positive experience here in terms of growing as a scholar and scientist. It’s not the optimal social environment/most bustling town (and that sentiment is widely shared), but I’ve made some good friends, too.
I actually don’t begrudge Bailey the premise of his work, although the ethical issues in his research are questionable. I research hot-button issues myself (sexual assault, factors that influence the acceptability of suicide, interpersonal violence, etc–my research is kind of grab bag of horrible things! ), and I’ve had people tell me that researching things like violence and suicide meant that I am insensitive to the people who have lived it and don’t care about them. To me, nothing could be further from the truth (I research these topics because I care about the people who go through them), but I always try to keep myself aware of how emotionally charged what I research is, and it’s the people who are directly affected by whose reactions mean the most to me. That said, I think science should be as objective as possible, and that we shouldn’t restrict research questions just because the topics make us uncomfortable. On the flip side, researchers should be willing to re-consider and reform their opinion in light of empirical evidence to the contrary–something Bailey seems to have stubbornly refused to do from what I’ve read. (As an aside, his son is apparently a professor of developmental psychology who researches sex/gender differences in mathematical and educational achievement. His CV is pretty good.)
@musicprnt, I did a poor job of stating my position. I do believe that non-binary/neutral genders can be a thing (although research in this area appears non-existent, so as a scientist I’m like “data! we need data!”), just that what I’m questioning/how I feel doesn’t seem to fit with that at all. Sorry for my lack of clarity.
@veryhappy, By all means, feel free to scratch your head. I’m certainly scartching mine!
Viewing gender as a continuum doesn’t necessarily invalidate anything, but there are a lot of people who view gender on a continuum and as such basically claim that therefore, since we are all somewhere on the continuum, that there should be no reason to transition, being transgender is invalid since gender is fluid and so forth. I didn’t argue gender is on a continuum, I said there are more than a few people who use that to as an argument to claim that being trans is a fallacy, that we are all blends so enjoy exploring your gender expression, etc…An example might be how someone views their birth genitals, there are people who identify as trans who have no desire to change their birth genitals, they are okay with them, but otherwise identify as male or female, they might be in the continuum, whereas someone else can’t wait to get GRS.
The kind of person has a parallel in the world of sexual identity. There is the infamous Kinsey scale, where people were on a scale of 1-6 or something like that, 1 is totally gay let’s say, 6 is totally straight, and what research showed was that a lot of people are not 1 and 6…those who claim homosexuality is a choice glom onto that, and say “well, if a person is 2 (mostly gay), they very well then could find someone of the opposite sex and marry them, since relatively few are a 1 who identify as gay” (this leaves out, of course, that in practical reality a 2 would have almost zero attraction to someone of the opposite sex, the way a 5 would have little towards the same sex, among other things). There are more than a few academic types who have made that argument, mixing the continuum with the idea that gender is a construct, to argue that trans folks aren’t real, since gender is not a binary so why would they want to transition? In reality, a lot of people in the continuum in fact are perfectly happy gender blending and blurring and so forth, but there are many who like their ‘normally gendered’ counterparts, are at the binary or close to the ends of the binary spectrum, where their birth gender doesn’t match their brain gender. I didn’t say binary gender was the only reality, I said that binary gender is very real to a lot of people, even if technically they fell in between, their identity was binary, that’s all.
There was a blurb on the local news channel when I was at my dentist’s office, that the NJ senate and assembly are trying to get a bill passed that would allow amending birth certificate gender designation without having to get GRS (NJ changed the law in 1984 to allow amending BC’s if someone had GRS). They have been trying to get this one through for a couple of years, Christy (not surprisingly) vetoed the last time they tried back in December, supposedly because he claimed it would lead to fraud and so forth (how, I don’t know, because the bill he vetoed specifically said that a person applying to amend their BC needed all kinds of proof that they had undergone medical treatment and so forth, I would assume probably chemical castration and having worked with doctors and such willing to certify their status). On the other hand, it took the DMV years to realize that a lot of trans people never get GRS, either because of cost or health issues, and that having the wrong gender on a driver’s license was cruel and discriminatory. Hopefully whatever they are passing now will meet his bloated excellencies criteria, but I wouldn’t hold my breath, either.
My sympathy is with anyone who struggles with their weight, I am not exactly skinny but I have no sympathy at all for Chris Christie, he is a nasty jerk, he is one quick to bully others, and it just came out that he and his buddies at a sporting event ended up putting away something like 63,000 dollars of public money on food and drink (this from a person decrying government waste, mind you, and calling social safety net programs, including school lunch programs for poor kids, ‘waste’). Not to mention in light of this thread he is not exactly been a friend to lgbt people, he and his wife are ardent Catholics who did everything in their power to stop same sex marriage from passing, and i suspect he will veto any bill extending the right to change birth certificates for transgender people who don’t do GRS.
For all those who were fretting about airbrushing and unrealistic ideals, Caitlyn’s wrinkles look pretty natural in the photos within the piece. Her hands, neck, mouth lines and crow’s feet look like an authentic 65. The photos look very different in the actual magazine than they do when seen online.
), and I’ve had people tell me that researching things like violence and suicide meant that I am insensitive to the people who have lived it and don’t care about them. To me, nothing could be further from the truth (I research these topics because I care about the people who go through them), but I always try to keep myself aware of how emotionally charged what I research is, and it’s the people who are directly affected by whose reactions mean the most to me. That said, I think science should be as objective as possible, and that we shouldn’t restrict research questions just because the topics make us uncomfortable. On the flip side, researchers should be willing to re-consider and reform their opinion in light of empirical evidence to the contrary–something Bailey seems to have stubbornly refused to do from what I’ve read. (As an aside, his son is apparently a professor of developmental psychology who researches sex/gender differences in mathematical and educational achievement. His CV is pretty good.)