New Brain Study Reinforces Neurobiological Explanation of Being Transgender

Dec2

A new brain study was released that shows human brains are a mosaic of male and female structures. A few people have tried to use this study to discredit all the other studies that have identified specific differences in male and female brains, and how transgender people have brains that are more like the gender with which they identify than the gender assigned at birth.

MTF_Brain_Scan_differences

Let’s remember this slide for a moment, ok? Don’t lose sight of this image on this slide.

The new study, The brains of men and women aren’t really that different, study finds, does not say that male and female brains are identical. It says they are extremely similar and that any male or female brain has a large mix of more male or more female structures. In addition, this study looked at the overall brain, at the topology of the total brain to reach its conclusion.

Now interestingly, this study actually reinforces the existing neurobiological research into transgender brains thus far. How can it do that? Because it shows how similar male and female brains are, and what that means is you don’t have to have a “completely female” brain to be an MtF trans woman or a “completely male” brain to be an FtM trans man.

Instead, this study further enhances that it is only a few small critical structures, just like the BSTc in the slide previously that which is tiny! It’s inside the hypothalamus, which itself is about the size of a peanut. And then it’s inside the stria terminalis, which is a small structure inside the hypothalamus itself. And then the difference is in the bed nucleus, which is inside the stria terminalis which is inside that tiny hypothalamus. And we already know from other studies that this region of the brain appears to be linked to gender identity and somewhat also towards sexual orientation.

So the studies done to date do not contradict the neurobiological thesis for being transgender. In fact, this study further enhances that work by showing how small the changes can be that lead one to feeling gender identity dysphoria.

When people try to argue that this study disproves a biological basis for being transgender, refer them to my comments here. This study reinforces the neurobiological model.

I will add here, a diagram from the TED Talk of one of the scientists involved in this study. The brain itself is neither male nor female. It’s always a mosaic of structures. But the mosaic consists of a mixture of male and female structures. And every human brain is like this. So rather than having a “female” brain or a “male” brain, what matters are those few individual structures that control sense of gender identity.

IntersexBrains

LGBT Republicans, Stop Giving Me The ‘Single Issue’ Excuse

Oct25

DestructionOfMiddleClass

I often ask LGBT Republicans why they vote for the GOP despite the GOP’s open hostility towards LGBT people. The answer is usually something along the lines of “I’m not a single issue voter!” Well, let’s look at that utter nonsense, shall we?

Economically, since 1980, tax rates on the wealthy have steadily fallen due to Republican influence. If tax cuts created jobs, we should be swimming in them, but we’re not. Instead, as the chart on the right shows, Republican led economics, since 1980, have led to the shrinking of the middle class. It’s a documented fact that the economy always does better under Democratic presidents than Republican ones.

Then there’s the deficit. Republicans love to scream about the deficit. But who are the only presidents in the last 50 years to reduce the deficit? Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, both Democrats.

And discussion of the deficit leads to discussion of the national debt. Who tripled the national debt? Ronald Reagan. Who was on course to double the national debt before he lost a second term? The elder George Bush. Who did double the national debt? The younger George Bush. And the younger George Bush did that with a completely Republican Congress after being handed a balanced budget that was paying down the national debt under Bill Clinton.

How, in the face of these facts, can any person believe anything the GOP says about economics? HOW? What sort of twisted mental outlook does it take to lie to yourself to convince yourself that you should vote for these failures and liars?

ExecutiveOrdersAnnuallyByPresidentRepublicans scream about Obama issuing executive orders, but he’s issued the lowest annual rate of executive orders since Grover Cleveland! Here is a chart showing the number of executive orders issued per year and Obama in no way issues more than Republicans. So that’s another lie.

And the orders Obama has issued have largely been because Republicans have refused to work with a president elected by massive popular vote as a means of punishing the entire nation for daring to reject their right wing extremist views!

When do you, as Republicans, stop and look at reality and realize that it is your party that is being obstructionist? That it is your party that is exhibiting every sign of racism imaginable? That it is your party that wants to institutionalize bigotry against LGBT people’s civil rights as some sort of “religious freedom”?

So economically, everything about the GOP has been a lie and destructive to you, the middle class voter. Every single thing. Have they been right ever about anything? Can Republicans ever even tell the truth economically?

Then there’s the false bogeyman of “gun control”. LGBT people who vote based on this single issue wrongfully claim that Democrats want to ban all guns. Nothing could be further from the truth. Howard Dean made the case several years ago that extremism (notice that word?) about gun control was a losing political issue, so the Democratic party looked at that and realized it was true, and walked away from that. Yet the Republicans still try to throw that charge against Democrats even as they try to ignore mass shooting after mass shooting. Even as they try to ignore massive levels of gun violence among our poor (and largely minority) communities. Yet the GOP continues to push absurd notions like every teacher being a walking armory rather than other measures that have worked in other nations. But nothing demonstrates that hypocrisy like the NRA’s own convention where guns were banned. I wonder why they did that, hmm?

Then there’s the issue of voter suppression. The GOP works tirelessly to enact laws that are aimed at suppressing would-be Democrats (poor minorities and women) from voting. They’e even admitted this. Here’s a collection of public Republican statements about the real effects and real intentions of “voter id” laws: Unbelievable GOP Statements on Voter Suppression

And yet despite openly saying that, Republican voters refuse to listen to what their own party leaders admit, and cling, irrationally, to the idea that voter id laws will clean up some non-existent voter fraud problem.

Then there’s the War Of A Thousand Lies. Iraq was the war where Republicans proved, over and over and over again, that they will lie about anything to start a war to make their corporate buddies rich. And that’s what happened. Cheney’s Halliburton raked in $35 billion alone from the Iraq war. And those nearly 1000 lies? They killed over 4000 Americans, wounded another 30,000+ Americans, and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians. There’s no morality that can excuse what the GOP did to get us into the Iraq war or excuse the human costs of the Iraq war.

Then there’s the truth that the GOP has introduced over 120 anti-LGBT bills this year at the state and local levels around the United States. How many have Democrats introduced? Zero. The GOP hates you if you are LGBT. And thinking you can change the GOP from within? How’s that working out for the Log Cabin Republicans? In the 1970s, the GOP didn’t even care about LGBT people. They weren’t for us, but they were not rabidly against us. But today they are foaming at the mouth against LGBT people everywhere, trying to pass laws that would institutionalize bigotry against LGBT people, and yet some of you vote Republican?

I could go on and on, but I won’t. Voting Republican as an LGBT person is an act of insanity. Don’t give me the “single issue” voter excuse and dismiss me being LGBT as my reason for voting Democrat.  I vote Democrat because Democrats are not war mongers, because Democrats are good for the economy, because Democrats want to improve and enforce reasonable restrictions on buying and owning guns, because Democrats have actually been good at controlling and even reducing the national debt, because Democrats want you to have health care, because Democrats believe you should not retire in poverty.

Voting Democrat as an LGBT person doesn’t make me a single issue voter. It makes you positively insane for believing all those Republican lies when the plain facts in front of your face tell you they are not true.

So what excuse do you have now for voting Republican? It’s sure not a “single issue, LGBT” excuse, is it?

A Public Service Announcement About Facebook, Network Connections, and Bad Programming

Sep22

Facebook is an amazing social media experience but technologically, it’s a pile of crap. And it’s not the only pile of crap out there either. A lot of work has gone into making the HTTP/HTTPS protocols useful as “live” protocols when they never intended as such. HTTP/HTTPS were always intended to grab static content and deliver it for viewing, not interaction.

But this is like VHS and Betamax. VHS was worse but it won that war. The world wide web now sits atop a mess of HTTP/HTTPS code that is really problematic and often unnecessary, and which often has unintended side effects.

Case in point – I recently lost access to my Facebook account. Every time I tried to login, pages would not successfully load. I checked all sorts of things, flushed browser caches, tried four different browsers on four different machines. None of this helped. I could login to a different account fine on a given machine but not into my account.

A friend came along and mentioned that she had similar issues before and solved them by going into Settings, choosing the Security tab, then choosing “Where You’re Logged In”. Since I couldn’t even login, I wasn’t sure this was helpful, but I persisted and I finally managed to login to my account on Chrome on my HTC One smart phone. When I did, I was shocked. There were a large number of sessions, from all sorts of places. One was from the Atlanta airport in 2013 – more than two years ago! Yet Facebook still counted this as an “open” session and apparently was trying to keep it alive.

I began killing clearly old sessions. After whittling that number way down to just the few machines I use around my house, I tried to login from my desktop PC again. It worked. The laptop worked. And while I don’t always do that, it worked logging in from my work laptop as well.

So I am making this post as a public service announcement, and for myself as well. I want to preserve this reminder on somewhere other than Facebook so I can get the specifics again, should I ever need it again.

But I will also try to avoid that and periodically check my open session count, just to be sure it doesn’t end up crazy huge again either.

September 7th, A Day To Remember

Sep7

Selfie_20150906-resized

It was 19 years ago today, September 7th, that I was wheeled into surgery to remove the remains of a tumor that had been destroyed by months of chemotherapy. Prior to that chemotherapy, I had been about 195 pounds. By the end I was around 140, and honestly probably more in the 130s. By the end of chemotherapy, most days were enough time awake to eat, maybe watch a single TV show or two, and then sleep, 20-22 hours per day. And then I was told the tumor was dead.

Chemotherapy was over in mid-July of 1996. I was given basically 6 weeks to gain a little strength, then the surgery would ensure that the remains of that tumor were gone.

What was supposed to be a 4 hour surgery became 10. The tumor had apparently been wrapped around my aorta and in dying to the chemo, it had become this rock hard substance. My surgeon visited me later and apologized for the extra time but said he was literally chipping that stuff off my aorta, like flakes of cement.

The tumor had also been wrapped around the nerve to the left vocal cord. That nerve is a bit weird and shows how evolution does things, not always in the most sensible way. That nerve comes from the spine, over to the heart first, then back up to the left vocal cord. There was no way to separate the remains of the tumor from that nerve so it got cut.

This left me unable to speak since the left vocal cord was flaccid and unable to flex to meet the right cord, since no neural signals could now reach it. To correct that, a plastic implant was inserted in that vocal cord in another surgery in early November of 1996. I still have slight numbness in my hands and feet from chemotherapy. My scalp was ravaged by chemotherapy and never really recovered. And my hearing, already a 20 decibel loss in my good right ear, became a 50+ decibel loss and I finally admitted that I needed a hearing aid.

Despite all this, I survived. But this all also made me think very hard about myself, who I was, what I’d done to myself emotionally and psychologically to get to where I was then. I also got to see my children graduate from high school, get married, go to college, have children of their own. It took me another 8 years, to about 2004, to really learn about and understand the words transsexual and transgender but I’d bought into another lie – that if I hadn’t transitioned early, I couldn’t transition at all. It was six more years after that, 2010, that the mother of all dysphoria episodes began that simply would not relent and which drove me to the brink of suicide, before I finally admitted I needed help, and with prodding from Julie Jeznach, I finally sought that help.

The rest, as they say, is “herstory”. People to whom I gave my life, my time, my love, my earnings, have rejected me. That’s their choice and I have to accept that, but it’s still bitter. And knowing what I know today, I can honestly say that I do have regrets. We’re not supposed to have regrets and I know that I can’t change the past so I don’t plan to wallow in these regrets at all. But I do acknowledge them. And if I’d known 30 years ago what I know now, I would have just walked away instead of worrying about other people’s emotions and opinions.

So I write this today with my younger trans friends in mind. Being trans can suck. People can be ugly, cruel, callous, hateful. But we’re trans and we can’t escape that truth. My advice to you, to each of you, is make your decisions for yourself first. Anyone who can’t handle the decisions that you need to make for you neither loved you nor is your friend so is not worthy of your consideration of their opinions.

While I am very happy with where I am in life right now, in one sense, I write this today to my younger trans friends to say “Don’t be me.” Don’t put others ahead of yourself. Don’t defer what you need to be happy to make others happy first. Most of the time they won’t care about you. Not really. And those that do care? They’ll have your back and be there for you.

Have a good September 7th, a good Labor Day, and a good day for yourself first and foremost.

Notes about the Bangkok Rama Hotel (Baansiri) During My Stay In Thailand

Aug24

Regarding the trip to Thailand, I chose to stay at Baansiri, the Bangkok Rama Hotel, in the cottages in back. The first two weeks there they seemed to have issues with their WiFi which were annoying but I was also not there 4 of those days anyway. Once they got the issues fully resolved, I had only rare hiccups with their WiFi.

The food at the restaurant of the hotel was relatively inexpensive compared to other places (and most places were far less expensive than the US anyway) and was quite good. Being at the hotel, we were provided breakfast coupons to get breakfast for free if we so wished. Lunch and dinner we either had to purchase somewhere, such as the restaurant or elsewhere, or cook our own, which we did a fair bit of as well.

The cottages are fairly basic. If you want to be pampered you might choose the Dusit Princess instead, but I was more than pleased with the cottages and the close proximity to so many other of Dr. Chettawut’s patients. We spoke often, exchanged information, contacts, and shared food and drink on occasion. One of the women chose to not offer contacts as she said she was essentially going stealth after her return to Europe. She was witty, funny, and I’d have liked to have known her better but I understand her choice.

If you have a functioning phone when you get to Bangkok, consider downloading the Food Panda app. You can order from a huge number of local restaurants and have it delivered to your cottage.

Outside the hotel, immediate to the left of the grounds, is a nice little sandwich shop. We enjoyed that. Immediately to the right was a Seven Eleven and then several small local restaurants or other shops, such as a bakery.

About four blocks down to the right you will come to a large concrete bridge going over the street for pedestrians. On the other side of that is a shopping plaza that has a small replica “Big Ben” clock and English themed shops. Across the same parking lot on that far side of the street is Tesco Lotus, a very large store, much like a Target here in the US. It has a grocery area, clothing, house supplies, cosmetics, toys, appliances, etc. Inside the same building as Tesco Lotus are a few shops, such as a bookshop and several bakeries, candy stores, etc. There are also three or four banks inside the Tesco Lotus building, which can give you the most current exchange rate for your dollars to Thai Baht exchanges.

The Bangkok Rama is on the north side of a “loop” and Dr. Chettawut’s office is on the complete opposite side *(south side) of that loop, about 15 minutes away. On the east side of that same loop sits the Dusit Princess. I had a friend staying there who arrived two weeks before me so we stopped by there to visit. Right next to the Dusit Princess is the Seacon Mall (I think that’s the name) which is a very large and interesting mall if you are looking for that sort of shopping.

I was not physically up to it, but my traveling companion took one day near the end of the trip to take the 10 hour round trip and excursion out to the Tiger Temple. She got me some well appreciated souvenirs and her photos just make me want to return someday to see the tigers, both adults and cubs.

If you have questions about the Bangkok Rama, feel free to ask. If I think of anything else to add, I will. The facilities were comfortable and I experienced no serious issues post-operatively while there nor yet at home (knock on wood).