And so, it happens again

I shouldn't be surprised. And really I'm not. I'm just sad.

A college freshman jumped off a bridge, after his roommate posted a video of him making out with another man.

I could say a lot of things here, about stupid people not understanding the potential consequences of their actions, about the complete impropriety of videotaping someone who doesn't know they're being filmed. I could rail about homophobic bastards being cruel, or about people who think homosexuality is just a cheap joke to throw out for an easy laugh. I could get on a high horse and talk about human decency and how it's been lost in the internet age, or I could come up with cheap platitudes about how this should be a lesson to us all to treat each other with kindness.

But none of it would make a bit of difference. Because the kid's already dead.

He's only one of hundreds of gay teens who kill themselves every year. And until our entire society opens its eyes and collectively says "what the fuck are we doing wrong?" it's going to continue.

Books

An incredibly long time since I've posted anything here. Being back in the US makes it difficult to make internationally-themed observations, and I've been too damn busy for the past few months to make posts. But I'm back on, in the name of literature, because I started reading a new book that criticizes one of my favorite books, and this is naturally something that interests me enough to write about.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides is quite possibly one of my favorite books ever. An intersexed protagonist, an adventurous journey, the stories of multiple generations in a family woven together, an immigration tale...I thought it was a masterpiece when I first read it, and I gave copies to several people before coming out to them, if I wasn't entirely sure how they would react. Middlesex is in many ways the book I want to write and the book I wish I'd written. Imagine my surprise, reading another gender-related book, to find that my esteem was not universal.

I've just started reading Intersex (for lack of a better word), which I had picked up months ago when Lambda Rising closed (depriving DC of its resident gay bookstore and leaving a hole in the pattern of my wanderings around Dupont Circle). The book is set up as a set of mini-stories and essays, and one of the first ones has to do with Middlesex.

She opens by saying:

"People keep asking me about Jeffrey Eugenides' new novel Middlesex because the main character is considered a hermaphrodite and so am I. But really, neither of us are. Outside of myth, there are no hermaphrodites. It is physiologically impossible to be both fully male and fully female."

I was a bit confused by this opening. Last I checked, "hermaphrodite" meant possessing the external sex characteristics of both genders, to a greater or lesser degree. I checked with the online dictionary, and found these definitions.

hermaphrodite her·maph·ro·dite (hər-māf'rə-dīt')
n.
An individual having the reproductive organs and many of the secondary sex characteristics of both sexes.


her·maph·ro·dite
   /hɜrˈmæfrəˌdaɪt/ Show Spelled[hur-maf-ruh-dahyt]–noun
1.an individual in which reproductive organs of both sexes are present. Compare pseudohermaphrodite.
2.Biology . an organism, as an earthworm or plant, having normally both the male and female organs of generation.
3.a person or thing in which two opposite qualities are combined.


Nothing in those definitions indicates that one would have to be "fully" both genders to fall into the category of "hermaphrodite." But this is a dictionary, and not even a medical one, and WebMD was remarkably silent on the subject. But clearly the word has non-dictionary revealed subtext, or the author wouldn't be so "fuming and hot with shame as [Eugenides] called me and people I love hermaphrodites."

I admit, I hadn't realized that the term was offensive until I read that. To me it had always been a medical term, distinguished from the term intersex as indicating morphology, rather than hormones or genetics. Creating further complication, there are people who actually do identify with the term hermaphrodite in its medical sense, as indicated by this short page on "Being a True Hermaphrodite."

The author of Intersex accuses Eugenides of having "never actually talked to an intersex person before he published that book," and I don't know if that's actually true or not. She further accuses him of "being yet one more person profiting off the selling of intersex people as freaks of nature." I would disagree with that statement. When I read Middlesex, I thought that Eugenides did an excellent job of making Cal the protagonist three-dimensional and human, not a freak at all. But then, I'm not intersexed, so what do I know? Maybe I'm just one more ignorant person projecting my views onto the world. Or maybe the real anger in the essay has less to do with Middlesex as a book, and more to do with the fact that the book that drew attention to the intersex population was written by a normal heterosexual male.

The main thing this essay teaches me is that I need to be careful. In my own writing, I'm working on a story with a transgendered protagonist. I don't want it to be said that I'm "exoticizing" gender variance. Truth be told, I don't find it that exotic. Interesting, yes. Exotic, no. I've had friends and acquaintances all over the gender continuum, enough to know that, aside from their relation to the binary, they're people like any others. But again, because I'm not trans myself, there's always that danger, in the event of my writing becoming successful, that I'll be seen as speaking for or about a population that I don't actually belong to. If and when I ever finish this particular project, I fully plan to run it by my trans friends, to make sure that it passes muster. But I still have to wonder if, someday down the line, someone will write a similarly angry piece about my writing, because I had the audacity to write something that they had not yet dared.

An Amazing Project

A month or so ago, I found out that there's a new version of Our Bodies, Our Selves in the works, through their blog. They wanted to be sure that they included some LGBT perspective, so I filled out their questionnaire. I figured I should do my part to have gay and genderqueer women represented in the puberty/women's health bible.

Then I found this. Awesomeness upon awesomeness. It's a resource guide of the Our Bodies, Our Selves variety, put together by a completely different team of people, and focused completely on trans and genderqueer issues. Identity, body stuff, legal stuff, it will all be in there. And that's amazing. If I had found a book like that at a library when I was fifteen it probably would have clarified a lot of things for me. I'm so happy that someone is finally putting something like this together. I added my two cents to the survey, and I'll probably submit cameos to
a few of the chapters as well.

The fact that a book like this can even be conceived is a sign that genderqueer people are actually beginning to be recognized as people now. The demographic is recognizable and extant and has purchasing power. This makes me incredibly glad.

Standards of Education

In Texas, a conservative constituent has succeed in passing a new set of standards for education, according to the Huffington Post. This isn't the usual evolution vs creationism debate. It actually avoids biology, as near as I can tell. This one focuses on history, economics, and sociology.

Some gems? The religious backgrounds of the Founding Fathers will be addressed, but not the reasons behind the separation of church and state. Kids will be required to learn about John Calvin, but not Thomas Jefferson. And they will also be required to learn that the free market economy works best without government interference.

Now, I have no problem with talking about the faith of the Founding Fathers. Certainly many of them had deeply held religious beliefs. But they also, had strong philosophical beliefs founded in the ideas of the Enlightenment. These philosophies about the rights of men and about individual freedom of conscience had an equal if not greater influence on the formation of the Constitution than did any religious ideas. Likewise, John Calvin is a very important historical figure, and it's certainly good to know about him, but why on earth should a British religious reformer be taught at the expense of an American intellectual? Isn't it American history that we're teaching? And as far as the free market goes, yes, it does seem to be the most profitable economic system that we've come up with so far. But it's also brought us things like Enron, which clearly point to a need for significantly more market regulation than a pure free market philosophy would advise.

It could be worse, though. One of the amendments that fortunately got struck down was one that suggested that the civil rights movement created "unrealistic expectations for equal outcomes." The fact that anyone would even think about making that statement part of a generation's educational standards is seriously bile-inducing. "No, kiddo, all these people marching for their rights...they're not actually oppressed, they just think they are! Someone should just tell them what their place is so they don't get any unrealistic ideas..." Bleh.

Really, my main problem is that education should not be so politically driven. I understand the concept that you have to "get them while they're young" if you want kids to later subscribe to almost any ideology. But what about the idea of an actual education? What about educating kids so that they'll actually learn to think well about different ideas and later do well in college? Isn't that supposed to be the point of education in general? That should be more important than which historical figures you include or exclude, and it should prohibit you from only teaching certain facts about an event or period in history while willfully ignoring others. Intellectual honesty, people. I don't care what you choose to believe based on your analysis of the facts. I just want to know that you actually have the facts, all of them, and that you're actually, amazingly, using your ability to think.

What Sex is Your Brain?

Today, salon.com posted an article about brain sex, including a link to a quiz powered by the BBC. Naturally curious, I took the quiz to determine whether or not my brain is male or female.

The quiz consists of six sections, each of which is supposed to determine a different aspect of your brain's gender. Part one of the test measures your ability to match different angles, generally considered to be a more male ability. Part two asks you to clasp your hands together and then indicate which thumb is on top, which theoretically tells you which side of the brain is dominant. Part three test your ability to "empathise and systemize," and part four tests your ability to recognize emotions based on pictures of peoples' eyes. Part four asks you to measure your fingers, part five asks you to compare different faces for overall attractiveness, and part six asks you to rotate 3D shapes in your mind.

My result? Completely gender neutral. Big surprise. Behold: I'm smack dab in the middle.



While I'm gratified to find that there's semi-scientific evidence that backs up my general feelings of genderfuck, I have to question certain aspects of the test. The segments testing the ability to recognize angles and mentally rotate complex objects are fairly straightforward and standard, and the word association section is badly designed but otherwise not problematic.

Some of the other sections, though, are pretty dubious. Mainly I have to question two: the finger length and the attractiveness scale tests. Finger length definitely says something about prenatal hormones: most straight men and lesbians have a longer ring fingeer than index finger, and most straight women and gay men have longer index fingers than ring fingers. I certainly have classic lesbian fingers, and I can see the value in looking at finger length as part of overall gender development. But I question the place of finger measurements in what is otherwise an almost wholly cognitive test. Likewise I question the right-side/ left-side dominance test as determined by which thumbs you cross. It doesn't seem to take into account right- and left-handedness, which to the best of my knowledge are evenly distributed between the genders.

Beyond the finger tests, I have to question the attractiveness test. In this test, the subject is asked to differentiate between several similar faces and indicate which one they find most attractive. According to the results, I prefer more "feminine" features. Well enough. But through that whole section, I was thinking that none of the people photographed were people I'd be likely to ask on a date. And because the pictures were photoshopped to emphasize or de-emphasize certain features (to be more "masculine" or "feminine," though I don't know how they define those terms), I generally found the photos that had been tinkered with the least to be the most attractive. So the data may be skewed.

I do find gender differences fascinating. And I would love to see a more in-depth and expansive study or self-quiz to determine how peoples' brains are gendered. As salon says, this is your average Cosmo-type quize, only with a dash of science thrown in. When they come up with a quiz that's more science and less Cosmo, I'll be very interested to see the results.

Also on the Mental Health Front...

They've finally admitted that the study linking MMR vaccines and autism was flawed, and have retracted it. It's about damn time.

Fish for Brains

A new study in Austria has shown that adolescents and young adults who are in danger of mental illness develop far fewer psychoses, and are less inclined towards psychotic breaks, when they take fish oil supplements. It makes sense. Omega-3 fatty acids are the building blocks of the brain and neural systems. We need lots of them in our diets for our nervous systems to function properly, and most peoples' modern diets don't include nearly enough of them. Most snack foods in general contain Omega-6 fatty acids, which are also important, but not used nearly as much in the brain. It's ironic, but in our fat-filled diets, we're not getting the fats we need.

Thr irony of the modern US is that we have so much food available, but so much of it is nutritionally unsound. It is entirely possible, in our world, to be both obese and malnourished. Who would have thought? And while we struggle with our waistlines, we're also screwing up our brains. I've discovered, over the past several years of pescatarian traveling, that food has a profound effect on mood and behavior. It's not just that hungry people are grumpy. That goes without saying. In Morocco, where my diet consisted mostly of overcooked-in-oil carrots and potatoes plus bread, I gained weight and felt listless much of the time. I generally got my energy and enthusiasm back in Essaouira, where I could at least, hamdulilah, get fish. While the presenece of variety in my diet was certainly exciting, I think that the effect of protein plus Omega-3's on my system was what really made a difference. In other countries I felt similar diet-based changes. Much as I loved the Czech Republic, the constant diet of fried cheese and potatoes nearly killed me.

Now, back in the US, I'm faced with the dilemma of being broke and needing to husband my resources as much as possible until I've acquired a steady income. Though there have been days when I've subsisted on cereal bars and bananas, I've discovered that it's much better to eat as well as I can afford to, because the health payoff is exponential. It's actually not that hard to do. Canned seafood has improved significantly from what I remember in childhood, and can be added to soups and sauces to provide those important proteins and Omega-3's. Lentils are ridiculously cheap, contain protein, and can be used to make soup. Kale and collard greens both hover around 99 cents a pound, and it takes a hell of a lot of them to make a pound, so you can have fresh vegetables regularly even on a budget (and they taste better than you think). The more I learn about diet and health, particilarly mental health, I realize that I can't afford not to eat well. As long as fresh veggies and some variety of seafood are available in some combination, I will eat them. It's important to feed your brain.