Boys Will Be Boys Or Will They

If you're born with a Y chromosome, you grow up to be a man.

If you're born with an X chromosome, you grow up to be a woman.

That's the norm.  The baseline.

But what if your own brain rejects this?

No matter the genetic and physical evidence of sex, it doesn't match your gender?  What if the genetics just confuse matters?

Now what?

We're not good at making life easy for people caught in this fine little trap.  If anything we make it harder on them than it has to be.

Don't have to tell Erin this, I'm sure.

What can we do now?  Out of basic politeness we could just go along with treating them as the gender they ID with.  That'd cure so many ills.  Essentially ignore the deviation from the norm because a guy in a dress isn't hurting you.  Even if that guy is in a dress simply because he likes dressing that way doesn't hurt you.

Being bothered by something is not at all the same thing as being harmed by something.

How do we cure such deviancy?  That's a deliberately loaded way to say it.

Especially so since abnormal and deviate mean whatever condition in its most negative light.  We never say Albert Einstein had a deviant intelligence, for example.

In a strict sense they only mean the subject does not match the baseline and assign no direction to the difference.  The terms have come to be assigned a negative direction to the difference from the norm.

A cure can be one of several things; but the big two are...

We can get the brain to accept the same gender as the sex.

We can change the body to match the brain's expectations.

Getting the brain to agree with the genetics would seem to be preferable option since it's much less invasive and poses fewer health risks.  But... thanks to a lack of understanding and some religious evangelical types, actual therapy in this direction is ineffective in many cases and downright traumatic as well.  Even the successful treatments are not certain and require some finagling to be counted as successes.

Making the body match the brain isn't really any more successful.  First there's the invasive surgery and hormone treatments.  Then when everything is "done" (and it's never all done) there's often years and years of feeling less than a whole member of the new sex.  Particularly in the case of male-to-female sex changes where the hormone therapy is screaming "GO GET PREGNANT!!" and it's just impossible.  There's a lot of post op depression and suicide.  A lot of "I went through all of that and I'm STILL not better?"

As it stands we're kind of offering a choice between Hells.

It's so much easier with science fiction.  Places like Ghost in the Shell, where you just move your mind into a fully cyberized shell of the appropriate sex to your liking.

Places where genetic medicine is such that you can have that X or Y chromosome edited to change sex.

Places where you stick you head into the therapy machine and your mind is altered and you emerge with your thoughts matching your genitalia.

Places where there's no gender, even if there are sexes.

There's a ton about gender that's just fashion.  A man wearing a skirt, is a cross dresser.  Make the skirt plaid and call it a kilt, however...  A man wearing a dress is also a cross dresser.  Make it white and put an agal on his head and it's not a dress, it's a thawb.

When you remember that the bearded lady in the flower print sun dress is not hurting you, why hurt them by being rude?

Two Things

Girls.  Don't drink until you pass out on the beach.  During spring break most especially.

Guys.  A passed out girl is not in any way a "come hither" pose.

I'd say savages here, but I'd be called a racist.  Race is incidental to the behavior.

The onus of blame is entirely on the guys.  A civilized man would have sought aid and protected the incapacitated girl.  The worst that girl should have experienced was an epic sunburn and crippling hangover from being so stupid to pass out on a sunny beach.

Thanks For Nothing Pasco County Schools

The Boy is going to an adult learning center.

It's not government, but until now has been paid for out of the funding that is provided for his attendance with the county schools.

This funding is supposed to last until he turns 24, or four more years.

Today the school district informed the learning center that they weren't going to fund the summer break.

The learning center is a $50 a day proposition for us to pay for ourselves.  I sure don't have no spare $1,000 laying around to pay for July.

I know the school gets a break on that price, they're paying less than $50 a day (like $15).

Three things really piss me off about this.

1.  They had to have known that they weren't funding The Boy since the beginning of the year.  Waiting until today was low and likely calculated to do the most harm.

2.  The Boy is SUPER excited about the stuff that is on the schedule for the summer program that is now in jeopardy.

3.  We turned down opportunities for him to attend other summer programs that are funded by SSI and private donations.  This ties into #1.  If they'd told us two months ago we'd just be having him in those programs and all would be well.

I feel shitty for mentioning it, but there's the tip jar button over there on the top right.  Fund The Boy's classes for a day and get a special warm feeling!  Honestly need funding for eight days.  The stuff he's most excited about are just two days a week and if we could get that scrapped together all would be well in The Boy's universe.

Stay In School Kids

Jim Carrey points out that over a million people have been killed by firearms since John Lennon was murdered.

By gum, he's right.

But he's skipping over some of it.  A bit more than half are suicides.  No matter how you slice it, someone who uses a gun to check-out is serious and when a gun isn't available will use other means.

But in the past 32.4 years since the death of Mr Lennon, over a million people have been killed by a firearm in the USA.  Just a bit under 31 thousand a year.

Well, Jim, got some news for you...

In the whopping 12 years of the Third Reich, they managed to off some 12 million people (and most of them in the last four years of it).  It will take us 388 years to catch up Hitler.

In four years Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge managed to at least tie our "score" and might have doubled or tripled it (unlike the NSDAP they didn't keep good records).

36 years of Stalin killed more than 40 million people in the Soviet Union.  I think we'd have to use nukes on ourselves to catch up not just rely on small arms.

Chairman Mao snuffed about 35 million people and did it in about five years.  He's got us stomped for rate.

Why do I bring up these four dictatorships, Jim?

You'll never guess what they all did before they started murdering their own people.

They took away all of the guns from the everyday citizenry.

Only One

Via Weapons Man

Guess how many pickups with innocent people inside MY AR shot up today.

Zero.

Same as yesterday, and the day before and the day before and the day before...

McThag, safer with "weapons of war" [sic] than the LAPD.

Epiphany

Reading S Weasel and she mentions that the children were just props in that pathetic shitheel's little drama.

This is very true.  Who those children were as individuals did not matter even a bit to that loser.  What mattered was what they were, defenseless children whose deaths would get the media to report about what a monster he was to grant him the gratification he couldn't achieve on his own.  Literally objectifying them.

Lo and behold, he isn't the only one!

The media and the anti-gun politicians are using those poor children in the exact same way to advance their agenda.  They don't care who those kids were as individuals.  All they care about is what those kids were, defenseless objects destroyed by their most feared deodand.

At least we publicly condemn the pathetic shitheel.

The victims were tiny people though.  People who depended on others to protect them and keep them safe.  People who were failed by the system and policies that some are wishing to apply in a "more but harder" fashion.  There were heroes that day too.  Teachers and staff who bodily placed themselves between the shitheel and their charges.  They too are people and they gave the final measure in their duty.

Blaming the deodand and not the shitheel cheapens their sacrifice and mocks their heroism.

Do Not Believe The Lies

Connecticut has banned having a loaded firearm from being on school grounds since 1992 and closed several loopholes in 1998.

Therefore it is impossible for this to have happened.

Additionally it is illegal in Connecticut to commit murder.

Since what "happened" is illegal and the method "used" is illegal it is therefore impossible that this heinous crime occurred.

Oh, wait...

UPDATE!

Connecticut has an Assault Weapon Ban!

And for the record, not a single one of MY guns fired a single shot in this tragedy and I refuse to be punished for the actions of others.

All Outta GAF

Florida has its share of hurricanes.

Florida also has more than its share of New Yorkers.

Something I noticed a couple of storms ago was how the former New Yorkers were treated by their friends and relatives who still lived up there and were visiting for the holidays.

The transplants were complaining mildly about insurance and some damages from the tropical storms the same year as Katrina.  The New Yorkers kept going on and on about what dumbfucks the transplants were for living in such a shit hole place that gets hit with hurricanes.

A couple even opined that no aid should be offered to such idiots as we who live here.  One even added that we deserved it for giving Bush the election (classy!).

This is why I am all out of give a fuck for the plight of New York City.

This, on top of the bullshit that Michael Bloomberg tries is enough to indulge in a bit of schadenfreude about NYC being pummeled worse with by Sandy than Miami was by Andrew (notice the difference in strength between those storms).

Violence And Responses To It

Joan, Jami...

Following your fine example I assume the mantle of victim.

I mentioned it here.

I was the victim of physical abuse at the hands of my fellow students in 5th through 11th grade.  In Nevada, Iowa; Ames, Iowa; and Blaine, Minnesota.

That's more than five years of being verbally and physically assaulted, nearly always by someone who was bigger and stronger than me.  The school administration(s) did nothing to prevent the attacks or punish my tormentors until I fought back, then we were punished together.

As I mentioned the abuse stopped once I made it painful for the bully.

I didn't discover some odd event that only worked in one place.  I found the cure in Nevada, just as I moved to Ames.  I found the cure again in Blaine, just as I moved back to Ames.  The cure worked again in Ames.

Not just once.  Every time.  I only won one of those fights.  My last one in Blaine.  But it moved me from the prey category the bullies prefer.  I may have only been promoted from rabbit to porcupine, but I was no longer victimized.

I've been assaulted by jocks from Iowa State University for wearing the wrong kind of shirt in "their" bar.  I've watched the campus and city police do everything in their power to avoid actually punishing the athlete and thus destroying their hopes at a professional career.  I was threatened with prosecution if I made an issue of it and pressed charges (particularly since I gave better than I got in that fight).

Every experience with being the victim of violence has convinced me that I am on my own.  That the only way to stop the attack is to make the attacker unable to continue.

I have also noticed that once is seldom enough, you have to prove you will fight back every time.

What really changed for me since high school is I am perfectly willing to teach the lesson once, and finally now.  Attacking me and my loved ones carries a death sentence now.

My wife is also a victim.  Her story is not mine to tell.  I do know that the nightmares stopped shortly after she bought her first firearm.

GRRRRRRRRRR!

Please, if you voted for President Obama, put a loaded gun in your mouth and pull the trigger.

By the way, this is a link to click on that explains why I'm just a little miffed.

I found this here.

Cold Fury has noticed as well.