‘British actor Emma Corrin, who won a Golden Globe award for their role in “The Crown,” is the latest artist to advocate for gender-neutral categories at award shows.

Corrin said they “hope for a future” with gender-free awards and also called for more nonbinary, queer and trans people to have roles on screen.

“It’s about everyone being able to feel acknowledged and represented,” Corrin, who is nonbinary, told the BBC in a radio interview last week. “I don’t think the categories are inclusive enough at the moment.”’

Trans Kids Don’t Have the ‘Regrets’ transphobic TERFs and Republicans Claim

Bloomberg reports:

«A new study confirms what experts in transgender medicine have known for years: The overwhelming majority — 98% — of adolescents who begin gender-affirming treatment continue that treatment into adulthood.

The research, published in the prestigious medical journal the Lancet, adds to a large and ever-growing body of evidence that gender-affirming care, a broad term that includes physical and mental health services, is critical health care for transgender youth.»

The Dutch study  which used data from the Amsterdam Cohort of Gender dysphoria, looked at trans youth who had used puberty blockers before the age of 18. The researchers looked at to what extent they had had been prescribed gender affirming hormones after they became adults.

98% of those who had started gender-affirming medical treatment in adolescence used hormones at follow-up. I

«Continuation of gender-affirming hormones in transgender people starting puberty suppression in adolescence: a cohort study in the Netherlands.»

Charles Hamilton: the 18th century transgender man who scared the British authorities

You know the anti-trans activists who say trans people become trans because of “post-modern gender ideology”. That is nonsense. We have always had trans people among us. LGBTQNation reports on Charles Hamilton, a traveling trans man in 18th-century Somerset.

Laura Linham writes:

“On July 16, 1746, at St. Cuthbert’s Church in Wells, Somerset, Charles (or, as the parish register has it, James) Hamilton and Mary Price were married by the Reverend Mr. Kingstone.

For two months, the couple traveled through Somerset as husband and wife selling quack remedies – unproven cure-alls that often had little medical value. 

Still, on September 13, in a nearby town called Glastonbury, Mary denounced her husband to the town authorities.It turned out that Charles was missing a vital piece of equipment for Mary’s long-term happiness – a penis.“

His wife apparently did not know about his transgender nature originally, but when she found out she betrayed him.  He was arrested.

It was apparently not the fact that Hamilton dressed and worked as a man that was the problem. Nor were the authorities sure about his gender.  What really annoyed the authorities was that he had penetrative sex without having a penis. 

The Court sentenced “her, or him, whichever he or she may be, to be imprisoned six months, and during that time to be whipped in the towns of Taunton, Glastonbury, Wells and Shepton Mallet.”

It might be that he ended up in Philadelphia in the autumn  of1751, and that he worked there as a doctor and a surgeon. 

For more, read “Meet Charles Hamilton: the 18th century “female husband” who scandalized British society”

Do animals have genders? A researcher studying apes has the answer.

Some people are trying to reduce gender to biological sex, appealing to “common sense” or even “science”. This is one way of invalidating gender variance and transgender people. The fact is that gender is a common term used in animal studies. 

Both biological sex and gender are complex phenomena.

The great Dutch primatologist  and ape expert Frans de Waal puts it this way:

‘Biological sex is divided into males, females, and a small in-between category. The deeper science delves into it, the more complex sex becomes, which is why talk of the “sexual binary” is a mere approximation.

Differences between the sexes are rarely black and white, de Waal argues Rather, they show a bimodal distribution (bell curves), which means that they concern averages with overlapping areas between them:

‘For example, men are taller than women, but only in a statistical sense. We all know women who are taller than the average man, and men who are shorter than the average woman. The same overlap holds true for behavioral traits, such as when men and women are said to differ in assertiveness or tenderness.’

As far as gender goes, de Waal writes that it resists a division into two neat categories. It is best viewed as a spectrum that runs smoothly from feminine to masculine and all sorts of mixtures in between:

‘Gender is even more complex. In its most common definition, it is like a cultural coat that the sexes walk around in, a coat that changes from place to place and from time to time.

Gender is not divided into male and female, but into masculine, feminine, and everything in-between. There is great variability. Many individuals show elements of both, and some elude gender labels altogether.’

Over five decades working with apes, de Waal has known quite a few that acted atypically for their sex. These individuals form a minority, he says, but nearly every group seems to have one:

‘There are always males with less machismo than others, and always females who act tomboyish. Males who ignore the social hierarchy may be muscular giants, yet stay out of confrontations. They never reach the top, but also don’t sink to the bottom, because they are perfectly capable of defending themselves. The typical status game (and the social tensions and physical risks that it entails) is not for them.’

For more about Frans de Waal and his new book, as well as an answer to the question  “do transgender animals exist?” read my article  “Do animals have genders? Are there transgender animals? A scientist find some clues among chimpanzees.”

Illustration: Crossdreamers AI

What is a woman…really?

Both right wing extremists, religious fundamentalists and TERFs try to defend a strict gender binary by arguing that gender can be defined by genitals, chromosomes and/or gametes (sperm vs. eggs). They dismiss intersex people as insignificant outliers and trans people as.. well.. liars.

But at Laura Halls point out over at Medium, those “statistical outliers” or “insignificant exceptions”  are really not that insignificant, regardless of how few they are, simply because they prove that their pseudo-biological definition of gender excludes living and breathing men and women who do not live up to their definition. These men and women exist, ergo the definition must be wrong.

Laura Hall writes:

Rather than admitting they are wrong or that their definitions/criteria are incomplete and need work, they [the reactionaries] insist that these people are just exceptions as I said. 

The problem with this argument is that in order for it to work, you need to be able to account for why such exceptions occur. If, as conservatives do, you define what a woman is based on having XX chromosomes and the ability to give birth, you cannot account for women who do not meet one or more of these criteria as by nature, your definition is exclusionary of them.

Simply saying that these people are exceptions to your rule isn’t accounting for these exceptions and you cannot do so if you go by the rigid, pseudoscientific definitions of man and woman that conservatives use. 

Being able to account for these exceptions would be explaining why, despite an apparent contradiction with your criteria/definition of a woman, these women who do not meet the criteria are still women…

Literally the only way in which they could account for these exceptions would be to appeal to aspects of identity or the ways in which gender is assigned or assumed socially and this is where the real problem lies.

Emily Quinn is an intersex woman with XY chromosomes and (as she says) “balls”. According to the logic of transphobes she should be banned from women’s bathrooms, as she must be a man according to their definition. See: Y does not necessarily equal M: On what intersex people can tell us about gender identity

More here!

Restroom door-sign from Norway: “IT’S JUST THE SAME TO US”

Norwegian bathroom door sign saying “Samme for oss”, meaning “It is the same to us.”

Indeed, it can be that simple.

VIa Jonas Ali Ghanizadeh. 

Hydrogen and Helium, Male and Female

They tell us that there are so few intersex and transgender people in the world that their existence does not invalidate a strict sex and gender binary.

At least 99.9 percent of all atoms are either hydrogen or helium atoms. Does that mean that all the other elements can be dismissed as statistical noise?

Pink is for Boys, Blue is for Girls

In June 1918  the trade publication Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department wrote:

 “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”

In Boston, Filene’s told parents to dress boys in pink. So did Best & Co. in New York City, Halle’s in Cleveland and Marshall Field in Chicago.

Blue signified water and  calm (which is why the Virigin Mary so often was depicted in a blue dress), while pink and red symbolized fire and aggression. Pink did not become a girl’s color until the 1940s.

This is all about culture, not nature.

• Trans Express: Why was Pink for Boys and Blue for Girls?
• Smithsonian Magazine: When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?
• Jeremy Mohler: ‘Traditional’ Gender Roles Aren’t What You Think They Are

Painting by Ivan Khrutsky.

The Washington Post writes about Bette Midler, gender language, trans people and TERFs

The Washington Post has published a pretty decent article about the TERF attacks on transgender people.

The article was instigated by the panicked attacks on trans women from Macy Gray and Bette Midler.

Bette Midler parroted TERF propaganda in her tweet:

WOMEN OF THE WORLD! We are being stripped of our rights over our bodies, our lives and even of our name! They don’t call us “women” anymore; they call us “birthing people” or “menstruators”, and even “people with vaginas”!  Don’t let them erase you! Every human on earth owes you!

These are the talking points of right wing extremists, too. Apparently a few attempts to develop a more inclusive language in some selected arenas (mainly in health services) is presented as a ban of the word “woman” in general. For both religious fundamentalists and “gender critical” this is seen as a threat against imaginary natural and social orders.

This kind of propaganda is effective, too, as shown in Midler’s uninformed tweet.

I personally know of no transgender person who has argued that people should not use the word “woman”. Indeed, many of them are transgender women who want to be respected and accepted as women, so why on earth would they want to ban the word?

Anne Branigin of the Washington Post follows up the debate on inclusive language, talking to Jules Gill-Peterson, an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University (photo above).

According to [Gill-Peterson], Midler’s tweet — and the New York Times opinion piece that inspired it — are rooted in a panic over language. But that focus actually diminishes the concerns of trans people at large, Gill-Peterson said.

“My reading on the panic around gender-neutral or gender-inclusive language is that it’s basically disingenuous,” Gill-Peterson said. “I don’t think any trans organizers, advocates or trans people would name gender-inclusive language as the No. 1 most urgent issue trans people are facing in the United States.”

In recent years, many U.S. medical and governmental institutions, advocacy groups and media organizations, including The Washington Post, have moved to adopt more gender-neutral language — part of a larger, worldwide trend of making gendered language more inclusive of transgender, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people. The fight over abortion rights has magnified this effort — as well as criticism of it.

While LGBTQ advocates and allies have noted that trans men and nonbinary people also seek abortions — and often encounter systemic barriers and discrimination along the way — these same individuals and organizations have often reiterated the importance of recognizing cis women in these conversations.

In recent guidance shared on Twitter, the Trans Journalists Association wrote: “It is unnecessary to avoid the word ‘women’ by substituting phrases like ‘birthing people,’ ‘people with uteruses,’ and the like. This language can offend both transgender and cisgender people.”

Read the whole article here. It seems to be outside the paywall.