Posts made by astriom

Here's my two cents on the whole transgender bathroom issue:

Stop asking how people identify. Stop making gender exclusive bathrooms.

There will always be Cartmans in this world trying to take advantage of a controversial subject for their own gain. All you can do is weed them out when you find them and stop giving them the attention or special treatment they are looking for. In any case, you should not be holding people who really do feel this way accountable for the people who only pretend to feel this way.

Also, we could be looking at a person who was born female, feels like they should be a male, but wants to be a female because of societal pressure or parental influence. Or maybe they were born female, feels male but enjoys not conforming to gendered norms with regard to clothing choices and hairstyle decisions.

@raphjd:

Feminists are gonna have a hard decision to make here.  Either they admit that people are falsely accused of rape or they brag about this story of a woman who was just as good, if not better, as the men she worked with.

The story says that the men who did the rape were the ones who accused her, not the person who got raped.

You should not be assuming that a feminist will have to abide by the two options you state here. They could also use this as a way to enlighten people to the fact that not all rape victims are women and not all rapists are men. They could remind people that in a male dominated society, it is usually the men who's word is trusted first and women second. Or to remind people that it's not really okay to blame the victim of a crime. Or even praise law enforcement for taking her rape seriously enough to actually do something about it and even discovering that this lady was falsely accused and continue the investigation.

Also, you cannot hold an entire demographic of people responsible for the actions of an individual person who may not even be a member of that demographic. Statements like this are pretty much the same thing as saying that a straight white male who molested a little girl can be blamed on the entire LGBT community because 'the gays' are child molesters. The raped and the accused may not even be feminists. And I think It's safe to assume that the real rapist(s) is/are definitely not feminist(s).

Some very interesting psychological studies have discovered two things about human sexuality that seem to suggest that who you're attracted to is neither a choice, nor does it have anything to do with genetics.

The first one is the discovery that there are measurable differences in different regions of the brain between heterosexual men and heterosexual women. For example, in women, the corpus callosum is much more developed when compared to men. When they added homosexual men and women to this research, they found that homosexual men's brains structurally resembled heterosexual women's brains more closely and vice versa for homosexual women and heterosexual men.

The second one is that brain development during critical periods, such as within your mother's womb, as well as reproductive organ development, is triggered through hormonal changes of the mother. One reason why we have babies being born with seemingly ambiguous genitalia is due to hormonal imbalances. My sister's third son, for example, was born with ambiguous genitalia. Only through DNA testing did they find out he was a boy, so they didn't get all cut happy with the scalpel. But the doctors did notice some hormonal imbalances during the pregnancy that they tried to compensate for by giving her estrogen supplements.

These two pieces of research have created some interesting theories that your sexuality is determined in your mother's womb based on the available quantities and ratios between certain hormones as they are transferred to you from your mother. Some theorists believe that some women develop a sort of immunity (for lack of a better word) to testosterone and floods her system with even more estrogen to compensate while others ability to produce estrogen becomes suppressed. If a baby's bloodstream has higher quantities of estrogen flooding into his brain, it's likely to trigger some developmental and structural growth in some regions while suppressing it in others and causing these measurable differences between men's and women's brains.

If this theory proves to be true, and your sexual preferences are linked to structural differences in your brain, it would indicate that your sexuality is not a choice and not something you can change.