You know how it’s all the rage for kids to have their pants half way down their ass so you can see their underwear? Well, today the kid pouring my latte had his pants hanging off his ass except…no underwear. His ass was totally hanging out of his pants. Not that I’m complaining, really. I can think of more than one person I’d like to see make that particular fashion statement. I was just caught a bit off guard.

It makes you wonder what everyone else in the coffee shop was thinking. I didn’t notice any obvious reactions: bugged out eyes, hanging jaws, whispering behind hands, etc. Not that the self-righteous crowd in this state is going to be in a coffee shop in the first place.

This local roaster has a penchant for hiring … non-traditional … employees. They have a dozen shops around the valley and more often than not the employees are pierced and tattooed and otherwise thumbing their nose at social convention, but I wonder how the boss would react to the whole bare ass thing. Also, would that count as indecent exposure? We’re not locking up plumbers, so I’m not really sure.

I must confess I was almost giggling as I thought of those law makers who had palpitations when boxers first appeared on the scene and felt compelled to introduce legislation to prohibit such moral turpitude. Can you imagine the apoplexy when they spotted this kid with his ass out there for all to see?

Oh, did I mention I was at the one shop down in Utah County?

I’ve been reading Rewriting the Soul: Multiple personality and the sciences of memory. It was recommended to me by one of my professors. I picked it up more for the “sciences of memory” part than the “multiple personality” part. I confess I am a skeptic of multiple personalities (officially Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID now). It’s been a very interesting read. His commentary on how we acquire knowledge in the social sciences was particularly intriguing.

[Binet’s] measures of “intelligence” had to agree, generally, with preexisting judgments and then be adapted at the margins. Had he declared that many children who could not cope with French elementary education were intelligent, he would have been mocked. Had he said that the better students at the lycées where stupid, he would have been reviled. … Binet’s great innovation, the testing of intelligence, made sense only against a background of shared judgments about intelligence, and it had to agree with them by and large, and also to explain when it disagreed. Who shared the judgments? Those who matter, namely the educators, other civil servants, and Binet’s peers in the middle classes of society.

…One result of calibration is that prior judgments became both sharpened and objectified. What were once discrimination made by suitably educated or trained individuals were turned into impartial, distant, nonsubjective measures of intelligence. Intelligence became and object, independent of any human opinions (my emphasis).

Now, I was aware that IQ tests are under fire for being culturally (white, middle class) biased, but it wasn’t until I read those words that I understood the why and wherefore.

Many sociologists of science, and a few philosophers, have recently welcomed the idea that scientific knowledge is a social construction. They contend that science does not discover facts, but constructs them (Hacking, 1995).

Makes you stop and think doesn’t it?

Tired of feeling fat and out of shape, I’ve been making a concerted effort at getting to the gym on a regular basis. I started swimming a few weeks ago—at the gym, a full hour workout w/ QUAC would kill me right now—and today I was able to finish a length of butterfly w/o feeling like I was dying. OK, so it’s a long way to go until I’m back to doing a 50m fly in just under 32 seconds, but it’s progress and a milestone I feel pretty good about. Yea, me!

No, that’s not me, but I did take the picture. It’s a good friend kicking ass at the IGLA championships in Ft. Lauderdale a few years ago. He took home several medals. I don’t remember if one of them was for fly or not. As a matter of fact, a sizable contingent of QUACers is in D.C. right now at this year’s IGLA championships. Really wish I was there, but between the whole chubby-out-of-shape thing and the too-damn-much-on-the-credit-card-as-it-is thing, I stayed home this year.

J. K. Rowling was invited to give the commencement address for Harvard this year. You really should take some time and read it.

Harvard Magazine

…and it’s about damn time. You gotta see this at Pam’s House Blend:

Macy’s Bold Affirmation of Marriage Equality.

[Note: As with all sensitive topics, I’ve been sitting on this one so I can read it over a few times and make sure it sounds relatively sane. It’s almost old news now and the APA has recently released this statement regarding the work group process and Dr. Zucker’s experience. I’m posting this anyway, because I think it’s still an important topic.]

Certain parts of the blogosphere have been buzzing about the APA’s announcement of the DSM-V work groups and their members: specifically page 11 wherein Kenneth J. Zucker, PhD is named the chair of the Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders Work Group. I don’t know how well known Zucker is to the population at large, but NPR’s recent piece, “Two Families Grapple with Sons’ Gender Preferences: Psychologists take radically different approaches in therapy” has certainly raised his public profile. There are quite a few folk upset that Zucker has been named the chair of a work group tasked with taking another look at gender identity disorder (GID). Some folk, count me among them, think GID needs to go. There is some justified concern that with someone who believes in treating GID chairing that committee, there will be little or not change to GID. Some even seem to fear there will be some backsliding.

There are a couple of things people seem to be missing in the discussion. First, one writer has suggested perhaps that the APA was not fully aware of Zucker’s work. Charitable, but not bloody likely. You can be damn sure that the APA is fully aware of Zucker’s work and theoretical framework. The fact that Zucker has been named the chair tells you two very important things. One, it tells you the state of establishment thought on GID. I doubt that numbers even exist, but I’d be stunned to learn there are more Ehrensaft’s than Zucker’s out there (see the NPR article). Get into the professional establishment and the ratio undoubtedly drops even more. Two, it tells you that whatever your disagreements with Zucker and his philosophy and approach to gender issues, he is most likely not the quack/hack some are making him out to be.

Second, people are also wondering how the APA, which dropped homosexuality as a mental disorder from the DSM-III in the 70s, could appoint someone with such “backward” notions about gender to chair a committee set to re-evaluate GID. Some have stated that Zucker and his work with children diagnosed with GID is about preventing homosexuality. Based on what little I know, I find that unlikely. Nothing I read in the NPR article suggests that is the case. Also, a local psychologist who is quite familiar with Zucker’s work recently refuted an email claiming that Zucker is a supporter of the ex-gay movement. The hysteria that we are heading back to pathologizing homosexuality is unwarranted and unfounded. Gender expression and sexuality are completely different concepts and one has little or no bearing on the other. It is perfectly consistent, from a theoretical/professional point of view, to be fully accepting of homosexuality while believing in GID.

Third, we are talking about children here. We are not talking about adults. Scientific literature does suggest that gender identity is somewhat to very plastic in children. One text I read stated that gender identity is fixed by age seven. Zucker works with children under ten. If we can modify a child’s gender identity to be more consistent with social expectations shouldn’t we at least try? The answer to that question is unequivocally, “It depends.” It depends on the child. It depends on the parents. It depends on what sort of philosophical/religious/moral stance any one of the parties involved takes. I think children who don’t conform to society’s gender expectations are in for a rough ride, no matter which path they take.

At the ages we are talking about, the parents exert an enormous influence on the lives of their children. Little girls aren’t the only ones who like to stomp around in mom’s high heel shoes. Does that mean little boys have a latent desire for the feminine or does it just mean that mom’s shoes are colorful and make cool noise? What meaning do the parents assign to these behaviors? Some fathers will flip if they see their little boys wearing mom’s shoes. Others won’t flip until he puts on a dress. How many of you would feel okay if your child started wearing underwear of the opposite sex? The NPR story is as much about the respective parents’ ability or lack thereof to accept their child’s gender bending.

My biggest problem with GID is how culturally dependent it is. To me it seems the last vestiges of an outmoded way of thinking about male and female. I can pretty much guarantee that the discussion and the definition of GID would look quite different if society didn’t have such rigidly defined pink and blue boxes; if society didn’t insist that a human being can only stand in one and only one box; if society didn’t apply enormous pressure for an individual to pick the box that has traditionally been associated with the anatomical bits between their legs. GID is more often diagnosed in boys than in girls. You’ll have a very difficult time convincing me that’s biological. I suspect it has more to do with gender bias in our society. Like Madonna said, “Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short, wear shirts and boots ’cause it’s okay to be a boy. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, ’cause you think that being a girl is degrading.” Which gets your heart pounding more: your daughter in boxers, your daughter in briefs, or your boy in panties?

It would be interesting for NPR to do a follow up story in 10 years when Bradley and Jona are adolescents. Will Jona’s popularity continue into adolescence when the rest of her peers start paying more attention to gender and sex? How well do you think it will go over if Jona insists she should be allowed in the girls’ locker room? Still, even if Jona runs into some land mines while navigating adolescence, it seems to me the odds of successfully navigating adolescence increase dramatically with a firm and sound sense of self.

Where Zucker, in my opinion, ultimately falls short is in his conceptualization of the problem:

“Suppose you were a clinician and a 4-year-old black kid came into your office and said he wanted to be white. Would you go with that? … I don’t think we would,” Zucker says.

If a four-year old boy came into your office insisting his penis was a vagina, I don’t think anyone would go with that. He’s got to come to terms with reality. The quesiton becomes, “What does it mean that your skin is black (or that you have a penis)?” Does having black skin mean you can only have a future in professional sports? Does having a penis mean you can’t play with dolls? Perhaps Zucker didn’t think his race analogy through, but he’s basically validating racism by implying that there are behaviors assigned to people with white skin that people with black skin may not adopt. While that my still be an unfortunate reality, few would (openly) suggest there is some biological order that dictates such restrictions. For me the concept is not a whole lot different. Skin color or anatomical bits between the legs, either way whatever definitions and behaviors society has assigned to those anatomical realities need to be examined and, in most cases, eventually dismantled.

Brandon’s tale is heart wrenching for anyone who has come from a place where they were taught to hate or fear some particular aspect of themselves. His mother’s talk of his “addiction to pink” ticks me off in more ways than one. Still, I’m not convinced Zucker is the demon some are making him out to be. Indeed, I was recently pointed to this post by Alice Domurat Dreger

How do I know these are wrong? Well, I asked Zucker. Point blank. … I asked Zucker: Do you think if a child ends up transitioning sex as an adolescent or adult, that’s a bad outcome? No way, he said. In fact, he pointed out that in that case–when a child grows up to be an adolescent who needs to change sex because that means s/he will be better off–Zucker helps arrange it to make sure it happens.

Wild allegations and hysteria are not the way to address this issue, certainly not with a scientific body like the APA. Get your facts straight…err…correct…and develop a well reasoned argument to support your case. Humanity is slow to change, but truth will eventually win out. We accept the world is not flat. We accept the earth is not the center of the universe. That may seem self evident now, but those are truths that were a long time gaining widespread acceptance.

I replaced my dying Saturn over the weekend. Here’ is my new beauty.

I went into my insurance agent today to update my policy. The two ladies in the office looked out the window and did some probably obligatory cooing over my new car. They liked the color. It’s called copper red micah. In the sun it really does have a copper feel otherwise it feels more red. At any rate, the little grandma-type lady who was helping me said it looked like “what’s her name’s ruby slippers.” Now, it really doesn’t look ruby ever, but it can sparkle if the sun is hitting right. The other lady exclaimed, “Oh, that’s just what he wants to hear. That’s not a very manly color!” I, of course, was getting a good chuckle out of the whole exchange and thinking, “Oh, honey. If you only had any idea what either one of you was talking about.”

While we were reviewing my policy and the attending kick in the wallet a new car was going to bring, she noticed that I was 10 years accident free. I’ve actually never been in an accident, but 10 years is all they track. She seemed surprised. “Oh, my that’s very good.” Really? Is it really that rare that someone can go 10 years w/o an accident? That’s pretty sad.

Netflix has “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century” available for on demand viewing. I’ve been down all day with some nasty virus and had little better to do than lie in bed and watch Buck Rogers. Not that Gil Gerard in hard to watch, even with all the hokey martial arts and…unique…70s fashion.

It’s been interesting to watch the show wrestle with race and gender. It would be interesting to be able to listen to recordings of the planning meetings to hear what people had said. There are so many…oddities. One the one had you have Colonel Wilma Deering. Female in a command position. Confident. Decisive. Not the traits commonly ascribed to women. Still, she’s not above using her “feminine wiles” to distract a villain. Nor does she seem threatened or upset by Buck’s implied womanizing, and actually has an implied colorful past of her own. Then there is Princess Ardala. The quintessential femme fatale. Sexy and dangerous. Except that she has the inability to control her lust for Rogers and in episode after episode is undone by it. In the last episode of season one the point is made that Ardala is not a real woman, just a spoiled girl. An interesting distinction.

I’m not sure what to make of all the latex and bikini’s. That could be, at least in part, due to my male point of view. I guess one could make the argument that a woman exposing her body is empowering and women don’t have to be sexless to be powerful. I’ll leave that up to the ladies to decide. My favorite gender-WTF, though, was when Twiki found a love interest. Those of you old enough to remember the show will remember Twiki’s signature beedee beedee beedee. His love interest’s signature sound? Booty booty booty.

Race is equally muddled. Diversity is carefully calculated. Five captives in a cell and one is black, one is Latin, one is Asian, one is white and one is aging. Wouldn’t it be nice if the world were equally divided into fifths? Um…wait. No Arabs? Despite obvious attempts at diversity, the arch enemies, the Draconians, have a decidedly Asian feel to their uniforms, reminiscent of samurai. Though they did switch the original Kane from the pilot, who also looked to be of Asian descent, for someone with a more Latin feel. There was another episode where the bad guy’s lair looked like it came right out of a Chinese painting. Oh, and this is the best one: Buck gets to play body guard to Miss Cosmos. How do beauty contests work in the 25th century? Genetics. Miss Cosmos is the “almost perfect genetic ideal of a female human.” Miss Cosmos is also couldn’t be more Scandinavian. Platinum blond hair. Blue eyes. Pale skin. That’s the human genetic ideal, huh?

Still, for all it’s awkwardness, I did enjoy watching the show. Not every TV series from my childhood can stand up to my memory of it. “Dukes of Hazzard”? I remember watching that show religiously and enjoying it immensely, but I tired of watching it after just a few episodes. Even the hunky John Schneider couldn’t keep me coming back for more. Next to bear scrutiny: “Battlestar Galactica”.

No celebrating spring today. (NSFW/NSFPWTS^*)

^*Not Safe For People With Tender Sensibilities

Bill Maher takes a moment to reflect on recent events in Texas and point out a few elephants in the room that no one is talking about.