Gender Rising

The NHS in Northern Ireland is the worst in the UK. During the quarter April/June 2021, over 349,000 people were waiting for a first appointment, 53 percent for over a year, an increase of 39,000 for the same period in 2020. Adjusted for population size, waiting lists in Northern Ireland are 100 times greater than those in England, a country 50 times its size

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[T]echnological innovation is essential for growth to persist in the long run. But innovation requires detailed knowledge of production processes and what can make production more efficient. Any society that frowns upon hard work will be unlikely to have a robust class of innovators. Any society that disparages finance will be unlikely to have a thriving entrepreneurial class or significant investment in capital.--Koyama and Rubin

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Gender Rising

From January 2019 to December 2023, 13,994 minor patients received gender-transition treatments, with 5,747 undergoing sex-change surgeries and 8,579 getting hormones and puberty blockers, according to Do No Harm's database. (from Don)

Historically, the diagnosis of mixed gender was made in about 1 in 30,000 births. That diagnosis was anatomic at birth with mixed genitalia.

Androgen insensitivity (usually diagnosed at puberty) is a bit different.

Complete androgen insensitivity syndrome affects 2 to 5 per 100,000 people who are genetically male. Partial androgen insensitivity is thought to be at least as common as complete androgen insensitivity. Mild androgen insensitivity is much less common. In androgen insensitivity, male hormones and anatomy are normal but the cells do not recognize androgen stimulation and do not develop maleness. This, like the adrenogenital syndrome, results in a true dichotomy between the genetic and phenotypic.

The model Hanne Gaby Odiele in 2015.

The other cause of sexual ambiguity is the adrenogenital syndrome, an acquired increase of steroids that causes changes in physical appearance. It can occur at any age. Think of the famous track and field athletes, the Press sisters.
Both were genetic females who developed benign adrenal gland tumors that produced cortisone and, downstream, testosterone, which masculinized them. Although easily treatable, the swell Russians took advantage of the poor girls' medical problems and lhad them compete in women's track and field. Tamara Press was a world champion for years.

1 in 30,000 is 0.00003333333. If there were 20,0000,000 births during that five-year period, there should have been about 666 sexually ambiguous infants born. If true, where did 13,000 surgical candidates come from?

The Rigid/Fluid Problem

I protest against that counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for either, I can just leave her alone. In some respects she certainly is not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others.--Lincoln



We put an old dryer out for the garbage guys but it was gone by six a.m..
Mom had quite a day. She went to West Virginia to find office space for the merger/buyout she is brokering, then watched as a guy drove toward her down a narrow street in Pittsburgh with his back door flapping open. (It hit her car but there was little damage.) She then went to a board meeting for a nonprofit where an expected board revolution did not occur.
The Pirates are becoming embarrassing. They probably will react symbolically and fire Hurdle, as if the players and their development were not the problem.
Our most competent nurse is leaving.

Walmart Inc has sued Tesla Inc., saying solar panels supplied by the electric car maker were responsible for fires at about seven of its stores, according to a lawsuit filed in a New York court on Tuesday.

Interest rates on long term bonds are dropping. Pundits cry "Recession!" But there are no vacuums. The bond rates in Europe are negative; why couldn't our rates be dropping because European bond investors are moving money into higher yielding American bonds?

If Omar and Tlaib can boycott Israel, why can’t Israel boycott them? (I stole it.)

If we ignore the top 350 CEOs running the largest US firms as outliers,  the average CEO of a typical firm in the US doesn’t earn that much more than the average dentist ($174,000).

Insurers are expanding their Affordable Care Act plan offerings for next year, with the once-troubled business now generating profits, even as the overall individual-insurance market has shrunk.(wsj)

Conservatives, alongside libertarians (with the strange exception of presidential candidate Gary Johnson), have argued that a baker should not be required by law to design and sell custom products for same-sex weddings to which bakers have conscience-based objections. The Supreme Court agreed.  With that in mind, I fail to see how it is not hypocritical or inconsistent at the very least for conservatives to turn around and argue that while the Christian baker can choose not to bake the gay couple’s cake, Google and YouTube should not be free to choose how they moderate their platforms and which content they allow on those platforms.--deRugy

From Issues & Insights:

The global warming alarmists, who have seized and now control the narrative — because, like a child who won’t stop crying for a toy he can’t have, they refuse give up — have a credibility problem. Actually, they have several. The public will eventually forget about them all, though, just as it has overlooked the mistakes by those who predicted other catastrophes that never arrived, such as Y2K, the new Ice Age, acid rain, mass human starvation, overpopulation, peak oil, and the Silent Spring. After all, humans have been watching Doomsday prophets fail throughout history. They’ve been so common we hardly notice them.

NB: Issues & Insights is a website launched recently by the journalists behind the Investor’s Business Daily editorial page.

I'm not sure this is a good idea. Dr. Neal Kassell — the man who performed surgery on Biden three decades ago following two brain aneurysms--dismissed fears about the 76-year-old Biden's mental faculties, noting that he's "as sharp as he was 31 years ago" and assuring people that the hemorrhage and subsequent operations did not result in any brain damage.

In 1485, in the last major battle of the War of the Roses, King Richard III was defeated and killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field by Henry Tudor, the earl of Richmond. 

                   The Rigid/Fluid Problem

Trying to overturn--or even tweak--biology is a tough, uphill battle. Our open-minded culture is, however, giving it a go. The following is a good summary of the quandary, from Perry:

A progressive in 2014 can consider it an unacceptable limitation on individual freedom for gay couples to be denied the right to marry — and base that argument on the claim that a gay man’s love and natural desire for another man, like a lesbian’s love and natural desire for another woman, is irreducible and ineradicable — and then insist just five years later that it is an unacceptable limitation on individual freedom for anyone to be presumed a man or a woman at all.

As Andrew Sullivan has argued, the two positions are fundamentally incompatible. The first, which morally justifies same-sex marriage, presumes that biological sex and binary gender differences are real, that they matter, and that they can’t just be erased at will. The second, which many transgender activists embrace and espouse, presumes the opposite — that those differences can and should be immediately dissolved. To affirm the truth of both positions is to embrace incoherence.

Vive la Difference: A Heresy

History is a vast early warning system.--Norman Cousins

Chris was a lot better yesterday.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton referred to those killed on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka as "easter worshipers in church". "Christian" could not be spoken.

In a cashless society, the banks would get a piece of every commercial transaction.

Good news: Germany’s armed forces are currently studying the possibility of acquiring nuclear bombers capable of using the new American B61-12 atomic bombs.

It's always worth remembering the predictions of settled science. From 1970:
1. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
2. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
3. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.

Our standard of living is high because we are able to focus on the tasks that we do best and trade for everything else. Imagine life without trade. A world of cottage industry.

Sri Lanka’s government has information indicating the plotters of Easter bombings that killed more than 300 people were reacting to the New Zealand shootings that left 50 Muslims dead in March, the country’s defense minister said.
Oh, so there was a reason.

A new report in Wired magazine details how Iran has been target of a "Shadow Brokers-style" hack campaign which seeks to expose methods, names, and activities behind an elite cyber-espionage team linked to Iran's Ministry of Intelligence. The Shadow Brokers leaks from 2016 famously targeted the National Security Agency, dumping tools used by the agency online, and later resulted some of the most devastating cyberattacks in history such as the NotPetya and Wannacry attacks, which devastated networks all over the world. Now it appears it's Iran's turn to be targeted by a powerful mystery group doxing Iran's foremost hacking team. 

Fragging was a slang term used to describe U.S. military personnel tossing of fragmentation hand grenades (hence the term “fragging”) usually into sleeping areas to murder fellow soldiers. It was usually directed primarily against unit leaders, officers, and non-commissioned officers. In 1970, 209 fragging incidents caused the deaths of 34 men; in 1969, 96 such incidents cost 34 men their lives.

According to Business Insider, Starbucks will install needle-disposal boxes in bathrooms in stores in at least 25 US markets in the coming months. 

At least 80% of felony defendants on the state level can't afford an attorney. Funding is so inadequate that defendants became class-action lawsuit plaintiffs in nine states. The suits claimed that states failed to appropriate enough money for their defense, and that the failure was a violation of the defendants' Sixth Amendment right to counsel. Plaintiffs won in three states — Michigan, Montana and New York.  Less that of local public defender offices have enough attorneys to meet caseload standards. That drops to less than a quarter on the state level. How can this be? So why should Exxon and Simpson get all the good lawyers? How can a country that professes equality before the law insist on publicly funded birth control and not equal representation before the law? The real question is, why is the legal profession not socialized?

According to tradition, the great English dramatist and poet William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon on April 23, 1564. It is impossible to be certain the exact day on which he was born, but church records show that he was baptized on April 26, and three days was a customary amount of time to wait before baptizing a newborn. Shakespeare’s date of death is conclusively known, however: it was April 23, 1616.

                        Vive la Difference: A Heresy

 “It does appear that on many, many different human attributes — height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability – there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means – which can be debated – there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined.”
This observation was made by Lawrence Summers when he was president of Harvard and the negative reaction was so great that it cost him his job. The argument did not seem to be with the observation but that it was taken seriously rather than accepted as a distortion, the result of bigotry, harassment, deprivation and misguided social convention.

That said, there is this, collected by Perry:

 Births and Deaths 

• For every 100 girl babies who die in the first 27 days of life 125 boy babies die.
• For every 100 girl babies who die after the first 27 days but in the first year of life 127 boy babies die.
• For every 100 girls ages 1 to 4 years who die 126 boys die.
• For every 100 girls ages 5 to 14 years who die 133 boys die.
• For every 100 girls and women ages 15 to 24 years who die 280 boys and men die.
• For every 100 women ages 25 to 34 who die 232 men die.

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics

2. Special Education 

• For every 100 girls ages 3-17 years diagnosed with communication disorders (speech problems, language problems, voice problems) there are 168 boys. Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
• For every 100 girls ages 4-17 years diagnosed with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) there are 237.5 boys. Source: National Center for Learning Disabilities
• For every 100 girls ages 6 to 21 years old enrolled in public schools and receiving special education services there are 189 boys. Source: National Center for Education Statistics
• For every 100 girls who receive services in public schools for autism there are 300 boys. Source: National Center for Education Statistics
• For every 100 girls in K-12 in public schools classified as having mental retardation there are 140 boys. Source: National Center for Education Statistics
• For every 100 girls K-12 in public schools classified as having emotional disturbance there are 355 boys. Source: National Center for Education Statistics
• For every 100 girls in K-12 in public schools who are classified as having a specific learning disability, there are 207 boys. Source: National Center for Education Statistics
• 3. K-12 Education 
• • For every 100 girls who repeat kindergarten 145 boys repeat kindergarten.
    Source: National Center for Education Statistics
  • For every 100 girls whose entry into kindergarten is delayed 139 boys are delayed.
    Source: National Center for Education Statistics
  • For every 100 girls suspended from public elementary and secondary schools 240 boys are suspended.
    Source: National Center for Education Statistics
  • For every 100 girls expelled from public elementary and secondary schools 291 boys are expelled.
    Source: National Center for Education Statistics 
  • For every 100 high school girls who take the SAT test, 89 boys take the test.
    Source: National Center for Education Statistics
  • For every 100 college-bound high school senior girls in the top 10% of her class, there are 79 boys.
    Source: College Board
  • For every 100 college-bound high school senior girls who take AP/Honors courses in math there are 82 boys.
    Source: College Board
  • For every 100 college-bound high school senior girls who take AP/Honors courses in Natural Sciences there are 79 boys.
    Source: College Board
  • For every 100 college-bound high school senior girls who take AP/Honors courses in Foreign/Classical Languages there are 64 boys.
    Source: College Board
  • For every 100 college-bound high school senior girls who take AP/Honors courses in Art/Music there are 54 boys.
    Source: College Board
  • For every 100 college-bound high school senior girls who take AP/Honors courses in English/Language Arts there are 64 boys.
    Source: College Board
  4. Higher Education 
  • For every 100 women enrolled in US colleges (degree-granting postsecondary institutions) at all levels there are 77 men enrolled.
    Source: National Center for Education Statistics
  • For every 100 women enrolled in US graduate schools there are 73 men.
    Source: Council for Graduate Schools
  • For every 100 women who earn an associate’s degree from US colleges there are 63 men.
    Source: National Center for Education Statistics
  • For every 100 women who earn a bachelor’s degree from US colleges and universities there are 74 men.
    Source: National Center for Education Statistics
  • For every 100 women who earn a master’s degree from US colleges and universities there are 74 men.
    Source: National Center for Education Statistics
  • For every 100 women who earn a doctor’s degree from US universities there are 90 men.
    Source: National Center for Education Statistics
  5. Educational Attainment of Young Adults 
  • For every 100 women ages 25 to 29 years who have at least some college but no degree there are 94 men.
  • For every 100 women ages 25 to 29 years who have at least an associate’s degree there are 80 men.
  • For every 100 women ages 25 to 29 years who have at least a bachelor’s degree there are 85 men.
  • For every 100 women ages 25 to 29 years who have at least a master’s degree there are 73 men.
  • For every 100 women ages 25 to 29 years who have a first professional or doctor’s degree there are 81 men.
  Source: National Center for Education Statistics
• 6. Other Indicators (16)
  • For every 100 women who are homeless there are 154 men.
    Source: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
  • For every 100 women who are homeless and unsheltered there are 242 men.
    Source: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
  • For every 100 women who die by opioid overdose, 212 men die.
    Source: Kaiser Family Foundation
  • For every 100 women who abuse illicit drugs and alcohol, 180 men do so.
    Source: Addiction Center
  • For every 100 women who have problems with alcoholism there are about 200 men.
    Source: ScienceDaily
  • For every 100 women do die on the job, there are 1,294 men who die working.
    Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
  • For every 100 females ages 15 to 19 who commit suicide there are 293 males.
    Source: Centers for Disease Control
  • For every 100 females ages 20 to 24 who commit suicide there are 463 males.
    Source: Centers for Disease Control
  • For every 100 females ages 25-29 who commit suicide there are 424 males.
    Source: Centers for Disease Control
  • For every 100 females ages 15-19 who dies of homicide, there are 642 males.
    Source: Centers for Disease Control
  • For every 100 females ages 20-24 who dies of homicide, there are 717 males.
    Source: Centers for Disease Control
  • For every 100 females ages 25-29 who dies of homicide, there are 579 males.
    Source: Centers for Disease Control
  • For every 100 females ages 30-34 who dies of homicide, there are 488 males.
    Source: Centers for Disease Control
  • For every 100 females who are in adult correctional facilities there are 1,000 males.
    Source: Census Bureau
  • For every 100 females under age 18 who are in a correctional facility, there are 770 males.
    Source: Census Bureau
  • For every 100 females in a federal prison, there are 1,333 male prisoners.
    Source: Federal Bureau of Prisons

By Any Other Name

Hanne Gaby Odiele attends the 2015 CFDA Fashion Awards at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center on June 1, 2015, in New York. (Photo: Larry Busacca, Getty Images)

​
California on Tuesday became the first state in the nation to condemn "unnecessary" surgeries on intersex children. 

The Legislature passed a resolution demanding the medical community halt nonconsensual medical procedures that try to cosmetically "normalize" variations in intersex children's sex characteristics.
The resolution, which calls the practice a human rights violation, is a landmark moment for the intersex community, advocates say. 
"It means for the very first time a U.S. legislative body has affirmatively recognized that intersex children deserve dignity and the right to make decisions about their own bodies – just like everyone else," Kimberly Zieselman, executive director of interACT Advocates for Intersex Youth, told USA TODAY. 

Which is to say the State of California is now making diagnoses and therapeutic norms.

This is a fascinating problem and, despite its complexity and the obvious close-mindedness and prejudice in this law and its presentation, Zieselman should be listened to.

First, Zieselman. She is a woman with what was called "testicular feminization syndrome" but has a new and apparently more palatable name: "Androgen insensitivity syndrome." This fascinating  complex is one in which the child is genetically male with normal male hormones but whose cells can not be stimulated by the male hormones. It is rare, 1 in 13,000 births. As the body's cells are insensitive to androgens, the child has abdominal sex organs but the germ cell producers are testis, and the other organs regress leaving the child with a rudimentary uterus and a short vagina. (Internal testis have a very high rate of malignant degeneration.) Mrs. Zieselman was diagnosed in her early teens when she was brought to a fertility specialist because she had not started to menstruate. She was diagnosed and her parents were advised to have her testis removed to prevent cancer development and she was started on female hormones. She is now opposed to such preemptive acts and feels the child should have more input to her care. Importantly, none of these children have any male hormone contribution to their development--a contribution that is still poorly understood but most of these kids who are "assigned" femininity are pretty comfortable with it. And the decision to do this was historically done because  it was the direction--and the hormonal nature if not the histologic nature--of the child anyway and the creation of maleness in such a child was and is technically difficult.

So this condition, which is well adapted to, has become a cause. And, like so many of these causes, a number of problems have crept in. And it seems at its base is the complexity of identity. What is the nature of a fifteen year old girl who is genetically male but with absolutely no expression of it?  Is she any different from the fifteen year old girl who believes she is Italian and finds on 23andMe that she actually is of Serbian ancestry? And how much of this investigation and excitement is to the benefit of others? Does the 15 year old girl really benefit by knowing her genetic complexity? With the uncertainties of this kind of diagnosis, is a 15-year old  girl in a good position to make a decision about her phenotypic direction?

One interesting insight comes from the United Nations which gives statistics that  the instance of Intersex--where the sexual appearance differs from the histological one--is 1.7%, as is frequently quoted, "a figure roughly equivalent to the number of redheads."  Now the commonest cause of intersex is the adrenogenital syndrome, where steroids are not completed in their developmental pathway and continue to be stimulated which causes an inadvertent rise in male hormones. This affliction--the affliction the Russians left untreated in the Press sisters whose male hormone levels gave them an athletic advantage in women's track and field, where they passed the genetic test as female--has an incidence of 1 in 13,000 births. How is it possible that the U.N. incidence of all of these rare abnormalities is 1.7%? Simple. You increase the definition of "intersex" and make it more common, more everyday.

Such a change in perception certainly benefits somebody.

The Confusion Between Equality and Sameness

"I was told by the founding members of the Women's Studies Department at the State University of New York at Albany that I had been brainwashed by male scientists to believe that hormones even existed, much less had any role in the shaping of our identity and character."--Camille Paglia

The quote above is from an interview recently in "Slate." Paglia is always good for some controversial and challenging notions but this quote is hard to get over. Hearkening back to the original anti-science manifesto, The Feminine Mystique, this is a simple, proud declaration of creationist-like foolishness. The opinion here is from a woman captured and overwhelmed by equality and sameness; all subsequent pegs must fit in that egalitarian hole. So Friedan felt that gender behavior was socially determined. All observation aside, Mean Joe Green and Marilyn Monroe differ only in their upbringing. It is easier if the theoretician was not raised on a farm. (Actually, it might help society if she could explain how--and why--farmers get bulls to act like that and what magic they work on steers.)

This twisted thinking is the direct result of preconceptions that demand Procrustean-like distortion of observation and analysis. And that twisted thinking is a direct result of the failure--or the fear--of coming to grips with the problematic world where people are not the same and, with that recognition, what to do next.

Transsexuals

Becoming Nicole is a book about two parents who adopt twin boys only to see, as they grew older, one boy begin to favor feminine things, then insist he was a girl. It promises to be quite compelling.
The statistics on such a phenomenon are rare so the numbers are difficult to use for any reasonable generality. Here are some numbers, as limited as they are.

Only about 5% of cross-dressers, or transvestites, have any desire to be the opposite sex, but those who do are often convinced they are a woman in a man’s body.
Fewer women believe they are men trapped in a woman’s body.
Perhaps one in thirty thousand of the population truly believe they are biologically different from their genetic makeup. At patients' request, 10,000 sex-change operations have been performed to date, (Israel & Tarver,1997), creating people physically of one sex but chromosomally of the other.
The percentage of homosexuality among co-twins is 11%.
Of four studied monozygotic (identical) male twin pairs, of which one was transsexual, the other twin was transsexual in only one case, so researchers concluded that genetic factors were most unlikely to be important.
The most unequivocal evidence is that brain microstructures are produced by long-continued behavior, rather than long-established brain structures causing the behavior. The brain changes physically in response to our behavior - London taxi drivers have an enlarged part of the brain dealing with navigation, violinists a larger area dealing with movement of the fingers of the left hand. There is no evidence that people are born with brain microstructures unalterable ever after - but there is strong experimental evidence that experience changes that microstructure. Transsexual brain differences would be more likely the result of transsexual behavior than its cause. (Presumably this might have "training" implications but who knows?)
Lady Gaga aside, there is no evidence for the political case that transsexuals were born that way.

The Gay Rainbow

There is a lot to think about in the gay pride rainbow flag; there is more there than they know.

 

Color has been a signal in the gay community. Oscar Wilde was famous for wearing a trademark green carnation on his lapel, a look other Londoners and Parisians of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries to express their orientation. Novelist Robert Hitchens described the phenomenon in 1894’s The Green Carnation, and the book in part spurred Wilde’s trial for sodomy. Yellow was used for the same purpose in Australia according to the book Sunshine and Rainbows, a study of gay culture in Queensland. The "purple hand" was an early symbol of the gay liberation movement and an effort to show resilience in the face of anti-gay attacks.  It is said the term originates from Oct 31st 1969 when activists protested the San Francisco Examiner's series of anti-gay articles in front of the newspaper building. Employees of the newspaper dumped purple ink on the peaceful protesters. The activists used the ink to draw slogans on the building and to make a visible mark of gay uprising.

Apparently a Purple Rhino was used as a symbol but it was understandably arcane and failed. During the Holocaust, gay men were forced to wear pink triangles, and that symbol has since been reclaimed by the gay community at an annual commemoration event at Twin Peaks in San Francisco.

 

In 1978, San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker designed what is believed to be the first modern gay pride flag by combining eight stripes, each a different color with its own symbolism: pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, blue for art, indigo for harmony, and violet for the human spirit. When he wanted to manufacture the flag for sale, he found that hot pink wasn’t as available as the other colors, and so the flag dropped to seven colors. Baker later dropped indigo to maintain an even number, and the flag arrived at its contemporary six colors. When San Francisco gay activists marched to protest the 1978 assassination of city supervisor Harvey Milk, they marched with Baker’s flags. 

There is an unscientific element that argues that individuals in their sexuality are more tabla rasa, less predetermined, than previously thought. Betty Freidan's The Feminine Mystique says astonishingly that gender behavior is actually culturally determined. (No one believes this but a very few hard core. Some have actually said there is a conspiracy regarding hormone research.) So one wonders if the rainbow is a better symbol than they know. It is a banner of gradualism, as one wavelength merges into another. So each life becomes part of a spectrum rather than an individual packet. Every entity with more or less frequency, more or less wavelength, could be another. And all are part of the white light.

So Jenner is more a slid-step, less a leap.

The Complicated World of Feminists

This is the opening of a long article in The New Yorker on conflict between feminists and transgenders:
"Trans women say that they are women because they feel female—that, as some put it, they have women’s brains in men’s bodies. Radical feminists reject the notion of a “female brain.” They believe that if women think and act differently from men it’s because society forces them to, requiring them to be sexually attractive, nurturing, and deferential. In the words of Lierre Keith, a speaker at Radfems Respond (a feminist event in Oregon), femininity is “ritualized submission.” In this view, gender is less an identity than a caste position. Anyone born a man retains male privilege in society; even if he chooses to live as a woman—and accept a correspondingly subordinate social position—the fact that he has a choice means that he can never understand what being a woman is really like. By extension, when trans women demand to be accepted as women they are simply exercising another form of male entitlement."