As a transgirl smack-dab in the middle of her transition, I have a vested interest in transgender rights developments around the world. Often times I’m left disappointed, but some news coming out of South America earlier this month has me all aflutter; Argentina has passed a transgender rights law light-years ahead of any other. But what does that mean? Well, any adult who feels the need can change their legal sex/gender without the need for medical treatments or procedures. However, if somebody wants medical interventions then all insurance companies, public and private, must cover those treatments or surgeries. In other words, Argentina’s government has done something unheard of, and has decided to treat their transgender citizens like responsible, competent adults equal with their cisgender peers.

For most people reading this who come from countries still in the Stone Age of transrights (in other words, most countries), this law seems an impossible achievement. I for one live in the U.S., where there are 56 different laws on changing your legal sex, depending on the state you live in, and every single one requiring either hormone replacement therapy or gender confirmation surgery. Not only is this ridiculous, but also expensive; these treatments often require a medical and/or psychological professional’s approval, and insurance often covers neither medical nor psychological treatment in these cases. These laws are because the Harry Benjamin Standards of Care lays out a process that someone seeking to change their gender must follow:

1. See a psychologist for a number of months
2. Convince them you have had gender identity dysphoria for the majority of your life
3. Obtain a referral letter for hormone replacement therapy
4. See an endocrinologist (which is typical, but other medical professionals will suffice)
5. Get a prescription for hormones
6. Wait for hormones to take their desired effects. This is a looooooooooooooooooong process.
7. Go full time
8. Change your legal name (if needed/wanted)
9. Get top surgery/facial feminization surgery (if needed/wanted)
10. After 1 year of being full time, see a psychologist (with a PhD) to get permission for gender confirmation surgery
11. Find a doctor to perform the surgery
12. After GCS you may apply to get your gender marker changed on your license/birth certificate

Yes, you read that right. In order to get your driver’s license changed you must first undergo an invasive medical procedure (in most U.S. states at least, other countries may have different qualifications). This leads to an interesting dilemma for some. As I said before, most insurance companies won’t cover these treatments (this is slowly changing, but still follows that trend), meaning that much of these treatments must be paid for out of pocket. And this is assuming you even have insurance, which an increasing number of Americans simply don’t. So, once you go full time, you must find a job to pay for these treatments, which can be incredibly difficult seeing as how your actual gender will not match up with what’s on your legal records. And this is assuming you even want gender confirmation surgery (many trans people choose not to operate, meaning they will never be able to change their legal documentation).  There are many implications of getting stuck in this negative spiral of gatekeeping that I’m not even going to get into here. Suffice it to say though, many people turn to illegal activities which can be incredibly dangerous and life threatening, and could easily be avoided if the right laws were passed.

Obviously the situation shown above is not the norm. It is a reality for more people than you’d realize, but there are millions of people in America, and worldwide, who have successfully transitioned with or without GCS. I for one have been incredibly lucky so far; I’ve found therapists and endocrinologists who were not gatekeepers, and have managed thus far to hide my transition from my employers. I’m coming up on the point of having to go full time and change my legal documentation, and I have no idea how that will turn out. But the point is, transition is hard no matter if you have insurance or not. We don’t need politicians making it more difficult when a simple change of insurance laws will ease the struggles of so many. Not every country has to go as far as Argentina, but right now they are a shining example of what can happen if a government listens to and respects its citizens. Thank you Argentina, for doing your part to make your citizens healthier, happier people; we could all learn a lesson from you.

Queer Health is a bi-monthly feature that shares information about important health issues. Look for Queer Health every 2nd and 4th Saturday of the month.

• Nepal to grant full citizenship status to LGBT people (thus extending state protections against discrimination).
• Trans athlete Keelin Godsey in bid for Olympics.
• Thomas Beatie awarded sole legal custody of children.
• Kashish, India’s queer film festival, to take place in Mumbai.
• Short interview with Kate Bornstein.
• Lesbian couple conduct marriage ceremony in Disneyland Tokyo.

Featured image is of Kate Bornstein.

My drawing of Mohammed attracted a mediocre troll who, in addition to scolding me for spreading my internet atheism in such an inappropriate venue (my atheist blog!), regurgitated a few extremely common tropes that are worth addressing.

The first is the hilarious idea that although Christianity is fair game, I’m not allowed to mock Islam – that further, I waged some kind of “racial attack” by depicting Mohammad firing his well-known lasers. Specifically, the troll said,

“Why did you as an author deem it necessary to mock every muslim in the world, by disrespecting their religion? [...] When attacking an entire religion, instead of the specific assholes in power of the traditionally islamic nations, you’re damning millions and millions of people.”

Christopher Hitchens addressed this best.

Starting at around 1:42, he says:

If you’re like me, and you go on the air, you find yourself debating some whining, self-righteous, self-hating, self-pitying Muslim, and you tell him what you think of his Koran and his prophet, he says, “You have offended a billion Muslims!” You’ve noticed this? There’s a slight tone of moral blackmail here, I sometimes think.

If it was a matter of defending the right of someone to hold their religious belief, I would defend the right of a Muslim if there were only three of them. The idea of a billion is clearly intended as a threat. There’s a menace to it. You’ve upset a billion of us – you should watch out.”

The troll knew this, saying, “Here in Denmark, ie., we have pretty definate proof that the Muhammed drawings were published WELL KNOWING that it could ignite riots.” Islamists went from being poor, besieged, racially attacked from all sides, to being people who apparently have every right to start riots when someone publishes something they don’t like.

That is a kind of power I have absolutely no interest in defending, much less feigning deference for. It’s nothing but fascistic bullying, and that’s why it’s so important to draw Mohammad – and to be openly atheist, openly gay, openly female. They can’t murder all of us, and a religion that predictably inspires many of its adherents to riot is not a religion that any sane person should be defending.

To really belabor the point, I’ll just quote from the incredible feminist/atheist/Iranian activist Maryam Namazie

* Kuwait’s parliament recently voted in favour of a legal amendment that would make blasphemy a crime punishable by death following the arrest of a man accused of insulting Mohamed on Twitter.

* In Saudi Arabia, Hamza Kashgari, a 23-year-old reporter from Jeddah, faces the death penalty for blasphemy after he Tweeted an imaginary conversation with Mohammad.

* In April, two young Tunisians, Jabeur Mejri and Ghazi Beji, (one in absentia) were sentenced to seven years in prison for posting cartoons of Mohammad.

* Alex Aan, a 30 year old atheist, faces up to 5 years in prison charged with blasphemy for saying there is no god on Facebook.

* Asia Bibi faces execution in Pakistan for blasphemy.

* In Egypt, a court upheld the conviction of comedian, Adel Imam, of ‘offending Islam’. Author Alaa al-Aswany says: the court ruling sets Egypt back to the “darkness of the Middle Ages” and that this is “an unimaginable crime of principle”.

* In Britain, 17 year old Rhys Morgan was forced to remove a Jesus and Mo cartoon or face expulsion from his Sixth Form College and there were demands by various student unions at London universities that Atheist societies remove Jesus and Mo cartoons from their Facebook page.:

[...]

Despite their track record, it is therefore absurd how the fundamental debate on Islam and free expression here in Europe, North America and Australia is framed within a context of offence, racism and Islamophobia. Let me explain. If you are criticising Islam, the veil, sharia law, or Islamism in Iran, Egypt or Afghanistan the debate is not framed around racism and Islamophobia.

If you’ve ever argued with a self identified “rational, logical” person over the existence of things like patriarchy, odds are you cherish the times science backs up your claims. Of course, you also probably have had whatever studies you proffered dismissed out of hand as quackery, or worse, taken as proof of their own argument instead, usually some variation on the old “intellectuals are in a conspiracy to conceal the truth” trope.

This article was forwarded to me some time ago, and I sat on it thinking for an extended period. Some of that was on account of moving recently, needing to get place in order, and I also hoped to see another extended version on other science blogs. Eventually it did show up on Science Daily, just not with any significant additions, however it led me to find another article in a similar vein. These pieces started a long train of thought, which I need to unpack over more than one post, so the second article will be discussed more fully next time.

One thing they made me think about was a black hole. Astrophysicists had theorized about the existence of black holes for a good long while before enough evidence was discovered to create consensus. In social sciences, where the validity of entire disciplines seems constantly in question by large numbers of people and being certain of one’s findings is that much harder, it must feel similarly powerful to discover “scientific evidence” for things like sexism.

The use of scare quotes here isn’t intended to signify dismissal, but we are a place for skeptics, and the main reason I took so long to pick this up is because I had some concerns about the methodology that still aren’t fully resolved. To explain requires quoting a large portion.

 “The authors of this study predicted that participants would view sexy women as objects, but see sexy men as persons. What do we mean by viewing someone as an “object” versus a “person?” Research suggests that when we view a person, we pay attention to spatial configuration (e.g., when we view a person’s face, we look for all of the spatial relationships that define a face, such as having two eyes above the nose, as well as a nose above the mouth). However, when we view objects, we process them differently and do not account for spatial relationships among the object’s features. One consequence of this is that when an image of a person is inverted (i.e., when it is turned upside down), we have a hard time recognizing it because all of the expected spatial relationships are thrown off. This problem does not arise when we view objects, because our recognition of an object is not based upon spatial configuration—thus, it is just as easy to recognize an object when it is right-side up or upside down. In summary, when we see a person, we should recognize an upright image better than an inverted image; however, when we see an object, we should be equally good a recognizing it regardless of how the image is presented.” (emphasis added)

So not surprisingly, when testing college age men and women with the images, they found that recognizing images of “sexy women” was comparatively easier, whether they were inverted or not, and images of “sexy men” were more difficult to recognize when inverted. They conclude from this that people, regardless of gender, are more likely to perceive images of “sexy women” the same way they do objects instead of people, and infer from this that established patterns of objectifying women in the media is a strong candidate for why many of us do.

Often, and I believe very fairly, tests like these are called out for doing their work on college students, which, especially at respected research universities, are not exactly representative samples of anyone but… well, privileged college students for the most part. This time, I don’t see that as a huge issue.

There are other concerns I couldn’t put to rest as easily. How they’re defining “sexy” has to be the most obvious. If I had access to the academic databases for a direct look, I might be able to understand better, either to assent or give more knowledgeable criticism. If that doesn’t underscore how privilege plays a part here, I don’t know what could.

One way to resolve this is to just assume they mean “sexy” in the same way Madison Avenue thinks of sexy in all the ads out there, or media generally. They say this after all in their own abstract, that they “predicted” this outcome in large part because of established media and culture theories that posit objectification.

But what if that means they saw what they saw because they predicted they would? It’s a very unscientific question, I know, it misunderstands the whole methodology of advancing a hypothesis before testing, crucial in scientific method. If anything, the fact that many would interpret this as a very valid question goes a long way towards showing just how much of a trap the social sciences are in. They’re derided as soft sciences, or not sciences at all, and yet when they use methods common to “hard” fields, their proponents’ motives are called into question.

Part of the trouble in offering a study like this to those who resist understanding objectification is that the study’s conclusions take as a given that objectification of the female body is real, widespread, and long established. The kind of people we so often have to argue with, however, actually believe that objectification is a two way street, that men are as objectified as women, and that’s if they aren’t just plugging their ears and saying it ain’t real at all.

Using Toulmin argument analysis, it is surprisingly easy to demonstrate just why so many perfectly rational arguments fail to convince. It doesn’t say much about how we evaluate evidence, but it does give a simple structure for parsing an argument. The study we’re looking at certainly makes an argument. It’s logically valid, sound, and well qualified too (meaning it does not extend its claims beyond the evidence). I find it fairly compelling, and at the same time have total confidence that it won’t change anyone’s mind whatsoever.

I want to be wrong. I want to be wrong for the same reasons I think the study is basically solid and good science. However, the same patterns of objectification which I want pointed out and deconstructed like this are also the force which, I believe, insures the closed minded against the threat of actually learning something.

The folks who need to hear this most are also the least inclined to place value in the findings of psychologists (especially when they challenge their prejudices). The least likely to acknowledge any kind of power differential between men and women. The most likely to perceive, and thus defend, benefits they get from the status quo. They don’t trust the “backing” of the claim, they suspect the evidence, and they completely reject the premise. In short, it’s like trying to argue with those who assume from the start you’re a liar.

That doesn’t mean the study is worthless. I would love to see it repeated, especially if it were much broader and included data on how people identified ethnically, religiously, and obviously I want them to show me the queers. In case anyone’s working on that, I make my own prediction, that results would still be largely the same. I figure it’s similar to the famous doll test, findings from which helped Thurgood Marshall win Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. A hegemonic idea can penetrate all minds relatively easily, even when, for many, that idea promotes self-hatred.

We find black holes by looking for how light is warped by their gravitational pull. Perhaps then we’re right to look for evidence of objectification, or other toxic psychosocial phenomena by looking for how our own perceptions are warped.

Or maybe we just have a rational, but entirely incorrect theory. We’ll pick this up next week.

Featured image is a simulated view of a black hole in front of the Large Magellanic Cloud. Taken from Wikimedia Commons.

Guest post by Awkward Turtles.

Note: this is part two of a multi-part series documenting my experience of getting top surgery (i.e. a mastectomy).  This time around, I’ll be talking about identity exploration, why I chose to have surgery, what the operation entails, and my feelings going into it.

When I left you, at the end of my last segment, I was beginning to question my gender identity and to research and listen to as many trans/queer people’s experiences as I could, both in person and through books and the internet.  As I learned more, my identity went through several shifts.  Initially I was drawn to “butch” conceived of as a masculine third gender, especially given that some of the emotional aspects of the butch identity resonated with me at the time.  I was also attracted to “genderqueer” both as an expression of a non-binary (neither male nor female) identification, and because it often seemed to have a political valence, an implied resistance to the coercive way in which gender is all too often reproduced.  But apart from not being a broadly recognized term, “genderqueer” also felt somewhat less descriptive than I would prefer, covering a variety of gender conceptions from bigender to agender to somewhere-between-male-and-female, sometimes even coexisting with a male or female identity.   I eventually concluded that my theoretical rejection of coercive gender assignments and oppositional sexism might better be described simply as a form of feminism.

Kate Bornstein’s work introduced me to the concept of “transgender” as an umbrella term for anyone who transgresses gender norms, but I still felt self-conscious identifying as trans or transgender without knowing whether I ever wanted to go on hormones and without even having chosen a male name.  On top of that, I didn’t feel comfortable formally “coming out” as either genderqueer or trans without being sure I wouldn’t end up identifying as the other, partly because I didn’t want to create an impression either of myself or of trans/queer people in general as uncertain or insecure, and partly because coming out can be just plain exhausting.

While things weren’t completely clear on the identity front, I found baby steps to take in the mean time.  Far and away the most crucial of these was ordering a chest binder.  It is difficult to describe to someone who has never experienced dysphoria how extraordinary a feeling it is to finally feel able to identify with and be happy about an important aspect of your body in a way you never thought possible.  Seeing my flat(tened) chest gave my self-image and self-esteem an almost immediate boost; I was able to walk taller and prouder now that my clothes finally fit the way I’d always wanted them to.  Besides feeling much better in my own skin, binding had a profound effect on the way I was perceived by strangers.  I began being called “sir” and other male terms right and left, and while I was still occasionally “ma’am”-ed, it happened with far less frequency.

I was surprised how much I found myself enjoying this turn of events, and began actively trying to pass.  Plus, the more I was unquestioningly accepted as male, the more I began to be able to see myself, or at least imagine seeing myself, as such.  I admire people who are not concerned about passing, and of course I completely support everyone’s right to self-identify as any gender regardless of whether they “pass”, but for me, in an uncertain place, it was a very positive feedback loop, and one of the first and easiest ways I had of having my identity recognized.

Not that kind of binder!

While binding helped, I quickly decided it was not a final solution.  The compression was physically uncomfortable and became increasingly painful the longer and more often I wore the binder.  It impeded my breathing and made any form of athletic activity, even walking up a steep hill, near-impossible.  My back ached constantly.  I decided I needed to pursue top surgery, i.e. a mastectomy.  I felt more than ready, and had heard enough accounts of genderqueer and even female-identified people with chest dysphoria choosing top surgery that I felt comfortable taking the step regardless of how I would ultimately identify.  Through a lot of negotiation and a series of incredibly lucky breaks with both the surgeon and my insurance company, I managed to get a surgery date of May 24 with Dr. Michael Brownstein, a veteran and very highly skilled surgeon, and authorization from my insurance company to boot.

For those who aren’t familiar with mastectomies, there are two main surgical approaches, each with several slight variations.  The first only works for people with relatively small amounts of breast tissue (the equivalent of an A or at most a B cup) and is called the peri-areolar method.  It involves the surgeon making an incision around the circumference of the areola, removing the breast and duct tissue through a combination of scalpel work and liposuction, trimming the skin to size, and bringing the skin together around the nipple like a drawstring bag.  The second approach works for any chest size (good for my borderline C/D-cup frame) and is called the double incision method.  Here, the surgeon makes two long horizontal incisions across the lower part of the breast tissue, removes the tissue with a scalpel, trims the skin to fit, and closes the incisions.  Usually the nipples are cut away and then grafted on again, though sometimes the surgeon leaves them attached by a pedicle and operates around them in an attempt to preserve better sensation.  Either approach (peri-areolar or double incision) takes one to four hours and is usually performed as an outpatient procedure, allowing the patient to leave the hospital after getting out of anesthesia.

The patient will have drains coming from the sides of the incision sites for about a week after surgery to prevent fluid buildup, and has to wear a compression vest for one to three weeks to minimize swelling.  Most people spend the first few days after surgery pretty exhausted and groggy due to the pain meds.  Through the rest of the first week they become much more cogent and able to get out of bed and walk around as the pain begins to subside, but mostly still try to take it really easy.  After the first week you get your drains and sutures out and can shower and gradually start going back to your day-to-day life.  However, it takes four to six weeks to fully regain mobility and come to a point where you can lift more than ten pounds and resume athletic activity.

On reflection, it’s kind of amazing to me how little fear or anxiety I am facing about the impending surgery.  I feel a bit flustered with excitement now and then, but overall I’m feeling pretty calm.  Of course, I’m not looking forward to wearing the medical binder and being unable to shower, exercise, or have my full range of motion for some time.  But the only real fears I have are incidental to the surgery itself.  Actually, the most present one over the past couple weeks has been of some horrible accident happening that would prevent me from getting the surgery; I don’t think I’ve ever been more cautious walking down stairs and crossing the street in my life!  A more distant, but just as real, concern is what repercussions the surgery will have as far as my identity and transition.  I’ve heard from so many people that although (or really, to the extent that) top surgery resolved their chest dysphoria, it also made them more aware of the discomfort they had with other aspects of their bodies (either because pre-surgery, one’s chest tends to literally block one’s visual field or because post-surgery, emotional energy that was previously directed to managing chest dysphoria becomes freed up and attaches to other things).  I am especially concerned that I will feel increasingly dysphoric about my hip/thigh area.

Mercifully, I don’t have particularly wide hips, but the fat I do have collects in what is, for me, an uncomfortably feminine pattern.  Given that I already exercise and eat well, the only healthy way to counteract this would be to start testosterone, which (among other effects) redistributes body fat so as to give one a more masculine figure.  Now, starting testosterone has appealed to me for some time for this very reason, and others too: the possibility of a lower voice and the ability to put on more muscle are especially tempting.  And over past several months of research and reflection, the physical effects of testosterone that once gave me pause, such as body hair growth and temporary increased acne, no longer seem like such a big deal.  But I don’t feel that I could go on T without transitioning socially as well, and a complete social transition to male, despite the fact that it has attractions of its own, still feels like a pretty daunting prospect.  But I remind myself that however I end up feeling after the surgery, and whatever I end up deciding to do, it will all be part of the process of self-discovery, and it will be for the best in the end.  And given how I feel today, top surgery is not something I want to put off any longer.  Only one way to go: onward!

Turtles is a young human living in Oakland, California. They enjoy yummy vegetarian food and weightlifting and queer dance parties and falling asleep in the sun. Their weaknesses include eating too many salty things and staying up late reading feminist blogs. They are attracted to many different kinds of people and are trans in the broad sense and are still figuring out the details.

Today, the 23rd of May, marks exactly one month until the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth. Events have been going on, and will continue to go on, through the whole of this year to celebrate the milestone. You may have seen that next month’s Skepchick Book Club book will be David Leavitt’s biography of Turing, but you may not know much about the man himself – much less about why he warrants a whole year of recognition. As Queereka’s resident Turing geek (official title) I hope I’ll be able to demonstrate what an important figure Turing was, the enormous debt we owe him, and the injustices he faced as a gay man living in the wrong time. Of course, I won’t be able to cover every facet of him, which is why you should definitely join in with next month’s discussion!

Alan Mathison Turing was born on the 23rd of June 1912 to an upper-middle class British family. It didn’t take long for him to show signs of brilliance. As a teenager he attended Sherborne School, where his scientific talents weren’t appreciated by the more classics-focused teachers, leading him to work on them in his own time (including extrapolating Einstein’s doubts about Newton’s laws of motion, completely independently, at the age of sixteen). It was also here that he met and fell in love with a fellow student named Christopher Morcom. Sadly, Morcom died suddenly of tuberculosis near the end of their schooling – it was this event that turned Turing into an atheist and arguably helped shape the rest of his life.

Having won a scholarship to study maths at King’s College Cambridge, Turing was elected a Fellow of the college only a year after graduating with a first-class honours degree. A year after this he published perhaps his most important paper, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem“. In it he introduced what became known as Turing machines – machines capable of performing any mathematical function if it were expressed as an algorithm (a set of instructions for the machine to follow). This theory is central to computer science – in essence, Turing created the theoretical framework for computers in this paper, decades before the first digital computers were built.

If those contributions weren’t enough, Turing went on to even more great things. During the Second World War, he worked at Bletchley Park, the centre of Britain’s codebreaking efforts, where the brightest minds in the country worked together to crack German ciphers. It is believed that these efforts shortened the war by at least two years, potentially saving millions of lives.

Though what was achieved at Bletchley Park was undoubtedly a massive team effort, built upon the previous work of others including Polish cryptanalysts, Turing’s contribution was clearly vital. He shares credit with Gordon Welchman and Harold Keen for the invention of the Bombe, a machine designed to break Enigma, one of the Germans’ major methods of encryption. He worked to make previous methods of decryption more general, robust and efficient. His ideas also fed into the design of Colossus, a machine that cracked the Lorenz cipher, though he wasn’t directly involved in it.

While at Bletchley he gained a reputation as an eccentric. To combat hayfever he’d wear a gas mask while cycling to work, he chained his mug to the radiator to prevent it being stolen, and when the chain came off his bike he didn’t get it fixed. Instead, he counted the number of times the pedals went round and got off in time to adjust it. Turing was awarded an OBE for his war work, but wasn’t allowed to reveal the nature of it due it being classified – the full extent of his contributions would not become clear until after his death.

The Alan Turing Memorial in Manchester

After the war Turing worked first at the National Physical Laboratory, then the University of Manchester, on early computing machines. He also began to consider the issue of artificial intelligence, formulating the famous Turing test. This states that a computer can be said to “think” if a conversation with it cannot be told apart from a conversation with a human being. In the last two years of his life he turned his mind to mathematical biology, specifically morphogenesis (the study of how organisms develop their shapes), where his work is considered seminal.

(Did I mention he was also a world-class marathon runner? Hey, you have to balance out founding computer science with a little physical exercise.)

As you may have worked out, in addition to all of this Turing happened to be gay. While these days most people in the UK have cottoned on to the fact that being gay is not a bad thing, back then homosexuality was illegal – it was only legalised in 1967. In 1952 Turing spent the night with a young man, Arnold Murray, who was also a petty thief. This would prove to be his undoing. After their encounter Murray and an accomplice broke into Turing’s house – Turing, honest to a fault, reported the crime to the police, but in the process was forced to acknowledge his sexual relationship with Murray. They were both charged with “gross indecency”. Turing lost his security clearance and was also forced to choose between a jail sentence and chemical castration by oestrogen injections. He opted for the latter.

The treatment, which aimed to reduce libido, was humiliating, and didn’t even work as it was “meant” to – Turing’s sexual desires were unaffected, but he became impotent and grew breasts. He couldn’t run any more after his body became bloated thanks to the effect of the hormones he was required to take. Two years after his arrest, on the 7th of June 1954, Turing died aged just forty-one. He had apparently taken his own life by biting into an apple laced with cyanide. Some have speculated whether this could have been an accident, due to him not washing his hands after performing experiments, or even something more sinister – the government viewing him as a liability following his conviction and orchestrating his death. What matters, though, is that the world lost one of its greatest minds prematurely, and wouldn’t have were it not for the horrendous treatment dished out to him simply because of who he was attracted to.

While in his lifetime Turing was wholly unappreciated, since his death and since the work he did during the war has been declassified that has changed. Blue plaques punctuate the route of his life. An entire year of events relating to him have been planned all over the world, from conferences to mass sunflower planting. In 2009, then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an official apology for the way Turing had been treated, saying, “We’re sorry, you deserved so much better”. There have been campaigns to officially pardon Turing and all the other men convincted of gross indecency and to get him on the next £10 note.

Sadly, despite all these gestures, the injustice remains and continues around the world in infinite guises. Perhaps the greatest tribute of all would be to work to make the world a place where no one gets intimidated, prosecuted or killed because of who they are and who they love.

Feature image from the Alan Turing Year website.

How could I have forgotten Draw Mohammad day? Argh! Here’s my entry in the name of all the people injured, imprisoned and killed for drawing a picture of a dude whose been dead for 14 centuries.

Link to yours in the comments.

DC Comics plans to reveal that a major established character is gay, according to Dan DiDio, DC’s co-publisher.  If nothing else, the backlash from the people who brought you “Rue is black?! Unacceptable!” should be entertaining.

Check out these awesome portraits of US Hunger Games Olympic athletes.  The featured image is Jennifer Nichols of the US Archery team.  Oooh, we got a badass up in here!

Guidelines for preventing and managing sexual assault in prisons have been updated to include specific guidelines for LGBTI prisoners.   According to the Obama Administration, “The standards require training in effective and professional communication with LGBTI and gender nonconforming inmates and require the screening process to consider whether the inmate is, or is perceived to be, LGBTI or gender nonconforming. “

Guest post by Awkward Turtles

Note: this is part one of a multi-part series documenting my experience of getting top surgery (i.e. a mastectomy).  This time around, I’ll be talking about my upbringing and how I got to this point.

I was a pretty happy kid.  I was lucky enough to have a loving family, go to a series of fantastic public schools, and grow up in Seattle, which is basically one of the most awesome, beautiful cities in the world.  Thanks to its progressive environment, I didn’t have to think too much about gender growing up.  My love of dinosaurs, superheroes, and baggy jeans was encouraged from a young age.  Apart from a few instances in which dresses were non-negotiable (probably the only times I threw full-blown tantrums as a child) and some very minor teasing from schoolmates (mostly surrounding the fact that most of my friends were boys, interestingly), my tomboyishness was largely a non-issue.

I couldn’t have avoided picking up on cultural messages about what girls were supposed to like and be entirely.  In fact, I think my attempt to distance myself from stereotypical femininity was part of the reason I identified so insistently as a tomboy from a young age, despite the fact that I was not particularly masculine either.  But I cannot help thinking in retrospect that I would have encountered far more resistance (and, for better or worse, started to grapple with my gender identity far sooner) if I had been male-assigned at birth and similarly gender-nonconforming.

This drawing is from DeviantArt user InTotalDenial.

In any event, my rather idyllic experience came to a screeching halt when puberty hit.  Perhaps it was not so much screeching as creeping, since the horrifying changes emerged gradually, worsening day by day.  But I couldn’t help but think everything was happening way, way too fast.  I remember standing in front of the mirror again and again, pulling back the skin from my hips, flattening my chest with my hands, pleading with my body not to do this to me.  Eventually I got to a point where I simply couldn’t live with it.

When I was thirteen, I began drastically reducing my food intake and compulsively exercising.  I lost dozens of pounds, but hardly noticed; I had developed such a distorted relationship to food and to my own basic ability to gauge what my body looked like.  I was taken to the hospital after passing out one hot summer day, and my parents subsequently started taking me to a nutritionist.  I ultimately recovered from the eating disorder, but it left me with an overwhelming sense of the futility of trying to modify my body in any way, and, once I realized what a distorted self-image I was capable of developing, a fundamental distrust of my own feelings about my body.  I spent the greater part of the next decade attempting to disassociate myself from it as much as possible.

By nature and by training I try to look for reasons for everything, and trying to understand the intense distress puberty caused me was no exception.  I came up with all kinds of rationalizations: the fact that pubescence was fairly precocious in my case; my discomfort with being objectified as an adult female; etc., etc.  But I never considered the most obvious answer- that I was trans and experiencing gender dysphoria- because, first, I didn’t know such a possibility existed, and second, even if I had, it would not have been an option.  This might be a good time to explain that those loving parents who raised me were evangelical Christians.

They weren’t your textbook-case evangelicals, given that they were well-educated and even politically liberal on some issues.  But they certainly self-identified as evangelicals, and they believed so fervently that salvation comes only through Jesus Christ that they were incredibly active in our church.  My dad even worked for an evangelical student organization.  Many of our family trips were to accompany him as he preached at student retreats, and nearly all our family, friends and relatives were Christian.

The thing is, though, I didn’t have a horrible experience growing up in “the church;” the vast majority of the folks I was surrounded by were smart, friendly, and genuinely interested in my growing up happy.  Though I had persistent doubts about both the factual and logical consistency of and the moral quality of Christian teachings, these usually seemed like sufficiently abstract and distant issues that I was able to patch them over with rationalizations until a good way through college.  That’s another story, but the short version is that in addition to absorbing some underlying homophobic messages, I managed to completely fail to learn of the existence of the trans community until long after I had settled into that aforementioned fatalism.

Both in direct ways and indirectly (because of the confusion about and attempts to ignore my discomfort with my gendered body) my religious upbringing managed to pretty effectively repress my sexuality as well.  Thankfully that started changing when I found myself in love with a girl the summer after I graduated college.  As refreshingly simple as that was admitting to myself, it definitely wasn’t easy telling my parents; I waited about nine months to come out to them.  At least it provided a nice opportunity to come out as an atheist while I was at it!  They ended up taking the news much better than I could have hoped.  While they weren’t always comfortable discussing the issues, they were very clear on the point that I would always be their child and they would always love me.  Meanwhile, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area for grad school and started settling into and exploring my queer identity.

As it turns out, though, I hadn’t settled in for too long before new questions emerged.  They mostly began arising after I met (ok, went on an OkCupid date with, haha) a transmasculine person who identified as genderqueer but was nevertheless pursuing medical transition (in his case, testosterone therapy and top surgery).  I also discovered around this time that a close friend of mine, whom I had assumed identified as female, in fact identified as trans and male.  The implications were spinning around in my binary-steeped mind.  Could a person desire to appear male without identifying as male?  Could a person identify as male without having any interest in medical transition?  What do I identify as?  What do I want?  Who am I?  Thus began a yearlong quest to understand gender, in the hopes of understanding my own.  Certain conclusions came sooner than others, but eventually I decided there were certain things I could be sure about.  I’ll talk more about how I’ve come to identify and what I’ve decided to do in my next post.

Turtles is a young human living in Oakland, California.  They enjoy yummy vegetarian food and weightlifting and queer dance parties and falling asleep in the sun.  Their weaknesses include eating too many salty things and staying up late reading feminist blogs.  They are attracted to many different kinds of people and are trans in the broad sense and are still figuring out the details.
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Featured image from user idontdrinktea.

One of these days, one of my fellow co-workers at the lab said to me, upon finding out I was an atheist:

“Seriously? You don’t belive in anything? Anything at all? Man, I can’t imagine what that feels like.”

Now imagine hearing that. In a lab. While you’re making science.

When I decided to become a biologist, I expected a somewhat skeptical environment, where one could lack spiritual beliefs and be considered a normal human being. An environment where most people were or aimed to be, you know, scientists. But from day one, when the Phylogeny professor asked to a 40-people class “Who believes solely in evolution, without any higher power behind it?” and only two people raised their hands (whilst nine said they believed solely in a higher power), I’ve been proven wrong and wrong again.

And if I’m constantly surprised to find out this many future biologists are actual creationists, people are just bewildered by my inability to believe in a God.

Have you ever been in an environment where a lack of beliefs was expected? Do you think there is such a place? Is there a situation where you are surprised to be in a mostly-religious crowd?

The Afternoon Inqueery (or AI) is a question posed to you, the Queereka community. Look for it to appear on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, at 3pm ET.