Newtowner @danielle@octodon.social
Sydneysider. Scientist. Parent. Trans. Femme. Middle-aged. Grumpy.
"If we want more than has been found to be present we are no longer tempted to harass the statistician to work miracles... To consult the statistician after an experiment is finished is often merely to ask him to conduct a post mortem examination. He can perhaps say what the experiment died of."
- Sir Ronald Fisher
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40383882
I'm guessing that Fisher didn't have a big teaching load at the Rothamsted Experimental Station.
A generational oddness: gender identity nomenclature has changed in a way that creates communicative barriers. My older (70s) trans friends refer to themselves as "transsexuals", "transvestites" and "transgenders" and my younger friends (20s) call themselves "trans women", "genderqueer" or "nonbinary". I feel awkward about it, so I'm thinking of following my four year old daughter's suggestion and identifying as a "boygirl". That way everyone can be offended by my choices.
After reading what passes for psychometrics in certain branches of the psychiatric literature I would like to propose that DSM VI should be reduced to the famous Richelieu quote
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
next to a picture of a gibbet. It would save me a certain amount of bother in arguing with fools who can't tell the difference between measurement and maliciously induced method effects.
http://www.command.com/3M/en_US/command/
https://fuck.marketing/ but this one is really good
I never realised what misgendering feels like until discovering how it feels to be gendered correctly. Reaching the point where strangers sometimes perceive me as female even without hormones ... it's like that first day of feeling healthy after a long illness, or that moment that the sun breaks through the clouds on a dark day. But then they "realise" I'm a man, correct their mistake, and the world goes grey again. I often wish I'd never found out what I was missing.
How do you dress for a work presentation when only half the audience knows your gender? It's in a small town, you'll have to use the men's toilets and it distresses the local blokes if you look "too femme". However, you'll also need to discuss said gender with several work people and you'll need to look "femme enough" for those conversations go smoothly. If your choices make too many people uncomfortable there will be consequences. Does Miss Manners have an etiquette guide for this situation?
Curse you, anonymous tiny human girl. I was settling into a familiar ritual of fear and loathing of returning to the country, composing vicious posts in my head. And now thanks to your nutty enthusiasm at something so pedestrian as the arrival of a bus I can't stop smiling. Seriously I'm trying to get my grump going and you're making it very difficult. Very impolite.
Fine. Be like that.
Now I'm just going to have to be happy for the rest of the afternoon. I hope you're proud of yourself.
One does not have to look far in order to find the trouble [with null hypothesis significance testing] -- it is simply a basic misconception about the purpose of a scientific experiment ... not to precipitate decisions, but to make an appropriate adjustment in the degree to which one accepts, or believes, the hypothesis
- William Rozeboom (1960)
Letting go of my assigned gender is hard. I guess it feels like I was shoved into this tiny box and people hurt me every time I tried to get out, all the while denying there was a box. Then decades later those same people say oh yes there's a box, but it's okay to come out of the box. And I think to myself, "my, grandma... what sharp teeth you have..."
A thing I find hard about accepting a feminine identity: not getting distressed at criticisms of men. I've been required to call myself a man for so long that it's hard to adjust. Even when not directed at me, "life on easy setting" remarks hurt. I think about how gender affects me, how I struggle to put voice to my history, and I want to scream. I know I'm reading those comments wrong, but I've been forced to live as a man for so long that it just feels like salt being rubbed in the wounds.
I cannot make up my mind whether the most awesome thing about thermal nail polish is watching the nails change colour in different ways on different fingers, or the explanation for how it works:
http://www.labmuffin.com/how-do-thermal-polishes-work/
Actually I take that back. The best thing about thermal nail polish is that at long last I'm living somewhere that I can wear it safely.
Ebbinghaus:
Mental states of every kind, -- sensations, feelings, ideas, -- which were at one time present in consciousness and then have disappeared from it, have not with their disappearance absolutely ceased to exist. ... We cannot, of course, directly observe their present existence, but it is revealed by the effects which come to our knowledge with a certainty like that with which we infer the existence of the stars below the horizon.
The NSW decision to drop the Safe Schools program is a little sad. I suppose it was inevitable, but I do wonder how many of its critics had ever engaged with them. The one thing I went to was a pretty chill "okay trans kids do exist, let's not be unkind to them" information session. It really didn't seem to warrant the moral panic that ensued. Seems a shame.
The 500 character limit is an interesting constraint. It feels more like writing the abstract to a scientific paper, whereas 140 characters is closer to writing the title. A title only needs to state what you believe, but an abstract also needs to state why you believe it. Writing a good title is easy; writing a good abstract is much harder. I hope this survives. It's kind of fun.
A tiny joy of gender ambiguity: children construct the most endearing descriptions. My daughter confidently informs me that I am a boygirl. Another child tells me that Captain America is a girl who likes to be a boy. A third tells me that some dads can be girls because girls can marry girls and one of them can be the dad. They do seem to attach importance to the amab/afab distinction, but they're totes fine with complex mappings onto masc/femme identities, roles and presentation. It's sweet.
I swear I had something for this
