Gaywallet's recent activity
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4 votes
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Inequities in conversion practice exposure at the intersection of ethnoracial and gender identities
3 votes -
The health impacts of red meat - reviewing a recent study and current recommendations
7 votes -
Comment on Nearly 30% of Gen Z women identify as LGBTQ, Gallup survey finds in ~lgbt
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Comment on Nearly 30% of Gen Z women identify as LGBTQ, Gallup survey finds in ~lgbt
Gaywallet I don't think that's fair at all. Sociological and cultural factors have been proven at times to be extremely strong. Taking a look at employment history by gender, or gender disparities in...I think it's fair to assume there has to be something physiological that makes AFAB people more likely to be bisexual.
I don't think that's fair at all. Sociological and cultural factors have been proven at times to be extremely strong. Taking a look at employment history by gender, or gender disparities in education scores as it relates to specific fields, you can see entire fields shift over the course of generations entirely based on how society perceives a job to be meant for women or for men. Secretarial work, for example, was completely dominated by men at one point in history and was highly resistant to the entrance of women into the profession for quite some time. Today, it's quite the opposite. Looking at how many individuals identify as queer while a culture goes through removing anti queer laws and explicitly granting them protection, it's clear to see that social repercussions can easily result in a whole magnitude of increase in self reported behavior.
Furthermore when we examine other animals which are not human, we do not find huge disparities between sex and homosexual behavior. There are few animals for which there are sex differences in homosexual behavior and when there is, it's often situations in which homosexual behavior has higher relative rates within a species based on the culture present at their location. Digging further, we have plenty of examples of sex based behavior completely flipping within a single species based on the culture they are surrounded by - one such case are the troops of macaque monkeys in Takasakiyama Japan and their not so distant neighbors in Katuyama. In one location fathers are deeply involved in child rearing behavior and in the other they are indifferent and leave raising children entirely to the mothers.
The idea that this must be physiological because we seem to always see this in modern societies is misled. Today's cultures are heavily shaped by the history of humanity on this world. This viewpoint ignores historical cultures such as the Greeks who by all accounts had much more male homosexual behavior than female, and it ignores cultures which don't hit the mainstream or have been erased by history such as societies with more than two genders (let alone how problematic this makes determining physiological factors that contribute to sexuality) or who may have had higher rates of sex-specific homosexuality.
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Comment on 'If anything happens, it's not suicide': Boeing whistleblower's prediction before death in ~transport
Gaywallet It certainly doesn't have to be a room full of mustache stroking big wigs. It's kind of dismissive to paint it as in if it must have been a group of nodding C-suite executives smoking cigars and...It certainly doesn't have to be a room full of mustache stroking big wigs. It's kind of dismissive to paint it as in if it must have been a group of nodding C-suite executives smoking cigars and drinking whiskey or whatever. If it was a hired hit, Occam's razor points towards someone with ties to Boeing having made a decision (a big shareholder, a really passionate employee, a state representative who has received many generous donations - any number of possible scenarios), not that it was a coordinated or well thought out effort.
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Comment on Nearly 30% of Gen Z women identify as LGBTQ, Gallup survey finds in ~lgbt
Gaywallet If you're referring to all the studies which assess for genital blood flow or where they stick someone in a fMRI, those are both seriously flawed ways to study attraction. If you're talking about...have physical sexual reactions to the same sex
If you're referring to all the studies which assess for genital blood flow or where they stick someone in a fMRI, those are both seriously flawed ways to study attraction. If you're talking about more subtle ways such as pupil dilation those also have similar issues with being a biological signal that happens for many other reasons. It's also entirely possible to be very attracted to someone and not have any 'physical' reaction and the idea that people have consistent 'physical' reactions as a response of their emotional or intellectual state is kind of absurd and rife for issues with design problems due to human diversity and the realities of human lives - as an extreme example if someone just lost a loved one, they are simply less likely to respond to attraction or even recognize attraction because of the impacts of stress. Attempting to account for more minor instances of stress or other contributing factors is an extremely difficult proposition given how many potential sources of stress and environmental factors there can be.
It seems to be physiological rather than exclusively cultural.
This is kind of a huge jump, especially since we absolutely cannot control for culture. There is no way to double blind the effects of culture because we cannot opt someone out of culture nor can we fully assess how it shapes our actions because it is so all-encompassing.
The only thing we can really say about why women are more likely than men to be bisexual is that it's likely influenced by culture - as we see differences in lgbtq+ rates in countries where being queer can get you stoned to death and those which are more open and that there may be a biological basis for this but it's not really measurable as we don't understand how attraction works on a biological level and culture has a huge effect on human behavior.
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Baldur’s Gate 3 wins Outstanding Video Game at GLAAD Media Awards
13 votes -
Comment on 'If anything happens, it's not suicide': Boeing whistleblower's prediction before death in ~transport
Gaywallet There's definitely a lot we don't know yet, but I must say this is a very strange death. But these are still early days, we don't have an autopsy report, we don't have police findings, and we...There's definitely a lot we don't know yet, but I must say this is a very strange death. But these are still early days, we don't have an autopsy report, we don't have police findings, and we don't have other pieces of evidence such as whether he flew out to his depositions with a firearm. It's definitely captured my attention, however, and I'm curious to find out what happened.
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'If anything happens, it's not suicide': Boeing whistleblower's prediction before death
50 votes -
Montana man, 80, pleads guilty to creating giant mutant hybrid bighorns
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Comment on Neuro-biology of trans-sexuality : Prof. Robert Sapolsky in ~lgbt
Gaywallet It shouldn't, and to his credit Sapolsky does recognize this, but having listened to Sapolsky make his case about the lack of free will I harbor doubts about his ability to entertain ideas which...It shouldn't, and to his credit Sapolsky does recognize this, but having listened to Sapolsky make his case about the lack of free will I harbor doubts about his ability to entertain ideas which are outside of his frame of reference. In particular, as I noted, the lack of understanding or familiarity with the diversity amongst transgender individuals and the focus on sexual dimorphism with no mention of hormones and other factors which might shape it, let alone the fact that dimorphism and even brain activation patterns are not precise models of thought... in short I just wonder if he's the right person to be talking about this. He is without a doubt an important professor in the biological sciences, but that doesn't necessarily give him authority to talk on this specific biological field.
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Comment on Neuro-biology of trans-sexuality : Prof. Robert Sapolsky in ~lgbt
Gaywallet Sapolsky is referring to the two papers I linked in the top level reply when talking about the BSTc in the lecture. These papers do not use MRI data and are more targeted at measurements of brain...Got it, I just wasn't sure if the research you referenced was that one that caused people to say that trans women's brains "look" more like cis women's brains on MRIs or what have you. Not that this was necessarily considered accurate.
Sapolsky is referring to the two papers I linked in the top level reply when talking about the BSTc in the lecture. These papers do not use MRI data and are more targeted at measurements of brain volume and subsequently counting receptor types. The BSTc is the portion of the brain he spends the majority of the talk highlighting, and he makes some claims with regards to how transgender brains resemble the brains of the gender with which they identify which I do not believe are justified.
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Comment on Neuro-biology of trans-sexuality : Prof. Robert Sapolsky in ~lgbt
Gaywallet As a brief aside, Sapolsky is perhaps best known in his rejection in the idea of free will. For someone so heavily invested in determinism, I'm not so certain he's the best person to be talking...As a brief aside, Sapolsky is perhaps best known in his rejection in the idea of free will. For someone so heavily invested in determinism, I'm not so certain he's the best person to be talking about what essentially is biological determinism - he is perhaps more likely than others to suffer from confirmation bias when looking for differences in brain morphology. Even if some individuals are more likely than others to have a primarily nature based reason (such as by differences in brain morphology, as proposed) for being transgender, he doesn't seem to even confront the idea that nurture could effect whether someone goes to their deathbed insisting they were born the wrong gender but never pursuing hormonal intervention as compared to someone who pursues medical intervention at an earlier age (this premise assumes that hormones or other biological processes do not effect brain morphology as it is developing, for which there is ample evidence it does) and it doesn't even begin to confront gender non-conformity or situations which are more complex than folks who are transgender but conform to the gender binary.
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Comment on Neuro-biology of trans-sexuality : Prof. Robert Sapolsky in ~lgbt
Gaywallet Sapolsky doesn't talk about what gender the transgender individuals he's talking about have. He generally refers to transgender and transsexual individuals (using the two terms interchangeably,...Sapolsky doesn't talk about what gender the transgender individuals he's talking about have. He generally refers to transgender and transsexual individuals (using the two terms interchangeably, typically utilizing the latter) when talking about the research I criticized above, which only includes a grand total of 6 transgender women. He also talks briefly about phantom limb syndrome at the very end, but that's not exactly something we can pin down to brain structure or even brain activation (fMRI studies as a proxy for brain activity is itself quite problematic, but that's outside the scope of this reply). I'm not convinced that this is a true sexual dimorphism because nearly every study I've ever seen looking for sexual dimorphism in the brain is riddled full of problematic thinking, failure to adhere to the scientific method, or tainted by the file drawer effect. For more information on how male and female brains are probably not actually any different as well as general issues with science targeting gender, I highly recommend the book Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine.
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Comment on Neuro-biology of trans-sexuality : Prof. Robert Sapolsky in ~lgbt
Gaywallet I kinda hate when people point at the BSTc as a functional difference and as the one biological difference between transgender individuals and non-transgender individuals. The reason that I hate...I kinda hate when people point at the BSTc as a functional difference and as the one biological difference between transgender individuals and non-transgender individuals. The reason that I hate this, is that it's based on extremely shoddy evidence with a horrendously low p, was a finding that they weren't even looking for, and the author never bothered to attempt to replicate it (as far as I know, no one has replicated this finding).
The two papers which all this evidence rests on are the following:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7477289/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10843193/The first paper involves only 42 subjects, 6 of whom were transgender women. While they found that the BSTc was larger in males, for transgender women they failed to reach significance (p=0.13) for the assertion that their brains are more aligned with women. They also make an assertion about cross-hormone sex differences based on a single woman who had an adrenal tumor for a short period of time.
The second paper reviews the same subjects in the first paper, and attempts to further classify brain differences based on neuronal type and some other factors. Again, most assertions on transgender folks fail to reach a significant p. Of note, this particular study attempts to classify difference between homosexual and non-homosexual transgender individuals, a problematic framing which comes from a thoroughly discredited individual and is generally a red flag for poor quality research which is heavily influenced by bias.
Of additional note, studies since have proven a link between hormonal changes to brain organization 1 2, notably the BSTc appears to continue to differentiate and change far into adulthood 3, and brain morphology differences found in transgender individuals in the six individuals included in the original study may purely be a reflection of the age these individuals started hormones.
A final note on the original study by Zhou is that the study was not hypothesis driven and was purely exploratory. When you look at an unlimited number of data points and try to find the ones that differ, you will find differences due to pure chance. The BSTc was not even the region of interest they were exploring, suggesting that they examined additional areas just so they could have something interesting to publish. Given that no one has replicated their findings since and studies have even shown that the BSTc is more malleable in humans than originally thought (of note it's much less malleable into adulthood in rats), I wouldn't put any stock into these findings.
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Nearly 30% of Gen Z women identify as LGBTQ, Gallup survey finds
36 votes -
Comment on Our bacteria are more personal than we thought, study shows in ~health
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Our bacteria are more personal than we thought, study shows
21 votes -
Comment on Oregon decriminalized drugs. Voters now regret it. in ~life
Gaywallet Yep, we're getting a lot better at it. I live in SF and I have a box of nasal spray naloxone at home because every once in awhile someone yells out in the street that they need help....Yep, we're getting a lot better at it. I live in SF and I have a box of nasal spray naloxone at home because every once in awhile someone yells out in the street that they need help. Unfortunately, however, naloxone via nasal spray takes longer to take effect than IV or IM administration, and that time can result in brain damage due to hypoxia. There's unfortunately very little high quality evidence on this in humans for obvious ethical reasons, but studies in other animals show that even via atomized nasal administration (slightly faster absorption) there can be significant lag time between the two routes.
I can certainly tell you first hand that it's not uncommon for someone to receive several nasal narcan doses and still be unresponsive until EMS shows up and does an IV or IM administration. It may simply be that we need to create easy to follow guidelines, an acronym or something of the sort in conjunction with handing out more doses of nasal narcan to help revive patients in a quicker yet still effective and risk mitigated fashion.
Yes, that's why I highlighted sex differences that exist within a single species (the macaque monkey example) that vary by location (culture of the troop), such as child rearing behavior. While I am not aware of specific cultural influences on sexual behavior within a single species of animal outside of humans, I would be really surprised if this wasn't true because of how much evidence we have of culture vastly modifying animal behavior within a single species. Unfortunately, however, female-female sexual behavior is often minimized not just in humans, but also in the animal kingdom, so recording inter-cultural differences in homosexuality based on the animal's sex is difficult.