Classification of ground state mesons (left) and baryons (right) (from “Quarkmodel” in Review of Particle Physics2020) Stefan Meyer Institute for Subatomic Physics of the Austrian Academy of Sciences
Named: " The Siberian Doorway to the Underworld" AKA "The Batagay Megaslump" AKA the "Batagaika Crater".
The permafrost in Siberia’s Yana Highland is melting causing a crater to form. Permafrost is ice under the ground that keeps a layer of dirt up.
The rate of melting is increasing with global warming. And may continue until the crater hits bedrock.
The Batagay River which receives water from the snow melt will be affected. And unfrozen sediments and nutrients will be released causing green house gasses to be released.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is the first regulatory body to begin to use miniature models of a human organ – the liver. These models (pictured) are made from different types of human liver cells grown on a scaffold. This scaffold has blood-like fluid pumped through it to deliver nutrients and remove waste products. The FDA want to find out if these ‘livers-on-chips’ can reliably model how our bodies react to new foods, including added colours and flavours, and food-borne illnesses. If its initial trial is successful, the FDA may start testing on kidney, lung and intestine models. These could more closely replicate how the cells in our body behave than is currently possible with computer models and through studies on human tissues and animals. And ultimately reduce the number of animals used in testing. However, it will still be some time before ‘organs-on-chips’ replace traditional research techniques.
Written by Charlotte Rose Davison
Image by Emulate Inc., Boston, MA, USA, published in Nature, April 2017
US Food and Drug Administration, Silver Spring, MD, USA
Image copyright held by Nature Publishing Group 2017
Announcement in FDA Voice blog, April 2017
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Wait... if gender's a social construct, then does that mean being trans is a choice? It sounds like you're saying that being trans is a performance. I can't see how one can be born trans without there being anything innate about the two genders.
“If gender is a social construct, being trans is a choice” makes about as much logical sense as saying “if money is a social construct, being poor is a choice”. Which, you know, money is a social construct. There is no inherent “value” to anything, regardless of when it was based on something tangible like gold or how it is today, based on…I don’t know, the trust of banks or something. I’m not an economist. Point is: monetary value is decided by us, so it’s a social construct, but just because it’s a social construct doesn’t mean it’s not real or doesn’t have real effects. It’s similar with gender: just because we define what it means as a society doesn’t mean it’s not real.
Also, being trans is not a performance. You’re confusing gender and gender presentation. The difference between the two is best exemplified in drag: people who are usually men (and usually even cis men) are presenting as women for the sake of a performance. Their gender remains male, only their gender presentation changes. I’m only saying this here because I’m probably going to use presentation later so I’d rather we be on the same page about what it is.
As for gender in particular, I have two three things to say. And just to be clear: I am a cis person, so I may make mistakes, although I think I have done enough research and listened to enough people to have a solid enough understanding to explain this, which is basically gender 101.
Also, have a cut because it’s a long post.
One: There are no “two genders”
The gender binary is also a social construct. There’s been plenty of explanations of that, and I don’t want to spend too long about this, because it’s not really the purpose of this blog (besides, biology is not my field of science). But the gist of the reasoning is this:
People who argue that there are only two genders tend to equate gender to sex.
Sex isn’t a binary itself, however. Sex is an ill-defined notion at best, too, but putting it on a binary is a bad idea whichever definition you go for, which tends to include:
Chromosomes. The good ol’ XX/XY is incomplete. Intersex people exist.
Gonads (sexual organs). Testicles and ovaries…but again, intersex people exist and some present organs that don’t fit neatly into one or the other, because both are grown from the same fetal tissue, so that tissue can go somewhere in-between.
Hormone levels, especially with testosterone, estrogen, and I think progesterone? Could be wrong about the latter. Regardless, this one doesn’t even work on anybody. There are cis perisex men with low testosterone/high estrogen, cis perisex women with the opposite, et cetera. Because hormones are complicated like that.
Ternary sexual characteristics (like pilosity, breasts, et cetera). That is actually the one we use to assume people’s sex and gender most often than not, since we can’t run a DNA sequencing, we can’t measure their hormone levels, and we can’t (usually) just ask to see their genitals. It’s also the most flawed of them. I mean, they’re controlled by hormones, so that’s a bad place to start for the reason I discussed above. Plus we can just work around them by altering gender presentation that I mentioned above. See also: binders, padding, make-up.
The sex binary was made by old scientists with incomplete data and a lot of confirmation bias. Any scientist worth their salt will tell you that if you have data that does not fit the current model, that model should be scrapped and replaced. I mean, without this (which is the very foundation of the scientific method), we wouldn’t have the theory of electromagnetism (which only all of the Internet relies on), or quantum mechanics, or relativistic physics. All of these replaced older models. Note that these old models, just like the sex binary, are still useful in specific situations! As long as you’re on Earth, Newtonian physics are fine and you can combine speeds additively instead of using the dreadful method of relativistic physics. As long as you’re talking about cis perisex people, the sex binary is useful to talk about a lot of their biological processes. But neither is useful outside of their hypotheses.
Back to gender. Gender is even more ill-defined than sex. I mean, without resorting to gender roles, it’s hard to even talk about what makes a man or a woman. So if it’s based on sex, and the sex binary, is outdated, why bother with a gender binary?
So…yeah. Gender today is understood to be on a multi-dimensional spectrum. As in, it’s not just “male, female, and stuff in between”. There are people who fall outside of the binary altogether, people with no gender, people wth multiple genders. Scientific observation tells us that, if this is their experience, our model that tells us there are only two genders is probably just plain wrong and we need a new one.
But back to that “it’s hard to define gender at all”. Put a pin on it. I’ll get back to it.
Two: The “born this way” narrative
That narrative. I understand how it came to be, and I understand its usefulness, but in the end, I loathe it.
See, the idea that you’re born this way (whether “this way” is referring to gender or sexuality) is mostly something to make the idea more palatable. And to make it less okay to, you know, oppress people based on it.
A lot of people relate to it. But ultimately, it is not a universal constant of the queer community, and if anything, it’s a little bit restrictive.
I mean, take sexuality. As a child, you may experience romantic attraction, but sexual attraction usually only occurs around or after puberty. So already it’s inaccurate to say that one is born gay/straight/bi/pan/poly/etc, because it’s something you only find out about yourself once you grow up and realize what those feelings are. And there may be external factors that delay that realization even further.
For instance, a lot of lesbians and queer women have reported that they only figured out their sexuality as adults, because before that, heteronormativity and misogyny made them assume that their lack of interest in boys was “normal”, that no girl really wanted sex or at the very least that they couldn’t like boys, because gender roles.
People who aren’t monosexual (whether because they’re attracted to multiple genders or somewhere on the asexual spectrum) similarly have a harder time realizing their sexuality because, usually, they’re not even taught that that exists. I was one of the lucky ones, knowing about bisexuality before I even had my own sexual awakening so I could place a name on it.
It’s the same thing with trans people. Some identify with their gender from as early as they’re able to, some take much longer, due to many reasons.
Plus, it speaks to a very weird societal mindset, to focus on being born a certain way as your “true” identity, as if people didn’t change and their identity was set in stone from the start. I think a much better narrative is that we’re born a genderless blob with no true identity of our own, and a combination of who we are and how our experiences influence us determines our identity, ergo our gender (as part of that identity). Then again, that’s just my philosophy of personal choice being at play here.
But really, the biggest issue I have with this idea is that it prevents people from questioning their gender and/or sexuality, when I think everyone, including cis and/or straight people, should do that. It is after all much more fulfilling to identify with anything because you’ve spent some time critically looking at the options and picking the one you like best rather than accepting what has been forced upon you.
Which leads us to…
Three: How do I know?
A.k.a. time to go back to that pin I told you to put on the idea that it’s hard to define gender.
While this isn’t a universally agreed-upon sentiment, I am of the school of thought that what defines one’s gender is what is referred to as gender euphoria. Now, I realize that “euphoria” might bring up the picture of some ecstatic feeling, but the term here is just used in opposition to dysphoria (the two being etymological opposites).
Gender dysphoria is one that people are usually more familiar with. It’s the idea that a person experiences discomfort with their assigned gender, and usually, with their body as per the expectations that gender places on your body. And “discomfort” is usually a euphemism, because it usually leads to disorders like depression or even to self-harm. It’s also what leads some trans people to need surgery or hormonal therapy, or just psychotherapy, as coping/healing mechanisms.
To some people, dysphoria is what defines transness, but as I said, I’m not of that school of thought, which goes back to my philosophy of choice. But also because it just seems odd to me to base a part of one’s identity around pain.
The theory around gender euphoria is that what defines one’s gender isn’t feeling bad about identifying with another gender, but feeling good about identifying with the “right” gender for you. Basically, if using the signifiers of one gender (such as, but not necessarily including all of, or limited to: pronouns, name, gender presentation and roles) feels better for you than whatever you’re using now, this is probably a better gender for you and you’re probably trans.
This theory doesn’t remove the possibility for dysphoria for the wrong gender, but it explains it as a side-effect of not experience gender euphoria rather than the defining experience of transness. And, well, seeing as “you’re only trans if you have dysphoria” is usually used by people to exclude other people from trans communities, and I’ve already stated my views on exclusionism in general…you can probably guess why I take this stance.
Now you’ll note that I only helped explain how you can tell what a specific person’s gender is here, not how to define gender in the first place. This is where we get back to the basic idea that gender is a social construct. All we can effectively observe is the signifiers of gender, and how people interact with those (dysphoria, euphoria, or just nothing at all). So how do we define a gender?
Well, that’s the social construct part—in other words, we can’t, not in a scientific way. Society (in other words, people) is what defines which pronouns or names are associated to what gender, or what we expect a person of a certain gender to be like.
Which is great! Because it means society is also open to more gender, or to redefine what those signifiers are. You’ve probably heard that the “pink is for girls, blue is for boys” idea is a fairly recent one and was in fact reversed less than a century ago, for instance. Or the fact that women couldn’t wear pants until fairly recently (in the scale of our society, anyway). That means we can introduce new signifiers for genders that are less represented (say, by making up new sets of pronouns), and we can also reject the signifiers that we feel are antiquated/oppressive (like…all of misogyny and toxic masculinity, basically). So we can have trans people while also not needing to cling to gender roles and sexism. It can be done!
I hope this admittedly long-winded explanation helps answer your question, anon.
