Ah, Discordia!

3x = 30 x+2y+2y=x+4y=18 2y-2z=2

z+xy = ???

which gives us x=10, y=2, z=1, and therefore z+xy = 1+20 = 21

I had to give a ten minute presentation on gender and a) how it’s different from sex, and b) whether or not there’s such thing as a “male” and “female” brain.

I found COUNTLESS studies supporting the idea that the brain itself is unisex- there is very little, if any, difference between “male” and “female” brains, with one exception. I’m by no means a neuroscientist but this is what I understood from this particular article: there’s this tiny part of the hypothalamus (a small part of the brain) that has neutrons in it, and the number of neutrons varies. HOWEVER, when the brains of cis men and women and trans men and women (who had not taken hormones for years prior to the time of death) were studied, it was found that the cis men and trans men had almost identical average neutron counts, and the cis women and trans women had almost identical average neutron counts. So if you’re DMAB but realize at some point that you’re a trans woman, as far as your brain is concerned, you ARE a woman! The same goes for DFAB trans men (intersex/nonbinary individuals weren’t studied, unfortunately).

because the thing is there are minor sex differences in the brain

Mulan. Love your scars by MeryChess

you don’t understand what it’s like to have to take your pain and your limitations into account when searching for housing or employment.

you don’t understand what it’s like to quit a job or an activity you love bc it’s exacerbating your pain levels.

you don’t understand what it’s like to send the “sorry, gotta cancel” text to the same friend four days in a row because your pain is just too intolerable.

you don’t understand what it’s like to have to choose between leaving early (again) or suffering through something that will cause you hours or days or weeks of increased pain.

you don’t understand what it’s like to have your accommodations/self-advocacy/self-care viewed as laziness or rudeness or apathy.

uk armed forces will be exempt from human rights laws. you read that right. the tories want to “protect” soldiers from investigations into non-conflict-related violence abroad

We cannot condemn enough this disgusting move from the already well known senseless British government supported by every of their voters.

This is the fatphobia in the health system that many people refuse to acknowledge. This is the fatphobia that gets fat people killed. THIS IS IT.

I am really passionate about healthcare and medicine.

and now I am really passionately angry

You don’t need to be a woman who’s only attracted to other women to be a lesbian.

You don’t need to be allergic to gluten to suffer from coeliac disease.

You don’t need impaired vision to be visually impaired. 

Which is a roundabout way of saying you don’t need dysphoria to be trans.

If you have measles you may or may not have a rash.

If you are trans you may or may not have dysphoria.

um

yes

yes you do

that is one of the KEY PRINCIPLES OF MEDICAL TERMINOLOGY

Insulin deficiency ISN’T the main symptom of diabetes! Depending on your diabetes type, it may not even be anything to do with diabetes (type 2 diabetes, i.e. the type gained later in life, is not about insulin concentration but receptor specificity, and type 2 patients actually often have a physiological excess of insulin)

Insulin deficiency is a pathology of diabetes. It’s not a symptom. Symptoms of diabetes are things like fatigue, energy spikes and troughs, thirst and diuresis, hypo- or hyperglycaemia...

To be clear, in the “transness is a disease” model (which I’m not saying I subscribe to):

Transness is the disease

A gender not matching your assigned sex is the pathology (i.e. the discernable characteristic of the disease, used both to define and definitively diagnose)

Dysphoria is a symptom - often present, an indicator of the pathology, but not the underlying pathology itself.

Look, in that model, it would be fair to say that non-dysphoric trans people are asymptomatic and thus less in need of treatment, in the same way that someone can have... idk, cancer, and if it’s non-metastatic and non-malign (and thus relatively asymptomatic) they’re not going to be triaged on an equal footing with someone whose cancer is metastatic, malign, or both. But both patients have cancer.

Or to take another example: you can have a cold virus that is entirely asymptomatic, or only slightly symptomatic. This doesn’t mean you need to go to the doctor, but you still have a cold. The underlying pathology is still present. And it can still be relevant to medical treatment - for instance, if you take immunosuppressants, the cold will be A Problem, or you can still pass it on to other people, or it may exacerbate other problems.

You don’t need to be a woman who’s only attracted to other women to be a lesbian.

You don’t need to be allergic to gluten to suffer from coeliac disease.

You don’t need impaired vision to be visually impaired. 

Which is a roundabout way of saying you don’t need dysphoria to be trans.

If you have measles you may or may not have a rash.

If you are trans you may or may not have dysphoria.

um

yes

yes you do

that is one of the KEY PRINCIPLES OF MEDICAL TERMINOLOGY

Creepy or adorable? Researchers at Harvard University have demonstrated the first autonomous, untethered, entirely soft robot: the octobot.

Instead of being controlled by electronics, the robot’s logic board is powered by chemical reactions and fluid passing along tiny channels. Scientist have struggled to create completely soft robots because rigid components like circuit boards, power sources and electronic controls are difficult to replace.  

Learn more about the octobot and soft robotics here and see the full study published in Nature here.

um yes