Pizza, apes and aliens

 Pretty much since starting this blog I have been trying to get my weight down. But recent visits by two friends and all the eating out that that entailed has made me balloon again. They both loved the authentic pizzas to be had round here but there is probably no food known to man that is more fattening. Now that I am in control of my meals again I have managed to get back on track but it's amazing just how much weight you can put on with just a few days of overindulgence! I have to admit, it was good, though!

I still want to get into those little black dresses I used to be able to wear. So the battle of the bulge continues.

Ape gender

I have felt for a very long time that being transgender is an inherent part of certain people's biological makeup. No matter what I or most of my trans friends have ever done to try to stamp out this tendency so as to conform better with modern Western society has ever worked. My body developed predominantly masculine traits, but my gender identity has always been feminine. But a hunch is not the same as certainty so I try to find evidence to support this feeling.

I am reading Frans de Waal's brand new book Different: Gender through the Eyes of a Primatologist. De Waal is a leading biologist who popularised the name bonobo as an alternative to pygmy chimpanzee for that species closely related to ours that, unlike the patriarchal and rather violent world of the chimpanzee, has a matriarchal society that tends to reduce conflict and increase social cohesion by maternal care and free sex throughout life. This has led male-dominated academic institutions and religious leaders to froth at the mouth since bonobo life flies in the face of centuries of belief that males are dominant in animal societies and (therefore by natural right) in human ones. This book is specifically about gender and I may comment more fully when I have finished it but what I have read so far seems encouraging. It joins an increasing number of recent publications by biologists that suggest that gender identity develops separately from one's biological sex. Whilst many trans people might say "well, yeah" at that, it's important to have evidence to support such notions, hence the worth of modern scientific methods in drawing conclusions from real-life observations of how living things actually work, rather than how we'd like them to be. 

Are there primates other than man who can be trans? De Waal seems to have evidence to support the idea.

I've just noticed that Crossdreamers has been reading the book as well and that blog provides some interesting quotes from it.

 

Sex and gender on other worlds

As recommended by Lynn, I am also reading Iain M Banks' 1989 science fiction novel The Player of Games in which changing biological sex is an aspect of life in the Culture. And three sexes, including a dominant cross-sex, is the feature of the Empire the protagonist ends up in. This notion of additional sexes is not new in science fiction. Just for example, in Ursula Le Guin's 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness, the inhabitants of Gethen are ambisexual, taking masculine or feminine roles as required. In Isaac Azimov's 1972 novel The Gods Themselves, a species with three sexes has a significant role in the plot. 

The advantage of science or fantasy fiction is that human society, assumptions and outlook can be challenged, in gender as well as in anything else, by describing worlds that operate in different ways. The current restriction on what gender roles may and may not do or be in contemporary society is still largely dictated by the Abrahamic religions; as you head further from the West and the Near and Middle East where these religions dominate, there seems to be a greater acknowledgment of the realities of transgender life. I have been reading science fiction a lot in the last four or five years as it seems to provide a way of expanding outlook in the wake of increasingly restricted views of society perpetrated by a lot of the populist leaders who seem to be cropping up in our world at present.

Sue x