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2006
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Explaining
“stolen” memories
A
friend of mine often steals my memories. However, it is not the same as in your article. She and I have only known each other for about 8 month when I moved to the area. I will tell her something from my past and a few days later she will repeat the information back to me, but now claims ownership of it. Usually it has to do with something technical, like how I accidentally learned that dish soap and standing water on cement will lift up much of the smell and stain from pet urine.
I have not confronted my friend on this. She is a very nice person and obviously doesn’t know she doing it. However, it is frustrating to me, she is the hub of which I have met other friends of mine in the area. I often wonder how many times a day she repeats my memories to them while claiming them as her own. And if she is doing that, how many of the things that she tells me that aren’t my memories, aren’t really hers either, but another one of her friends.
Thank you,
CR (crli ster at gmail.c om)
Genes
behind transsexualism possibly found
The tone of this piece is the very sort of thing that contributes to the sundry indignities and oppressions transsexuals face all their lives.
It would seem that the author grasps the basic nature of the condition, ie. the deep-seated neurological (perhaps genetic?) conflict of gender identity versus body morphology. However when speaking of male-to-female transsexuals as “men who wish they were women” the author completely misses the point, and adds needless insult to injury to boot.
I’m not going to get into what makes a man a man and a woman a woman. (The author didn’t bother to, after all). I’ll just say this: if the brain itself, the very seat of human awareness and consciousness, is not to be considered a valid authority on the question of a person’s identity, what, pray tell, is?
In general, this article casts the “desires” of transsexuals to be the genders they perceive themselves to be as mere wishful thinking, and outright insults the hard won gender identities of such people by calling transsexual women men.
Don’t get me started on the unnecessary (and long outdated) sensationalism of juxtaposing Christine Jorgensen’s ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures in the article? For scientific shock value, I suppose, or perhaps to illustrate the exotic weirdness of this “rare” condition.
It’s quite obvious that the author does not consider transsexual people to be the genders that they “claim” themselves to be. But if any author is going to present their own (implicitly stated) biases against transsexual people as fact, particularly in a scientific journal, it behooves them to explain the parameters of exactly whom they consider to be men and women in the first place, and why.
<<More broadly, the research could help clarify one of the most contentious and poorly understood questions in biology: what creates “gender identity”-the sense most people have that they are either a man or a woman.>>
Certainly, this article contributes nothing to that end.
Ina Tingherie
inaliketina *at* yahoo.com
March 27
Claim of reversed human evolution sparks skepticism, interest
It is difficult for me consider that any genetic defect that lead dissabilities,
metal or and motor, could be thought as human de-evolution or consider this ill
people as sub-humans. Ethycally and ideologically I find that this paper is bad and
speculative. I think that Dr Uner Tan must consider that many genetic syndromes
about motor dystonias and mental retardation had been described before and those
people have not been considered between humans and animals. I think also, that he
must give us more scientific evidence and descripction about the syndrome, par
example electromyograms, levels of muscle enzymes , electroencephalograms, brain
MNR, hormons levels, etc, something to be the bassement, outside the genetic, about
the description of the syndrome.
Dr Alicia G fuchs, MD:PhD
Facultad de Medicina
Universidad de Buenos Aires
Argentina
afuc hs [at] mail.retin a.ar
March 8
* * *
Backward? Forward? What does direction mean in evolution? Are we destined to develop in a particular way? Only in the eyes of religious dogma. Teeth in chicken are not a backwards evolution because their dinosaur ancestors had teeth. One can be fairly certain that before then, the common ancestor of the dinosaurs and the chicken, lacked teeth. The first tube of tissue that ingested food lacked teeth. Perhaps palm-walkers will become more common. Will that not make the family that is said to represent a throw-back the first wave of the future? Darwin, rightly I think, treated evolution as if it lacked an arrow or direction towards some perfect or ideal form. The whole debate is sterile. And now we see it is to be sensationalized.
Bah-humbug.
Kenneth Arenson
Personal Injury Law
Ste 202 - 10 St. Mary Street
Toronto, ON., M4Y 1P9
www.kenarenson.com
March 3
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