Some reddit polls indicate that an increasing number of MTF crossdreamers would like to transition

Over at the Crossdreaming subreddit two members have posted some polls that give surprising results. They indicate that  male to female crossdreamers are much more likely to want to live as their target gender than many  previously thought.

By crossdreamers I mean people who dream about being "another" gender.

The methodological foundation for these polls are weak, as the concepts used are not clearly defined and we are not completely sure who the respondents are.

That being said, r/crossdreaming is a subforum that attracts people who are interested in the concept of crossdreaming, and the history of that forum tells me that most of the respondents are most likely people who are experiencing crossdreaming fantasies themselves, including – most likely – erotic ones.

The great majority are also male to female crossdreamers, i.e. they were assigned male at birth.

We should keep in mind that it is possible that those who are most likely to find this forum and its poll interesting are those crossdreamers who struggle with their gender identity. We do not know this for sure, but this may represent a selection bias.

In any case: The data tells us something interesting about this specific part of the transgender community.

So, what do the polls tell us?

This is why true diversity, and the acceptance of queer and transgender people, is the best way of addressing human suffering

The quest for finding safety in normalcy is a hopeless one. It is better to embrace the diversity of humanity, and let people be who they were meant to be. This also applies to queer and transgender people.

Korviday's brilliant queer analysis of Shrek

Why is it that so many people fear transgender and queer people, or any people that do not follow the norms, for that matter? Why do they want everyone to be like themselves... No, strike that. They do not want them to be like themselves, given that they are all imperfect beings... No, they want them to be like the idealized versions of themselves. The perfect man. The perfect woman. Why is that?

In the  video embedded below korivday uses the two first Shrek movies to discuss what causes this pressure towards “normalcy”.

It is not that these movies present Shrek as queer. They don’t. But they do give us a very good idea about what it means to be an outsider who does not fit the norm.

Korivday is using the interaction between Shrek and the powers that be (Lord Farquaad and the Fairy Godmother) to describe the way society forces queer people back into the closet.

It is a brilliant analysis, and I recommend that you watch it!

Transgender and Non-binary News on Flipboard

Here are four new Flipboard magazines on transgender, nonbinary and queer issues.

I have, over the years, become an active transgender and non-binary news curator. I am doing a lot of research when I write my blog posts and take part in online debates, so I might as well share what I find with likeminded individuals.

So you can find me on twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and tumblr.

Right now I am experimenting with a service called Flipboard. Flipboard is an app for smartphones and PCs that gathers news that might be of interest to you and presents it all in an online magazine format. I use it a lot, not only for transgender news surveillance.

Users can create their own magazines on Flipboard, where they share content they find interesting. Others can then subscribe to these channels, visit them and get news from those magazines in their main feed. Shared items may also pop up in search results.

I have made four Flipboard magazines that may be of interest to some of you. You do not need to register as a user to read the magazines in a browser.

• Transgender News (The latest on trans and nonbinary issues)
• Essential Transgender Reading (Classics from the archives)
• Queer Perspectives (LGBTQA and queer news and articles)
• Trans Express (which is basically a list of my Trans Express posts)

If anyone is interested in becoming co-curator for any of these magazines, let me know. 

Flipboard is available here.

Julia Serano gives us the perfect antidote to transphobic pseudoscience

The trans activist and philosopher Julia Serano has written an excellent overview of the autogynephilia theory of Ray Blanchard, its history, its scientific flaws and its roots in traditionalist prejudices.

Crossdreaming is common

I joined the autogynephilia debate some 10 years ago, and have been trying to reduce the damages the theory has caused among gender variant people ever since.

I would say that one of the most important insights that have been brought up since then, is the insight that erotic crossdreaming or cross-gender fantasies are found among all kinds of people and not only among male to female "crossdressers" and gynephilic ("woman-loving")  and bisexual transgender women.

You find cross-gender fantasies among cis people. You find crossdreaming among trans women who love men. You find it among many of those assigned female at birth. This alone falsifies the theory, which requires that only "straight men" (i.e. lesbian and bisexual trans women) have such fantasies.

How to solve the transgender problem in sports

How to ensure fairness in basketball

I have been thinking about fairness in sports a lot. That is the kind of person I am.

The average height of men in the US is 175 centimeters. In basketball it would be only fair to ban those over 175 centimeters, as extra tall men have an unjust advantage compared to the others.

However, since the men that are 175 centimeters have a natural advantage over those that are 170 centimeters tall, we need to ban everyone between 170 to 175 cm as well. But this will leave the ones that are 170 cm heigh having an unfair advantage over those that are 160 cm, and so on and so forth, which leads me to conclude that the best  kind of basketball is the one where every participant is exactly one meter tall.

At this point we will also ban everyone who is below one meter, because you have to draw the line somewhere, right?

In Norway the average height of men is close to 180 cm. The average Sri Lankian man is 165 cm. The one meter rule will make sure that all international basketball games are fair. Err on the side of caution, I say.

(I am sure my American friends will find the use of the metric system here a little bit bewildering. Remember, though, that 1 meter is 3.28084 feet. I think we all can agree that it easier to remember 1 meter than 3.28084 feet.)

When does a woman look like a man? What AI can tell us about gender.

Most of the images are generated by an artificial intelligence (Artbreeder).
None of these persons exist in the real world.

The way an AI (artificial intelligence) interprets gender can tell us something about how we humans see gender. It seems there is a very narrow tipping point where we start to reclassify from male to female and vice versa.

Artbreeder

Gulliver made me aware of a new artificial intelligence (AI)  based app called Artbreeder over at Crossdream Life. It lets you transform images and photos in a wide variety of ways, including merging photos of two persons and adjust "genes", i.e. variables that defines physical traits.

One such "gene" is gender. You can take a photo of a person, adjust the "gender gene", and watch how feminine traits turn into masculine features.

This software is using machine learning, and it  its calculations are based on  input from a vide variety of photos and pictures. I am not sure how they define feminine and masculine in these algorithms, but keep in mind that the input is culturally defined. AI has a tendency of reproducing contemporary cultural biases.

That being said, what interests me here is not how the AI sees gender, but how I see it, how human beings see it.