Crossdream Life Forum Moves to a New Home

The Crossdream Life forum has moved over to a new address.

You can find the new forum over at crossdreamlife.lefora.com.

The reason for the move is simple: We do not have the resources needed to run our own bulletin board system on our own server.

We have therefore outsourced the technical part to Lefora.

I am afraid old members will have to sign up again to the new forum. But in return they get some nifty new features, like video embedding, chat, skins for personal home page, polls, photo albums and more.

The old site will be kept  as an archive for the time being.

Sign up for the new Crossdream Life forum today!

(Photo: Rawpixel Ltd)

10 Great Books on Sex, Gender and Sexuality

In this third part of my "must read gender/transgender books" series, I look at books that discuss sex and gender in general.

Illustration by Olyzel

Much of the pain gender variant people go through is caused by the fact that their family, friends and surrounding society do not understand them.

The reason they do not understand them is that they are trapped in a binary narrative that tells them that men and women are two different species with completely different temperaments, abilities and modes of behavior. Anyone who breaks with this binary is therefore mentally ill.

Recent research, in the social sciences as well as in biology, tells us that this strict binary is wrong on many levels. What is considered proper gender expressions varies tremendously between cultures and over time.

Moreover, it turns out nature is nothing like what your school text books told you. Did you for instance know that the bonobos, our closest relative, has a matriarchal society run by females? They solve conflicts by having a lot of sex with each other, regardless of age or gender. The next time someone tells you gay sex is "unnatural", tell them about the bonobos.

Click here for part 1 of this series!

Here are some of the books I recommend:

Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People, by Joan Roughgarden

Those who follow nature programs on TV know the script: Violent and aggressive males stalk weak and passive females in an everlasting tale of evolutionary brutality. This narrative is then used to make fun of "feminine" men.

Roughgarden shows us a natural world that is nothing like the gender stereotypes of traditional evolutionary biology.

Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, by Anne Fausto-Sterling

Myths Of Gender: Biological Theories About Women And Men, by Anne Fausto-Sterling

Like Roughgarden, Fausto-Sterling is good at seeing through the stereotypes of natural science. Most of the differences between men and women are created by culture and not by nature, Fausto-Sterling argues.

Nope, transitioning does not actually lead to suicide

This is story about "The Science Proves What I Believe Complex", and how a Swedish study of post-op trans people  is misrepresented in order to "prove" that gender reassignment surgery is harmful.

I have now been blogging on trans and crossdreamer issues for seven years, and there is one game that never cease to amaze me. I call it the "Science Proves What I believe" complex. And it does not matter what people believe; they always seem to find a report or a paper somewhere that seem to support their position.

Anti-trans activists often lie about research to
"prove" that transitioning is harmful.
Photo by SIphotography.

If they cannot find such a paper, they often start misrepresenting reports, probably hoping that no one will bother to check.

The Internet is vast, though, and with a lot of clever people. There are always some people out there who take the time to check and double-check dubious statements. Cristan Williams over at Transadvocate is one of them.

Like me, she will go directly to the researcher and ask, if needed.

"The Swedish Study"

Recently we have seen a lot of anti-transgender activity where people are trying to prove that trans people who undergo gender reassignment surgery are not helped by such therapy.

Indeed, the argument now is that transitioning in this way is harmful for the ones involved, and that the alleged failure of the treatment  proves that they were delusional in the first place.

People fighting against transgender rights (TERFs, Fox News and religious fundamentalists included) make a lot out of a Swedish study on transgender people, claiming that it proves that gender reassignment leads to suicide.