| sew | sewed | sewed | sweing | tailored |
| sewing machine | ||||
| sew something | ||||
| sew up a seam | ||||
| sew up a deal |
Saturday, April 30, 2022
Friday, April 29, 2022
CSA schedule .
Monday, May 2, 10:30 - 11:20 a.m. Motivation and Organization from Home, Presenter: Pablo
Monday, May 2, 11:30 a.m. - 12:20 p.m. Winning @ Email, Presenter: Diana
Monday, May 2, 5:30 - 6:20 p.m. Creating Dynamic Thesis Statements, Presenter: Victoria
Tuesday, May 3, 10:30 - 11:20 a.m. Managing Digital Distractions, Presenter: Derek
Tuesday, May 3, 2:30 - 3:20 p.m. Online Learning Tips and Tricks, Presenter: SSC Tutors
Tuesday, May 3, 5:30–6:20 p.m. Effective Body Paragraphs, Presenter: Victoria
Wednesday, May 4, 10:30 - 11:20 a.m. Reading Strategies for Online Classes, Presenter: Diana
Wednesday, May 4, 12:30 - 1:20 p.m. Writing a Compelling Resume, Presenter: Michael
Wednesday, May 4, 1:30–2:20 p.m. Managing Stress, Presenter: Oksanna
Wednesday, May 4, 3:30–4:20 p.m. Subject-Verb Agreement, Presenter: Kanako
Thursday, May 5, 11:30 a.m.–12:20 a.m. Avoiding Plagiarism, Presenter: Pablo
Thursday, May 5, 1:30–2:20 p.m. Taking Notes in Online Class, Presenter: Diana
Thursday, May 5, 2:30–3:20 p.m. Anti-Procrastination, Presenter: Oksanna
Friday, May 6, 9:30–10:20 a.m. The Writing Process: Prewriting, Presenter: SSC Tutors
Friday, May 6, 10:30 a.m. - 11:20 p.m. Structuring Personal Narratives, Presenter: DA Creative Writers
Friday, May 6, 11:30 a.m.- 12:20 p.m. Campus Connections & Resources, Presenter: Pablo
Or, you can use Drop-in Tutoring at https://www.deanza.edu/
You can also get credit for meeting with a Counselor—if you haven’t already. Links and verification instructions are in S22 CSA Canvas.
Do you have questions about the WRC or workshops or CSA (Links to an external site.) ? Please reply to this email or talk to Victoria, Oksanna, or Diana in the Writing and Reading Center. We will work with you to find that one open time you have in your schedule so that you can complete CSA.
Hope to see you soon!
The WRC Team
Thursday, April 28, 2022
No License Plates Here: Using Art to Transcend Prison Walls
SOLEDAD, Calif. — More than most artists, the men who gather twice a week for mural class in the B Facility are accustomed to darkness.
But the scene they are creating — a tropical rain forest — requires color and light, elements in short supply at Salinas Valley State Prison.
“I don’t have much of a legacy,” Jeffrey Sutton, who is serving 41 years for armed robbery, said of his life. “This is something positive that helps me focus on getting out,” he added, daubing flecks of green onto the leaves of a jungle vine.
IT BOTHERS MATTHEW LAHUE and it surely bothers you: enter a public restroom and the stall lock is broken.
Fortunately, Mr. Lahue has a solution. (creative idea)
It’s called the
Bathroom Bodyguard. (of course if you have friend or pet you can do that)
Standing before his Buffalo State College classmates and professor, Cyndi Burnett, Mr. Lahue displayed a device he concocted from a large washer, metal ring, wall hook, rubber bands and Lincoln Log.
Slide the ring in the crack and twist. The door stays shut. Plus, the device fits in a jacket pocket.
The world may be full of problems, but students presenting projects for Introduction to Creative Studies have uncovered a bunch you probably haven’t thought of. Elie Fortune, a freshman, revealed his Sneaks ’n Geeks app to identify the brand of killer sneakers you spot on the street.
“I don’t expect them to be the next Steve Jobs or invent the flying car,” Dr. Burnett says. “But I do want them to be more effective and resourceful problem solvers.” Her hope, she says, is that her course has made them more creative.
can able to create available resorces .
Once considered the product of genius or divine inspiration, creativity — the ability to spot problems and devise smart solutions — is being recast as a prized and teachable skill.
Pin it on pushback against
standardized tests and standardized thinking, or on the need for
ingenuity in a fluid landscape.
Thesis 4 Thoy
Thesis: Men living their life to the stereotype of being the strongest
will find themselves stuck to a lifestyle trying to impress others giving themselves
no time to develop a personal identity of themselves.
There are many solutions to this issue, however, many of the solutions are
unproductive that only cause more damage to men and the few good solutions are
being neglected.
Point 1: Men stuck to this stereotype find themselves living a life to impress others
Point 2: Men stuck to this stereotype give themselves no time to develop a
personalities for themselves
Point 3: The solution fix this isn’t to create gender- neutral environments and
eliminating the construct of gender, but to provide young boys the resources
necessary to become good men.
Group: How do these 3 Points connect? How? Why?Thesis 3
Thesis:3
Point 1: Females need to be decorated in order to be beautiful/feminine.
Point 2: Males to be the providers/breadwinner.
Point 3: Expectation that females need to look sexy to be consider beautiful
Group: How do these 3 Points connect? How? Why?
Thesis 2
Thesis: There is a gender code that says that men who show emotion are weak. This is false, but it is more destructive because of the emotional damage it has on young boys and men alike, and the implementation of this gender code in all aspects of society such as the school or workplace. As a result, this gender code needs to be abolished
Point 1: When looking at the harmful effects that gender code enforcement can cause, it is important to highlight the code that males are seen as weak if they show emotion, and the incalculable damage that this causes.
Point 2: When observing the gender code depicting men as weak when showing emotion, it can be shocking to see how this gender code affects numerous other aspects of interaction involving males.
Point 3: A final reason concerning the destructiveness and need for the dismantlement of male gender codes concerning weakness and emotion is the impact that this gender code has in places such as school, or the workplace, and the relationship skills that men develop.
Group: How do these 3 Points connect? How? Why?
Thesis 1 sample ( student1)
Thesis: Enforcing what girls and boys can or can’t play with brings about unhealthy gender standards, unnecessary division, and limited freedom of expression.
Point 1: People’s preconceptions of what girls and boys should play have created unhealthy gender standards that fosters a very toxic mindset about how to view oneself
Point 2: Telling boys and girls who and what they should play with creates unwarranted division between children of both genders
Point 3: Children should be allowed to express themselves freely with what they enjoy to play with.
Group: How do these 3 Points connect? How? Why?
Examples: Division by gender at an early age may lead children to the more “extreme” aspects of gender, running the risk of preventing children from playing with, or behaving in ways, that they prefer (or feel most at home in).
Cause-effect type of connection. The division of playing with only certain toys sets the chain in motion, resulting in exaggerated behavior which may feel less true to children.
Connection Types for Points → Thesis
1. Cause – effect/result
2. Effect/result – cause
3. Contradiction/Opposition
4. Complication (supports, but only under certain conditions)
5. Support - providing a detailed example or expert opinion
6. Common idea underneath - may not be directly statedTuesday, April 26, 2022
Thursday, April 21, 2022
Unlimited Attempts Allowed
Available: Apr 18, 2022 12:00am until Apr 21, 2022 11:59pm
Please write a new PIE paragraph, different from the one you wrote in Week 2
(for the assignment "A Gender Code that Interests You So Far").
Point -- What's ONE gender code you will address and WHY? Why is is it important?
Information -- What are 2 pieces of evidence you will use to support your point? Introduce it, as in provide context on where it's from and include the quote in the proper format.
Wednesday, April 20, 2022
PIE format
What is PIE format?
PIE format
The format is based upon the scholarship of Dr. Anne Marie Hall at the University of Arizona. PIE is an acronym for Point, Illustration, and Explanation. It is used in body paragraphs to help students figure out how to include examples and quotes. PIE also forces students to engage in analysis and to fully and to logically develop their ideas. It is an ideal model for any student who has a lot of trouble organizing a paragraph.
Is this similar to essay structure?
PIE is a part of the structure of an essay. An essay is defined by an introduction, body, and conclusion. PIE helps to develop the body paragraphs of the essay. You can consider PIE to be the structure for each individual body paragraph.
Do I apply PIE to my introduction and conclusion?
No. PIE is used for body paragraph development only.
So, what exactly do Point, Illustration, and Explanation mean?
Point: This is the main idea sentence, or topic sentence, of the paragraph. It establishes the topic and stance that you are taking in the paragraph. To unify the essay, it also needs to link directly to the thesis statement.
Illustration: The Illustration is the example, the direct quote from a source, a detailed example from a film, or a personal example that helps to prove your point. In other words, this is your piece of evidence. The Illustration is intended to be objective; it is telling facts of some kind to the reader.
Explanation: The Explanation is the analysis. It explains to the reader why you included the Illustration that you did by answering the question “so what?’. The Explanation also shows how the Illustration connects to the Point of the paragraph and to the thesis of the essay. As a result, the Explanation is the most important, and probably the longest, part of the PIE structure. It is the “how” and the “why” of the analysis
Sample PIE Outline:
Point #1: King uses emotionally-charged language
Illustration #1: Occurs when King repeats various phrases. Evident when he says “Now is the time.” “Now is the time to make real the promises of Democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God’s children. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood” (706).
Explanation #1: With each repetition, I get the sense that King is placing more emphasis on the phrase itself. The word “Now” is also italicized, so that helps. I feel myself being drawn into what he is saying and feel his passion toward this particular subject.
Sample PIE Paragraph:
One of the most prominently used types of language in King’s speech is his use of emotionally- charged language, which is language used to evoke a sharp emotional response in the reader. The most obvious method by which King uses this language is through his repetition of key phrases in the speech. For instance, King states,
Now is the time to make real the promises of Democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God’s children. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. (706)
The fact that the editor of the speech has italicized the word “Now” calls extra emphasis to the importance of each new phrase that King speaks. The relatively short sentences serve to stimulate the passions of the reader, so that we may share in the same passion that King felt as he delivered these words in 1963. The fact that he uses repetition multiple times throughout the speech serves to call our attention to the urgency of the issue being discussed. This form of emotionally-charged language serves to establish an emotional bond between the reader and King; however, King’s mastery of emotive language does not end here.
Variations: The PIE format can also be applied when creating longer, more complex paragraphs that you might see in scholarly journals. Writers may sometimes combine 2 or more PIE structures together in a single paragraph if they have several examples to reinforce their claim.
Empty PIE Outline for Your Use:
Point #1: _______________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________
Illustration #1: _______________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________
Explanation #1: _______________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________
Designed by: Mike Geary 10/16 Update by: Mike Geary 01/21
Tuesday, April 19, 2022
Units + Essay Due Dates
Units + Essay Due Dates
ESSAY DUE DATES :
| ESSAY | DUE DATE | POINTS |
|---|---|---|
|
Essay #4: Gender Codes |
Week 4
|
100 |
| Essay #5: Creativity (TIMED) |
Week 6,
|
100 |
| Essay #6: Responding to the Novel, Everything I Never Told You |
Week 9
|
100 |
|
Essay #7: Revision of Happy, Vargas or Gender (part of final, the Portfolio) |
Week 11,
|
100 |
|
Essay #8: The Reflective Essay, Revised (part of final, the Portfolio) |
Week 11,
|
100 |
|
Portfolio (Final Exam) |
For the Portfolio, you will (re)submit in ONE file:
which is our final for this class. |
Monday, April 18, 2022
copy Happiness Essay promp
ASSIGNMENT:
Write an essay on ONE of the topics below. Whichever option you choose, please bring in ideas from multiple readings/any videos I assigned and from your classmates on the Google Doc. Remember, you can use quotes to support your arguments, or you can use them as possible counterarguments. Also, as you explain your points, please give specific examples from your own life or examples you have seen in the world.
Also be sure to present and respond to counterarguments throughout your essay. You can find counterarguments in the readings and also in our Google Docs.
Option 1:
What is the relationship between money and happiness?
Before you start writing, consider:
-The things that make us truly happy ... do they require money?
-Is money giving us pleasure or happiness? When we buy something we want, does it make us happy? Is it real, lasting happiness, or does the feeling wear off quickly?
-Are there ways we can spend money that will bring greater happiness?
-How can money make us less happy? Think of specific examples.
Option 2:
Are we in control of our happiness? If so, what specific things can we do to increase our happiness?
Before you start writing, consider:
-Can we choose to be happy even if our life circumstances are difficult?
-Have you ever been unhappy even when you had good things in your life?
-Do we need other people in order to be happy?
-Are there certain external circumstances that prevent happiness?
-Can depression and anxiety prevent us from being happy even if we want to?
-Can we train our minds to be happy?
Option 3:
Should happiness be the main goal of our lives, or are there more important goals?
Before you start writing, consider:
-What other things in life are more important than happiness?
-Is the pursuit of happiness a selfish or shallow pursuit?
-Is it possible to live a happy life that has no meaning?
-Is it possible to live a meaningful but unhappy life?
-Do you agree with Emily Esfahani's Smith's views on the four pillars of meaning?
https://www.ted.com/talks/emily_esfahani_smith_there_s_more_to_life_than_being_happy?language=en
Option 4:
Is happiness a societal problem or a personal problem? In other words, does society's policies, wages, opportunities, and norms have a strong impact our happiness, or not?
Before you start writing, consider:
-Is our happiness shaped by our opportunities in life?
-Can we be happy with low wages and a lack of opportunity for careers?
-Can we be happy if we don't have adequate health care?
-Can we be happy in a society that is racist or unjust?
-Can we be happy if we go against society's norms?
Option 5: Combine some of the options above or create your own claim that connects the ideas in multiple readings about happiness. Please show me your thesis before you begin.
TIPS:
-Use your introduction to explain your own definition of happiness. Remember, we wrote this definition of happiness in class.
-Please know: your essay doesn't need to be black and white. It's fine to take a middle ground and argue that position.
-Don't forget to include counterarguments/responses.
-Please try to draw on multiple readings to help you defend and illustrate your points.
-Please underline or bold your thesis and your responses to counters.
Saturday, April 16, 2022
How Science is Helping us Understand Gender By Robin Marantz Henig
How Science is Helping us Understand Gender By Robin Marantz Henig
January 2017 issue of National Geographic magazine
Freed from the binary of boy and girl, gender identity is a shifting landscape. Can science help us navigate?
She has always felt more boyish than girlish.
From an early age, E, as she prefers to be called for this story, hated wearing dresses, liked basketball, skateboarding, video games.
When we met in May in New York City at an end-of-the-year show for her high school speech team,
E was wearing a tailored Brooks Brothers suit and a bow tie from her vast collection.
With supershort red hair, a creamy complexion, and delicate features, the 14-year-old looked like a formally dressed, earthbound Peter Pan.
Later that evening E searched for the right label for her gender identity. “Transgender” didn’t quite fit, she told me.
For one thing she was still using her birth name and still preferred being referred to as “she.”
And while other trans kids often talk about how they’ve always known they were born in the “wrong” body, she said, “I just think I need to make alterations in the body I have, to make it feel like the body I need it to be.”
By which she meant a body that doesn’t menstruate and has no breasts, with more defined facial contours and “a ginger beard.” Does that make E a trans guy?
A girl who is, as she put it, “insanely androgynous”?
Or just someone who rejects the trappings of traditional gender roles altogether?
You’ve probably heard a lot of stories like E’s recently.
But that’s the whole point: She’s questioning her gender identity, rather than just accepting her hobbies and wardrobe choices as those of a tomboy, because we’re talking so much about transgender issues these days.
These conversations have led to better head counts of transgender Americans, with a doubling, in just a decade, of adults officially tallied as transgender in national surveys; an increase in the number of people who are gender nonconforming, a broad category that didn’t even have a name a generation ago; a rise in the number of elementary school–age children questioning what gender they are; and a growing awareness of the extremely high risk for all of these people to be bullied, to be sexually assaulted, or to attempt suicide.
The conversation continues, with evolving notions about what it means to be a woman or a man and the meanings of transgender, cisgender, gender nonconforming, genderqueer, agender, or any of the more than 50 terms Facebook offers users for their profiles.
At the same time, scientists are uncovering new complexities in the biological understanding of sex.
Many of us learned in high school biology that sex chromosomes determine a baby’s sex, full stop: XX means it’s a girl; XY means it’s a boy. But on occasion, XX and XY don’t tell the whole story.
Today we know that the various elements of what we consider “male” and “female” don’t always line up neatly, with all the XXs—complete with ovaries, vagina, estrogen, female gender identity, and feminine behavior—on one side and all the XYs—testes, penis, testosterone, male gender identity, and masculine behavior—on the other. It’s possible to be XX and mostly male in terms of anatomy, physiology, and psychology, just as it’s possible to be XY and mostly female.
Each embryo starts out with a pair of primitive organs, the proto-gonads, that develop into male or female gonads at about six to eight weeks.
Sex differentiation is usually set in motion by a gene on the Y chromosome, the SRY gene, that makes the proto-gonads turn into testes.
The testes then secrete testosterone and other male hormones (collectively called androgens), and the fetus develops a prostate, scrotum, and penis.
Without the SRY gene, the proto-gonads become ovaries that secrete estrogen, and the fetus develops female anatomy (uterus, vagina, and clitoris).
But the SRY gene’s function isn’t always straightforward.
The gene might be missing or dysfunctional, leading to an XY embryo that fails to develop male anatomy and is identified at birth as a girl. Or it might show up on the X chromosome, leading to an XX embryo that does develop male anatomy and is identified at birth as a boy.
A recent survey of a thousand millennials found that half of them think gender is a spectrum.
Genetic variations can occur that are unrelated to the SRY gene, such as complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS), in which an XY embryo’s cells respond minimally, if at all, to the signals of male hormones. Even though the proto-gonads become testes and the fetus produces androgens, male genitals don’t develop. The baby looks female, with a clitoris and vagina, and in most cases will grow up feeling herself to be a girl.
Which is this baby, then? Is she the girl she believes herself to be? Or, because of her XY chromosomes—not to mention the testes in her abdomen—is she “really” male?
Georgiann Davis, 35, was born with CAIS but didn’t know about it until she stumbled upon that information in her medical records when she was nearly 20.
No one had ever mentioned her XY status, even when doctors identified it when she was 13 and sent her for surgery at 17 to remove her undescended testes.
Rather than reveal what the operation really was for, her parents agreed that the doctors would invent imaginary ovaries that were precancerous and had to be removed.
In other words, they chose to tell their daughter a lie about being at risk for cancer rather than the truth about being intersex—with reproductive anatomy and genetics that didn’t fit the strict definitions of female and male.
“Was having an intersex trait that horrible?” wrote Davis, now a sociologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in Contesting Intersex: The Dubious Diagnosis. “I remember thinking I must be a real freak if even my parents hadn’t been able to tell me the truth.”
nother intersex trait occurs in an isolated region of the Dominican Republic; it is sometimes referred to disparagingly as guevedoce—“penis at 12.” It was first formally studied in the 1970s by Julianne Imperato-McGinley, an endocrinologist from the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, who had heard about a cohort of these children in the village of Las Salinas.
Imperato-McGinley knew that ordinarily, at around eight weeks gestational age, an enzyme in male embryos converts testosterone into the potent hormone DHT. When DHT is present, the embryonic structure called a tubercle grows into a penis; when it’s absent, the tubercle becomes a clitoris. Embryos with this condition, Imperato-McGinley revealed, lack the enzyme that converts testosterone to DHT, so they are born with genitals that appear female.
They are raised as girls. Some think of themselves as typical girls; others sense that something is different, though they’re not sure what.
But the second phase of masculinization, which happens at puberty, requires no DHT, only a high level of testosterone, which these children produce at normal levels. They have a surge of it at about age 12, just as most boys do, and experience the changes that will turn them into men (although they’re generally infertile): Their voices deepen, muscles develop, facial and body hair appear. And in their case, what had at first seemed to be a clitoris grows into a penis.
When Imperato-McGinley first went to the Dominican Republic, she told me, newly sprouted males were suspect and had to prove themselves more emphatically than other boys did, with impromptu rituals involving blades, before they were accepted as real men. Today these children are generally identified at birth, since parents have learned to look more carefully at newborns’ genitals. But they are often raised as girls anyway.
Gender is an amalgamation of several elements: chromosomes (those X’s and Y’s), anatomy (internal sex organs and external genitals), hormones (relative levels of testosterone and estrogen), psychology (self-defined gender identity), and culture (socially defined gender behaviors). And sometimes people who are born with the chromosomes and genitals of one sex realize that they are transgender, meaning they have an internal gender identity that aligns with the opposite sex—or even, occasionally, with neither gender or with no gender at all.
Living Under Constant Threat
As transgender issues become the fare of daily news—Caitlyn Jennemnouncement that she is a trans woman, legislators across the United States arguing about who gets to use which bathroom—scientists are making their own strides, applying a variety of perspectives to investigate what being transgender is all about.
In terms of biology, some scientists think it might be traced to the syncopated pacing of fetal development. “Sexual differentiation of the genitals takes place in the first two months of pregnancy,” wrote Dick Swaab, a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam, “and sexual differentiation of the brain starts during the second half of pregnancy.” Genitals and brains are thus subjected to different environments of “hormones, nutrients, medication, and other chemical substances,” several weeks apart in the womb, that affect sexual differentiation.
This doesn’t mean there’s such a thing as a “male” or “female” brain, exactly. But at least a few brain characteristics, such as density of the gray matter or size of the hypothalamus, do tend to differ between genders. It turns out transgender people’s brains may more closely resemble brains of their self-identified gender than those of the gender assigned at birth. In one study, for example, Swaab and his colleagues found that in one region of the brain, transgender women, like other women, have fewer cells associated with the regulator hormone somatostatin than men. In another study scientists from Spain conducted brain scans on transgender men and found that their white matter was neither typically male nor typically female, but somewhere in between.
These studies have several problems. They are often small, involving as few as half a dozen transgender individuals. And they sometimes include people who already have started taking hormones to transition to the opposite gender, meaning that observed brain differences might be the result of, rather than the explanation for, a subject’s transgender identity.
Transgender people are at extremely high risk to be bullied, to be sexually assaulted, or to attempt suicide.
Still, one finding in transgender research has been robust: a connection between gender nonconformity and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). According to John Strang, a pediatric neuropsychologist with the Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders and the Gender and Sexuality Development Program at Children’s National Health System in Washington, D.C., children and adolescents on the autism spectrum are seven times more likely than other young people to be gender nonconforming. And, conversely, children and adolescents at gender clinics are six to 15 times more likely than other young people to have ASD.
Emily Brooks, 27, has autism and labels herself nonbinary, though she has kept her birth name. A slender person with a half-shaved head, turquoise streaks in her blond hair, and cute hipster glasses, Brooks recently finished a master’s degree at the City University of New York in disability studies and hopes eventually to create safer spaces for people who are gender nonconforming (which she defines quite broadly) and also have autism. Such people are battling both “ableism” and “transphobia,” she told me over soft drinks at a bar in midtown Manhattan. “And you can’t assume that a place that’s going to be respectful of one identity will be respectful of the other.”
As I sat with Brooks, talking about gender and autism, the bartender came over. “What else can I get you ladies?” he asked. Brooks bristled at being called a lady—evidence that her own search for a safe space is complicated not only by her autism but also by her rejection of the gender binary altogether.
There’s something to be said for the binary. The vast majority of people—more than 99 percent, it seems safe to say—put themselves at one end of the gender spectrum or the other. Being part of the gender binary simplifies the either-or of daily life: clothes shopping, sports teams, passports, the way a bartender asks for your order.
But people today—especially young people—are questioning not just the gender they were assigned at birth but also the gender binary itself. “I don’t relate to what people would say defines a girl or a boy,” Miley Cyrus told Out magazine in 2015, when she was 22, “and I think that’s what I had to understand: Being a girl isn’t what I hate; it’s the box that I get put into.”
Members of Cyrus’s generation are more likely than their parents to think of gender as nonbinary. A recent survey of a thousand millennials ages 18 to 34 found that half of them think “gender is a spectrum, and some people fall outside conventional categories.” And a healthy subset of that half would consider themselves to be nonbinary, according to the Human Rights Campaign. In 2012 the advocacy group polled 10,000 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender teens ages 13 to 17 and found that 6 percent categorized themselves as “genderfluid,” “androgynous,” or some other term outside the binary box.
Young people trying to pinpoint their own place on the spectrum often choose a pronoun they’d like others to use when referring to them. Even if they don’t feel precisely like a girl or a boy, they might still use “he” or “she,” as Emily Brooks does. But many opt instead for a gender-neutral pronoun like “they” or an invented one like “zie.”
Charlie Spiegel, 17, tried using “they” for a while, but now prefers “he.” Charlie was assigned female at birth. But when he went through puberty, Charlie told me by phone from his home in Oakland, California, being called a girl started to feel unsettling. “You know how sometimes you get a pair of shoes online,” he explained, “and it arrives and the label says it should be the right size, and you’re trying it on and it’s clearly not the right size?” That’s how gender felt to Charlie: The girl label was supposed to fit, but it didn’t.
One day during freshman year, Charlie wandered into the school library and picked up I Am J by Cris Beam, a novel about a transgender boy. “Yep, that sounds like me,” Charlie thought as he read it. The revelation was terrifying but also clarifying, a way to start making those metaphoric mail-order shoes less uncomfortable.
A better fitting gender identity didn’t come along right away, though. Charlie—a member of the Youth Council at Gender Spectrum, a national support and advocacy group for transgender and nonbinary teens—went through a process of trial and error similar to that described by other gender-questioning teens. First he tried “butch lesbian,” then “genderfluid,” before settling on his current identity, “nonbinary trans guy.” It might sound almost like an oxymoron—aren’t “nonbinary” and “guy” mutually exclusive?—but the combination feels right to Charlie. He was heading off to college a few months after our conversation, getting ready to start taking testosterone.
If more young people are coming out as nonbinary, that’s partly because the new awareness of the nonbinary option offers “a language to name the source of their experience,” therapist Jean Malpas said when we met last spring at the Manhattan offices of the Ackerman Institute for the Family, where he directs the Gender and Family Project.
But as more children say they’re nonbinary—or, as Malpas prefers, “gender expansive”—parents face new challenges. Take E, for example, who was still using female pronouns when we met in May, while struggling over where exactly to place herself on the gender spectrum. Her mother, Jane, was struggling too, trying to make it safe for E to be neither typically feminine nor typically masculine.
The speech team that had performed in New York City the night E and I met was getting ready to travel to a national competition in California, and Jane showed me the email she’d sent the coach to pave the way. E might be seen by others as male, Jane wrote, now that her hair was so short and her clothing so androgynous. She would probably use “both male and female bathrooms depending on what situation feels safest,” Jane informed the coach, and “will need to tell you when she is going to the restroom and what gender she plans on using.” I asked Jane, the night we met, where she’d place her daughter on the gender spectrum. “I think she wants to fall into a neutral space,” she replied.
A “neutral space” is a hard thing for a teenager to carve out: Biology has a habit of declaring itself eventually. Sometimes, though, biology can be put on hold for a while with puberty-blocking drugs that can buy time for gender-questioning children. If the child reaches age 16 and decides he or she is not transgender after all, the effects of puberty suppression are thought to be reversible: The child stops taking the blockers and matures in the birth sex. But for children who do want to transition at 16, having been on blockers might make it easier. They can start taking cross-sex hormones and go through puberty in the preferred gender—without having developed the secondary sex characteristics, such as breasts, body hair, or deep voices, that can be difficult to undo.
The Endocrine Society recommends blockers for adolescents diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Nonetheless, the blockers’ long-term impact on psychological development, brain growth, and bone mineral density are unknown—leading to some lively disagreement about using them on physically healthy teens.
More fraught than the question about puberty blockers is the one about whether too many young children, at too early an age, are being encouraged to socially transition in the first place.
Eric Vilain, a geneticist and pediatrician who directs the UCLA Center for Gender-Based Biology, says that children express many desires and fantasies in passing. What if saying “I wish I were a girl” is a feeling just as fleeting as wishing to be an astronaut, a monkey, a bird? When we spoke by phone last spring, he told me that most studies investigating young children who express discomfort with their birth gender suggest they are more likely to turn out to be cisgender (aligned with their birth-assigned gender) than trans—and relative to the general population, more of these kids will eventually identify as gay or bisexual.
“If a boy is doing things that are girl-like—he wants long hair, wants to try his mother’s shoes on, wants to wear a dress and play with dolls—then he’s saying to himself, ‘I’m doing girl things; therefore I must be a girl,’ ” Vilain said. But these preferences are gender expression, not gender identity. Vilain said he’d like parents to take a step back and remind the boy that he can do all sorts of things that girls do, but that doesn’t mean he is a girl.
At the Gender and Family Project, Jean Malpas said counselors “look for three things in children who express the wish to be a different gender”: that the wish be “persistent, consistent, and insistent.” And many children who come to his clinic meet the mark, he told me, even some five-year-olds. “They’ve been feeling this way for a long time, and they don’t look back.”
That was certainly the case for the daughter of Seattle writer Marlo Mack (the pseudonym she uses in her podcasts and blogs to protect her child’s identity). Mack’s child was identified at birth as a boy but by age three was already insisting he was a girl. Something went wrong in your tummy, he told his mother, begging to be put back inside for a do-over.
As Vilain might have instructed, Mack tried to broaden her child’s understanding of how a boy could behave. “I told my child over and over again that he could continue to be a boy and play with all the Barbies he wanted and wear whatever he liked: dresses, skirts, all the sparkles money could buy,” Mack said in her podcast, How to Be a Girl. “But my child said no, absolutely not. She was a girl.”
Finally, after a year of making both of them “miserable,” Mack let her four-year-old choose a girl’s name, start using female pronouns, and attend preschool as a girl. Almost instantly the gloom lifted. In a podcast that aired two years after that, Mack reported that her transgender daughter, age six, “loves being a girl probably more than any girl you’ve ever met.”
Vilain alienates some transgender activists by saying that not every child’s “I wish I were a girl” needs to be encouraged. But he insists that he’s trying to think beyond gender stereotypes. “I am trying to advocate for a wide variety of gender expressions,” he wrote in a late-night email provoked by our phone conversation, “which can go from boys or men having long hair, loving dance and opera, wearing dresses if they want to, loving men, none of which is ‘making them girls’—or from girls shaving their heads, being pierced, wearing pants, loving physics, loving women, none of which is ‘making them boys.’ ”
This is where things get murky in the world of gender. Young people such as Mack’s daughter, or Charlie Spiegel of California, or E of New York City, must make biological decisions that will affect their health and happiness for the next 50 years. Yet these decisions run headlong into the maelstrom of fluctuating gender norms.
“I guess people would call me gender-questioning,” E said the second time we met, in June. “Is that a thing? It sounds like a thing.” But the “questioning” couldn’t go on forever, she knew, and she was already leaning toward “trans guy.” E had moved a few steps closer to that by September, asking people, including me, to use the pronoun “they” when referring to them. If E does eventually settle on a male identity, they feel it won’t be enough just to live as a man, changing pronouns (either sticking with “they” or switching to “he”) and changing their name (the leading candidate is the name “Hue”). It would mean becoming physically male too, which would involve taking testosterone. It was all a bit much, E told me. As their 15th birthday approached, they were giving themselves another year to figure it all out.
E’s thinking about where they fit on the gender spectrum takes the shape it does because E is a child of the 21st century, when concepts like transgender and gender nonconforming are in the air. But their options are still constrained by being raised in a Western culture, where gender remains, for the vast majority, an either-or. How different it might be if E lived where a formal role existed that was neither man nor woman but something in between—a role that constitutes another gender.
There are such places all over the world: South Asia (where a third gender is called hijra), Nigeria (yan daudu), Mexico (muxe), Samoa (fa‘afafine), Thailand (kathoey), Tonga (fakaleiti), and even the U.S., where third genders are found in Hawaii (mahu) and in some Native American peoples (two-spirit). The degree to which third genders are accepted varies, but the category usually includes anatomical males who behave in a feminine manner and are sexually attracted to men, and almost never to other third-gender individuals. More rarely, some third-gender people, such as the burrnesha of Albania or the fa‘afatama of Samoa, are anatomical females who live in a masculine manner.
I met a dozen or so fa‘afafine last summer, when I traveled to Samoa at the invitation of psychology professor Paul Vasey, who believes the Samoan fa‘afafine are among the most well-accepted third gender on Earth.
Vasey, professor and research chair of psychology at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, returns to Samoa so frequently that he has his own home, car, and social life there. One thing that especially intrigues him about third genders, in Samoa and elsewhere, is their ability to shed light on the “evolutionary paradox” of male same-sex attraction. Since fa‘afafine almost never have children of their own, why are they still able to pass along the genes associated with this trait? Without offspring, shouldn’t natural selection pretty much have wiped them out?
Being fa‘afafine runs in families, the same way being gay does, Vasey said. (He said it also occurs at about the same rate as male homosexuality in many Western countries, in about 3 percent of the population.) He introduced me to Jossie, 29, a tall, slim schoolteacher. Jossie lives in a village about an hour from the capital, Apia. She giggled at my questions, especially when I asked about guys. For Jossie, being fa‘afafine is also a family trait. Several fa‘afafine relatives listened to our conversation: Jossie’s uncle Andrew, a retired nurse who goes by the name Angie; her cousin Trisha Tuiloma, who is also Vasey’s research assistant; and Tuiloma’s five-year-old nephew.
“In this village they don’t really like the ‘fa‘fa’ style,” said Angie, who emerged from the house she shares with Jossie wearing nothing but a long skirt, called a lavalava, tied at the waist. Back in her 20s Angie had thought it might be nice “to have an operation to be a woman.” But now, at 57, she said she’s happy without surgery. She no longer feels discriminated against. Fellow church parishioners might criticize the way she and Jossie dress or behave, but “our families here, they understand.”
Vasey is now investigating two hypotheses that might explain the evolutionary paradox of male same-sex sexuality.
The first, the sexually antagonistic gene hypothesis, posits that genes for sexual attraction to males have different effects depending on the sex of the person carrying them: Instead of coming with a reproductive cost, as happens in males, the genes in females have a reproductive benefit—which means that the females with those genes should be more fertile. Vasey and his colleagues have found that the mothers and maternal grandmothers of fa‘afafine do have more babies than the mothers and grandmothers of straight Samoan men. But they haven’t found comparable evidence among paternal grandmothers—or among the aunts of fa‘afafine, which would come closest to definitive proof.
A second possibility is the kin selection hypothesis—the idea that the time and money that same-sex-attracted males devote to nurturing their nieces and nephews make it more likely that the nieces and nephews will pass some of their DNA down to the next generation. Indeed, among the fa‘afafine Vasey introduced me to, several have taken siblings’ children under their wing. Trisha Tuiloma, who is 42, uses the money she earns as Vasey’s research assistant to pay for food, schooling, treats, even electricity for eight nieces and nephews. And in his formal research Vasey has found that fa‘afafine are more likely to offer money, time, and emotional support to their siblings’ children—especially to their sisters’ youngest daughters—than are straight Samoan men or Samoan women.
One other point about gender identity became clear when I met Vasey’s longtime partner, Alatina Ioelu, a fa‘afafine Vasey met 13 summers ago. When Ioelu first drove up to my hotel, my understanding of what it means to be fa‘afafine started to unravel. Ioelu was much more masculine than the other fa‘afafine I’d met. Tall, broad-shouldered, with an open, handsome face, he favored the same clothing—cargo shorts and T-shirts—that Vasey wore. What did it mean for someone who reads as a man to belong to a third gender that implies heightened femininity?
Gradually it dawned on me, as the three of us chatted through dinner, that Ioelu’s identity as a fa‘afafine shows how deeply bound in culture gender itself is. Vasey and Ioelu plan to marry and retire in Canada someday. (Vasey is 50; Ioelu is 38.) “There we’d be perceived as an ordinary same-sex couple,” Vasey told me.
In other words, the gender classification of Ioelu would change, as if by magic, from fa‘afafine to gay man, just by crossing a border.
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