So I've been reading this blog since it's inception and have been enjoying it thoroughly. Thank you to all you contributors have have made each day a little less boring and a little more enlightening.
But I've been rather intimidated to actually post anything myself in fear of sounding "dumb".
Now I'm inspired...by none other than gender identity. I read this article a few days ago and found it truly fascinating. If you know me, you know that I'm very interested in the concepts of race and culture. I also sometimes find myself interested in the concept of gender. I'm beginning to think the common trend between these issues (and education, my field of work) is that of self-identity and human development.
Just for fun, I'll add a funny story to that....The Spanish teacher at my school found out last week that one of her students, Courtney, is a girl. Courtney, being a non-Spanish name, did not clue her in, and the student had short hair and always dressed in baggy t-shirts and jeans, so the teacher always referred to Courtney as a boy. School started in September. I wonder if Courtney would be offended if she knew...
4 comments:
Thanks for the support Shaina. It's nice to have some reassurance that people are reading, even though they aren't posting!
Here are three other tangentially related articles: this one about a man claiming he should no longer have to pay alimony after his ex-wife had a sex change operation (he lost) and this one about an ex-NBA player coming out of the closet (and this one about another ex-NBA player's hateful response)
There's also a transgendered writer at Baseball Prospectus - it seems the advantage of being a writer is that people pay the most attention to the words used, not who wrote them.
And at the risk of being too whimsical, you can find out if you are male or female by taking the BBC's sex id test. I'm 50% male! Which is equally male as one of my female coworkers (it seems that our small sample of scientists skew towards male regardless of actual sex).
Also, we all might sound dumb sometimes - but that's kind of the point. I envision this blog as a way for us to learn about topics we're interested in. Sometimes we'll post on things we've read a lot about and have well-formed opinions about. But I hope none of us hesitate to post on things we don't know about, in the hope that someone else will, and we'll all learn something. To paraphrase some english poet, being dumb today just means we can be smarter tomorrow.
Hopefully posters and commenters can accept other people disagreeing with what they have to say, and those people disagreeing will do so respectfully. After all, if you were really dumb, we wouldn't let you be an author.
I scored 25% female on that stupid test Dave linked to. Apparently I'm not good at rotating the things in my head, like a woman (but the test is broken there, I claim) and I'm good at remembering which things were moved and which weren't, like a woman. I was happy to learn that I find feminine features more attractive than masculine ones (SHOCKING) and I enjoyed learning that women are actually more likely to remember where my keys are than I am. I'll have to file that away for later in life :-)
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