Xue Yan is a Ph.D. student in applied health sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Working with their academic advisor, Dr. Liza Berdychevsky, and Janiya Daniel and Max Zagorsky, Xue Yan is conducting a study titled Sexual Perspectives and Sexual Self-Concept. Participation in this study will involve taking part in an online survey. […]
Amanita contributed to TGForum with an advice column titled Ask Amanita. She is a gender counselor and activist who advocates for the transgender community. Her spouse is a trans woman. This post is about how her wife’s transition, which Amanita fully supported, caused changes in their social standing in their community. How they had to make new friends when the old ones retreated, and how much the discrimination hurts. Share this post with any cisgender allies.
Depression occurs throughout the population but transgender people are subject to a particular kind of depression associated with cultural rejection. Day after day hearing news reports of anti-trans legislation around the country will bring you down for sure. Dr. Dana Bevan looks at the types of depression, examines the drugs used to treat depression, and expounds on some non-drug treatments that may help.
What causes transgender behavior? That’s a question that has bothered many of us. What is it that makes us want to cross gender borders? Dr. Dana Bevan asked herself that question and decided to search for an answer. Her efforts have determined that it’s not one thing but a number of factors that create transgender behavior. Today she reviews the first four and adds a fifth factor.
A U.K. transgender website announced it was going to publish a paper by an anonymous research scientist claiming that being transgender was a “biological condition.” The press was alerted but without warning, before the date the paper was to be published the site issued a tweet canceling publication. Dana Bevan outlines the reasons why.
Jordan Peterson has been in the news this year with his attacks on transgender people’s right to exist. Most notably he took to Twitter to criticize Eliot Page for publishing photos of his remodeled chest, tweeting that “Remember when pride was a sin. And Ellen Page just had her breasts removed by a “criminal physician.” Where did Peterson come from and why is he so anti-trans? Dana Bevan provided his origin story with Jordan Peterson Has No Clothes.
Carl Sagan identified some useful tools for detection of faulty arguments that have come to be known as his “Baloney Detection Kit”. Dana Bevan has had experience with articles concerning being transgender and she borrows from Sagan to give you six tools that should be in your Transgender Science Baloney Kit.
Dana Bevan feels that the proposed Standards of Care for transgender people concentrates heavily on care for those who are seeking to transition, and ignores a large segment of those who fall under the transgender umbrella. She also finds fault with the WPATH process for commenting on the proposed Standards and with the WPATH data gathering.
Research into the incidence of HIV infection in trans women seemed to indicate that it was widespread. One study concluded that nearly 30% of transgender women were infected. It would be an appalling number–if it were true. Dana Bevan maintains that such high numbers are not representative of what is actually going on. And she proves it with information about how researchers went about gathering the data they used and how their methods could be tainted by bias.
Dana Bevan looks into the early research going on to determine when children begin to learn about gender and find what their gender is. Science is making a beginning to investigate this area and is the research is benefited by the rise of more transgender children who are supported by their families.
What is your best chance of getting a date? Why should you stay away from narcissists and those with borderline personality problems? Are infatuation, sex and pair-bonding different in the brain? How to succeed in the friend zone after a one-sided infatuation? Dana Bevan looks at the science of love.
Dr. Dana Bevan delves into the effect of the subconscious on the behavior of transgender people. How important are subconscious mechanisms that are built into our nervous systems and brains? While Sigmund Freud became famous by sexualizing, and then popularizing the idea of the subconscious he did not scientific research to back up his “theories” about the subconscious and those assertions are still harming people today.
