Subject: [Peninsula_Interweave] Talk at East-West Bookstore: "The Battle of the Sexes"

From: "Spirit Writer" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 Oct 2006 15:49:56 -0400

"The Battle of the Sexes".  Talk to be given Sun. Oct 22 at 2 pm, at 
East-West Bookstore in Mountain View (324 Castro St.).  Free but call to 
reserve a seat (650-988-9800).

Description:  "Gender can be a real hot-button issue, especially when we 
look at the politics of it.  The sexes are often at odds over matters of 
socialization, power, status, and more.  But what if we could live two 
lifetimes:  one in each gender?  Would our perspective change?  Join us for 
an extraordinary afternoon with Dhillon Khosla, author of Both Sides Now, as 
he shares the story of his transition from female to male and how his long 
journey taught him to honor the greatest spiritual commandment of all.

My personal commentary:  I don't like the reinscription of the binary gender 
system inherent in this description (who says there are only two 
genders???)...but I do think that it is promising that a talk involving 
transgenderism is being given at a metaphysical bookstore.  Anyone know 
about Dhillon and/or his book?

CJ

---

From: Marnie Singer <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2006 12:23:23 -0700 (PDT)

Note that all of the citations in David's link are from 1995.  If research is not continuing to follow this, it would be interesting to find out why.
   
  Personally, I care more about education around transgender issues, support for trans folk, and social justice work in general than I do about "what went wrong" when yet another wonderful challenging transperson entered our world.  Etiology does not interest me here; how we move into the future does.
   
  By the way, It is not insignificant when a quantitative scale-of-1-to-10 type person like me lets go of that way of approaching issues.  
   
  Marnie

David Harris <[email-masked]> wrote:
          Since no one else from Interweave was present, here's my report:

At 2:05 I looked at my schedule book to confirm that the "War Between 
the Sexes" talk was at 3:00, which was what I remembered. But my book 
said 2:00! I called and they said there were plenty of seats, so I 
drove over, missing about half the talk. The guy who was talking was an 
articulate regular guy, who was saying things about how he used to 
approach other women as a woman and have them reveal their most intimate 
secrets. Now as a man, if he acts that way, women are much more 
secretive. He seemed to be appealing for more kindness between the 
people at the extremes of the sexual continua. He has a book that he 
spent over 5 years writing, to convey the messages clearly.

I was particularly interested in what he said about recent biological 
research with hormones and timing. He said that it appears that the 
brain develops circuits in an order (sequence), with sexual identity 
developing some degree of sense of being male or female (imagine a 
continuum scale of 1-10), then the circuit for partner choice (some 
degree of choosing males or females), and other traits later. So 
depending on natural or artificial variations in what and when, we can 
get all sorts of 1-10 kind of variations on different aspects of 
sex-related feelings and behavior. It all depends which hormones were 
present at particular times. I'd like to know more about the 
experiments and whether I'm summarizing it correctly from his 
description. A quick Google search on 'sexual development hormone 
timing' found this solid science discussion, suggesting that 
insecticides and other chemicals might act as androgens and estrogens: 
http://psycprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/view/topics/sex-brain.html . And of 
course we are also influenced by our life experiences, and most strongly 
by the X chromosome and the presence or absence of the Y chromosome. 
Hey, if it was simple we'd all be living like 1950's TV shows.

- David

Amy Zucker Morgenstern wrote:
>
> I don't like the binary attitude either--but it is
> interesting, given that our society DOES take not only
> a binary view but a "men VS. women" view, to hear from
> folks who've lived on both sides of the supposed
> divide.
>

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