Replacing Lie #1 With Lie #2

Having been soundly beaten about for lying about prisoner transfers, we now find Harper spewing more BS:

The Prime Minister said the facts have been clear for several years. He said in 2006 the military suspected abuse of an Afghan prisoner and steps were taken to correct it.

This bunch changes their stories more often than their underwear. A few days ago, they were swearing up and down that there was "no credible" evidence to Mr. Colvin's allegations. Yesterday, they had the good General spouting the party line - even when there was evidence to the contrary in the public sphere. Today, Harper's trying to claim that they did the right thing?

I don't know how anybody can possibly believe the lies coming out of this government - lies that are being told at the expense not just of Canadian soldiers, but at the price of Canada's reputation abroad.

Credibility Test

Who are you going to believe? The soldiers that were on the ground and recorded the events at the time they happened, or a General who wasn't anywhere near the scene?

Gen. Walter Natynczyk, Canada's chief of defence staff, told a parliamentary committee on Tuesday that Canadian troops questioned the man who was picked up during operations in Zangabad. But it was the Afghans who took him into custody, Natynczyk said.

"We didn't take this person under custody," he said.

Funny, that's not what the soldiers who were present claim happened:

In one well-documented case in the summer of 2006, Canadian soldiers captured and handed over a detainee who was so severely beaten by Afghan police that the Canadians intervened and took the detainee back. Canadian medics then treated the man's injuries. The incident is documented in the field notes of Canadian troops, recounted in a sworn affidavit by a senior officer and confirmed in cross-examination by a general.

I'll take the troopers on the ground for credible evidence, thank you. Natynczyk wasn't there, so he's working from a politicized, sanitized version of the situation, and was no doubt ordered to make his statements to lend credibility to the crumbling façade of Peter Mackay's lies on this subject.

So, not only is the government lying to Canadians about this situation, they are failing to explain the lack of action when it was clear that there was evidence of Afghan officials mistreating prisoners - regardless of who captured them.

Last Week's Lies Are Inoperative

Remember Harper & Co. swearing up and down that there was absolutely no evidence to support allegations of prisoner abuse?

Not so much.

So ... I wonder what this week's lie will be to cover up last week's that has been disproven?

25 Years Ago

Marc Lepine murdered 14 women at École Polytechnique in Montreal. (Antonia Z. @ the Star has a great piece on this)

Twenty five years later, the Conservative government is trying to dismantle the long gun registry in this country. Completely ignoring the fact that legal guns in the home are among the most common tools of domestic homicide, and denying law enforcement personnel access to the best possible knowledge as to whether a gun may be in the home when answering a domestic violence call.

On page 33 (Pdf Pg 39) of this StatsCan report, it's quite clear that women are disproportionately at risk of being murdered by their partners or former partners.

Hardly surprising - this is a government which has been hostile to women needs from day one; has a very vocal and active group of MPs who are hostile to women's health issues and so on. Do you want to go back to the 1950s (or earlier)?

Think about it...

Proving (or Disproving) Gender Identity

One of the complaints that are often levelled at transsexuals (and other transgender people) is that the claim of cross-gender identity is not verifiable (or falsifiable).

Superficially, there is a considerable amount of truth to this. Gender identity, like any other form of identity is essentially expressed only in the form of what an individual can articulate. This is particularly thorny when transsexuals assert an essentialism to their identity, and separate that essential aspect from the social and physical aspects of gender.

As a line of reasoning, it's not a bad tactic - in large part because it is hard to refute with the kind of absolute observation that it implies. But, we can also draw a few interesting lessons from the science of physics. Almost every subatomic particle we know about is understood not from direct observation, but from inference. Observations that confirm larger particles contain small anomalies that aren't quite predicted by the original model. Eventually someone comes along and comes up with a model which describes a new subparticle and the mathematics of that describe the anomalies seen previously.

I will take as a given that there is at least some agreement that gender itself contains multiple axis which intersect with each other. The three that are fairly obvious to me are as follows:

- Physical Gender: This is nothing more than physical sex characteristics - primary and secondary - the contribution of biology.

- Social Gender: The social context in which we each live. Some of us live as men, others as women; and a few live their lives somewhere in between - often adopting the label 'genderqueer'.

- Gender Identity: This is what is between our ears. It is about how we experience the physical and social aspects of gender, and ultimately our emotional response to that treatment.

Clearly, none of these three exists in a vacuum with respect to the others. Social gender is driven by how others perceive us - and first impressions are often the result of observed physical gender. Lastly, Gender Identity impacts how an individual responds to the physical and social aspects of gender.

So, on what basis do we infer the existence of gender identity as distinct from the physical and social aspects of gender?

First, allow me to point out that there is no precise definition of 'man' and 'woman' in our society. There are women who are drawn to behaviours we would often consider to be masculine; and there are men whose behaviours are surprisingly feminine. In other words, their behaviours do not fit what is considered "typical" for someone of their physical gender. This is the first point of anomalous data.

The second aspect of gender that is surprisingly diverse is the physical. As we are learning, just because someone is born with a penis and testes, they aren't necessarily male with respect to chromosomal sex; and a vulva and vagina similarly don't guarantee that the individual is explicitly female when chromosomes are examined.

The third piece of the picture is the very existence of cross-gender identified people - whether we are talking about crossdressers, genderqueer people or transsexuals is quite irrelevant. The fact is that we have a small but significant number of people whose personal narratives fall outside of the man/woman binary even if they are otherwise male (or female) with respect to their physical and social genders.

These three dimensions are key to my argument, for the represent the kind of anomalies in experimental data that led scientists studying physics to suspect that the particles which make up atoms were themselves made up of other, smaller particles. We have a small, but significant group of people who claim identities which do not align with what their physical and social gender experiences would suggest.

In the spirit of other branches of science, we can't just discard evidence because it is inconvenient. This evidence in part leads me to infer that there is a dimension to gender that exists outside of the observable physical and social aspects of the topic. If there wasn't, it's hard to effectively describe the existence of cross-gender identity. The existence of people who fall outside of the binary in the physical and social dimensions further suggests that these attributes exist along a continuum.

For the purposes of this discussion, I will assert that gender identity as an axis of human experience that interacts with the physical and social aspects of gender provides an interesting and significant completion of the model.

The problem of verifying this attribute is non-trivial. Until we take a look at the experience of successful transsexuals (by successful, I mean those who transition and live a balanced, healthy life in their chosen gender).

That I know of, there is no objective test that can be applied that will unequivocally show someone to be transgender. But then again, there is no objective test that proves that someone is innately homosexual, heterosexual or for that matter any other attribute of our personalities really.

So, to understand it, we must use inference, and in particular I turn to the narratives of transsexuals who transition successfully. A reasonably common feature of many transsexual narratives is a lengthy struggle with a crushing sense of dissonance resulting from the disjoin between their physical, social gender experiences and their identity.

As they progress through the process of therapy, hormones and real life experience (RLE), most transsexuals report significant improvements in their experience of the world as the dissonance that they had previously experienced is alleviated. Many describe a state of euphoria once they cease experiencing the dissonance that has been a part of their lives for as long as they can remember. (and it is not uncommon for cross-gender identity to be known and understood by the individual among their earliest memories)

If we can take these narratives at face value, then the experimental evidence is before us - namely that by taking steps to address the dissonance experienced on a daily basis, the dissonance is gradually relieved.

Again, applying a little bit of inductive logic, we can infer the existence of an unseen, but all too real, attribute that is influencing the individual's experience of the social and physical aspects of their gender. Not only is there evidence of an attribute having an impact on the person's experience of the world, but we can alter the nature of that impact for the individual.

Remember, that because we are dealing with an attribute that is not subject to objective examination, it is necessary to do examine it through subjective and inductive means. Consequently, the standards of care that WPATH publishes recommend a cautious, measured approach to treating people who present with gender identity related symptoms. For many transsexuals, transition periods of a decade or more are not unusual. This length of time speaks to a persistence and sense of purpose that cannot be overlooked, for it gives the therapists a great deal of time to evaluate the integration of the person throughout the process. There is research out there that makes it quite clear that for transsexuals, there is great benefit in transitioning.

The strongest evidence for the existence of gender identity comes in the form of how well transsexuals adapt to life in their chosen gender. While it may be true that a few are simply highly adaptable people, it is hard to believe that this would apply to all. Further, the fact that some people approach the notion of transition and then back away leads me to suspect that gender identity occurs along a spectrum, just like most other aspects of being human. (which is why I cited Intersex conditions earlier on in this essay - to make the point that even "absolutes" like male and female aren't necessarily as concrete as we might initially hope)

Further, if gender had purely social and physical attributes, then the tragic story of David Reimer would never have happened. Unfortunately it did, and in doing so, more or less destroyed the validity of any model that addresses gender purely as a social construct. The fact that David refused to be a girl, even when all of the social cues provided said otherwise, tells us a great deal about the persistence of underlying gender identity in individuals.

Have I demonstrated the existence of Gender Identity as an attribute separate and distinct from the physical and social aspects of gender? Not completely. What I have done is described the shape of the theoretical hole that gender identity fills, and pointed out that there is consistent - if somewhat subjective - evidence that the attribute's impact on an individual can be altered, although the attribute itself seems surprisingly difficult to alter.

Dear Mr. Adler: PFO

Charles Adler published a particularly noxious screed in the National Post the other day - presumably at the behest of the knuckle-draggers in the PMO that want to silence critics of the government's handling of of Afghan prisoners.

The fundamentals of Adler's tirade are nothing more than the usual "you don't support the troops" line.

This is incorrect. The issue isn't the troops. It's the orders that they have been given - and those come from command and the politicians. Let's be absolutely clear on that matter. The decisions about the handling of individual detainees happens on the ground, in the context of the moment and the standing orders the troops operate under. The orders they are given come from the command structure, and ultimately are directed substantially by the politicians.

So ... the issue here is the orders that told troops to turn over prisoners to a questionable regime. We already know that Mr. Colvin's e-mails made it to the Department of Foreign Affairs ministerial offices (then occupied by Peter Mackay).

It's apparent that at several points in time the military's command hierarchy put the brakes on those transfers over the course of 2006-2007, but subsequently resumed them.

The politicians involved did nothing to correct the situation - or if they did, it was so slowly as to be meaningless in terms of dealing with the issues.

The issue today is simple - why were our politicians so slow to address the issues of prisoner handling? AND - why are the Conservatives being so obstructive about getting the facts out?

Make no mistake, the war in Afghanistan is a war of occupation. We (NATO forces) are the invaders, and what is happening on the ground there has happened repeatedly in the past - not just the Soviet occupation, but every attempt to control that region over the millenia of recorded history. Canada is paying a high price in 'blood and treasure' to prosecute this war of occupation, and nobody has ever put forward a convincing case that Canada's security is truly benefiting from our presence over there. (Lots of jingoism, no substantive facts)

The issue is not about "supporting the troops" - it's about a government that doesn't understand why we are there in the first place, and has clearly lost its moral compass.

It Was A Matter Of Time

I figured sooner or later someone from the right wing would start commenting about Mike Penner (fka Christine Daniels) suicide.

Sure enough, someone over at "Opine Editorials" took up the cause.

Even if we were to all agree that "gender reassignment" was generally a good and legitimate thing, could it ever be possible... possible... that every so often, a person who seeks such a change could be doing so out of some problem that could be addressed in some way other than gender reassignment?

What an opening argument. It starts off with a bad assumption and goes downhill from there.

What's the bad assumption here? That people who pursue gender transition do so on a whim, and the treatment professionals involved just say "yeah sure, go ahead". Even the tiniest smidgen of research would have turned up this Wikipedia overview Sex Reassignment Therapy, and Standards of Care for Gender Identity Disorders which links to an online PDF copy of the WPATH SOC which most North American practitioners follow.

In other words, the treatment community is already aware that only a small fraction of transsexuals need to transition. This why steps like Real Life Experience (RLE) are an essential part of the process. I'll come back to this in a few moments, after I address the next bit of flawed logic in the argument.

I'll choose a less politicized situation as an analogy. A guy goes to a doctor and says, "I have back pain. I need pain pills." But maybe that specific patient doesn't need pain pills. Maybe the patient just needs a massage, or a chiropractic treatment. Maybe the patient is sleeping in a chair and should be sleeping in a certain kind of bed, instead. Even though the pain pills may dull the pain, would it be good to the doctor to continually write the patient prescriptions for the pain pills and not address the other things?

Providing treatment for Gender Identity issues is a little more complex than treating back pain. Among the myriad issues is the difficulty in confirming someone's stated gender identity in an objective sense. This is why it is very important that the treatment team and the client work very closely together as each step is taken.

Then the logic train comes completely off the rails:

... If any of them took Penner aside and implied that perhaps his identity as a male or female wasn't the heart of what was ailing him, and reassignment wasn't the way to go and that he should get some other help, that could have easily been the end of their career.

The fact is that very few people would know what was going on in Mike Penner's head. I would imagine that Mike/Christine had a lot going on, and it would have been difficult if not impossible for anyone except for a trained professional to pick up on some of the themes in his mind. Certainly, if any of my peers tried to play "armchair psychologist" with me, I can imagine I might be tempted to tell them exactly where to go and what to do when they got there.

Gender transition is no trifling matter, and certainly not something that should be taken lightly.

Clearly, Penner wasn't happy. Happy people do not kill themselves. I didn't know the guy, but perhaps that unhappiness has been there a long time, and Penner thought he'd be happier as "Christine". Apparently, he wasn't happy as Christine, since he reverted back to Mike. The gender confusion activists will want to deny that the "gender reassignment" trial was a symptom of something that was wrong with Penner.

There are so many things that this paragraph misses about this story that it more or less negates its own meaningfulness. Among the questions that it fails to ask - was Mike Penner socially isolated after transitioning from being Christine? What kind of support was his treatment team providing him? What other comorbid symptoms did Mike/Christine exhibit in therapy? Was he receiving treatment for those conditions?

The reality is that from several perspectives, Mike's decisions to transition not once but twice represent a key reason why the RLE aspect of the SOC are in place. Not everybody who experiences cross-gender identity needs to transition fully, and not everybody who explores the idea of transition stays there. Mike walked a long distance down the path of transition, and for reasons I don't know, decided that he was in the wrong place living as Christine.

It is a shame he didn't get whatever help he really needed. This could very well have been a death by political correctness.

Around about this point, I find myself getting quite angry with the false inference here that Mike's suicide is the fault of his attempt to transition and the support that he received as Christine.

Identity is a tricky thing to pin down. Many transsexuals spend decades of their lives trying to understand themselves - a fortunate few seek help . Transition itself is a path fraught with peril - both external and internal. It is critical at every step of the way that the client be as aware of their circumstances as possible, and that their treatment team be working with them every step of the way - precisely to avoid the unfortunate outcome that Mike Penner arrived at.

The author of the column over at "Opine Editorials" has really demonstrated much of the misinformation and ignorance that embody much of the public understanding of transsexualism and how it is treated.

Mike Penner's death is a tragedy, and every transsexual who has heard about it must feel the loss all the more poignantly for having walked through their own dark places to get to where they need to be. To infer that Mike's suicide has anything at all to do with the support of those around him when he transitioned to living as Christine and back to Mike is disingenuous, and ultimately disrespectful to both Mike and those around him.