Video Response to Trans Lesbian 2000's Blog 06/19/22

The Incompleteness of Story Telling

Opening Thoughts

Whenever we tell a story to someone, including ourselves, we pick and choose what details we share and which of those details we wish to emphasise. Consequently, even though we may be retelling the same story, and it's true everytime you tell it, it may sound completely different and invoke different emotional responses from the listener.

The above is NOT a new concept.

Telling Stories

As I tell my stories, such as my deconversion for instance, or my climb out of homophobia as another example, I realize that my stories vary depending on whom I'm telling them to, my current emotional state, and the media I'm presenting them on. When I look back I can see, if the media is text, audio or video, that every word I say is true but I might be telling the story in such a way that may generate more sympathy for myself.

Reasons for Embellishment - Trans-specific example

A recent example is my regaling my transistion story to a friend on Discord. Everything I said was true; a series of vignettes that retold a life story of suppression and self-censorship. But did I tell it in such a way that may have painted some others in my story in an overly bad light to elicit undue sympathy for myself? Certainly, there are people I know who suffered more than myself, such as those who chose to transition when they were young and were around my age at the time. I might be painting myself as brave, but how brave was I? I am a coward compared to those who made the decision to transition. I honestly envy them and their courage and I wish to be as courageous as they were. But my story makes me no braver than I actually was, or wasn't.

So I sit and judge myself asking, "Why didn't I have the courage to insist on transitioning?" To run away if needed and seek it out myself, if necessary, as many of the really braves ones had done. Maybe if I had been exposed to more LGBT+ people, knew more actually trans people, perhaps I would have. I would have seen through the lies of church leaders so much sooner. I might have developed my empathy for them as a child rather than have to wait until I already was an adult. But that didn't happen. I didn't meet any openly LGBT+ people, trans people are rare as it is, media presented LGBT+, trans people in particular, as freaks and the butts of jokes, and my parents chose to shelter their children as much as possible.

But my parents couldn't keep it entirely away. They raised a prolific reader and I kept finding references in popular scientific media to transexual and transgender people that presented them as simply people. I felt my own need to transistion everytime I read on of those articles. Science fiction is full of people who undergo gender transition, and I knew that this too was my future. If I knew where to go or whom to ask I might have tranisitioned as soon as high school, certainly university. As I didn't know whom I could approach about the topic, let alone what to ask, I remained in my assigned gender and I now tell myself comforting stories of why I did so.

I experimented a bit with makeup in University, and bought the odd female garment, but put that all away when my relationship with the woman who would become my wife, and later ex, began to deepen. She always said that "I saved you" but I never learned what it was that she saved me from. All I know is that I could never completely excise the feminine from my personality and the need to express it. The man my ex needed me to be could never develop because I was never that man! I don't entirely blame her for wanting someone more aligned with her expectations of manhood, but I believed the version I brought to the relationship was a lot less toxic than what most men bring because I tried to forge my own version of manhood from my broken sense of gender, or at least that is what I tell myself. Not perfect, or free from the effects of patriarchy, but just with less evil. Now that I've given up the very idea of being a man with any kind of manhood, I hope that I left a better model for my AFAB children, if indeed I ever did, should they seek a relationship with a hetero-cis male, than what society offers.

Conclusion

My point is that my stories that I tell people are entirely factual as far as my memory can recall or I can piece together from empirical data that I've left like tidbits around my home and the internet. However, the stories are not always the same and may not always be true to the spirit of keeping things factual as possible. I am often angry with myself but I know I can't change the past. When thinking about my past decisions I tell myself how I'd do things differently if I were to do them over, but this is such futile thinking that I don't know why I even play that silly game. To all my readers, if I've somehow mislead you by how I presented my facts in my personal stories, I apologize. It is not intentional as my stories are true as far I know in the moment when I tell them. All I know is that they are indeed factual, if nothing else.

Now, as always, I strive to be better than I was yesterday and hope to be better tomorrow than I am today.

Am I Homophobic?

Your dad was homophobic when we were together

TW/CW: topics of homophobia, transphobia, biphobia, lesphobia, classism, racism and sexual relations are mentioned.

That was a statement made by my ex-wife to my nonbinary child about myself regarding the fact that I'm currently transitioning. The short response is, No, I am not, but the more nuanced answer is, No, but I still struggle with internalized homophobia.

Each and every one of us probably struggles with internalized homophobia; myself, my ex-wife, my nonbinary kid and even the reader. And what my ex said is true, in part. When she met me I was much more homophobic than I am now, or have been for some time. What she fails to account for is that I didn't like myself when I was acting out of homophobia and had already been actively trying to change before I had even met her. But it's difficult to change a behaviour when it seems to normal. At least I had some good friends, coworkers and the odd instructor who wouldn't let me get away with my bullshit! So I changed and grew!

This is not to mention that homophobia felt like hating myself. I'm not homosexual but I am bisexual, and many of the things that bisexuals like are the same things. In addition I'm also trans. Being AMAB and bi or trans is automatically seen by heteronormative society as gay. An insult that got thrown at me quite a bit in junior high so by the time I went to university people using the epitaph gay on me had lost much of its effect. Though one girl I dated briefly did call me gay because I didn't attempt to have sex with her on the first date. That did hurt a bit but I honestly just felt really awkward trying to initiate anything with her parents just on the other side of the thin duplex wall. Ironically, hindsight informs me that if I had had sex with her that would probably have been gay in the lesbian sense.

Before my kids were born I had slain most of my demons regarding homophobia, transphobia, racism, sexism, classism, and etc…. This is not to say that I was perfect as I not only had internalized many of the above, I still had to, still do to this day, work on eliminating or overcoming my attitudes to people in all the listed groups. That said, I know that I'm getting better every day that I work on them. Somedays I trip and fall, backslide if you will, but the general trend is always tending towards improvement.

There's a lot more I could say about my attempts to come out to my ex-wife over the years of our marriage, issues where I was left of and more progressive than her, and her current choice in partners. But that would be bashing her and this is not the point of this post. Sometimes I was better than her, sometimes she was better than me. That's life, I'm trying to make my peace with her, my past self, and the future that I'm working towards. So, if my ex-wife ever reads this post: Honey, our sex was always as gay af!

Part of a Campaign

Started passing out pamphlets for the Communist Party of Canada - Alberta today. My firs task was posting copies of the pamphlets on the public bulletin boards around town. That's all for today. More updates to follow.

Political Evolution and Other Thoughts

Time to Start Again

It's been a while since I've posted on my blog. Even though I had been meaning to get back to it, there have been some significant changes in my life. At this moment, I'm finalizing a divorce with my ex-wife. While the break-up has been, by-and-large, friendly it has still been disruptive over the past several years.

Political Views

When I started this blog my political views had already been moving leftward for some time. In some strange way I probably still considered myself conservative, even though I never voted for Conservatives in my province or country, and only grudgingly voted for Liberals if there wasn't a viable NDP candidate available. But as left as I thought voting NDP made me, it actually didn't. In my mind at the time, that was as far left as anyone could go in our political system. Oh sure, the Green Party was left of the NDP on some issues, but the NDP was left of the Green Party on others. The truth is, both the Green Party and the NDP are quite liberal, albeit progressives

With the somewhat disappointing running of Canada's NDP in the 2015 election, where Tom Mulcair actually campaigned to the right of the Liberal Party of Canada's Justin Trudeau, I found myself questioning the political landscape in Canada. Rachel Notley and the Alberta NDP also won that year in my home province, but their promoting the pipelines and the oilsands while talking about fighting climate change and environmental disaster really bothered me. Since then, I've been looking for a means to fight back at the system that was dragging us all to the edge of disaster.

Exploring the Political Realm

So I began to look around. Centrism is selling itself as the only possible rational answer, but when you look closely at Centrism and centrists they are not actually in the centre as they claim to be. What centrists are in the "centre" of is what are perceived to be the right and left parties of the political establishment. As politics is shifted, and indeed shifting, to the right around the world that means the centrists are actually rightists. Not the rational and objective centred persons of discernment they promote themselves as. Plus many centrists love to push far right talking points, such as "Horsesh*t..." er, "Horseshoe Theory," which only moves the conversation, and the political spectrum further to the right.

Thanks galaxy-brained centrists!

Rejecting Centrism for the sham it was, and that all major parties were rightists promoting one or another form of austerity and imperialist actions, I found myself turning firmly now to the Left. This was frightening because "Commies" were to the left. In fact, if you took the word of conservatives, anything left of them are actually "Commies" including milquetoast liberals and social democrats. I rejected any accusations that I was a communist in an almost reflexive manner. It's not that I thought badly of Communists, but I didn't feel at the time that I was one, and I also understood the negative social implications of being accused of being such.

Yet, throughout my life I have been anti-capitalist in some way or another. Again, this was not born out of a deep-seated hatred for capitalism, but more a resignation that this was the only option available, as shitty as it was. I grew up being taught that. While I do recall various teachers and professors encouraging criticism of capitalism they were few and far in between. When the USSR was disbanded in 1991 I watched the televised tearing down of the Berlin Wall and my feelings were mixed. Part of me was cheering East Germany finally being free, and the end of the threat of impending nuclear war. But East Germany isn't really free, they just have a free market, and at this point in history the threat of nuclear war is higher than it has been in a long time, perhaps since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

It's two minutes till midnight. (The Doomsday Clock. Feb 14, 2019)

In my early twenties, a friend I knew in Victoria, BC mentioned that I'd make a good anarchist. I wasn't too sure what he meant by that and that's when I found out that he was a communist. At this point, I wasn't too interested in being any sort of communist, but his description of what anarchists and anarchism are stuck with me ever since. Since then I have had several friends that were communists of one sort or another, though I really thought they were wasting their time even if I agreed with much of what they said. So I set about trying to make my way in a capitalist world, playing by capitalism's rules. I had some successes and some failures, but despite all my efforts and training I never acquired the financial or social capital to "make it."

When I finally decided to abandon capitalism I remembered what my friend from Victoria had said. Still not convinced I took some political compass tests and found that my political traits put me in the Libertarian Communist side. It wasn't the first political test I had taken, but even when I was my most conservative my political inclinations were always left. I took a few more such tests and decided that there was a rough semblance of a consensus leaning towards Libertarian Communist so it might be worth my time checking out this political viewpoint. I read some anarchist literature, watched some videos by popular anarchist YouTubers, and even voluntarily cracked open some Noam Chomskey. Much of what I read struck a chord within me and I hungered for more.

At this point, I turned to reading Marx and the works of several Marxist thinkers, watching Marxist YouTubers, and found Michael Parenti's works. Suddenly, I wasn't sure that I might be an anarchist after all. As time wore on I've realized that I'm more of a Marxist-Leninist.

Conclusion

While I'm probably not a very good revolutionist, I do my bit to raise the class-consciousness of myself, my kids and my coworkers. Having been raised in a working-class family, class struggle is an obvious and readily apparent dynamic. I'm not entirely surprised that my kids have clued into it almost on their own as they've also grown up with working parents. My coworkers, at least those I've spoken too about it, seem to see it too albeit they may be resigned to their roles. Sometimes the UCP or the Conservative Party of Canada try to ferment the electorate over this or the other thing to stir up anger against the government in power. These are opportunities that I try to use to point out how the parties play off of each other, not for the benefit of the citizens, but for themselves, and those whose interest they're protecting. Perhaps, someday, we can get some real, well organized and thought out demonstrations going and everyday, working people might again feel their latent power.

The future is worth fighting for, don't you agree?

Evolutionary Rates - Kimura

Preamble

In his paper, "Evolutionary rate at the molecular level", Kimura (1968) discusses the rate of evolution as found in comparing various contemporary, at the time, studies with respect to nucleotide substitutions. Kimura began with the assumption that most mutations are neutral or nearly neutral, whereas the thinking at time was that most mutations were usually either harmful or helpful. It was Kimura's work that led to Neutral Theory becoming the Null Hypothesis in modern Molecular Evolution.

Kimura, according to my H-Index Calculator, has been cited over 39169 times, has an h-index >10 and a g-index >10.

Methodology

Kimura begins by looking at the paper by Zuckerkandl and Pauling (1965) who compared studies of hemoglobin molecules who found, among mammals, in a chain of about 140 amino-acids there was a change in one amino-acid in a 10⁷ year period. Then Kimura compares Buettner-Janusch and Hill's (1965) study on primate hemoglobin who found a substitution rate of 45x10⁶ years. The study by Kaplan (1965) between were also compared and found a rate of 2.7x10⁶ years.

Here, Kimura makes the assumption that nuclear DNA is similar among most mammals and that the GC content in mammalian DNA is uniform withing a value of 40-44%. Then Kimura assumes that 4x10⁹ of nucleotide pairs are haploid chromosome complements. From this Kimura estimates a substitution rate within the population of ~2 years.

Compared to the 300 generations rate predicted by Haldane's paper (1957), this is a huge contrast. Kimura concluded, Haldane's erroneous fitness factor aside, that this could be accounted for if most mutations were in fact neutral or at least nearly neutral.

Thus the very high rate of nucleotide substitution which I have calculated can only be reconciled with the limit set by the substitutional load by assuming that most mutations produced by nucleotide replacement are almost neutral in natural selection. (Kimura, 1968, p. 625)

The next paper Kimura looks at is the work by Lewontin and Hubby (1966) who studied genetic variation in the fruit fly species Drosophila psseudoobscura and estimated in each individual that 12% of each loci are heterozygous. Kimura assumes that the heterozygosity would be much higher in nucleotide sequences. Since it is evident that the mutation rate in Drosophila is ten times that of humans, Kimura calculates a mutation rate of 1.5x10^-5 and checks his calculation by looking at Drosophila neutral mutations, neucleotide pair mutation per generation the fact that the Drosophila genome is 1/20 the size of the human genome to get the same result.

Finally, Kimura looks at Kimura and Crow (1964) who found that for neutural mutations the probability that an individual in a population is heterozygous and if the individual is homozygous differ.

Looking at Watson's work (1965) Kimura finds that in gamete production substitution in base pairs could be 200-2000 and is reduced to ~2 by natural selection.

Conclusions

Firstly, as in my last post, it must be said that Kimura was in no way finding fault in evolution. In fact, Kimura was proposing a new idea to explain why organisms appear to change so quickly with low cost when calculations such as the one by Haldane say it would take a long time and be costly. In fact, Kimura has been proven correct with Neutral Theory being the Null Hypothesis, with Nearly Neutral Theory taking up much of the slack.

Secondly, Kimura has shown that evolution occurs at a even a faster rate than had previously been supposed. Once again, this supports not defeats evolution. This paper in no way shows that genomes are decaying.

Kimura sums up by stating that each generation is producing neutral or nearly neutral mutations that have been largely ignored and are occurring at a very high rate making random drift an important factor of evolution.

Questions to My Opponent

• Did you actually read the paper before posting it?
• If yes to the previous question; did you think neutral or nearly neutral mutations indicated that genomes are decaying?
• Do you think "random drift" indicated genomic decay?
• What on earth made you think that this paper demonstrated that the evolution of one species to another is impossible when it is a keystone to the modern understanding of evolution?

Bibliography

• Evolutionary rate at the molecular level (Kimura, 1969)

Genome Decay Claim

Prelude

Recently, a Creationist on Google+ presented a list of papers that he felt demonstrated that genomes are decaying and, therby, evolution of species from one form into another is impossible. The thread where this discussion occurred was a post titled Evolution: How it Works and How to Teach it. The articles cited by the Creationist are listed as follows:

• J.B.S. Haldane. 1957. The cost of natural selection. J. Genetics55: 511-524
• Kimura, M. 1968. Evolutionary rate at the molecular level. Nature 217:624-626
• Muller, H.J. 1950. Our load of mutations. Amer. J. Human Genetics 2:111-176
• Muller, H.J. 1964. The relation of recombination to mutational advance. Mutation Research 1:2-9
• J.V. Neel, et al. 1986. The rate with which spontaneous mutation alters the electrophoretic mobility of polypeptides. PNAS 83:389-393
• A.S. Kondrashov. 1995. Contamination of the genome by very slightly deleterious mutations: Why have we not died 100 times over? J. Theor. Biol. 175:583-594
• S. Kondrashov. 2002. Direct estimates of human per nucleotide mutation rates at 20 loci causing Mendelian diseases. Human Mutation 21:12-27
• M.W. Nachman and S.L. Crowell. 2000. Estimate of the mutation rate per nucleotide in humans. Genetics 156: 297-304
• A. Eyre-Walker and P. Keightley. 1999. High genomic deleterious mutation rates in Hominids. Nature 397:344-347
• J.F. Crow. 1997. The high spontaneous mutation rate: is it a health risk? PNAS 94:8380-8386
• J.F. Crow. 1958. Genetic effects of radiation. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 14:19-20
• M. Lynch, J. Conery, and R. Burger. 1995. Mutation accumulation and the extinction of small populations. The American Naturalist 146:489-518
• K. Higgins and M. Lynch. 2001. Metapopulation extinction caused by mutation accumulation. PNAS 98: 2928-2933
• F. Hoyle. 1999. Mathematics of Evolution. Acorn Enterprises, LLC, Memphis, TN.
• Howell et al. 1996. Evolution of human mtDNA. How rapid does the human mitochondrial genome evolve? A. J. Hum. Genet. 59: 501-509
• Loewe, L. 2006. Quantifying the genomic decay paradox due to Muller’s ratchet in human mitochondrial DNA. Genet. Res., Camb 87:133-159

The conditions are that responses must be from credible, scientific journals. He cannot use apologist websites such as Answers in Genesis or Journal of Creations and the like. In turn I have agreed not to use sites like Talk Origins though I did correct him with his claim of Talk Origins being an "atheist apologist" website that rejects Creationist studies out-of-hand.

I don't see why you're arguing this point, I've agreed to only use scientific journals. To belabor the point; if you could show, scientifically, that Creationism is true, that the God of the Bible is the God of Creation and that the God of the Bible exists then most of the scientists on TO would be on the side of Creationist (though many would choose not to worship this God). AiG and the like, well they've stated on their webpage that they will not be swayed. Ken Ham said so quite bluntly in a recent debate that he wouldn't change his mind.

That's the difference.

Program

I shall address each article as they appear in the list. The rate at which I post will be subject to numerous variables such as my ability to acquire an article, how busy I am in my family and work life and how motivated I am when I do have the time. Any claim by my Creationist opponent that suggests I am answering in a particular order, or rate, just to avoid dealing with challenging papers will be treated in the same vein as Godwin's Law. I shall try to determine several things.

• If the author(s) is(are) actually challenging the validity of Evolutionary Theory, or disputing a detail of Evolutionary Theory.
• If the conclusion of the article means what the Creationist thinks it says.
• If the research is refuted, improved upon or verified by other research.