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Another disturbing aspect of the center was its lack of regard for the rights of parents—and the extent to which doctors saw themselves as more informed decision-makers over the fate of these children.

when there was a dispute between the parents, it seemed the center always took the side of the affirming parent.

no matter how much suffering or pain a child had endured, or how little treatment and love they had received, our doctors viewed gender transition—even with all the expense and hardship it entailed—as the solution.

castration also greatly reduces production of the male hormone testosterone

Emasculation has been variously employed to make male slaves more docile, to punish enemies or criminals, and to reduce the noxious urges of sex offenders. In modern medical practice, orchidectomy is most commonly employed to treat testicular cancer, and is generally confined to removing only one testis. But removal of both testes may be performed to counter prostate cancer by lowering testosterone levels, or following major physical injury.

Castration after puberty, turning men into eunuchs, diminishes or completely eliminates the sex drive. Muscle mass, physical strength and body hair are all typically reduced, and eunuchs are usually beardless. Breast enlargement is also common.

Do transgender women and girls have a constitutional right to play on women's sports teams? That question will be argued before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday

Do transgender women and girls have a constitutional right to play on women's sports teams? That question will be argued before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday.

That law never went into effect. U.S. District Court Judge David Nye issued an injunction last August, writing that the plaintiffs who challenged the law are "likely to succeed in establishing the Act is unconstitutional as currently written."

Transgender powerlifter JayCee Cooper is suing USA Powerlifting, the sport's biggest U.S.-based organization, after it barred her from competition on the basis of her gender identity.

"It came as a surprise to me that when I applied to compete at my first competition, I was told that I couldn't compete specifically because I'm a trans woman,"

The International Olympic Committee adopted guidelines in 2015 permitting trans women to compete if their testosterone remains below a certain level for at least 12 months.

The third possibility is that Donald Trump doesn’t really care about domestic policy; he mostly cares about testosterone.

He wants to cut any part of government that may seem soft and nurturing, like poverty programs. He wants to cut any program that might seem emotional and airy-fairy, like the National Endowment for the Arts. He wants to cut any program that might seem smart and nerdy, like the National Institutes of Health.

But he wants to increase funding for every program that seems manly, hard, muscular and ripped, like the military and armed antiterrorism programs.

In “The Sleepwalkers,” Christopher Clark, a professor of modern European history at Cambridge, describes how within 10 days czarist Russia’s ministers had created a narrative to justify Russia taking up arms for its “little Serbian brothers” should Austria-Hungary try to punish them. The dead archduke was portrayed as a stooge of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and a warmonger (which he wasn’t). The intent was to shift the moral onus from the perpetrator to the victim. France bought into that stratagem, and England more or less went along, the three bound by the Triple Entente of 1907. Austria-Hungary in turn had by July 4 sent an envoy on the night train to Berlin, where the Kaiser had just rebuked an official urging calm: “Stop this nonsense! It was high time a clean sweep was made of the Serbs.” So Austria-­Hungary got its famous “blank check,” and 37 days after Sarajevo the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire later in the year and eventually Bulgaria) were at war with the Entente powers

Russia’s ­mobilization, he says, was “one of the most momentous decisions of the July crisis. This was the first of the general mobilizations.” McMeekin says that Russia’s crime was first in escalating a local quarrel by encouraging Serbia to stand up to Austria-Hungary and then accelerating the rush to war. He faults Barbara Tuchman in her classic “Guns of August” for misdating Russia’s mobilization two days later than it was ordered. He is no apologist for Germany. In “The Berlin-­Baghdad Express” (2010), he nailed the Kaiser as a half-crazy jihadist inciting Muslims against Anglo-French interests in the faltering Ottoman Empire, but his 2011 book “The Russian Origins of the First World War” lived up to its title. Clark lends authority by citing Russian-French falsifications of documents. The Russians backdated and reworded papers in the records. The French were even more inventive, fabricating a telegram reporting six days of war preparations by Germany that weren’t happening. In Clark’s phrase, both Russia and France were at pains, then and later, to make Berlin appear “the moral fulcrum of the crisis.”

By a stringent line-by-line analysis of the terms of Austria’s 48-hour ultimatum to Serbia and the Serbian reply, Clark demolishes the standard view that Austria was too harsh and that Serbia humbly complied. Austria demanded action against irredentist networks in Serbia. It would have been an infringement of sovereignty, yes, but Serbian tolerance of the terrorist networks, and its laid-back response to the Sarajevo murders, inhibit one’s sympathy with its position. Clark describes Austria’s ultimatum as “a great deal milder” than the ultimatum presented by NATO to Serbia-Yugoslavia in the March 1999 Rambouillet Agreement for unimpeded access to its land. As for Serbia’s reply, so long regarded as conciliatory, Clark shows that on most policy points it was a highly perfumed rejection offering Austria amazingly little — a “masterpiece of diplomatic equivocation.”

New research shows that the German Nazi leader was on a constant supply of crystal methamphetamines to stay awake and energized, according to the UK Independent.

The intoxicated Fuhrer, a famous hypochondriac, was on more than 74 different medications while he ordered the systematic murders of Jews across Europe

It also claims he took nine shots of methamphetamine while living out his last days in his bunker to ease his pain and stress

we’ve left the Holocene behind — that’s the geological epoch since the end of the last ice age — and entered “a post-Holocene…geological age of our own making,” now best known as the Anthropocene.

the Anthropocene Working Group (because of my early writings, I’m a lay member), has moved substantially from asking whether such a transition has occurred to deciding when.

1950 as the starting point, indicated by a variety of markers, including the global spread of carbon isotopes from nuclear weapon detonations starting in 1945 and the mass production and disposal of plastics.

Will the Olympics Finally Embrace Trans Athletes?

The International Olympic Committee (IOC), which previously required transgender athletes to undergo gender-reassignment surgery in order to compete, is now expected to recognize that distinction by allowing all transgender men to compete in the male category “without restriction” and allowing transgender women to compete in the female category after a year of hormone replacement therapy (HRT).

To date, no openly transgender athlete has competed in the Olympics,

One argument is that the number of trans women who want to compete in elite sport is so tiny that they should be encouraged

Davies says that it is a matter of time before a country decides to exploit the rules. She points out that in 17 American states, teenagers only need to identify as a girl to take part in female races, something that could lead to lucrative college scholarships.

e have countries in the world that don’t care quite how they earn their medals, we know that from history and from what the Russians did at Sochi. So, if you have a rule that says people don’t have to have surgery any more, only have to self-identify and have reduced testosterone for one year — and who is monitoring that? — they can turn up at the Olympics and compete in a women’s event.

Our system has broken down. The Congress is effectively not functioning, elections merely rearrange the tribal deadlock, and reasoned discourse has been tweeted out of existence in the wider public space. This democracy has no effective means to govern itself, except through bitter paralysis or executive fiat. Now we’ve added an instinctive tyrant to this equation, and the last two years have been blinking bright red for constitutional corrosion and collapse.

It was bad enough when he was fighting his own party, his own Cabinet, and all of our allies. Now he’s lost the House and fired everyone who disagreed with him in his own Cabinet. He runs the country by impulsive, often contradictory diktat, and grips other tyrants— from MBS and Sisi to Putin and Bolsonaro — more closely to his chest. With the Mueller report pending, a docile new attorney general in the wings, and a majority on the Supreme Court inclined to give the executive the benefit of the doubt, we are about to enter Act III of this tragedy.

We all knew this was coming. Our liberal democracy is in abeyance. We now wait to see what the replacement will be. It could come sooner than we think.

Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, replied to my inquiry with a detailed critique of the A.P.A. guidelines.“The report is blinkered by two dogmas. One is the doctrine of the blank slate” that rejects biological and genetic factors, Pinker wrote, adding thatThe word “testosterone” appears nowhere in the report, and the possibility that men and women’s personalities differ for biological reasons is unsayable and unthinkable.The other dogma, Pinker argued,is that repressing emotions is bad and expressing them is good — a folk theory with roots in romanticism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Hollywood, but which is contradicted by a large literature showing that people with greater self-control, particularly those who repress anger rather than “venting,” lead healthier lives: they get better grades, have fewer eating disorders, drink less, have fewer psychosomatic aches and pains, are less depressed, anxious, phobic, and paranoid, have higher self-esteem, are more conscientious, have better relationships with their families, have more stable friendships, are less likely to have sex they regretted, are less likely to imagine themselves cheating in a monogamous relationship.

In Pinker’s view, the A.P.A. guidelines fail to recognize thata huge and centuries-long change in Western history, starting from the Middle Ages, was a “Civilizing Process” in which the ideal of manhood changed from a macho willingness to retaliate violently to an insult to the ability to exert self-control, dignity, reserve, and duty. It’s the culture of the gentleman, the man of dignity and quiet strength, the mensch. The romantic 1960s ethic of self-expression and escape from inhibitions weakened that ethic, and the A.P.A. report seems to be trying to administer the coup de grâce.

There is a strikingly different approach to the debate over masculinity in a different branch of academic inquiry. As David Autor, an economist at M.I.T., wrote in response to my inquiry:The greatest adverse shock to the psychosocial welfare of U.S. men has not stemmed from dysfunctional notions of masculinity (not that these are above reproach) nor from #MeToo (which was long overdue) but from deep secular labor market forces — both technological and trade-induced — that have over nearly four decades reduced the demand for skilled blue collar work.The effects of these economic changes, Autor wrote, have been devastating:These forces have dramatically eroded the earnings power, employment stability, social stature, and marriage market value of non-college men. The ensuing dysfunction touches not just in earnings and employment but also male idleness, dysfunctional and destructive behavior (e.g., drug and alcohol abuse), and the erosion of two-parent families, which, research suggests, facilitate children in becoming successful adults.

an update of Fight Club, 20 years on. Whereas that earlier film saw its disaffected Generation X protagonists get in touch with their violent instincts as a form of catharsis, The Art of Self-Defense posits that these days, men do not have to dig deeply to find their inner brutes.

the world The Art of Self-Defense is describing: one where pure testosterone bubbles to the surface of every conversation and confrontation. It’s ostensibly a fantasy. But it looks a lot like home.

Florida's Republican governor signed a bill Tuesday barring transgender females from playing on public school teams intended for student athletes born as girls, plunging the state into the national culture war over transgender rights.

"In Florida, girls are going to play girls sports and boys are going to play boys sports,"

The NCAA, which oversees college athletics, has said it has "a long-standing policy that provides a more inclusive path for transgender participation in college sports." The NCAA currently requires transgender women to get treatment to lower their testosterone levels before they can compete in women's sports.

Tennessee state Rep. Bruce Griffey (R), who has a cisgender daughter on a school golf team, is co-sponsoring a bill that would allow school competition only based on the sex listed on one’s birth certificate.

“What if one of the boys is not doing well, so he pretends to be transgender to win?” he asked. “I’m protecting a discriminated class: that’s girls and women in sports.”

But detractors say arguments about biological advantages among transgender athletes are based on limited research and put an outsize focus on a tiny fraction of young competitors. About 2 percent of high school students in the United States identify as transgender

Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same

Why wouldn’t you choose a girl? That such a statement should be so casually uttered by an old cowboy like Ericsson—or by anyone, for that matter—is monumental. For nearly as long as civilization has existed, patriarchy—enforced through the rights of the firstborn son—has been the organizing principle, with few exceptions

“You have to be concerned about the future of all women,” Roberta Steinbacher, a nun-turned-social-psychologist, said in a 1984 People profile of Ericsson. “There’s no question that there exists a universal preference for sons.”

“And the first question this kid asked me is just … ‘What the heck does good masculinity look like?’”He grimaced.“And I’ll be honest with you: I did not have an answer for that.”

by 1958, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. warned that “the male role has plainly lost its rugged clarity of outline.” Writing in Esquire magazine, he added, “The ways by which American men affirm their masculinity are uncertain and obscure. There are multiplying signs, indeed, that something has gone badly wrong with the American male’s conception of himself.”

today’s problems are real and well documented. Deindustrialization, automation, free trade and peacetime have shifted the labor market dramatically, and not in men’s favor — the need for physical labor has declined, while soft skills and academic credentials are increasingly rewarded