I'll add that for sex it's pretty clear you are male, female, or a mix of both. In light of what I said above for transgender that means your brain and body seemingly developed with a different sex. And this idea isn't totally weird either. Besides the numerous animals that can switch as needed, there are cases of humans where different cells have different chromosomes. Heck, mothers of boys have some of their cells that live on within them. They are like 0.01% male after birth. It's wild stuff. Gender, of course, is being understood differently to mean a collection of personality traits, interests, etc. I can see some value in that for online communities and stuff but I don't agree with making people learn that by force, only by choice if you want to as it doesn't seem as grounded in genetics and is more a preference.

On the gender debate, this is something I've thought a lot about as I know a transgender individual quite well. I think seeing an acknowledgement of intersex as an exception of sorts to the idea that everybody is male or female is good because it lays the groundwork for understanding trans people as well. The thought experiment is to pretend we had the technology to swap brains. If you took a woman's brain and put it in a mans body, what gender is this individual? If we are being fair we would of course say that their body is male and their brain is female. As for who they are, I would default to female since our brains make us what we are more than anything else. Now, if you understand that hypothetical extreme, then what about another hypothetical. What if somebody were born that way? What would they be? Of course in reality it is not simple, nor likely accurate, but if you want to understand the topic I think the truth may be understood by that example. We know that in most areas male and female brains are similar, but certain areas differ on average. So if you take a population and compare that trait there will be some males who are more female with respect to that trait (and visa versa) but most will not be. But if you take enough of these gendered traits for an average male or female most will fall in alignment with their sex. These personality differences are consistent with literal differences in brain structure. Ok, so what if you get a individual who do to a series of abnormalities in genetics (etc) has a brain that more closely resembles the brain of the opposite sex? Maybe this happens, maybe it doesn't, but ask yourself is this biologically reasonable to be possible? Can you see how this might make somebody identify as the opposite sex to their birth? Science does not say just yet whether this is what makes somebody transgender or not, but I would hope most who read this can at least say you can see how it might be reasonable. These people exist, and I know one of them. It's not made up. And if you want to know about other exceptions, a really interesting one is complete androgen insensitivity. Those who have that are born XY but their body can't respond to testosterone so they grow up looking, sounding, and usually identifying as female because their development leaves them closer to that. There are many other chromosomal variations that make people develop weird combinations of male and female.

How has the GEM performed?

Been a wonderful last week in Montana, every time I come here I want to move back, it's just so beautiful here. Been doing a ton of boating at Lake McDonald, hungry horse, and flathead, and tons of hiking in Glacier national park. And we couldn't of asked for better weather while we've been here. Got charged by a momma grizz a couple days ago when we came around the corner of a trail and spooked her. Had her follow us down the trail for half a minute but what felt like an eternity, then she charged close to us to intimidate (not to attack), luckily it was pretty clear she wasn't going to attack us so we didn't need to use bear spray, I'd guess she got just about 15 feet away. Managed to capture a couple crappy pictures before they ran off.

Nice trendz today. Even the EPS is more suppressed with the heat dome.