Transgender, Transable, Transracial

Does transgenderism conflict with feminism?

What Makes a Woman? (New York Times)

Do women and men have different brains?

Back when Lawrence H. Summers was president of Harvard and suggested that they did, the reaction was swift and merciless. Pundits branded him sexist. Faculty members deemed him a troglodyte. Alumni withheld donations.

But when Bruce Jenner said much the same thing in an April interview with Diane Sawyer, he was lionized for his bravery, even for his progressivism.

After Being TKO’d by Fallon Fox, Tamikka Brents Says Transgender Fighters in MMA ‘Just Isn’t Fair’ (Cage Potato)

Transgender MMA fighter Fallon Fox earned her second straight win on Saturday, when she TKO’d Tamikka Brents in the first round at a Capital City Cage Wars event in Springfield, Illinois. Brents reportedly suffered a concussion and a broken orbital bone during the two-minute beatdown, and required seven staples in her head.

Brens said:

I’ve fought a lot of women and have never felt the strength that I felt in a fight as I did that night. I can’t answer whether it’s because she was born a man or not because I’m not a doctor. I can only say, I’ve never felt so overpowered ever in my life and I am an abnormally strong female in my own right.

Does transableism conflict with disability rights?

Becoming disabled by choice, not chance: ‘Transabled’ people feel like impostors in their fully working bodies (National Post)

When he cut off his right arm with a “very sharp power tool,” a man who now calls himself One Hand Jason let everyone believe it was an accident.

But he had for months tried different means of cutting and crushing the limb that never quite felt like his own, training himself on first aid so he wouldn’t bleed to death, even practicing on animal parts sourced from a butcher.

“My goal was to get the job done with no hope of reconstruction or re-attachment, and I wanted some method that I could actually bring myself to do,” he told the body modification website ModBlog.

His goal was to become disabled.

Is transracialism bad for racial progress?

Why Comparing Rachel Dolezal To Caitlyn Jenner Is Detrimental To Both Trans And Racial Progress (Huffington Post)

Transracial identity is a concept that allows white people to indulge in blackness as a commodity, without having to actually engage with every facet of what being black entails — discrimination, marginalization, oppression, and so on. It plays into racial stereotypes…

 

Is the US Tax System Really Progressive?

One of the things I learned in grad school is that figuring out how much people pay in taxes can be really, really complicated. The first complication is that you have to consider not just the federal taxes, but also state and local taxes. That’s actually not too bad. What gets a lot trickier, however, is if you actually try to figure out effective taxes. Sure, it’s easy to look up the tax rates by income bracket, but that doesn’t account for things like the mortgage interest deduction. So it’s kind of an open question, are the effective taxes in the US (including state and local as well as federal) progressive? Or do the benefits at the top (like mortgage interest deduction) and the penalties at the bottom (like cigarette taxes) combine to overwhelm the statutory progressivity of the tax brackets?

Dylan Matthews at Vox has the answer:

885 - Effective Tax Rates

So yeah, they’re progressive, but not as progressive as you’d expect them to be. Here’s what economist Miles Kimball had to say:

This is a very nice chart showing that taxes overall are remarkably close to proportional. One of the things that suggests to me is that a much simpler tax system that had people paying a proportional tax such as a VAT tax, coupled with a lump-sum transfer to the poor, would not be such a big change after all. We probably cause a lot of distortions by pretending to have a progressive tax system instead of admitting that we have a mostly proportional tax system and optimizing it.

Amen. There are much, much simpler (and therefore cheaper and healthier) ways to get to where we’re at.

I will add one caveat, however. When you’re figuring out how much people pay in taxes, it’s probably also worth trying to determine how much they receive in direct government benefits. If someone pays 20% of their income in taxes but then receives food stamps worth 20% of their income, isn’t their net contribution zero? From my experience, if you do this analysis then initially you get a much, much more progressive system, but you also get a much, much trickier problem. A lot of the benefits to the wealthy are harder to track than direct government expenditures. What’s the benefit, for example, of friendly zoning laws that artificially inflate land prices and thus benefit the upper class?

 

Calvin and Hobbes and the Glory of God

881 - Time Travel

Let me start with a great blog post from G. at Junior Gaynmede: Have You Ever Heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates? Morons. Here are a couple of excerpts to whet your appetite for this excellent post:

Calvin and Hobbes is one of the great works of Western civilization. I don’t know if it will still be read and loved centuries into the future, but if not so much the worse for centuries into the future. Centuries into the future ought to write “Time Machine” on the side of its cardboard box and zoom back here for some of the good stuff.

And also:

Christ made childishness one of the great questions of human existence. Following him, we now know that it is of the stuff salvation is made of. For the Christian, childhood is part of the Great Conversation and Calvin and Hobbes is a classic work. It’s silliness is soulcraft.

I want to extend that last paragraph just a little bit and talk about Lazarus. I taught that story in Sunday School on Sunday, and two verses in particular stood out to me as I taught it. They have stayed with me since, as well, orbiting my mind with the insistence of gravity and physics, demanding constant attention. Here they are:

39 Jesus said, Take ye away the stone. Martha, the sister of him that was dead, saith unto him, Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days.

40 Jesus saith unto her, Said I not unto thee, that, if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God?

The contrast between Martha’s concern about her brother’s rotting corpse and Jesus’ promise to see the glory of God strike me as profound. It seems to me that nothing that actually matters in life can be grasped directly. If you wish to mold your character, you must do so indirectly, by policing your thoughts and actions. If you wish to spread the Gospel and preach, you can use your words and actions, but they will never be more than a vehicle through which the Holy Spirit may–or may not–be conducted. If you wish to experience love, you cannot do so directly, but must instead look for the signs of love in a caress, a word, a sacrifice.

And so it is with the glory of God. You cannot see it directly. It is not, I think, that it is too bright and that we must look way as from the blazing sun. Although that may also be true. Nor, I think, is it that it is a kind of mathematical limit or Platonic form which exists but not in this place. Although, there may be something to that analogy as well.

I have no theory about why we must interact with the things that matter most in our life but–as a Mormon–I sense a deep connection to the question of embodiment. We believe that this physical existence is not a necessary evil but a progressive step in our grace-fueled upwards trajectory. Something about physicality, about the specificity of mortal experience, allows the abstract to be instantiated and therefore experienced.

One message of the story of Lazarus is that the glory of God is not separate from our mortal experience, but exists within it. The physical and tangible reality of Lazarus risen–shadowy presage of Christ’s greater triumph–is not incidental.

What does this have to do with Calvin and his tiger? Simply this: art–with the specificity of character and plot and setting–is another way we can approach the abstract, the profound, and the divine. There is something about the specificity of Calvin as this particular boy and Hobbes as this particular tiger that bring us closer by circles to great truths than straight lines ever could.

Privilege is Complex and Contextual: A Case Study

So the BBC has an article that is probably not going to generate a ton of sympathy with anyone: The surprising downsides of being drop dead gorgeous. It’s actually a pretty great article for a serious discussion about privilege, however, because it has attributes of identity privilege (your looks are largely intrinsic and immutable, like your race or gender) but with less (not none, but less) emotional volatility.

The obvious takeaway is that being pretty is basically a good thing:

In education, for instance, Walker and Frevert found a wealth of research showing that better looking students, at school and university, tend to be judged by teachers as being more competent and intelligent – and that was reflected in the grades they gave them.

But one of the interesting things is that this privilege isn’t always beneficial. There are times and places where being pretty isn’t going to work to your advantage. And these aren’t weird, idiosyncratic hypotheticals. These are real-world situations that we all face:

And as you might expect, good-looking people of both genders run into jealousy – one study found that if you are interviewed by someone of the same sex, they may be less likely to recruit you if they judge that you are more attractive than they are.

Here’s another one:

More worryingly, being beautiful or handsome could harm your medical care. We tend to link good looks to health, meaning that illnesses are often taken less seriously when they affect the good-looking. When treating people for pain, for instance, doctors tend to take less care over the more attractive people.

That one is particularly interesting, because the mechanism is identical to a lot of the benefits of beauty. People associate beauty with health, high-functioning, etc. Usually this is good. When you’re beautiful and in pain, however, this exact same mechanism turns against you.

And another one:

And the bubble of beauty can be a somewhat lonely place. One study in 1975, for instance, found that people tend to move further away from a beautiful woman on the pathway – perhaps as a mark of respect, but still making interaction more distant. “Attractiveness can convey more power over visible space – but that in turn can make others feel they can’t approach that person,” says Frevert. Interestingly, the online dating website OKCupid recently reported that people with the most flawlessly beautiful profile pictures are less likely to find dates than those with quirkier, less perfect pics – perhaps because the prospective dates are less intimidated.

This one is interesting, because it shows that the benefits of privilege can entail their own costs. Is it possible, for example, that there’s a connection between the privilege enjoyed by white males and the fact that they have the highest risk of suicide, and often at the peak of their socio-economic power?

888 - Suicide Rate by Gender

887 - Suicide Rate by Race

886 - Suicide Rates by Age

Obviously it’s not as simple as “loneliness of being privileged = high suicide rate.” That wouldn’t explain the very high rate of suicide among American Indians nor the fact that the age group almost as likely to commit suicide as the 45-64 (when white men are typically at the height of their social power) is 85+ (when white men are generally frail and socially vulnerable). But that’s kind of my point: privilege isn’t that simple It’s not just a matter of “this attribute makes your life easier,” whether the attribute is being white or being beautiful.

This also isn’t some kind of appeal to sympathy. As I said at the outset: I hardly doubt that anyone is going to suddenly feel bad for natural born beauties. So this can hardly be construed as an argument that really it’s the white male who has it hardest of all. That’s not my point. My point is simply that privilege–even when we’re talking about identity-based privilege–is more complex and more interesting than the dominant rhetoric allows.

The Philosophy News Network

Existential Comics posted a hilarious strip about the Philosophy News Network. Here’s a sample of Albert Camus as rugby sports reporter:

889 - Camus as Sports Reporter

My favorite parts were actually the little ticker scroller running along the bottom, however. Here’s another one of those:

898 - What It is Like to Be a Bat

That’s a reference to Thomas Nagel’s famous essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, by the way. But if you want to know about the Large Idea Collider, you’ll have to check out the full post.

 

Is There a Difference Between Red State/Blue State Families?

The outcomes of “red states” and “blue states” are often used to demonstrate the superiority/inferiority of whichever political ideology. But the following report on state-by-state family structures in The New York Times demonstrates the importance of proper analysis:

In the blue-state model, Americans get more education and earn higher income — and more educated, higher-earning people tend to marry and stay married. In Minnesota, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Connecticut, at least 51 percent of teenagers are being raised by both biological parents, among the highest rates in the nation. (That figure excludes families in which the two parents are together without being married; such arrangements are still rare — and less likely to last than marriages.)

The lowest rates of two-parent families tend to be in states that don’t fit either model: red states with the lowest levels of education or blue states with only average levels of education.

The entire article is worth reading and is full of useful information and links on family structure and child outcomes. Check it out.

A Great Comic About Privilege

I’ve got serious misgivings with the way “privilege” is often used in political discourse these days, where the assumption is always that it’s racial, gender, or other forms of privilege that matter most. It’s not in any way that I deny that these forms of privilege exist, but the discussion is too simplistic and too myopic. Privilege is not absolute. It’s contextual. And race and gender and sexuality and other identity-based forms of privilege aren’t the only forms that exist. They aren’t even the most important. More important? The privilege of coming from a stable, two-parent, biological family, for one, and the privilege of a low ACE-score for another.

So, although most of the folks who share this comic (and possibly the author, too) would probably disagree vehemently with me over the topic, I share it because it’s actually a very, very good example of how privilege really works:

This is just the first few panels. Click the image to go to the site and read the entire thing. It's worth it.
This is just the first few panels. Click the image to go to the site and read the entire thing. It’s worth it.

What’s really good about the comic is that it actually illustrates specific examples of privilege and, in this case, the privilege of class. The two children both have strong families, are both white, and gender doesn’t focus prominently in the storyline. Instead, it’s all about who can afford to study while in college vs. who has to shoehorn studies and menial work into the same schedule. It’s also about who has family connections that can smooth the transition into a competitive job environment, and who has to figure things out on their own.

Class is a better framework for discussing privilege than race or gender (although race-based and gender-based privilege do exist) because it gets closer to the heart of the matter: power. The trouble is that Americans don’t really like class. We’re not sure what it means and we kind of like to pretend it doesn’t exist. No one is more keen to pretend that class is not an issue then the upper-class, of course. This is one reason for the fascinating relationship of brand prominence to price.

Today, anyone can own a purse, a watch, or a pair of shoes, but specific brands of purses, watches, and shoes are a distinguishing feature for certain classes of consumers. A woman who sports a Gucci “new britt” hobo bag ($695) signals something much different about her social standing than a woman carrying a Coach “ali signature” hobo ($268). The brand, displayed prominently on both, says it all. Coach, known for introducing “accessible luxury” to the masses, does not compare in most people’s minds in price and prestige with Italian fashion house Gucci. But what inferences are made regarding a woman seen carrying a Bottega Veneta hobo bag ($2,450)? Bottega Veneta’s explicit “no logo” strategy (bags have the brand badge on the inside) makes the purse unrecognizable to the casual observer and identifiable only to those “in the know.”

One function of this kind of invisible prestige (although not the only consideration) is that it allows the most privileged to avoid attracting attention from those who are less privileged. Only their fellow elites can recognize their subtle status cues. This is also the reason that identity-based privilege is so appealing to middle- and upper-class Americans: it obscures more privilege than it reveals by quietly taking class off the table. Identity-based privilege is loud and boisterous, but it poses a negligible threat to existing socio-economic power structures. It’s about as revolutionary as a Che Guevara t-shirt.

Brandon Flowers as Role Model

891 - Brandon Flowers

I’ve written several times before about the tension between a desire to create something great and the feeling that all the greats were kind of crazy people with seriously unbalanced lives. Read enough bios and you quickly get the impression that the muses–artistic, scientific, or other–require jealous tribute. You don’t get to have a comfortable, stable family life and make a masterpiece. You must be tortured in order to be a genius.

Even though I’m not sure I’ll ever qualify to make that decision, and even though I’m pretty sure it will not ever be distilled into an actual moment-in-time choice; I’ve still decided to make my mind up preemptively. If I ever get to choose between making something great and my family, then I choose my family.

Does this preclude me from doing good artistic work? I hope not, and folks like Brandon Flowers give me hope. Here he is talking to NPR’s David Greene:

GREENE: So you’re sober. You are a devout Mormon. You’re family man, three kids, yet, you know, you’re pulled by the spirit of Elvis. You, yourself, have, you know, a rock and roll kind of image, you know, and that you’ll show onstage. I mean, these seem to be conflicting impulses here.

FLOWERS: They are. I mean, I’m not without temptation or anything like that, but I – you know, I also feel like I learned a lot in the early days, having that contrast of knowing what I felt, what made me feel good and then trying to fit into this role of a – you know, of the lead singer of a rock band. You know, because I’ve had both of those experiences, it made it easier for me to decide which road I was going to take.

Clearly there’s a lot more that separates me from Flowers, and rock musician has never been my particular dream. (Too noisy.) But it’s great to have a role model out there who is putting out great work, doing it without turning his life into a melodrama worthy of Greek tragedy, and acknowledging that it’s because of a choice he made.

Warren Buffet: What’s Better Than Raising the Minimum Wage?

892 - Minimum Wage WSJ

If you read Difficult Run with any frequency, you know that we really, really don’t like the minimum wage. There are lots of reasons for this, but one of the biggest is that there’s a better solution to the problem that the minimum wage is supposed to tackle, which is helping the working poor. It’s better because it gets more money into the hands of those who need it without either (1) eradicating low-income jobs (which are better than no jobs) or (2) uselessly funneling extra money into the hands of middle class teenagers working summer jobs (or whatever).

So, what is this superior alternative? Let’s ask Warren Buffet and the Wall Street Journal:

I may wish to have all jobs pay at least $15 an hour. But that minimum would almost certainly reduce employment in a major way, crushing many workers possessing only basic skills. Smaller increases, though obviously welcome, will still leave many hardworking Americans mired in poverty.

The better answer is a major and carefully crafted expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which currently goes to millions of low-income workers. Payments to eligible workers diminish as their earnings increase. But there is no disincentive effect: A gain in wages always produces a gain in overall income. The process is simple: You file a tax return, and the government sends you a check.

In essence, the EITC rewards work and provides an incentive for workers to improve their skills. Equally important, it does not distort market forces, thereby maximizing employment.

Given the existence of the EITC, it is inexcusable for anyone who genuinely cares about this issue to keep shouting for an increase in the minimum wage.

In a perfect world if I got to restructure our whole tax / welfare system from scratch I might make other choices than an EITC (like maybe an Universal Base Income), but in the world we live today the EITC is a smart, simple program that is already in place and just needs to be augmented in order to give targeted, sound support to the working power. In this case the smart thing and the right thing are the same: so let’s increase the EITC.

Global Inequality Is Falling: More Evidence

The Economist reported on a new study that finds that the “Gini coefficient of global inequality fell from 69 in 2003 to 65 in 2013. And median income rose from about $1,000 to $2,000 in just ten years.” The economists and authors of the study estimate that it will continue to plummet to 61 by 2035. As for annual income, the abstract states, “The number of people earning between US$1,144 and US$3,252 per year in 2013 prices in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms will increase by around 500 million, with the largest gains in Sub-Saharan Africa and India; those earning between US$3,252 and US$8,874 per year in 2013 prices will increase by almost 1 billion, with the largest gains in India and Sub-Saharan Africa; and those earning more than US$8,874 per year will increase by 1.2 billion, with the largest gains in China and the advanced economies.”

I’ve written about global inequality here before. Nathaniel and I have even published on the subject. This is utterly fantastic news.