Without these players constantly active, certain components of your biological sex can change. Secondary sex characteristics—penis, vagina, appearance, behavior—arise later, from hormones, environment, experience, and genes interacting.

To explore this, we move from the body to the brain, where biology becomes behavior. When the biology gets too complicated, some point to differences between brains of males and females as proof of the sexual binary.

Certain brain characteristics can be sexually dimorphic: observable average differences across males and females. This tiny brain area with a disproportionately sized name is slightly larger in males than in females. Trying to link sex, sex chromosomes and sexual dimorphism is also useless for understanding other brain properties. The hormone vasopressin is dimorphic but is linked to both behavioral differences and similarities across sex.

It also happens that transgender people have the brains to prove it. Thanks to the participation of trans people in research, we have expanded our understanding of how brain structure, sex and gender interact. For some properties like brain volume and connectivity, trans people possessed values in between those typical of cisgender males and females, both before and after transitioning. Another study found that for certain brain regions, trans individuals appeared similar to cis-individuals with the same gender identity.

In that same study , researchers found specific areas of the brain where trans people seemed closer to those with the same assigned sex at birth. Other researchers discovered that trans people have unique structural differences from cis-individuals. THE BODY AND THE BRAIN AND THE HORMONES BETWIXT. Anyone who has gone through puberty has felt the power of hormones firsthand.

For one thing, all humans possess levels of estrogen, progesterone and testosterone with sex differences not as prominent as is popularly thought. During infancy and prepubescence, these hormones sit in a bipotential range, with no marked sex differences.

Through puberty, certain sex hormones like estrogen, progesterone and testosterone become weighted toward one end of a spectrum. But in developed adults, estrogen and progesterone levels are on average similar between males and nonpregnant females. And while testosterone exhibits the largest difference between adult males and females, heritability studies have found that genetics X vs. The binary sex model not only insufficiently predicts the presence of hormones but is useless in describing factors that influence them.

Environmental, social and behavioral factors also influence hormones in both males and females, complicating the idea that hormones determine sex. Progesterone changes in response to typically male-coded social situations that involve dominance and competition. Though testosterone levels are different between males and females on average, many external factors can change these levels, such as whether or not a person is raising a child. Differing testosterone levels in both men and women can predict certain parenting behaviors.

Even the content of a sexual fantasy can change testosterone levels. The fact is, behavior and environment—like cultural gender norms and expectations—influence sex-related hormones, and the biology of the body and brain itself.

SCIENCE AND SOCIETY: BETTER TOGETHER. While this is a small overview, the science is clear and conclusive: sex is not binary, transgender people are real. It is time that we acknowledge this. The trans experience provides essential insights into the science of sex and scientifically demonstrates that uncommon and atypical phenomena are vital for a successful living system.

Even the scientific endeavor itself is quantifiably better when it is more inclusive and diverse. So, no matter what a pundit, politician or internet troll may say, trans people are an indispensable part of our living reality.

Transgender humans represent the complexity and diversity that are fundamental features of life, evolution and nature itself. That is a fact. It originally referred to participants as transgender. The views expressed are those of the author s and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

Simón e D Sun is a doctoral candidate in the Tsien Lab at New York University's Neuroscience Institute. When you think of leaders in the computing industry, your first thoughts probably turn to companies like Apple, Microsoft, and IBM. DEC identified a demand for more affordable and high-performing computing systems that could be used in scientific research and other technological settings.

DEC introduced a mid-range computing solution, the minicomputer, at a time when the alternative was too bulky and costly for most people.

In addition to its extensive lines of minicomputers, it also became involved with software as well as the internet in the very, very early days of the internet. So, what happened to DEC? Why did all the success and industry dominance they had for roughly three decades just suddenly slip away? It ends in roughly with the selling of the company to Compaq. While working together in the Lincoln Laboratory at MIT, Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson came up with the idea for DEC.

Olsen and Anderson also knew that these interactive machines could be made and sold cheaper, which would be another major draw for researchers and scientists who were craving the technology.

In sticking with the theme of keeping expenses light not only for customers but for the company as well , they set up shop in an old wool mill in Maynard, MA. The first product DEC created and sold was its Digital Laboratory Module.

Staying true to its business plan, the initial product lines DEC focused on were modules, or electronic components, that were mounted to circuit boards. DEC began selling its first computer at the end of While continuing to release new PDPs into the market, DEC also charged forward in its delivery of new modules.

The Flip Chip came out in and was meant to convert the PDP-4 to the PDP Many of its subsequent module releases served a similar purpose: helping users convert their old computers to upgraded versions. It was in this year when DEC released the PDP-8, which is widely recognized as the first successful commercial minicomputer. In the interim, DEC came up with a revamped version of their PDP line and released the PDP minicomputer.

Not only did it bring major upgraded features to their computing machines, it also was easier to use. By the time it stopped selling it in the s, DEC sold over , of them, making it one of the most popular minicomputers ever. In addition, the design of the computer, as well as its operating system, turned out to be immensely popular with other computing companies, that eventually ended up using it as inspiration for their own work.

After widespread success with its PDP, DEC made the move into high-end computers and launched the Virtual Address eXtension, or VAX. This new bit minicomputer or supermini line aimed to provide users with a wide array of computing resources that would be more affordable, powerful, and smaller than what companies like IBM could offer at the time.

DEC continued to stay busy during this time, regularly putting out new models of the VAX. The VAX came out in and became an instant bestseller.

What is the Islamic State? Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers.

In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. The group seized Mosul, Iraq, last June, and already rules an area larger than the United Kingdom. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been its leader since May , but until last summer, his most recent known appearance on film was a grainy mug shot from a stay in U.

captivity at Camp Bucca during the occupation of Iraq. Then, on July 5 of last year, he stepped into the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, to deliver a Ramadan sermon as the first caliph in generations—upgrading his resolution from grainy to high-definition, and his position from hunted guerrilla to commander of all Muslims.

The inflow of jihadists that followed, from around the world, was unprecedented in its pace and volume, and is continuing. Our ignorance of the Islamic State is in some ways understandable: It is a hermit kingdom; few have gone there and returned. Baghdadi has spoken on camera only once.

We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world. The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham ISIS , follows a distinctive variety of Islam whose beliefs about the path to the Day of Judgment matter to its strategy, and can help the West know its enemy and predict its behavior.

Its rise to power is less like the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt a group whose leaders the Islamic State considers apostates than like the realization of a dystopian alternate reality in which David Koresh or Jim Jones survived to wield absolute power over not just a few hundred people, but some 8 million.

We have misunderstood the nature of the Islamic State in at least two ways. First, we tend to see jihadism as monolithic, and to apply the logic of al-Qaeda to an organization that has decisively eclipsed it.

Bin Laden viewed his terrorism as a prologue to a caliphate he did not expect to see in his lifetime. His organization was flexible, operating as a geographically diffuse network of autonomous cells. The Islamic State, by contrast, requires territory to remain legitimate, and a top-down structure to rule it.

Its bureaucracy is divided into civil and military arms, and its territory into provinces. Peter Bergen, who produced the first interview with bin Laden in , titled his first book Holy War, Inc.

in part to acknowledge bin Laden as a creature of the modern secular world. Bin Laden corporatized terror and franchised it out. He requested specific political concessions, such as the withdrawal of U. forces from Saudi Arabia. His foot soldiers navigated the modern world confidently. There is a temptation to rehearse this observation—that jihadists are modern secular people, with modern political concerns, wearing medieval religious disguise—and make it fit the Islamic State.

In fact, much of what the group does looks nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse.

They often speak in codes and allusions that sound odd or old-fashioned to non-Muslims, but refer to specific traditions and texts of early Islam. But Adnani was not merely talking trash. His speech was laced with theological and legal discussion, and his exhortation to attack crops directly echoed orders from Muhammad to leave well water and crops alone—unless the armies of Islam were in a defensive position, in which case Muslims in the lands of kuffar , or infidels, should be unmerciful, and poison away.

The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe.

But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam. Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do.

In November, the Islamic State released an infomercial-like video tracing its origins to bin Laden. Zawahiri has not pledged allegiance to Baghdadi, and he is increasingly hated by his fellow jihadists. His isolation is not helped by his lack of charisma; in videos he comes across as squinty and annoyed. But the split between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State has been long in the making, and begins to explain, at least in part, the outsize bloodlust of the latter.

On most matters of doctrine, Maqdisi and the Islamic State agree. In time, though, Zarqawi surpassed his mentor in fanaticism, and eventually earned his rebuke. In Islam, the practice of takfir , or excommunication, is theologically perilous. The punishment for apostasy is death. And yet Zarqawi heedlessly expanded the range of behavior that could make Muslims infidels.

Denying the holiness of the Koran or the prophecies of Muhammad is straightforward apostasy. But Zarqawi and the state he spawned take the position that many other acts can remove a Muslim from Islam. Being a Shiite, as most Iraqi Arabs are, meets the standard as well, because the Islamic State regards Shiism as innovation, and to innovate on the Koran is to deny its initial perfection.

The Islamic State claims that common Shiite practices, such as worship at the graves of imams and public self-flagellation, have no basis in the Koran or in the example of the Prophet. That means roughly million Shia are marked for death. So too are the heads of state of every Muslim country, who have elevated man-made law above Sharia by running for office or enforcing laws not made by God.

Following takfiri doctrine, the Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people. The lack of objective reporting from its territory makes the true extent of the slaughter unknowable, but social-media posts from the region suggest that individual executions happen more or less continually, and mass executions every few weeks. Exempted from automatic execution, it appears, are Christians who do not resist their new government.

Baghdadi permits them to live, as long as they pay a special tax, known as the jizya , and acknowledge their subjugation. The Koranic authority for this practice is not in dispute. Centuries have passed since the wars of religion ceased in Europe, and since men stopped dying in large numbers because of arcane theological disputes. Hence, perhaps, the incredulity and denial with which Westerners have greeted news of the theology and practices of the Islamic State.

Many refuse to believe that this group is as devout as it claims to be, or as backward-looking or apocalyptic as its actions and statements suggest. Their skepticism is comprehensible. Look instead, these scholars urged, to the conditions in which these ideologies arose—the bad governance, the shifting social mores, the humiliation of living in lands valued only for their oil.

Without acknowledgment of these factors, no explanation of the rise of the Islamic State could be complete. Many mainstream Muslim organizations have gone so far as to say the Islamic State is, in fact, un-Islamic.

It is, of course, reassuring to know that the vast majority of Muslims have zero interest in replacing Hollywood movies with public executions as evening entertainment. Of partial Lebanese descent, Haykel grew up in Lebanon and the United States, and when he talks through his Mephistophelian goatee, there is a hint of an unplaceable foreign accent. According to Haykel, the ranks of the Islamic State are deeply infused with religious vigor.

Koranic quotations are ubiquitous. This behavior includes a number of practices that modern Muslims tend to prefer not to acknowledge as integral to their sacred texts. The Koran specifies crucifixion as one of the only punishments permitted for enemies of Islam.

Leaders of the Islamic State have taken emulation of Muhammad as strict duty, and have revived traditions that have been dormant for hundreds of years. They conquered most of what is now Saudi Arabia, and their strict practices survive in a diluted version of Sharia there.

If al-Qaeda wanted to revive slavery, it never said so. And why would it? Silence on slavery probably reflected strategic thinking, with public sympathies in mind: when the Islamic State began enslaving people, even some of its supporters balked.

Nonetheless, the caliphate has continued to embrace slavery and crucifixion without apology. A study group of Islamic State scholars had convened, on government orders, to resolve this issue. Tens of thousands of foreign Muslims are thought to have immigrated to the Islamic State. Recruits hail from France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, Holland, Australia, Indonesia, the United States, and many other places.

Many have come to fight, and many intend to die. Peter R. Online recruitment has also widened the demographics of the jihadist community, by allowing conservative Muslim women—physically isolated in their homes—to reach out to recruiters, radicalize, and arrange passage to Syria. Through its appeals to both genders, the Islamic State hopes to build a complete society.

For three years he was a televangelist on Iqraa TV in Cairo, but he left after the station objected to his frequent calls to establish a caliphate.

Now he preaches on Facebook and Twitter. Cerantonio—a big, friendly man with a bookish demeanor—told me he blanches at beheading videos. He hates seeing the violence, even though supporters of the Islamic State are required to endorse it. He speaks out, controversially among jihadists, against suicide bombing, on the grounds that God forbids suicide; he differs from the Islamic State on a few other points as well.

He has the kind of unkempt facial hair one sees on certain overgrown fans of The Lord of the Rings , and his obsession with Islamic apocalypticism felt familiar.

He is stuck in Melbourne, where he is well known to the local constabulary. If Cerantonio were caught facilitating the movement of individuals to the Islamic State, he would be imprisoned.

Cerantonio grew up there in a half-Irish, half-Calabrian family. On a typical street one can find African restaurants, Vietnamese shops, and young Arabs walking around in the Salafi uniform of scraggly beard, long shirt, and trousers ending halfway down the calves. Cerantonio explained the joy he felt when Baghdadi was declared the caliph on June 29—and the sudden, magnetic attraction that Mesopotamia began to exert on him and his friends. The last caliphate was the Ottoman empire, which reached its peak in the 16th century and then experienced a long decline, until the founder of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, euthanized it in Baghdadi spoke at length of the importance of the caliphate in his Mosul sermon.

He said that to revive the institution of the caliphate—which had not functioned except in name for about 1, years—was a communal obligation. Unlike bin Laden, and unlike those false caliphs of the Ottoman empire, he is Qurayshi.

The caliphate, Cerantonio told me, is not just a political entity but also a vehicle for salvation. They are neither obviously saved nor definitively condemned.

So, no matter what a pundit, politician or internet troll may say, trans people are an indispensable part of our living reality. The basic analysis made with the use of indicators is called technical analysis. USA: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Already a subscriber? Detransition Gender Intersex LGBT Sex Sex assignment Sex and gender distinction Sexual orientation. Opt-in for intersex people only.

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