Transgender Confusion

I never cease to be amazed about the ignorance making the rounds about transgender individuals.

No one is telling anyone that they can be a girl if that's what they want to be. Let me try and explain it as I understand it.

Sex: Is determined by biology and can be either male, female or intersex. Intersex individuals make up about 1.6% of the population and have either physical or chromosomal characteristics that don't match the typical male or female types,

Gender: Refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for boys and men or girls and women. Obviously gender is not arbitrary but extensively influenced by sexual characteristics.

Gender Dysphoria: Strong, persistent feelings of identification with the opposite gender and discomfort with one's own biological sex that results in significant distress or impairment.

To be clinically diagnosed with gender dysphoria:

A. Must persistently and strongly identify with the opposite gender (aside from desiring any perceived cultural advantage of being the other gender).

B. A persistent discomfort with his or her sex traits or sense of inappropriateness of the gender associated with those traits. Must have strong discomfort with own gender and express that discomfort.

C. Not concurrent with physical intersex condition.

D. Causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational or other important areas of functioning.

I don't know where people get this impression that one can simply declare themselves a member of the other gender. For instance one would not be recognized as transgender in a school environment without psychiatric concurrence.

The number of transgender individuals in the US is minuscule. Depending upon whose numbers you believe they are somewhere between 0.3% and 0.6% of the population.

To put this in perspective, 14% of the US population lives in poverty so I figure we have much more important things to worry about.

Meals on Wheels

Meals on Wheels is a program that bring food to the elderly that a difficult time shopping for themselves are on a limited budget.

The food isn't fancy but it's generally nutritious. It's delivered by volunteers so the cost is mostly for the  food.

But not to worry, according the Trump White House the program is "not showing any results" so they want to cut it in order to free up funds for a $54 billion increase to defense spending.

Like the man said, Republicans only care for themselves.

What the hell kind of results are you expecting from delivering small parcels of food to older folk who otherwise might not be eating regularly?

Is this part of the Republican plan to help out Social Security? Kill off the elderly so they stop collecting?

And to make matters worse, the extra money they want to spend on defense appears to be earmarked for the wrong sort of stuff. They want to fight the cold war rather than a 21st cetury war where insurgency and cyber warfare are the real dangers.

Give me a goddamn break.