Jon Brooks: The Controversial Research on 'Desistance' in Transgender Youth. One reason many researchers believe it’s unnecessary to delay the social transition of a child is that they don’t think the research on desistance is valid. In other words, they think the number of children who "grow out of" their transgender identity has been vastly overblown. (more)

She's young, transgender and an anarchist, and is leading Taiwan's drive to become a digital powerhouse. At 14, she (Audrey Tang) dropped out of school to start a search-engine company. At 19, she had left Taiwan to work as an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Now, at 36, she is Taiwan’s youngest government minister, charged with jump-starting the island’s stagnating, $130-billion high-tech sector. She is also Taiwan’s first transgender Cabinet minister and, perhaps most remarkable, the only one who describes herself as an anarchist. (more)

Sex and gender distinction - Wikipedia Differentiation between sex, physical characteristics of an individual, from gender, one's behaviour or identity... The distinction between sex and gender differentiates a person's sex from that person's gender, which can refer to either social roles based on the sex of the person (gender role) or personal identification of one's own gender based on an internal awareness (gender identity). (more)

aka Michael D. Hill, Agile Software Development coach http://geepawhill.org/ (more)

Chunk of released software work, within incremental/iterative flow. See also iteration. (more)

Extreme Programming guru (more)

cf Sex and Gender

Ron Jeffries is not working on a new Agile Software Development framework, but he is thinking through the process to clarify his thinking. (more)

Continuous Delivery (CD) is a pattern language used in Software Development to automate and improve the process of software delivery. Techniques such as Automated Testing, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment allow software to be developed to a high standard and easily packaged and deployed to test environments, resulting in the ability to rapidly, reliably and repeatedly push out enhancements and bug fixes to customers at low risk and with minimal manual overhead. The technique was one of the assumptions of extreme programming but at an enterprise level has developed into a discipline of its own. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_delivery (more)

Ron Jeffries: Twelve. This article expresses, in written form, the talk that Chet Hendrickson and I gave at the deliver:Agile conference. Al Smith once said “The cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy”. We say The cure for the ills of “Agile” is more Agile. See 2019-05-03-JeffriesAgileTwelve and 2yrs-ago 2017-06-25-JeffriesNewSoftwareDevelopmentFrameworkIdeas. (more)

an Under The Radar operation, typically within a BigCo (or BigGov) that avoids the surrounding bureaucracy and Process Management (Best Practices) and accomplishes big things. A Creative Network? Definitely D And D. (more)

The Search for the Best Estimate of the Transgender Population. The most recent paper, published last month by the Census Bureau, analyzed people who most likely were transgender, based on the fact that they had changed their name or sex with the Social Security Administration (more)

Jerry Coyne: New paper purports to refute “social contagion hypothesis” for transgender adolescents. Here’s a medical paper reported on the NBC News site as showing that the “social contagion” hypothesis for the increase in transgender adolescents (i.e., young people acquire gender dysphoria because of social pressure) has been refuted. In fact, I’ve read the paper and don’t know what to make of it, since the data are at odds with other data, and some claims don’t seem to support the authors’ hypothesis. The author’s claims clearly need further testing. (more)

Opinion | The Donald Trump Voters Whose ‘Need for Chaos’ Obliterates Everything Else. ...work of Michael Bang Petersen and Mathias Osmundsen, both political scientists at Aarhus University in Denmark, and Kevin Arceneaux, a political scientist at Temple. (more)

Default Friend: Meditations on the self-diagnosis. I constantly think about self-diagnosis and the Internet. (more)

Opinion | Republicans Have Their Own Private Autocracy. When the political scientist Henry Farrell suggested that I look at his field’s literature on cults of personality, I followed his advice. He recommended one paper in particular, by the New Zealand-based researcher Xavier Márquez; I found it revelatory. “The Mechanisms of Cult Production” compares the behavior of political elites across a wide range of dictatorial regimes, from Caligula’s Rome to the Kim family’s North Korea, and finds striking similarities (more)

The future of the culture wars (source unfindable) A couple of months ago a friend lent me his copy of Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage, and on Sunday, I finally read it. If you’re not already familiar with it, it’s about “the transgender craze seducing our daughters.” Wording not my own. I have to say, I am completely sympathetic to any pushback she received. It’s not that it wasn’t a good book or contained no valuable information. It’s not that it was hateful—anyone who says that hasn’t read it. It’s just that… it felt like it was missing something. Missing a few things. (more)

The Transgender Tipping Point. Almost one year after the Supreme Court ruled that Americans were free to marry the person they loved, no matter their sex, another civil rights movement is poised to challenge long-held cultural norms and beliefs. Transgender people–those who identify with a gender other than the sex they were “assigned at birth,” to use the preferred phrase among trans activists–are emerging from the margins to fight for an equal place in society. (more)

How Many Adults and Youth Identify as Transgender in the United States? The percentage and number of adults who identify as transgender in the U.S. has remained steady over time. Our estimate of the number of youth who identify as transgender has doubled from our previous estimate. (more)

Allison Parshall: What Are Puberty Blockers and How Do They Work? These medications are well studied and have been used safely since the late 1980s to pause puberty in adolescents with gender dysphoria. (more)