Nick Denton at Valleywag writes a freakishly misogynistic profile of Sandy Montenegro Littlefield, a former exec at Siebel and Oracle who married a rich tank collector:

She used to go to tech conferences in search of husband material, say the cynics. She’d arrive on her own and return on someone’s private jet. She is absolutely gorgeous in person, but I don’t think it took people too long to figure out she was a gold-digger.

Blogger Liz Henry points out the myriad layers of fucked-upness about this post, and then says:

Waaah! Women in tech are toooooo sexay! That sucks! It ruins our whole homosocial male bonding geek guy thing! Get them out! Or, quick, give Sandy a reverse makeover, a pair of glasses with electrical tape on the nosepiece, and some penny loafers!

Everyone needs to keep in mind that when women, sluts or not, sleep with geek guys, it might just be because they like geek guys a lot. Sleeping with geek guys doesn’t invalidate one’s geek credentials. It’s not like they have to be *rich* geek guys and the women have to be brainless bimbos going after their money. Trust me, geek guys, you are often super cute all on your own.

My favorite part of the Valleywag post is the weird attribution to “the cynics.”

Transgender people aren’t the monolithic community we may appear from the outside. For every MTF transsexual who insists that she was always a woman inside and she corrected her male body to match her brain, you can find someone who questions whether categories like “man” and “woman” are absolutes after all. (I’ve been reading Undoing Gender by Judith Butler, which is by far her most readable book, and has taken my breath away several times. She attacks the idea of gender as a social construct from a new, ingenious standpoint, by showing how our personhood — and hence our gender — can be “undone” by grief or loss or social crap.) But the woman-brain-in-a-man-body school of thought (or its reverse, for FTMs) remains the mainstream view of trannies. And it’s won the support of some very iffy Dutch science:

[I]nvestigators from the Netherlands Institute for Brain Research in Amsterdam reported preliminary evidence that transsexuals may be inherently different, after all. Their study of six male-to-female transsexuals showed that a tiny structure deep within a part of the brain that controls sexual function appeared to be more like the type found in women than that found in men. If confirmed, the study seems likely to challenge long-held beliefs about what it takes to make someone a man–or, a woman.

The facts: the researchers dissected the brains of six (just six!) post-op transsexuals. They compared them with brains of straight and gay men, and women. The region of the hypothalamus that the researchers claim is different in MTFs than in men (the central subdivision of the bed nucleus of the stria terminals) is “smaller than a pinhead” and you can’t even see the differences using an MRI. The researchers claim, with absolute confidence, that they know the “bed nucleus” “controls sexual function.” The scientists say the “bed nucleus”

measures about 2.6 cubic millimeters, about the size of the colorful, spherical head of a pushpin. In women, it averages 1.73 millimeters, and in transsexuals the average figure is 1.3.

Some other experts were skeptical, the article linked above says. All of the TSs who were dissected had taken estrogen for years, and maybe that changed the size of this region of the hypothalamus. Or maybe the stress of living as a trans person changed the size of their “bed nucleus”. And then there’s this:

Dr. S. Marc Breedlove of the University of California at Berkeley, who wrote an editorial that accompanies the new report, said that the function of the bed nucleus in human behavior, sexual or otherwise, remained “a complete black box.”

So we don’t even know what it is, or what it does. Or what its size signifies.
The reason this research bugs me has very little to do with me and my fellow trans people. It’s more my fear that we’re being used as wedge to push an essentialist agenda. It’s not too far from saying “transsexuals have women’s brains” to claiming “men’s and women’s brains are totally different.” And from there, to claiming that women have less good spatial sense than men. And from there, to claiming there’s an innate biological difference between men’s and women’s math abilities, says Richard Francis, author of Why Men Won’t Ask For Directions:

Evolutionary psychologists assume that it’s biological, that there are hormones involved, that testosterone somehow makes men better spatial navigators. But, the evidence for that is extremely weak. In fact, I spent much of the time writing this book having to read that kind of literature. Whereas there’s ample evidence that social-cultural factors play an enormous role in this. And also this spatial cognition story extends to sex differences in mathematics. For example, the sex differences are most pronounced in the United States, even in the Western world. In some cross-cultural studies, they’ve shown that in African-Americans and Hispanics that females are superior in mathematics, and in Asian-Americans it has been found that the sex difference is quite small. And, then there’s evidence that these sex differences are disappearing over time, which you would expect given the new educational opportunities available to females. And, this does not accord well with a biological explanation, much less an evolutionary explanation.

(Cross-posted from my blog.)

Kat the Traveler deconstructs Esquire’s profile of physicist/chemist Naomi Halas:

So, would you ever see a lead paragraph like this? “Dressed in a clingy suit with tight black pants and business shoes, Joe Smith looks as if he stepped off a Hollywood set. He smiles and giggles and uses words like awesome and totally without ever dropping his intense focus on science.”

…

Back to sexism! You’d never see this: “Happily married for 20 years to a theoretical physicist he met at IBM, Joe Smith was never able to have children. Maybe, he thinks, he was meant to do this instead.” Yep, gotta mention marriage and children since that’s the exclusive purview of women-folk. Snort.

Lots more good stuff at the link. Check it out.

It’s random! It’s a catch-all! It’s a linkblogging extravaganza! Here’s a bunch of random stuff I found on the web for your surfing amusement:

• Best Buy Gets In Touch With Its Feminine Side (USA Today). “The feminization of the consumer electronics business is underway… Shoppers may notice a softer, more personal atmosphere… Women now influence 90 percent of consumer electronics purchases… About four years ago, Best Buy realized women were warming up to technology…. Women are drawn to flat-panel TVs.”
• Miss Video Game 2007 (Average Gamer) “Lets take a look at the requirements… Number four. Loves the beach? Uh-oh! This one looks like trouble… You see, as a gamer I love dark cold rooms that are lit by flat panels and LCD monitors.” (From GenderInGames.)
• Social Morons and Daily Stereotype (Female Science Professor). Sexism and clueless behavior around a science conference. “At a conference this week, I was talking to Famous Professor X, and we were having a very interesting conversation about a topic of mutual interest. A man I don’t know and didn’t recognize walked up and started talking to Famous Professor X, completely ignoring me and ignoring the fact that he interrupted a conversation. Famous Professor X glared at the interrupting man and said “I am talking to Professor W (me)”, made a wonderful little shooing/dismissing motion with his hand, and turned back to me so we could continue our conversation. The interrupting guy slithered away sadly.”
• Women Scientists And Engineers Use New Information Technologies To Tackle Isolation On Campus (Science Daily). “Women researchers have plenty of human capital — the ‘what-you-know’ component of career success — but, because they are isolated, it is much harder for them to accumulate social capital, the ‘who-you-know’ connections through which insider information flows… NJIT Advance will address this problem by seed-funding small cross-disciplinary communities within which women faculty can do collaborative research, with each other and with male peers, from a position of numerical strength. The researchers will then interconnect these communities using traditional face-to-face networking strategies in combination with 21st-century pervasive information technology.”

My new favorite blog Mad Science Mama has an amazing post about scientists who tweaked a gene in fruitflies that seemed to govern sex-specific behavior. And what did altering this gene change? The fruitflies’ fighting styles, of course:

The gene called “fruitless” is known for its role in male courtship… The same gene directs another sex-specific behavior — fighting patterns, the new study shows. Female fighting, for example, largely involves head butts and some shoving. Males prefer lunges; they rear up on their back legs and snap their forelegs down hard - sometimes nailing an opponent that is slow to retreat.

The flies undergo a major role reversal when the male and female gene versions are switched. With a feminine fruitless gene, male flies adopt more ladylike tactics, mostly the head butt and some shoving. With the masculine fruitless gene, females instinctively lunge to the exclusion of their usual maneuvers.

Every city over a certain size has a bar like Divas in San Francisco. Dark, somewhat threadbare and self-consciously glitzy, it’s known far and wide as the place for men to meet transgender women. Men visiting from out of town swing by Divas in the hope of meeting a tranny girl, and some local men go there regularly. A significant proportion of the women who hang out there appear to be working girls.

I’ve been to Divas maybe half a dozen times in the eight years I’ve lived in San Francisco, but I had never been there alone. But one evening I decided to put on a cute dress and strappy shoes, and swing by there to see what it would be like to be on my own there. But whatever I was expecting, I didn’t expect to be meeting other health policy wonks there.

(more…)

Over at the excellent FairerScience blog, Rosa points out that scientific studies that emphasize gender differences tend to get more attention than those that explore similarities.

Rosa writes:

If the results of two quick searches on Google are any indication, there’s a lot more interest in sex differences (”about 1,030,000 for “sex differences” “) than in similarities (”about 10,700 for “sex similarities”.”) . . .

We look for differences to help us define how we think about who we are, as individuals and as members of a group. For this reason, studies, articles, and statements that highlight differences are appealing and interesting. When these resources reinforce things we already think about the world and about sex differences, it can be even more satisfying: “See? I knew men and women were different!”

Yes, we do know that men and women are different in many ways, but we also know that men and women are similar in many ways as well. It’s easy to forget, amidst the exciting talk of difference, that just because it gets more play doesn’t mean it’s the only game in town.

Anecdotally, I’ve noticed the same trend in the kinds of studies that get media attention. Many of us are trained to explain gender as a “battle of the sexes.” Plus, clashes make for more interesting stories than agreements. Of course, it’s important to emphasize how women are different from men sometimes. Many medical studies conducted in the twentieth century used male subjects and assumed women would respond to drugs and treatments in exactly the same way men would. Obviously, this was absurd and simply led to ignorance of female biology.

Read Rosa’s post.

This blog is the perfect place for me to share this with you. I am probably the only person in the world who has a bra made from a voltmeter-ammeter panel.

Last year I was walking through the Castro neighborhood near where I live in San Francisco when I came upon an estate sale. Many of the belongings I found inside the house leaned toward the campy animal print ilk, but on the mantelpiece were three metallic brassiere sculptures. The mechanical one with propellers on the nipples was already spoken for, but to my delight I was able to take away this electrically-themed beauty for a hundred bucks.

Too bad the artist didn’t sign her (or his) work. Most guests to our house notice and comment on it, though, so it clearly makes a statement!

Does anyone else have girl-geek-themed artwork or artifacts? Or imagery that confounds received notions in our culture about how girls and women are supposed to relate to science, technology, and other geeky fields? Please share!