sexual orientation

Occupational Health News Roundup

kkrisberg — Tue, 01 Mar 2016 23:10:56 +0000

Occupational Health News Roundup

At The New York Times, writers Kim Barker and Russ Buettner report on the labor investigations being conducted at nail salons throughout New York in the wake of a 2015 New York Times article that exposed widespread wage and labor abuses. They report that all but a dozen of the 230 salons whose investigations were closed last year were found violating at least one labor law. More than 40 percent of the salons were violating wage laws. Barker and Buettner write:

But the details of the state inspections are perhaps most revealing about just how challenging it is to regulate a largely immigrant-run industry in which almost everything is done off the books and employers are often unfamiliar with the intricacies of state labor laws.

About 85 percent of the salons failed to maintain adequate payroll records, a violation of state law, making it by far the most common citation, according to The Times’s review. Without records, investigators had to accept whatever employees told them they were paid, usually in front of their bosses. Many workers fear retaliation if they are honest about illegal wages, manicurists and labor officials said. Investigators later found that one owner fired a worker who spoke to an investigator.

The Times article interviewed a number of salon owners, some of whom report difficulty understanding state labor laws. For example, they report that in two-dozen cases, salons paid wages above minimum wage, but still broke labor law by paying daily or weekly rates. Barker and Buettner write:

Labor investigators documented many of the abuses that were highlighted in The Times’s articles. But workers’ fears in speaking with inspectors, along with the fact that the state efforts came at a time of such intense scrutiny of the industry, complicate direct comparisons of the scope of the problems found by the state and by The Times. Among the more than 100 manicurists interviewed by The Times, for example, only about a quarter said they were paid an amount that was the equivalent of minimum wage.

The inspection records reveal another reality: Many owners, even some of those making efforts to pay decent wages, simply failed to grasp the technical details of state labor laws. Many salon owners, for example, seemed unaware that they must pay one full hour of bonus wages when an employee’s shift spans more than 10 hours.

To read the full investigation, visit The New York Times.

In other news:

Reuters: Megan Twohey, Mica Rosenberg and Ryan McNeill investigate labor brokers — middlemen hired by companies to recruit foreign laborers for temporary jobs in the U.S. The reporters examined more than 200 civil and criminal cases filed in federal court that allege a variety of abuses by labor brokers, from wage theft to human trafficking. They write: “The cases illustrate how the absence of government oversight has allegedly enabled some brokers to exploit workers – and how intermediaries can insulate U.S. companies, providing them plausible deniability about the circumstances under which workers were recruited.” The reporters investigate the case of Nestor Molina, who allegedly lied to potential workers with the promise of permanent U.S. residency, while charging vulnerable workers millions in illegal recruitment fees.

NPR: Howard Berkes reports that an Oklahoma law that lets employers opt out of the workers’ compensation system has been declared unconstitutional by state regulators. The state’s Workers’ Compensation Commission described plans that some employers had adopted as an alternative to traditional workers’ comp as "a water mirage on the highway that disappears upon closer inspection." The decision, which is expected to be appealed, stems from the case of a Dillard’s department store worker who was injured lifting boxes and later denied benefits. The worker’s lawyer argued that the “injury would have been covered under the state's workers' comp law and that the rejection by Dillard's constitutes disparate treatment of injured workers,” Berkes reported. Last year, Berkes teamed up with Michael Grabell at ProPublica to author this investigation into the dismantling of the workers’ compensation system.

Houston Chronicle: Matt Dempsey reports that newly proposed chemical safety rules from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wouldn’t have done much to prevent the explosion at the West Fertilizer Company in West, Texas, three years ago. The finding is somewhat disappointing as the proposed rules are in response to a presidential executive order issued in the aftermath of the West explosion. The EPA’s new rules will require companies to conduct annual safety drills, be subject to third-party audits and improve emergency response. Dempsey reports: “The (Risk Management Plan) regulations will only require companies in three industries – paper, coal and petroleum and chemical manufacturing – to assess whether safer technologies and chemicals are feasible. It doesn't force those companies to make changes. It also doesn't expand the types of facilities covered by (the Risk Management Plan).”

Huffington Post: Dave Jamieson reports that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission will pursue its first lawsuits based on a worker’s sexual orientation. The two lawsuits involve a man employed at a Pennsylvania medical center and a women employed at a Maryland pallet manufacturer. In both cases, the workers endured anti-gay taunts and harassment. The commission has never before filed suit on behalf of a gay worker. Noting that the commission had previously determined that sexual orientation discrimination is inherently discrimination based on sex, Jamieson reports: “In an amicus brief it filed in a separate case last month, the (commission) argued that ‘sexual orientation discrimination necessarily involves sex stereotyping.’ In such cases, the agency wrote, workers are treated differently ‘because their orientation does not conform to heterosexually defined gender norms.’”

Kim Krisberg is a freelance public health writer living in Austin, Texas, and has been writing about public health for nearly 15 years.

kkrisberg Tue, 03/01/2016 - 18:10

Sex and Gender in An Odd Primate

gregladen — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 08:38:27 +0000

Sex and Gender in An Odd Primate

The Gender vs. Sex question...referring to the meaning of those two terms in relation to each other...is standard material for discussion in Anthropology and related fields, but is often left unattended to in day to day discourse. Both terms have internal complexity, with Gender meaning something about people’s identity as well as being a linguistic term, different but overlapping, and of course, Sex is a verby noun sometimes. But when we say “Gender vs. Sex” we are clearly talking about biological things such as chromosomes and genitalia, behavioral things such as attraction and orientation, self image, and so on, as well as the interaction among these things for a given person and for a given person’s interaction in the social matrix. Broadly speaking, “sex” is thought of as biological, “gender” as behavioral, however the last few decades of research and sociocultural maturation of our view of sex, gender and people have complexified this considerably, and the simple versions of these terms are inadequate and earlier, even “postmodern” feminist constructs tend to break easily. For instance, what sex is a person with a female-looking body, a vagina, breasts, all that stuff? Female, right? But what if the person has complete androgen insensitivity? This individual has testes. Wouldn’t that make them male? Such a situation, which is not particularly uncommon, does not mean that we can’t conceptualize complexity, it just means that the term “biological sex” is a bit limited.

The other problem with the sex vs. gender distinction is the implication that sex, as a biological thing, emerges more or less through the expression of genes during development and is mostly pre-determined, while gender is more a result of interaction with the extant world. Imagine a very small scale society where any one individual might ever know well no more than dozens of other individuals. There are such societies, and in fact, we evolved in such a setting. Imagine further than an individual grows up in this society with a “gender” that would, in a large scale society such as the US, be best characterized as gender-queer with a sexual interest in other similarly gender-queer people. But, since this “gender” is somewhat rare and the society is very small, almost every individual that ever grows up in this type of society will never meet anyone like that. If a gender emerges in social isolation, does it exist? That is more than just a thought experiment, it is a real life thing. Probably.

In truth, among mammals and other vertebrates in general (as a behavioral biologist I like to step back sometimes) the “sex” of an individual is often determined by purely behavioral things. The sex of certain fish is determined by social context, where an individual will change from male to female, or female to male, depending on the social structure in which they live. In some rodents, “genetic males” only become behavioral males if their mother, soon after birth, carries out certain activities that initiate hormonal cascades that cause the sexually dimorphic nuclei of the individuals’ brain, and other parts, to become “androgenized.” If a human in a laboratory simulates these activities with female pups, the female’s gender as an adult may be altered, and if the same human causes the activities to not happen to males, the males grow up as more or less gendered females even though they are “biologically” males. And, of course, this maternal behavior is pretty much built in to the mother rodent. So, where is “sex” and where is “gender” for the Norwegian rat? The line is blurred.

These examples relate to how “sex” (including gender, really) is “determined” biologically. Turtles determine sex by affecting the incubation temperature of eggs, some fish by social context, some mammals by anogenetical stimulation soon after birth, and humans by .... well, here is where we have a problem.

Humans, like other apes and generally primates, have integrated the things that are generally seen among mammals as sexual (stimulation, intromission, etc. etc.) into their already complex social politics. For most social primates, social politics determine who gets to have sex with whom, as well as other things. In some primates, sexual activities (or really, the term “erotic activities” may be better here) determine things about social politics (which in turn determine things about sexual activities). Humans have a couple of amazing, unique derived traits in relation to the other apes that make this wonderful wacky world of relationships even more complicated. Humans practice relative monogamy in the context of multi-male multi-female groups, which is simply unheard of in primates. Most primate species exhibit multiple sexually selected secondary characteristics in males but only one or even zero in females. In humans, the vast majority of secondary sexual characteristics are in females, not males. That is almost unheard of among mammals, though some birds also do it. Humans, across the societies that have been studied, have sex mostly in private, more often at night than during the day. In social primates generally, there is a certain amount of hidden sex and a certain amount of overt sex, depending on the species, but most of it is overt, and various erotic interactions that are incorporated into social politics are overt. In humans, there are all kinds of sex-related interactions that occur overtly, but they are almost all symbolic and deniable.

The point of this is that a bit of anogentical licking here and there, or incubation temperature, or some gene producing some protein or another isn’t sufficient to “cause” gender in humans, while “sex” is probably mostly non-cultural or non-social for most, but not all people. This makes sex and gender in humans complicated, with gender being 10X more complicated than sex (where the number “10” is unspecified as to base! Ha!). This in combination with extreme human sociality and population density has resulted in a new human sexuality that has probably emerged over the last 10,000 years in which people who would be unique in a small scale society may well be numerous, or at least, exist at sufficient numbers to have a social identity.

My friend Lux, at Teen Skepchick, has written a very informative and well reasoned post about the Sex-Gender thing, [HERE](http://teenskepchick.org/2012/11/08/gender-vs-sex-important-distinction/). In it, Lux expands and deconstructs the key definitions, presents the metrosexual “genderbread” graphic as a complex model, and then produces some important criticisms of that model. Significantly, Lux points out that adding lots of spectra across which people may be located helps to understand the relationships between gender, identity, sex, and orientation, but at the same time creates a new form of pigeonholing that has its own difficulty. (But see the comments on that post for reference to an improved Genderbread person.) Very importantly, Lux rephrases the sex-gender definitional problem in relation to cis and trans. Finally, Lux broadens the critical analysis to also address terms such as “men/man women/woman” vs. “male and female.” I will be adding that blog post to my list of blog posts to keep handy when discussing these issues.

gregladen Wed, 11/14/2012 - 03:38

Researchers create 'lesbian' mice by deleting a single gene

neurophilosophy — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 06:55:00 +0000

Researchers create 'lesbian' mice by deleting a single gene

DELETION of a single gene switches the sexual orientation of female mice, causing them to engage in sexual behaviour that is typical of males. Korean researchers found that deleting the appropriately named FucM gene, which encodes an enzyme called fucose mutarotase, causes masculinization of the mouse brain, so that female mice lacking the gene avoid the advances of males and try to mate with other females instead. The findings probably have little relavence to human sexual orientation, however.

FucM is one of a family of enzymes involved in rearranging the atoms in small sugar molecules called monosaccharrides. In 2007, Chankyu Park of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and his colleagues reported that these rearrangements facilitate the incorporation of the monosaccharide fucose into cellular proteins. This process is one of numerous chemical modifications that are well known to regulate the function of proteins, but the biological significance of FucM function in mammals was until now unclear.

Park and his colleagues therefore created genetically engineered ("knock-out") mice lacking the FucM gene. Apart from a slight reduction in body weight, the mice seemed perfectly healthy and were no different in appearance from their normal littermates. But the researchers noticed something unusual when they put the mutant females into mating cages with normal, sexually vigorous males. Typically, the stud will approach a female, touch her body and then sniff her anal-genital region. If the female is receptive, she will invite the male to mount her, by arching her back and raising her hind quarters. But the mutant females actively avoided the advances of the males, suggesting that deletion of the FucM gene had somehow interefered with their sexual and reproductive behaviour.

In mice, sexual behaviour is mediated largely by pheromones secreted in the urine. These chemicals carry sexual signals - they enable the animals to recognize, and motivate them to approach, members of the opposite sex. Normally, females prefer the smell of male urine and vice versa, but females lacking the FucM gene were found to prefer the urine of other females to that of males, spending more time sniffing it when simultaneously presented with both. Their sexual behaviour was similar to that of males, too: they not only rejected the advances of males, but also attempted to mount and mate with other females. Nevertheless, they remained fertile - most became pregnant when forced to mate with a sexually experienced male, and the way they subsequently behaved towards their offspring was no different from normal females.

When the researchers examined the brains of the mutant females, they observed a reduction in the number of dopamine-producing cells in the anteroventral periventricular nucleus (AVPv), a part of the hypothalamus which regulates the release of hormones required for ovulation. The AVPv is known to differ in size between males and females - it is between two to four times larger in females, and contains more cells. It is smaller in females missing the FucM gene, and thus closely resembles that of normal males. The researchers therefore hypothesized that deleting the gene causes changes in brain development that masculinize the brains of the females.

They also speculated that the observed changes occur because deleting the FucM gene perturbs the function of alpha-fetoprotein (AFP). AFP normally protects the female mouse brain from masculinization, by binding to and sequestering the hormone oestrogen during development, and its function is thought to be regulated by the addition and removal of fucose molecules. To test this prediction, the researchers analyzed expression levels of AFP in the mutant females, and the chemical composition of the protein circulating in their bloodstream. This revealed that AFP was present at normal levels, but that there was a significant reduction in the number of AFP molecules that had fucose attached to them.

Other researchers have shown that the neural circuits underlying male behaviours are likely to exist in the normal female mouse brain, and the reverse is probably true. It is also likely that the embryonic human brain has the capacity to differentiate along both the male and female pathways, depending upon exposure to sex hormones during the early stages of development.

These new findings show that FucM is critical for steering the developing mouse brain towards female diffrentiation. But they probably have limited relavence to human sexuality, because although FucM probably plays the same role in humans, oestrogen does not masculinize the developing human brain. There has been much talk of a "gay gene" in recent years, but no such gene has been discovered, It is, however, only a matter of time before the genes governing human sexual orientation are found.

Park, D., et al. (2010). Male-like sexual behavior of female mouse lacking fucose mutarotase. BMC Genetics 11 (1) DOI: 10.1186/1471-2156-11-62.

neurophilosophy Thu, 07/15/2010 - 02:55

Categories

Brain and Behavior

i am human whos body dont react and participate in
gay sex in human brain

Anyone know if they're releasing these lesbian mice to petstores? haha, I'm dying to get my hands on some to make a lesbian mice farm LOL

What an appropriate label for that protein. Hee, hee!

Poe! (FucM; FucU).

How is that pronounced, now? Fuk'em?

I welcome the research into this topic, with one caveat: this is a slippery slope into the "broken" and "not broken" labels that society will likely bestow.

Great solution for rat infestations if it works on rats too.

This may be more an issue of gender identity than sexual orientation. The two may not be easily distinguished in mice, though.

I wonder how this compares with female mice raised only with other females (no male exposure). They are quite happy to vigorously mount each other.

Agreed with the gender identity over sexual orientation comment. If a male mistakes a male for a female is it really an issue of sexual orientation?

Abstract:
"although the animals were fertile due to a rare and forced intromission by a typical male"
and the animal welfare office accepted that ? :)

Do the lesbian mice attempt to mount other lesbian mice, or only unaltered females? Is their hormone production more similar to that of a male or female mouse?

Also, RE: gay gene, I know we learned in psych 201, back in '99, that there was solid evidence that sexual dimorphism in the human brain was caused by threshold testosterone levels, and that studies suggested a strong correlation between suppressed testosterone levels in mothers and homosexuality in their sons.

The study that stuck in my mind was one that showed that men were substantially more likely to be gay if their mother's home city was bombed while they were in their second trimester. High levels of stress suppress testosterone production. As far as I know, being bombed does not correlate with any gene.

Disection of 'gay brains' also showed substantial difference in the development of the sexually dimorphic nucleus, and gays were also shown to produce characteristically female hormones (such as those associated with lactation.)

On the other hand, all of this is from memories of something that came up in a class I took more than a decade ago... Maybe it was discredited, or superceded by new research, but given the dominant ideologies of the last decade, I think it far more likely that it was simply ignored.

Hmmm... Well, it turns out that all of my questions were answered by clicking on one link. I'm apparently bordering on retarded, so take everything else I said with a grain of salt.

Dear Crazy Mermaid,

~nod, nod~ as well, nature versus nurture. Ultimately it really depends on what people think of variationsâ¦ Designed â astray from purpose, or is genetic mutation (natural, as opposed to engineered) part of the many factors life hands over to individuals? I donât know if I am stretching it if I invite you to apply the same logic with the physically and mentally challenged people.

Dear petrossa,

Lol, there was some genetic solution to make sterile bug of some sort I think (got to check parasitology notes on that one but regardless); as Corbier repeated, they were still fertile and

Yes, Corbier, it happens in nature all the time. I wonder if someone would complain if the female was physically bound though---wait no, now, does anyone care about the sexual act itself or the insemination? Because that is also a common practice in food industry/breeding â¦

P.S. Dear GroovyJ, whatâs that link you found?

A simple case of AMYGDALIC PRE-SEXUALITY. Very common in all humans.

I think that this finding has a lot relavence to human sexual orientation.
A long time ago we did not believe that a woman can be interested in a woman only or a man in a man only.
This finding can explain us a little.

Do you have citations for your assertion that progesterone masculinizes the fetal brain? I could have sworn that testosterone was responsible, e.g., as shown by XY cases of androgen insensitivity syndrome......

Well spotted Bradley. That should have been "oestrogen does not masculinize the fetal human brain" - I've changed it now.

I think this would be much better titled "Researchers create 'trans-gendered' mice by deleting a single gene." Masculanization of the brain is what caused the "lesbian" behavior. Trans-gendered would speak more truely to the mice being female but behaving as males. A male gendering is not what influences lesbian behavior in human females.

Agree with @17, sort of. The use of the word "lesbian" in the title is problematic (but so is the use of trans-gendered), not only for it's anthropomorphism, but also because what the study is really exploring is the masculanization of female mice, which, even though it may cause females to mount other females, does not a lesbian make. I appreciate that you pointed out (several times) that no inferences can be made regarding human sexual behavior. I think you could have said it 100 more times and that wouldn't have been too many! Perhaps I'm old and have lost my sense of humor (although I do love the word FUCK, perhaps a little more than is appropriate for a dowdy, middle-aged mother), but I think naming the enzyme FucM was a very unfortunate mistake (and possibly even misogynist). Is their similar research conducted on the feminization of male mice? And I can't help wonder why "forced intercourse" was employed rather than artificial insemination? Perhaps it takes more time, energy, effort and money -- but I, too, find it curious that this would be acceptable to any animal research review board (although given that rape in humans is socially sanctioned, I guess it shouldn't be a surprise). It's almost enough to make me want to take up arms with a violent, lesbian separatist, PETA group. Almost. Not quite. Oh, FUCK 'EM.

What is also a bit of a surprise to me is that I didn't see anyone mention what may be a real (and significant) implication of this study: that, given the right "equipment," males make perfectly fine nurturers of the young.