The Australian government has issued what is likely the first gender neutral identification card, or Recognised Details Certificate (similar to a U.S. birth certificate).
Norrie, 48, was born in Scotland and was labeled male at birth. At age 23 Norrie commenced sex and gender conversion to female through hormone and construction of a vagina and was then issued with a gender recognition certificate as female.

But Norrie did not feel that this female identity was correct, so zie ceased hormone treatment and identified as neither male nor female, “resisting further female or male normalisation. In January 2010 doctors declared that they were unable to determine Norrie as either male or female as zie has no gonads, the hormonal system was atypically male or female, and Norrie’s psychological identity was (androgynous).”

For more, go Here, and Here

Via The American Prospect

Michelle and her daughter M.J. sit in a coffee shop in a Wyoming strip mall, just over the border from their small town in Colorado. M.J., an eighth-grader, shyly sips her iced mocha and speaks with the “likes” endemic to junior-high hallways. Michelle talks with a calm and slightly tired maternal presence. She and M.J. take turns explaining how they learned to remake the boundaries of their own hometown.

M.J. was born a boy, Michelle explains, but as M.J. grew up, she made it clear to Michelle that she didn’t feel like one. “I knew something was going on at age two,” Michelle says. “But I couldn’t accept it at the time. So I put a lot of time into changing her or suppressing her.” But M.J. didn’t change, and she continued to insist on wearing skirts and dresses and play with “girl typical” toys. In sixth grade, the school counselor called Michelle to tell her that the other kids were teasing M.J. and that it was only getting worse. “They were concerned because she was being open about who she was. The way she acted, the way she dressed,” Michelle explains. That’s when she knew that it wasn’t a phase, and it wasn’t a “problem.” This was who M.J. was.

In Loveland, Colorado — population 61,000, 92 percent white and heavily evangelical Christian — Michelle didn’t know what to expect when she began to work with the school to facilitate her daughter’s transition from a boy to a girl. (more…)

#1 Future of Internet Debate Ignored by Media
#2 Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran
#3 Oceans of the World in Extreme Danger
#4 Hunger and Homelessness Increasing in the US

Visit http://www.projectcensored.org/censored_2007/ to learn more.

In honor of the first anniversary of the death of that greatest of champions for Palestinian rights, Professor Edward Said, we are pleased to announce that our Links section has now been updated and expanded to provide you with the best political activist resources on the world wide web.
(more…)

Eight years of planting genetically modified maize, cotton and soya beans in the US has significantly increased the amount of herbicides and pesticides used, according to a US report which could influence the British government over whether to let GM crops be grown.
(more…)

Unsuspecting civilians are doused with radiation and germ weapons. Intelligence agents recruit psychic spies. Generals plan an attack on a Chinese nuclear weapons plant. A phantom army triggers the largest arms buildup in history. Politicians secretly construct an underground city to escape fallout. The United States comes within 7 minutes of launching its ICBMs.

No, these aren’t screenplays that were junked when the Soviet Union went belly up. Each of these events actually happened. For the two generations of Americans who fought and financed the Cold War, it was an epic struggle between us good guys and the “evil empire.” Now, as the epoch fades into history, the declassification of tens of thousands of pages of secret documents has begun to cast a penetrating light on the era. As nine of these files reveal, truth can be stranger than fiction.
(more…)

At the end of January, Time magazine published an article addressing the growing
popularity of vegetarianism among American youth, particularly girls. The
article briefly describes a new website called cool-2b-real.com, that is
targeted at young girls to try to convince them that eating beef, and lots of
it, is now hip. The plan is to further manipulate the media-induced insecurities
of thousands of girls with developing bodies so they will eat more beef.
(more…)

Alarming new results from official trials of GM crops are severely jeopardizing Government plans for growing them commercially in Britain.
(more…)

Experimental plants engineered to produce pharmaceuticals are being grown at over 300 secret locations nationwide, a new report has revealed. Biotechnology firms are conducting experiments with corn, soy, rice and tobacco that are genetically manipulated to produce drugs designed to act as vaccines, contraceptives, induce abortions, generate growth hormones, create blood clots, produce industrial enzymes and propagate allergenic enzymes.
(more…)

Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary theorist at Harvard University whose lectures, research and prolific output of essays helped to reinvigorate the field of paleontology, died today at his home in Manhattan. He was 60 years old. The cause was adenocarcinoma, his wife, Rhonda Roland Schearer, said.
(more…)