#sampling population for their statistics. which was the basis of the entire paper. i want to ask how some of this shit even gets published.

[universalsatan]

Hey bestie, no need to answer this, but I saw u reblogged something from roach - works, and I just wanna let u know that she's a major terf

oh!!! thank you for this fr. i'm answering this bc i just wanna say that i don't have shinigami eyes and i'm on mobile most of the time, so these pointers are much appreciated <33

[hopefulfestivaltastemaker]

July 5, 2020

My weekly review of some things I have been up to. Topics include the goals for think tank work, a data model for policy, decoupling, determinants of birth rates, and the New African Renaissance.

Data, Analysis, Solutions

This has been a week of some serious rehashing of the Urban Cruise Ship project and what we are trying to do.

The three buzzwords we are using are Data, Analysis, and Solutions (though the logo doesn’t have ‘Data’ in it). We are strong on Data, OK but could be better on Analysis, and lacking in Solutions. Our funder wants to rectify this imbalance.

When one reviews various research, think tanks, and advocacy organizations, one finds a tendency to specialize in different portions of the policy pipeline. Our World in Data, for instance, is one of the best presenters of data out there, as the name would imply. They are weak on analysis, and one has to do additional work to turn the data into a coherent picture of the world, at least a picture more definite than the “things are getting better” message that OWID director Max Roser promotes. They don’t offer solutions.

At the other end of the spectrum, there is a range of advocacy organizations whose job is to develop solutions. Citizens Climate Lobby is the one in the environmental space that I consider to be the gold standard. They advocate a carbon fee and dividend. CCL commissions research and analysis from top tier outfits, though as a primary source of dispassionate data and analysis they are not the place I would go.

Union of Concerned Scientists, the organization from which I inadvertently copied the acronym, is the best example I know of that straddles the Data -> Analysis -> Solutions pipeline. Their scope is broad. I don’t always agree with their ideological orientation, and I find that their material has become too partisan for my tastes, but the quality of their work is consistently good.

I tend to gravitate to wide scope projects, so in some sense the Urban Cruise Ship scope of work is a good fit. But I fear that I am setting up for failure for trying to do so much that I cannot do any of it well.

A Data Model for Research and Policy

This is another idea I have been thinking about, and it is still so amorphous that I don’t even have a good title for this section.

As described above, I envision a fairly well-defined pipeline that starts with raw data (from environmental sensors, laboratory results, survey results, statistics, etc.), proceeds through multiple layers of analysis, and leads to an output of a well-defined policy that can be implemented by a well-defined entity. By policy I am referring not just to government policy but also business practices, investment strategy, or pretty much any kind of policy.

It is very difficult for any one entity to do this process in its entirely (see above), especially since good policy should draw upon a wide range of disciplines. Therefore, a division of labor develops in practice. Most policymaking isn’t very good though, relying more heavily on ideology and folk wisdom than on rigorous analysis.

We have the data tools necessary to break the pipeline into interoperable and computable chunks. The open data movement in governance is a good step, though they could greatly improve their offerings. We need open science too, which means open access publishing, but more importantly means publishing in a form that is accessible both to machines and a more general audience. We should think of R or Jupyter Notebooks, and semantic presentation of knowledge such as RDF, rather than PDF files, as the basic unit of academic publishing.

Publication at the think tank level would work in the same way. Since think tanks don’t typically do primary research, they would take as input academic publication and produce as output general policy principles. Advocacy organizations could take as input the work or academics or think tanks and output specific policy proposals.

In theory, a policy proposal could be compiled into its rationale in terms of raw data and mathematical models. On the latter, the models could even be run through a proof checker such as Lean. This would allow the development of agents that could analyze policy proposals for red flags, such as data of disputed veracity or methodological problems.

An end-to-end computable model for research and policy, aside from facilitating better decision-making in general, may emerge as an important infrastructural component of the technology stack that will ultimately become artificial general intelligence. As I’ve noted earlier, I think that popular understanding of AGI neglects the infrastructural aspect of the problem.

If this was an idea that I am serious about--which, to be clear, it is not at present--I would go about it as follows. First, I would draft one or more white papers explaining the technical workings and sample use cases of the system in detail, together with a business case. Second, I would implement proofs of concept of key subsystems using what I have built with Urban Cruise Ship. Third, I would seek funding and build out a team and create a minimum viable product. Then I would figure out how to make the system snowball via network effects. At least the first two steps I know I could do with sufficient time and effort.

Decoupling

In ecological science, decoupling refers to a system that allows population or economic growth to occur without an increase in overall environmental impacts. I spent the week developing some time series of world environmental impacts to see which ones are growing or shrinking in absolute terms, on a per capita basis, and on a per-GDP basis. Of course I’m not the first person to attempt to do this, but I haven’t seen anything comprehensive laid out and I think there should be.

Across a range of impacts, the only recent examples I see of growth relative to GDP are ores (by metal content) and minerals (e.g. sand, stone), both from 2002-2015. I would expect them to decouple after we get past the peak of world urbanization. There are absolute declines in meadows and pastures, 1990-2017 (though I wouldn’t consider this definitive), land for forestry, 1990-2017, several forms of air pollution in the OECD, ozone depletion, mercury emissions, extreme poverty, and lack of access to safe drinking water. On a per capita basis, I’ll just say the picture is a mixed bag.

This will be a good graphic and I am looking forward to having it done. The nice thing about a big picture graphic like this is that there are many conclusions the viewer can draw, and I need not be heavy-handed about it.

Factors that Govern Birth Rates

As planned, I took some time this week on the fertility work, this time trying to get a handle on some more practical questions.

There are a few things that are widely known in the field. Urbanization and educational attainment generally lower fertility. Religious people tend to have more kids. Family planning policies lower birth rates, though the effect is not very significant in wealthy countries. Legalized abortion lowers birth rates.

The two most popular pro-natalist policies are baby bonuses and subsidized childcare. The one estimate on the efficacy of baby bonuses I know about is Lyman Stone’s estimate that it costs anywhere from $30,00 to 300,000 to induce one additional birth, based on an Australian project. Several studies, such as this one, suggest that subsidized child care is more efficiency than a baby bonus, in terms of induced additional births per public dollar spent. That’s not what I would have expected but it makes sense.

Beyond the well-known observation that fertility is lower in urban areas relative to rural, there are some interesting distinctions within cities. Shoag and Russell find that stringent zoning depresses fertility. Kulu and Washbrook find that fertility is higher in smaller cities compared to bigger cities. Kulu, Boyle, and Andersson find that fertility is higher in suburbs relative to city cores. None of these are too terribly surprising, though since the effect of zoning is typically to suppress city size and density, the results of Shoag and Russell would seem to be in tension with the others. There is a story that can be told that would harmonize them, which is that cost of living is more relevant than urban form, and that cost of living tends to be higher in city cores, larger cities, and cities with stringent zoning.

Last week I noted three overarching hypothesis on the drivers of fertility decline: the quality/quantity tradeoff, cultural evolution hypotheses, and the tendency for modernity to create competing desires to family formation. I can’t say that anything I looked at this week helps me distinguish between these hypotheses.

New African Renaissance

This paper came out a couple weeks ago, outlining a vision for a Pan-African future. It is an interesting read, though a bit heavy on the speculative idealism, but I like to indulge in this kind of stuff now and then. There are some heavy hitters behind the initiative.

Based on demographic trends, Africa is the region of the world that looks to be in the best position to prosper in the second half of the 21st century.

[ezatluba]

Are Dogs' Nose Prints Really Unique and Unchanging?

Are dogs' nose prints distinctive enough to be used for identification?

September 22, 2021 

Jessica Schrader

Up to now, there has been little proof to show that a dog's nose prints are distinctive enough to allow the identification of individual dogs.

Evidence that the canine nose print is unique to specific dogs is actually an extrapolation of data collected on cattle.

A new study shows that a dog's nose print is well-established by 2 months of age and is unchanging over the first year of life.

I was somewhat surprised when I read a recent article by a team of Korean investigators, headed by Hyeong In Choi of Seoul National University, in the scientific journal Animals. My surprise came from the fact that the authors stated that, "The objective of this paper is to focus on the canine nose pattern (nose print) by studying if it can be used similarly to the human fingerprint as a unique biometric marker for each individual dog."

As a scientist and dog owner residing in Canada, I knew that the Canadian Kennel Club has been accepting dog nose prints as proof of identity since 1938. A few places in the United States have also adopted dog nose printing as a common way of identifying lost dogs as well. The stated belief is that nose printing is a more reliable way of matching identity, since a dog tag on a collar can be lost, and microchips can malfunction or become dislodged, making them useless for determining the dog's identity. The argument is that the nose print serves as a unique biometric marker for individual dogs.

Fingerprints Versus Nose Prints

The most familiar biometric marker of identity for most people is fingerprints. The uniqueness of fingerprints and their usefulness for identifying people was first established by Francis Galton, an eminent 19th-century scientist whose life and careerspanned the reign of Queen Victoria. He made significant contributions to the study of psychology and statistics, but also did important work in establishing the forensic usefulness of fingerprints, and establishing the first system for classifying them. Galton claimed that fingerprints were unique and that no two individuals have the same fingerprint patterns. (Recently it has been determined that the actual probability of finding two identical fingerprints is one in 64 billion, even including twins. Given the fact that the population of the entire world amounts to under 8 billion, that makes it highly unlikely that any two people alive today will have the same fingerprint.)

Of course dogs don't have fingerprints. However, the substitute biometric marker for fingerprints in dogs is their nose print. It has been supposed that just as the pattern of every person's fingerprints is unique, each dog's rhinarium (the section of bare skin at the tip of a dog's nose) has a distinguishing design of dimples, dots, and ridges that, when combined with the shape of his nostril openings, is believed to make a mark that is distinctive enough to conclusively identify one dog among all others.

Is There Any Scientific Proof?

So what is the evidence for this assertion that every dog's nose print is unique? This turned out to be one of those puzzling situations. I did a fairly extensive literature search to try to find out what the evidence was for the uniqueness of canine nose prints. I found several veterinary texts which asserted that canine nose prints were unique enough to be able to be used for identification, but none of them provided any references to actual scientific data on dogs. In fact, most of them referred to articles using nose prints to identify cattle. There is a lot of literature on the bovine nose print suggesting uniqueness and invariance, but the only report I could find on dogs was a three-paragraph short note in the journal Veterinary Quarterly in 1994, which stated that in the course of developing a computer program to recognize canine nose prints an unspecified number of Doberman pinschers were tested and their nose prints were found to be unique. On the basis of that literature search, I can only conclude that the assertions about dog nose prints are extrapolations based on the data collected mainly on cattle. Given that fact, it then made sense why the Korean team collected their new data.

The New Data

This contemporary study used a very small number of dogs, namely two litters of beagles for a total of 10 dogs. The researchers were asking two questions: if the canine nose pattern is properly formed by two months of age and if this nose pattern remains unchanged throughout the first year of the dog's life. Obviously, given such a small sample, the assumption of the uniqueness of an individual's nose pattern could not be definitively tested, however by using dogs in the same litter the chance for similar patterns might be increased.

The findings were quite clear. By 2 months of age, the nose print pattern was established, and monthly testing over the first year of their life showed no changes in the pattern. Furthermore, the investigators were able to show that a computer program could be used to identify nose prints. This result suggests that if a database could be established for dogs' nose prints, then the canine equivalent of the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) used by police forces to identify potential criminal suspects by their fingerprints, might be useful to locate and identify lost dogs.

A Unique Canine Keepsake

Even in the absence of such a database, it is a fun project to collect your dog's nose print, perhaps to frame it as a unique keepsake of your pet. The process is really quite simple and only requires a roll of paper towels, some food coloring, and a pad of paper. First blot your dog's nose with a paper towel to dry it out a bit. Then dip a piece of paper toweling into some food coloring and dab it onto your dog's nose. Gently press the pad of paper to your dog's nose, curving it around or rolling it in a smooth motion from one side to the other to ensure that you get the impression of the entire nose. You'll probably require a few attempts before you get a clear picture of what you want (especially if you have a squirmy dog). Once you get your clear print, immediately clean your dog's nose. You now have a frameable memento that may well be completely unique to your pet.

[willidleaway]

Oh Christ, why is this study being even given attention:

A facial recognition experiment that claims to be able to distinguish between gay and heterosexual people has sparked a row between its creators and two leading LGBT rights groups.

The Stanford University study claims its software recognises facial features relating to sexual orientation that are not perceived by human observers.

The work has been accused of being "dangerous" and "junk science".

I think the criticisms of it being dangerous are missing the mark a little—better that scientists hit on this idea and test it before governments do—but the claims of it being ‘junk science’, while a bit overly dismissive, hit closer.

I read through the preprint over the weekend, and I regret that I bothered. Here are the things I noticed.

First. Graduate School of Business? That’s a bit weird. Stanford has a computer science department (which both authors did go through), and a statistics department too, you know. Why does this researcher now have a position at a business school? By itself this is mostly a surface concern, though, and shouldn’t automatically sink your opinion of it. The first author in particular seems to have made a living out of mining for information from social media websites and building his research on it, framing it as sounding some kind of alarm on privacy rights. Make of that what you will.

Second. As many have noted, the sample was specifically restricted to US white Caucasian male/female faces, was classified on a straight/gay basis only (bi/pan/ace people, as you know, either have too many faces or are entirely faceless), and were taken from dating services rather than in a controlled lab setting. This is important from a scientific standpoint because while it may not completely invalidate this study, it nonetheless limits its validity. The authors hand-wave around this, but I see it as a severe limitation.

Third. Their repeated flourishes to try and frame the results of this study as indicative of support for prenatal hormone theory—i.e. androgen exposure in the womb influences sexual orientation—is both infuriating and laughable, particularly because of the second point. Do the men writing this study have any idea how much facial information could be fundamentally, irreversibly distorted in the taking of a picture? All I see is a lot of hand-waving about how Face++ and their neural net pick out facial structures that cannot be distorted, but are you really telling me that lighting and make-up (and maybe even surgery) cannot distort facial structure in a picture versus, for instance, in a laboratory 3D scan? How do you go from ‘given one straight face and one gay face this classifier can pick out which is which somewhat better than a coin toss’ to ‘gay people have masculine features and this is consistent with PHT’? How?!

Fourth. Speaking of ‘somewhat better than a coin toss’, that depends on what index you use. This is the single biggest issue I have with this study: the authors are not especially clear about the real-world performance of their classifier.

The numbers quoted in the abstract and in most media articles come from an area under receiver operating curve coefficient (which somehow abbreviates to AUC???), but this apparently isn’t meant to indicate the likelihood that the classifier is correct given one or more images of a particular face. The BBC puts it more succinctly than I would:

In one test, when the algorithm was presented with two photos where one picture was definitely of a gay man and the other heterosexual, it was able to determine which was which 81% of the time.

With women, the figure was 71%.

So given two faces where you know one face is of a straight person and one face is not, you can reach that level of accuracy. But how does the classifier perform if we’re running blind, and we just have five images of one face and we have to try and tell if the person pictured is straight? I don’t know, and the only hint we have of this comes from a particularly confusing discussion about accuracy and precision versus ‘recall’, where the authors drew 70 gay men and 930 straight men at random from their sample and had the classifier assign probabilities that the person pictured was gay. With a random draw of 100 people you might expect under 10 of them to be gay. What does the preprint have to claim about the classifier’s performance?

However, among the 100 of individuals with the highest probability of being gay according to the classifier, 47 were gay (precision = 47/100 = 47%).

That sounds like the classifier is doing a good job, but we don’t know what these probabilities are in the first place. What’s the 90th percentile chance of gay? Is it 90%? 99%? 57%? Could you conceivably establish a threshold chance of gay and use that in a blind test? No, you can’t! Remember: the sample of 1000 included a total of 70 gay men, so the classifier didn’t even put 23 of them within the 90th gay percentile. What does that tell you about the accuracy of this classifier? At this point, the authors have confused me so much that I just don’t care anymore.

If the pretense behind this study is ‘if malicious actors can pick out gay people from straight people via facial recognition, we need to sound an alarm’, then this is a really confusing, terrible alarm to sound. I’m not asking for a blueprint for malicious actors to follow, but I would really appreciate some clarity on the performance of this classifier, and I do not find their preprint satisfying in this regard. And somehow, that discussion is still better than their condescending, strawman-filled author’s note apparently aimed at a general audience, but surely unsuitable for this target when, at time of writing, it doesn’t even explain what an AUC is, and includes this gem:

We could be easily convinced that gay men (our gay male friends for sure!) have better hairstyles and facial hairstyles, and take better pictures. As we discuss in our paper, gay and straight faces do differ in terms of grooming.

Note the parenthetical. ‘Oh, trust us, we know what we’re doing with this study! We’re scientists and some of our best friends are gay!’ Eww.

Plus, if malicious actors wanted to pick out gay people, facial features aren’t the best way anyway. Consider, for instance, how the authors picked out gay Facebook male users in a validity check, trying to show that their classifier didn’t need dating profile pictures:

First, we used the Facebook Audience Insights platform to identify 50 Facebook Pages most popular among gay men, including Pages such as: “I love being Gay,” “Manhunt,” “Gay and Fabulous,” and “Gay Times Magazine.” Second, we used the “interested in” field of users’ Facebook profiles, which reveals the gender of the people that a given user is interested in. Males that indicated an interest in other males, and that liked at least two out of the predominantly gay Facebook Pages, were labeled as gay. Among the gay men identified in this way, and for whom relationship data was available, 96% reported that their significant other was male.

‘But,’ I hear you ask, ‘that’s only applicable in socially liberal environments where the person is comfortable being out online!’ Well, given that this study is based entirely around a segment of the cis white US population, I could say the same for the face-based classifier.

In conclusion, screw this study. As an attempt to justify prenatal hormone theory it is laughable and falls far short. As an alarm for online privacy, it’s about as effective as sounding a bell made out of papier-mâché. It may not be ‘junk science’, but the authors’ sanctimonious and dismissive attitude towards their critics and the apparent exaggerated sense of importance about their work, not to mention the way they come across as attention seekers rather than scientists operating in good faith ... ooh, it makes me mad.

[samanthaannmarie]

I would like to give you a heads up before you begin to read this. It will be fairly long for my first post and i expect it will run off on tangents as i plan to write in train of thought. Also please bear with the second person style. As much as this is a public address I am also writing this to you the one reading it. i hope you stay with me till the end. or should i say my beginning.

Lets start with this with my name; my given name. My name is Joshua. I am in all seriousness strongly considering transitioning form male to female. The purpose of this blog is to help me work through these thoughts and feelings and to hopefully help me arrive at the right choice for myself. I hope it will also stand as a record as to the path I've taken in the hopes of helping others who might walk it with me.

I plan to give you a fair amount of my history so as to give you an idea of where I come from and where I think I'm going. So let me start with before I was born.

I am my mothers oldest child; i was born in September of 1989. the irony of the path I'm on is that I was supposed to be a girl. the doctors told my mom that she was having a girl and she chose the name Samantha Ann-Marie for me, hence the user name. My birth was not a simple one though. i was removed via Caesarian section because the umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck. One might say I've been into rope play since before i was born. (buh dum duh tchsss) That was the easiest part of my first few years though.. I was born with an inguinal hernia that took several operations to repair and an undescended testicle which was tacked in place. The problems these have caused have tortured me my entire life. the greatest of which is that because of the pain the caused me I was sitting up as a newborn because it was the least painful position for me. this caused the over development of the tendons in my back and legs which cause me immeasurable pain to this day. I tell you all this not to elicit pity but to help you understand where i come from and how these events have shaped my choices. You do not know a man until you have walked a day in his shoes and i hope to one day walk a day in heels.

The next big think that happened to me as a child was I almost died again. I was almost two and my mom had me on a greyhound bus and a dog licked me in the eye and i went into anaphylactic shock; that was my second Christmas in the hospital. (that trend continues to this day as every December i go to the hospital for an asthma attack) so that is where my asthma and allergies start. the severity of which limited my childhood to a fifteen minute radius of a hospital. I also haven't been able to have a pet cat odog either since that incident. The biggest problem with how severe my asthma and allergies are is the medication i require to function on a daily basis. The steroid use has caused the most common side effects over a long period of use such as weight gain and mild breast growth along with stunted growth in other areas.

So at this point your probably getting tired of my medical history. especial since the reason you reading this is the MTF or HRT tag, so lets get into the first time i can remember questioning my gender role, a story of masturbation, role play, bdsm, and locked doors.

The first time i masturbated was when i was seven years old. The story of how I found out what masturbation was and how to do it is probably not typical. So i was at my best friends house and his older brother (13 at the time) was showing us the dirty side of the AOL chat rooms. The three of us ended up role playing with a woman in a bdsm situation. she was tied up being spanked while we fingered her pussy and she asked if we were getting off to her being tied up. this prompted us to ask our shining role model what getting off was. He explained how maturation worked by moving your hand up and down your penis until you came using soap as a lubricant. me being the impressionable and eager kid i was decided tor try it in the bathroom later that day under the guise of doing a number two. Now some of you might of tried you use soap at one point and you know that it is not the best idea. for those of you who haven't, i would strongly discourage the practice. So here i was masturbating for the first time in secret at my best friends house painfully using bar soap as a lube; and though the pain my stoburness won out and i had my first organs at seven. But here's the thing, my mind kept going back to that girl who was tied up. I wanted to know what it was like to be her, what a finger in my pussy was like, what having my breast fondled would feel like.

Those feelings grew stronger the longer I dwelled on them. it makes me think of when i was older and i had one of those little black and white tv/am/fm radio combos you could get for like thirty bucks.. i had it plugged in at the foot of my bed and would listen to barbie girl by Aqua over and over again quietly at night when everyone was asleep. Its still on of my favorite songs to this day. Do you remember those Avon books they used to leave with the paper or in your mail box? I do; in particular I remember looking through them and thinking about how pretty i could be if i could wear makeup like the girls who molded in them. the big thin was how they always had that add about how you could join the Avon team an be an independent woman. I remember asking my mom if i could work part time for them selling makeup after school. since i grew up in the suburbs i thought it would be the perfect job. for me because i could ride my bike to make deliveries. i also thought that if i could get the samples the girl i was friend with up the road could teach me how to do makeup and many even help me dress up. i also remember there was no dividing line yet and all those thoughts were what everyone thought about. Alas the innocence of you the is scratched away as people start drawing lines in the sand. the first line was when my little brother got in trouble for wearing our younger sisters makeup. Boys don't wear makeup is what has been stuck in my head since then.

You may of noticed that I don't mention my dad much. Well let me give you the low down on that. My biological father bailed before i was born. i tracked him down when i was twelve and tried to have a relationship with him especially after i found out i had another brother and sister but he has kept his distance and ignored me for the most part. my mom married when i was about one to my stepdad. then my brother an sister came along and he failed as a human being. in his mind i was his so, my brother was not his son and he never wanted a daughter. i think three kids got to him because he tried killing himself by sliding his wrists in the tub. all i can remember from that that incident was standing outside the apartment complex while my mom handled things. when i was about eight things finally hit the boiling point. His drug an alcohol problems had gotten bad and him and mom would fight all the time. One night i was woken up to them fighting and i walked out and told him to leave and he did. he blamed him leaving on me but mom assured me even though i said what i did it was her decision to kick him out. the usual divorce and custody battle followed and it all came to an end one night when my siblings and i were over for visitation. He made this god awful frozen pizza that tasted of nothing but oregano. my brother being the picky eater he is, refused to eat it and my dad grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and picked him up off the ground and shook him. after he lost custody he ran off to Maine to avoid child support. that will be all i will say on that subject.

Around this time in my life i was told that i needed to step up and be the man of the house. I also had a nervous break down and stopped smiling.

I was always a smart kid and my mom tried to make things better for me by sending me to a private school in 4th grade. It was the worst decision she had ever made in my childhood. I was horrendously bullied that year, so much so that i fell into shirt and picked him up off the ground and shook him. after he lost custody he ran off to Maine to avoid child support. that will be all i will say on that subject.

Around this time in my life i was told that i needed to step up and be the man of the house. I also had a nervous break down and stopped smiling.

I was always a smart kid and my mom tried to make things better for me by sending me to a private school in 4th grade. It was the worst decision she had ever made in my childhood. I was horrendously bullied that year, so much so that i fell into i practice to this day, to look into ones self. She also got me a scholarship to a marine biology summer camp where i got to go collect specimens from the Indian river an mosquito lagoon, recored their date and submit to wildlife management to help keep track of populations. the best summer of my life so far.

Around this time another line was drawn by my peers. when talking about women and sex with some other guys i broached the topic of wondering what the girl feels like during sex and what it would feel like to be the girl. The proposal was unanimously rejected and the topic shelved for i did not want to be rejected as i was just starting to come back out of my shell.

Ah middle school the time when you start to figure out what your going to be when you grow up and start to plan for high school. the years i gave up. My algebra background allowed me to win the weekly math competition the school held almost every week; so my math teacher recommend me for a trial program in statistics in 8th grade. Back tracking to 6th grade i started taking graphic design and stuck with it through middle school. i also took home economics in order to get better at cooking and sewing and i though no on would bug me for doing girly things because it was looked at as an easy class. But back to 8th grade, the year i lost hope in the school system. it started with the elective wheel and pairing dance and graphic design. i took graphic design and for the second half of the year i had to take dance, i freaked out when i got put in dance. don't get me wrong i wanted to take it. heck i could even do a split, straddle, pirouette, and anything else they asked of me. but the thing that had me freak out was that for the final i had to the cancan in front of the whole school wearing spanks. i could not have any one seeing that feminine side of me. men did not do girly things and i had to be a mans man. so i went to the principal about the final being cruel and unusual and got put back in graphic design. the biggest thing that killed my hopes of the future was i broke my foot. yeah i know, not that big of a deal, but the events around it were. i had to be out of P.E. while i was in a cast, which let me sitting in the library reading for that period. The problem was i had an interview for the advanced placement program in high school. during the time i was recouping. the interviewer was there all week right next to me anand on Friday when he was packing up to leave i asked him about why he never called me for my interview and he said he had sent a not to my P.E. class to call for me twice. I explained to him the situation and asked to do the interview and he looked at my paper and told me i was absent to much to be accepted. i then replied that even though i miss half the year due to illness my grades and test score are better than most. he said i would not be a good fit and walked away. I gave up on school then and there.

from middle school through high school i tried being a mans man and hid my feeling and thought from others all the while retreating back into my shell. I dropped out my senior year to get a job to help the family because the rescission caused us to loose our house.

When i was nineteen i went to job corps to get a trade and do something with myself. i had gone there for mechanics but during orientation i was convinced by my peers to do deck hand. this was a hellish choice; for two months while we learned about how to work on a barge we had to walk a mile a day with a 15o lb coil of steel cable over our shoulder and learn to throw and maneuver 2inch lock line over 40 and 50 feet distances. after all that we interned on a barge and this is where something was dug back out; something i had buried deep. the irony is it was dug out in a macho job. one night. i walked in on my lead man sitting in the pilot house looking at porn on the ships computer. He was looking at shemale porn and called me over to show me something. what he showed me didn't matter but the trans girl made something click in my head. i could be that girl that i had dreamed of being since i was a kid. i could be a girl in every way except a piece of flesh dangling between my legs. (i did not know of HRT, SRS, or FFS yet) This small thing brought back something in me that i had forgotten about for a long time. My taste in poor started to change from lesbian and anal, to shemale and trans lesbian with that always present bondage kink.

i continued my education at job corps and was certified as a welder. and used that to get a job in a machine shop that would allow me to live on my own. the thought i had did not come back in a rush but gradually and gained strength as time went on.

A major turning point for me was when i got laid off. i made a snap decision to go to truck driving school because it was the fastest way to get back to work. but the nature of driving a truck played to my benefit in a way. i was isolated for a long period of time and alone with my thoughts. this allowed me to analyze themselves thoughts and feelings. it also gave me the capitulation to buy makeup and cloths and toys to experiment. let me tell you as uncomfortable as a pair of 4in heels can be there is something that just felt right about them to me, the same goes for girl cloths and makeup. I went through a few purge cycles while driving a truck. i took about six months off and then went back to driving. this is where another impotent event happened; i met a trans truck driver who worked for my company. she inspired me a lot because she was still early in her transition yet she was out and about in public and showed no hesitation in doing so. we talked for a while while we waited for our loads to be ready, not about her being trans but about regular things. it showed me that you can be trans and be normal your not just a sex object or a freak or oddity.

Then my mom almost died.... she went into heart failure in 2015 and luckily for us in 2016 they found the cause and fixed it in early 2017. she wont get better but she wont get worse just yet either. so i got out of the truck and purged all of the girly things i bought to come spend time with her not knowing if i had a few weeks or a few years left.

So before i got out of the truck i had started to go about transition the "proper way" i went to a therapist to start therapy in order to get on HRT through proper channels. but after i had to quit driving i lost my insurance and put all that on hold while taking care of mom. so everything got put on hold till she had heart surgery at the beginning of this year. after she started feeling better i went back to driving in July of 2017 with the express purpose of financing my transition. but like all laid plans something happened. this time it was bureaucracy that threw up a road block for me and i had to stop driving abruptly in September. so now i have a job doing construction while i try and save up to get back on the track i want to be on.

You probably want to know why i think I'm trans? well the truth is I don't know for sure. what i do know is that since i started planing to transition i have started taking better care of myself. i went from bathing once a week to daily; i have lost 18 inches off my waist this year. and every time i think of people treating me like a girl i feel happy. a while ago i got super excited because a clerk at a gas station mistook me for a girl even know i had a three day stumble and am a six foot tall guy with the build of a line backer. I hope that in writing this that i will get feed back, questions, advice, tips, and anything else that will help me make the best choice for myself. i just want to wake up happy with my self every once in a while, or many like the way i look enough to take a picture of myself more than once ever seven or so years.

so my plans as of now are to save enough money to finance my transition specifically HRT and the required blood test for the next two to three years.

i want to go back to school during that time so i can have my legal name change done before i graduate to help make transitioning back into the workforce easier.

a bonus goal is to document my transition in detail.. daily pictures to create a more complete time line, and a food journal and exercise journal.

so if you made it this far thank you and i hope to hear from you. i hope that what ever journey your on that led you to read this post or my blog is a fulfilling one that leads you to your happy place.

with love,

Sammy