Ramachandran even cooler than expected

[jinian]

There's a wonderful article on V.S. Ramachandran in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010: "Brain Games" by John Colapinto. (The link will let you read it online if you have access to a digital New Yorker subscription, else the book has some other good stuff in it too.) I know I'm not the only Ramachandran fan around here, and his own books give hardly any idea of what a mad Renaissance type he is -- multiple Nature publications in fields tangential to his own! new species of ankylosaur recognized at a gem show, later named for him! what!

The article also conveys an amusing bit of fail by Richard Dawkins. Check this out: "Ramachandran is a latter-day Marco Polo, journeying the silk road of science to strange and exotic Cathays of the mind." Seriously, R.D.? Your subject, an ethnic Indian who lived in Bangkok as a teen, might think your metaphor is kind of ridiculous.

Colapinto, of course, also wrote As Nature Made Him, which there's been a good deal of questioning about around the trans community, but I think his journalism here seems pretty solid.

Comments

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Colapinto, of course, also wrote As Nature Made Him, which there's been a good deal of questioning about around the trans community

Could you enlarge on that? I know what the book is, but not what the controversy is over. (Maybe it should be immediately obvious, but I would think there's nothing inherently anti-trans about a case in which someone was assigned a gender which they were unhappy with.)

[jinian.livejournal.com]

I wish I could find a better reference right now -- mostly I've seen problems brought up in blog comments, and those are pretty effectively swamped by heavily linked reviews. My recollection is that the problem is mostly with genderqueer and feminist folks who object to Colapinto's binary-gender-essentialist slant. My recollection of the book is that it presents the case in a "boys are inherently boys at all times" way rather than your (and my) equally reasonable "someone was assigned a gender they were profoundly unhappy with" perspective. ISNA (http://www.isna.org/) loves it because it's anti-surgery, which I totally agree with, but I did get grumpy about the essentialism. Some of the reviews seem to disagree with my perception that Colapinto didn't address trans and intersex issues very well, so maybe I should reread.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Ah, that makes sense. I know the case but I haven't read the book.