kerasines

@kerasines / kerasines.tumblr.com

kim | 30
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53v3nfrn5

The female goat herders of Hadhramaut, Yemen

Goat herding is traditionally done by females in Eastern Yemen. The women cover all their skin from the heat and sun, protecting themselves from dehydration and skin damage, the socks and gloves keep their hands and feet soft despite the unforgiving desert sun. The hat (made from dried palm leaves) besides being a drip by itself serves an important role, it insulates air on top of their head thus keeping it cool, besides providing the obvious shade. The layered clothing also helps with the desert changing mood, where it can shift from hot days to cold nights.
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helen “trans people are perpetuating gender steriotypes” joyce is now upset that the scientific american is writing about how women were hunters too back in the day, not just mothers and caretakers. feminist win!

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mikkeneko

Reading the article I see why TERFs are mad about it; it explicitly makes the distinction between gender as a social entity and sex as a biological category, and defines biological sex having multiple factors, both of which are anathema to TERF philosophy.

It also includes these fascinating paragraphs about the role of estrogen in different types of physical activity, directly debunking the widespread notion that estrogen is the weak human's hormone and only does weak human things:

Given the fitness world's persistent touting of the hormone testosterone for athletic success, you'd be forgiven for not knowing that estrogen, which females typically produce more of than males, plays an incredibly important role in athletic performance… The estrogen receptor—the protein that estrogen binds to in order to do its work—is deeply ancient. Joseph Thornton of the University of Chicago and his colleagues have estimated that it is around 1.2 billion to 600 million years old—roughly twice as old as the testosterone receptor. In addition to helping regulate the reproductive system, estrogen influences fine-motor control and memory, enhances the growth and development of neurons, and helps to prevent hardening of the arteries. Important for the purposes of this discussion, estrogen also improves fat metabolism. During exercise, estrogen seems to encourage the body to use stored fat for energy before stored carbohydrates. Fat contains more calories per gram than carbohydrates do, so it burns more slowly, which can delay fatigue during endurance activity. Not only does estrogen encourage fat burning, but it also promotes greater fat storage within muscles… which makes that fat's energy more readily available. Adiponectin, another hormone that is typically present in higher amounts in females than in males, further enhances fat metabolism while sparing carbohydrates for future use, and it protects muscle from breakdown. Anne Friedlander of Stanford University and her colleagues found that females use as much as 70 percent more fat for energy during exercise than males. Estrogen's ability to increase fat metabolism and regulate the body's response to the hormone insulin can help prevent muscle breakdown during intense exercise. Furthermore, estrogen appears to have a stabilizing effect on cell membranes that might otherwise rupture from acute stress brought on by heat and exercise. Ruptured cells release enzymes called creatine kinases, which can damage tissues… Linda Lamont of the University of Rhode Island and her colleagues, as well as Michael Riddell of York University in Canada and his colleagues, found that females experienced less muscle breakdown than males after the same bouts of exercise. Tellingly, in a separate study, Mazen J. Hamadeh of York University and his colleagues found that males supplemented with estrogen suffered less muscle breakdown during cycling than those who didn't receive estrogen supplements.

The article also talks about sexual dimorphism in different species, concluding that "Modern humans have low sexual dimorphism compared with the other great apes," and that overemphasis on averages obscures the wide dispersal of individual traits, which is what I keep saying.

Please read the article if you have the time, it is SO cool. Human biology is so cool. Earth is so cool.

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reblogged

i think a loving thing u can do for yourself before a solo trip is to have a line item in ur budget, as critical and untouchable as Plane Tickets and Lodging, called Stupid. this money cannot be used for anything other than bailing u out of stupid situations

sometimes the Stupid moments are obvious like “my designated in-bag phone charger™️ is missing and my phone’s dying” or “i can’t find the goddamn bus stop it’s getting really late”, but sometimes they’re small like “huh the food at this bar i wanted to go to is pretty expensive”. the temptation to do the risky but cheap thing (walking around with a dead phone, getting lost, drinking on an empty stomach) over the expensive but safe thing (buy another charger at the closest shop, call a cab, pay too much for some mid-ass chicken gyozas bc though you do want to try the signature local beer it’s been a minute since you ate anything) is mitigated. it’s fine, u can assure yourself. take it out of the Stupid Budget

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