Bound to the dual-sex/gender system: (trans) gendering and body modification as narcissistic self regard

This chapter looks at the way that transsexuals neotiate their body projects, by balancing their ego ideals, bodily intactness and social roles. I draw on a reconstituted notion of (positive) narcissism to eplain the various modalities of transsexual body modification

The construction of Gender Dysphoria at 'Classifying Sex: Debating DSM-5'

On the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) website the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), is promoted as the “most comprehensive, current, and critical resource for clinical practice available to today's mental health clinicians and researchers of all orientations” (American Psychiatric Association, 2012a). The manual is ‘comprehensive,’ indeed; it has grown in size since its first edition to over 900 pages in its current DSM 5 incarnation. We could argue as Farley, the former president of the American Psychological Association, does that the DSM authors are contributing to an increase in “the relentless production of disorders and pathologizing of normal extremes” (Gornall, 2013: no page no.) and the facilitating of mental illnesses. In response to the publication of the DSM-5, a two-day conference at the University of Cambridge took place: Classifying Sex: Debating DSM-5, at which discussants debated the potential impact of the manual’s criteria for pathological, paraphilic and by default ‘normal’ sexualities, gender identities, and psychiatric practice. The delegates considered amongst many other topics the role of power and evidence, at least that is how I understood many of the contributions to the debate. The panel that I was invited to contribute to featured Kenneth Zucker (Chair of the Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders workgroup of DSM-5) to whom I was to critically respond. In this reflective commentary I would like to focus on power and evidence because Zucker has previously described the DSM’s international influence as spreading from clinical care, clinical training to clinical research (Zucker, 2010b). Moreover, in Zucker’s conference talk: The Science and Politics of DSM-5 (Zucker, 2013) it invoked these conceptual frameworks. Zucker’s intriguing first presentation slide read: “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac (Henry Kissinger 1973).” This was followed by a slide illustrating the sum of publications Zucker and the other Chairs of the DSM-5 working groups had published accompanied by Zucker’s remarks that these publications were part of the reason why they were selected by the APA’s Board of Trustees (BOT) and as Chairs of their respective work groups. This generated in me a sense that power and evidence to support these tangled, conflicting positions of power were being played out in a number of domains, profiting from many tactical partnerships (Foucault, 1998 [1984]): the BOT, the contributors to the working groups, the academe and in some cases the (parents of) patients themselves through data from the clinics

Nonparametrically consistent depth-based classifiers

We introduce a class of depth-based classification procedures that are of a nearest-neighbor nature. Depth, after symmetrization, indeed provides the center-outward ordering that is necessary and sufficient to define nearest neighbors. Like all their depth-based competitors, the resulting classifiers are affine-invariant, hence in particular are insensitive to unit changes. Unlike the former, however, the latter achieve Bayes consistency under virtually any absolutely continuous distributions - a concept we call nonparametric consistency, to stress the difference with the stronger universal consistency of the standard $k$NN classifiers. We investigate the finite-sample performances of the proposed classifiers through simulations and show that they outperform affine-invariant nearest-neighbor classifiers obtained through an obvious standardization construction. We illustrate the practical value of our classifiers on two real data examples. Finally, we shortly discuss the possible uses of our depth-based neighbors in other inference problems.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.3150/13-BEJ561 in the Bernoulli (http://isi.cbs.nl/bernoulli/) by the International Statistical Institute/Bernoulli Society (http://isi.cbs.nl/BS/bshome.htm

Outstanding Issues in Our Understanding of L, T, and Y Dwarfs

Since the discovery of the first L dwarf 19 years ago and the discovery of the first T dwarf 7 years after that, we have amassed a large list of these objects, now numbering almost six hundred. Despite making headway in understanding the physical chemistry of their atmospheres, some important issues remain unexplained. Three of these are the subject of this paper: (1) What is the role of "second parameters" such as gravity and metallicity in shaping the emergent spectra of L and T dwarfs? Can we establish a robust classification scheme so that objects with unusual values of log(g) or [M/H], unusual dust content, or unresolved binarity are easily recognized? (2) Which physical processes drive the unusual behavior at the L/T transition? Which observations can be obtained to better confine the problem? (3) What will objects cooler than T8 look like? How will we know a Y dwarf when we first observe one?Comment: 11 pages including 5 figures. To appear in the conference proceedings for Cool Stars 1

New spectral types L and T

The establishment of new spectral classes cooler than type M has had a brief, yet already rich, history. Prototypes of the new "L dwarf" and "T dwarf" classes were first found in the late 1980s to mid-1990s, with a flood of new discoveries occurring in the late 1990s with the advent of deep, large-area, digital sky surveys. Over four hundred and fifty L and T dwarfs are now cataloged. This review concentrates on the spectroscopic properties of these objects, beginning with the establishment of classification schemes rooted in the MK Process. The resulting grid of spectral types is then used as a tool to ferret out the underlying physics. The temperature ranges covered by these spectral types, the complex chemical processes responsible for the shape of their emergent spectra, their nature as either true stars or brown dwarfs, and their number density in the Galaxy are discussed. Two promising avenues for future research are also explored: the extension of the classification system to three dimensions to account for gravity- and metallicity-dependent features, and the capability of newer large-area surveys to uncover brown dwarfs cooler than those now recognized

Rank-based optimal tests of the adequacy of an elliptic VARMA model

We are deriving optimal rank-based tests for the adequacy of a vector autoregressive-moving average (VARMA) model with elliptically contoured innovation density. These tests are based on the ranks of pseudo-Mahalanobis distances and on normed residuals computed from Tyler's [Ann. Statist. 15 (1987) 234-251] scatter matrix; they generalize the univariate signed rank procedures proposed by Hallin and Puri [J. Multivariate Anal. 39 (1991) 1-29]. Two types of optimality properties are considered, both in the local and asymptotic sense, a la Le Cam: (a) (fixed-score procedures) local asymptotic minimaxity at selected radial densities, and (b) (estimated-score procedures) local asymptotic minimaxity uniform over a class F of radial densities. Contrary to their classical counterparts, based on cross-covariance matrices, these tests remain valid under arbitrary elliptically symmetric innovation densities, including those with infinite variance and heavy-tails. We show that the AREs of our fixed-score procedures, with respect to traditional (Gaussian) methods, are the same as for the tests of randomness proposed in Hallin and Paindaveine [Bernoulli 8 (2002b) 787-815]. The multivariate serial extensions of the classical Chernoff-Savage and Hodges-Lehmann results obtained there thus also hold here; in particular, the van der Waerden versions of our tests are uniformly more powerful than those based on cross-covariances. As for our estimated-score procedures, they are fully adaptive, hence, uniformly optimal over the class of innovation densities satisfying the required technical assumptions.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009053604000000724 in the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org