Misgendering and its Moral Contestability

In this article, I consider the harms inflicted upon transgender persons through “misgendering,” that is, such deployments of gender terms that diminish transgender persons’ selfrespect, limit the discursive resources at their disposal to define their own gender, and cause them microaggressive psychological harms. Such deployments are morally contestable, that is, they can be challenged on ethical or political grounds. Two characterizations of “woman” proposed in the feminist literature are critiqued from this perspective. When we consider what would happen to transgender women upon the broad implementation of these characterizations within transgender women’s social context, we discover that they suffer from two defects: they either exclude at least some transgender women, or else they implicitly foster hierarchies among women, marginalizing transgender women in particular. In conclusion, I claim that the moral contestability of gender-term deployments acts as a stimulus to regularly consider the provisionality and revisability of our deployments of the term “woman.

Baryonic coherent state formation from small domain disoriented chiral condensates

Rare hyperon yields such as the Omega and AntiOmega in heavy ion collision experiments are hard to be reproduced by numerical models. This, in combination with the thermal fit to SPS data, seems to call for a new production mechanism beyond the usual ones. Small domain disoriented chiral condensates (DCC) were proposed to be such a source of rare hyperons through skyrmion formation at the chiral phase transition. Here skyrmions are treated as coherent states of baryons on a compact manifold so that the distribution of baryons produced from a skyrmion can be known. From this more refined treatment, the number of topological defects produced are more than doubled to 30 or more and the domain size at the SPS is found to be even smaller than before at 1.1--1.5 fm. IT IS IMPERATIVE THEREFORE NOT TO USE ONLY PION DISTRIBUTION BUT OTHER MEANS FOR OBSERVING DCC.Comment: Talk presented at Quark Matter 2002, Nantes, France, July 2002, to appear in the proceeding

Critical Points in the Linear Sigma Model with Quarks

We employ a simple effective model to study the chiral dynamics of two flavors of quarks at finite temperature and density. In particular, we determine the phase diagram in the plane of temperature and baryon chemical potential as a function of the pion mass. An interesting phase structure occurs which results in zero, one or two critical points depending on the value of the vacuum pion mass.Comment: 16 pages plus 5 figure

Will Strangeness Win the Prize?

Five groups have made predictions involving the production of strange hadrons and entered them in a competition set up by Barbara Jacak, Xin-Nian Wang and myself in the spring of 1998 for the purpose of comparing to first year physics results from RHIC. These predictions are summarized and evaluated.Comment: 5 pages, 2 tables, 9 figures, Strangeness 2000 conference proceeding

Finite Temperature Solitons in Non-Local Field Theories from p-Adic Strings

Non-local field theories which arise from p-adic string theories have vacuum soliton solutions. We find the soliton solutions at finite temperature. These solutions become important for the partition function when the temperature exceeds m_s/g_o^2 where m_s is the string mass scale and g_o is the open string coupling.Comment: 22 pages, 6 figure