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If you’ve had the experience of being a teenage boy, you know that your body wasn’t particularly shy about revealing its sexual attractions. So, there I was with undeniable evidence I was attracted to men and stuck with the belief I was disgusting and broken. An abomination.

I’m happy to report, like so many members of the LGBT community, I stopped believing I was broken. I’m not sure what mental processes occurred to un-brainwash myself, but they seem to have occurred. There are hints as to what may have happened. Dr. Wim De Neys of Leuven University, Belgium, discovered that part of the frontal lobe activates when we realize stereotypes aren’t true and a separate part of the frontal lobe activates in order to override the stereotype (this second part doesn’t always occur).

So, it might be that the evidence provided by my body was strong enough to finally talk my brain out of its moral disgust. Or maybe it was the years of experience living as a gay man that did the job. I don’t know. I do know it was incredibly painful and difficult and I’m glad it happened.

Read it all here.

(Note from Heather: Phil and I were once apartment-mates. So great to see this from him! Yay, Phil!)

edforchoice:

Happy #IDAHO! Or #IDAHOT. Or #IDAHOBIT.

Have a look at our blog on ensuring people of ALL (or no) genders and sexualities are able to access relevant, evidence-based resources on reproductive health.

When we look in the mirror as a culture, our tendency toward hysteria always seems to hover in our communal blind spot. We’re not very good at seeing when groups with a political or social agenda are manipulating us with fear, often the unreasonable, irrational fear of the taboo. During the Salem witch trials, it’s quite clear that the members of that Massachusetts community felt that their fears - and their actions - were completely reasonable and sensible in light of the threat they perceived themselves to be facing. With hindsight, we think that burning people at the stake is just a little extreme, and that the threat of witchcraft is perhaps not quite so significant as all that. These days, we find ourselves facing a similarly pitched level of hysteria and carefully-inculcated terror in regard to youth sexuality… and similarly, we may be in grave danger of seeing our misperceptions and extremism only in hindsight.
Hanne Blank and Heather Corinna, here, from 2001.

Grade 8 students in Nunavut can now learn about sexual health with the help of a comic book, Eva Aariak, Nunavut’s premier and education minister said this week in the Nunavut legislature.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Mary Oliver

North Carolina is advancing a measure that would effectively allow personal beliefs to trump women’s access to birth control. Under HB 730, employers in the state could decide not to include contraceptives in their workers’ insurance plans for any reason — a direct violation of the popular Obamacare provision that stipulates women should receive birth control coverage at no additional cost to them. But as lawmakers debate HB 730, women’s health advocates in the state want them to know they’re not willing to be dragged back to the 1960s without a fight.