I've had a permanent retainer in my bottom 4 teeth for about 5 years now. I recently started a habit of flossing, but it takes too much effort for me to use the official flosser for those. But, I recently started using the proxabrush every morning, which takes about 5 seconds per tooth and gets about 90% of the job done.

I've been doing it for 2 months almost every day now.

Well, I had a transgender friend who said that at a trans meeting two types of people turned up: those that didn't strongly identify as either gender, and those that strongly identified as the gender opposite to their physical body. This is the distinction I am trying to describe.

And "agender trans people" is quite a mouthful.

Although some of the depression could be caused by that, it seems pretty likely that a large portion of it could also because by being treated by society as a gender they aren't, as well as more targeted transphobia.

I've heard trans people say that simply having breasts is really disturbing, enough to require unconfortable breast-binding. I've also heard a trans person say that they enjoy looking at themselves in the mirror, because they are turned on by their own body.

Incidentally, are there separate words for 'non gender identifying transgender' and 'trapped in the wrong body transgender'?

Anyway, clearly transphobia is going to make the problem worse.

When we call something a mental illness, it's because we are trying to treat it in some way, or alleviate the effects. This is not something we want to do with trans people, the effects that we're talking about are all other mental illnesses that we do want to treat the symptoms of.

Well, sex reassignment surgery clearly is a treatment. And the picture isn't clear with certain other mental illnesses either (e.g. autism).

I think there is a third causal path, which goes:

Thinking about being the opposite sex -> psychosomatic alteration of hormone levels during puberty-> structural differences in the brain -> transgender.

I'm not saying this is plausible, or that I have evidence for it. This is not my field. But AFAIK I cannot rule it out.

*I am not counting gender identity disorder as a mental illness, both because I don't think it should be classified that way and because this statement would be pointless if I did.

I would say that since transgender people are much more depressed, presumably due to being trapped in the wrong body (which, as we both mentioned, doesn't apply to all trans people) then GID is a mental illness because it causes depression and suffering.

This doesn't mean that transgender people need to feel bad about being trans, because that will just make matters worse. I know people who are trans and I know people who suffering from other mental illnesses and I hope I'm not coming across as insensitive but I just don't see the point in mincing my words.

Do you mind sharing the brand and product name, for others?

I've been using LyX for preparing my doctoral dissertation and I'm amazed that such a complete and capable tool isn't more widely known and used. I can't imagine preparing scientific documents now with anything other than LyX, and I can't imagine that I used to use software like MS Word for this purpose. Anyone have any other examples of obscure but amazingly capable software?

Natural experiments: I've been trying a new acne wash for the past 6 months, and although I felt like it was working, I wasn't sure. Then, the other day when I was applying it to my back, my partner noticed there was an area I wasn't reaching. In fact, there was an entire line on my back where I wasn't stretching enough to get the wash on. This line coincided exactly with a line of acne, while the rest of my back was clear.

Now I know the wash works for me.

Related: http://xkcd.com/700/

I suppose that this is only an allegation at the moment, although other similar allegations about the same organisation pushing a left-wing agenda at the expense of education have been made, which makes the whole thing more plausible (plus there is Azathoth's original allegation).

Asking an adult if they know anyone who is trapped is ok. The problem is that asking a 10 year old primes them with a concept they would not previously have had. If there is some sort of train of thought one can go down, which ends with 'help I'm trapped in the wrong body' when they would otherwise not have had this problem, then you do not prompt them to start this train of thought. For mostly the same reason, you don't ask children "do your friends drink vodka?".

Essentially, its conceivably possible that the idea of transsexualism poses an information hazard to children.

On Friday, I sent 13 emails and received about 40. 10 of those 13 were responses to others. Many of these were planning meetings or events where faster responses meant more got done today. This was not particularly unusual for a weekday. A couple of these were ones where we proceeded to have a conversation. I am a college student, but I am the leader of a couple groups on campus and heavily involved in a few more.

In my case, where about 1/4th of the emails I get need a response, I would say my current method of having a small pop-up come when I get an email works pretty well.

The once a day method works for people who don't need to respond, or response time is less important. But that's not true for everyone.

Positive experience:

I've been poly for 3 years, had 10+ poly relationships, and while all but 4 have ended problems caused by polyamory has never been the cause. I'm currently in a triad for 9 months, been with one of the people in the triad for almost a year, and have been in another relationship for a bit over a year. Polyamory has literally never been anything more than a tiny issue in my current relationships, and only once was it ever anything close to a serious issue.