Links for your reading pleasure

1. Acceptance of transgenderedness depends on being seen as ill:
   

   “It’s a Catch-22,” O’Donnabhain said. “I have to accept the stigma of being labeled as having a disorder [or] a mental condition … in order to get benefits. I haven’t liked this diagnosis from the very beginning. But I’ve got to play the game.”

2. “Experts” tell women when to have babies:
   

   Egg freezing should not be offered to women who want to put off having a family purely for lifestyle reasons, say experts.

   …An increasing number of women are choosing to freeze their eggs for social reasons in the hope they will be able to have a child when they are older.

   Critics argue they are delaying motherhood for the wrong motives, such as climbing the career ladder or until they have more money.

   Dr Marc Fritz, of the ASRM, said it would be wrong for women who have frozen their eggs to think they had ensured their future fertility.

   So, the idea is that freezing eggs is not a guarantee that women will be able to have kids. That’s fine. But instead of doctors warning women that freezing their eggs is not a guarantee of being able to have kids, and letting women make up their own minds as to whether that’s a risk that they want to take, “experts” are saying that women shouldn’t have the option because women make “bad” choices, like having jobs. (And to hear these experts talk about how wanting earning money is a “bad” lifestyle choice, you’d think raising kids was free.)

3. An earth-like planet may have water
4. A radio play of Douglas Adams’s “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” is on Radio 4. Listen Again is a wonderful thing.

–IP