The role of gender is very much a reference to how you see yourself within society. Our society tells us what gender means so having to do all kinds of changes to your body to feel like you can exist within a society probably means society is giving you bizarre messages about gender and while I understand there is a spectrum to gender, there really is only male or female in our society.

We were taught about the notion of transgender in the high school I went to and I remember thinking about it's relevance to me as a female. I am very much not your stereotypical female especially not then. I didn't want to be a mother, I thought the whole idea of having a baby inside of me was weird, I loved science, I was outspoken... was I really a male inside a female body?

In the end I decided I was me inside my own body. And the idea of getting gender reassignment was pretty hardcore; would I be swapping the frying pan for the fire? I didn't know at the time, because I didn't have a strong idea of the benefits of being a man beside the few men I knew were pretty awful, people I definitely did not want to be.

Now I have a fuller understanding of the idea of what it means to be female and male within the context of society. I have found more female role models, people I'd never heard of until I was older, and it helped me a lot knowing about women who went on adventures and talked to people and did things on their own.

If you feel the need to transition from one gender to the other, of course I support your decision, but is it society forcing you to feel uncomfortable within your own skin? Perhaps we need  to change society to broaden gender roles?

I used to work at a research institute that classified a software package called Maya as pornography. They may have been right, there isn't even a GNU version. GNU octave is a clone of Matlab. There are many GNU versions of paid for software. It is very expensive software but you can represent genuine physics within the MAYA environment. What makes this powerful is that we can simulate physics within the system. I thought this might be a great way to simulate insects and other biological systems within in.

Why is this important? When I build my systems on computers I get to test my hypotheses, see if I am right, find errors, fix those errors and prove myself right. This is great for finding flaws with in the model, find problems with  underlying assumptions...

Why I thought of this is I've been reading Edward O Wilson's book, 'letters to a young scientist', and in the prologue he mentions how he got funding for a website for all the insects. So I visited his website and it had been moved to the Smithsonian website. I guess at least it still exists but it's not as comprehensive as he made it out to be. Anyway that's why I thought of the models I proposed at this research institute.

I think this is a worthy attitude for all scientists, whether they are working with biology, physics, chemistry... of course many scientists are simulating their models, notably weather forecasters, and sometimes they get their models wrong, and sometimes they don't.

Even now we are seeing how deeply our planet goes in protecting us from ourselves, in all the damage we've done to the environment. Reading 'The ends of the world' by Peter Branner shows how many layers of protection there is, but most importantly, we have huge brains, we should be able to solve this problem, it's part of us achieving maturity as a civilization. but it's from our environmental models we've learned so much about our environment and as our models evolve as we learn, scientists build better and better models.