My own pet theory on why you see more male musicians.

Edit: Blogspot cuts off the right half of the picture; be sure to click on it for full view.

*Not based on actual data.

Words for Asshole

There are many ways to call someone an asshole. If they're a guy, you can call them a dick or a douche bag. If they're a woman then you can call them a bitch or a cunt. Either way, you can still just call them an asshole (although, like many gender-neutral terms, it is more often used for guys). All these words, when used as a pejorative, have basically the same meaning: that the person in question is self-serving, cruel, callous, greedy, or just generally evil. Yet, the connotations of the words are so different.
The most obvious difference is the gender difference. Cunt and bitch are used to describe women, which makes sense because they mean "vagina" and "female dog," respectively. Dick makes sense for men because it means "penis" (or a male nickname). What about douche bag, though? It's a female hygienic product, so it's kind of a mystery that it's used to refer to men. I guess it could be to create more of a gender balance in the number of words. Dick already provides a lot of permutations, though: dickhole, dickface, dickweed. It's kind of unique amongst these words. Cuntface? Bitchweed? You just don't hear it.
Another stark difference is the level of offensiveness. Obviously, cunt is the most offensive of these. Calling someone a cunt and calling someone a dick are basically the opposite-gender equivalents of each other - they're both words for genitalia that also colloquially mean asshole - and yet the former is so much more offensive than the latter. I'm not really sure why this is; possibly just a result of the fact that it's used less-often.
I've seen lots of people try to "reclaim" the word bitch, and re-invent it as a compliment. I've even seen a positive backronym create for it: "Beautiful Intelligent Talented Cute Hot." I'm against this reclamation. If someone calls you a bitch and clearly means it as an insult but you respond as though it were a compliment, then you're just being an idiot. I'm generally against people responding to the literal wording of what someone says when it's clear that the intended meaning is different, like back in elementary school when you asked your teacher if you can go to the bathroom and she'd say "I don't know, can you?" That's kind of the same thing that someone is doing when they interpret being called a bitch as a compliment, except it makes less sense because they're not using the literal meaning; they're using some crazy, made-up one. "Bitch," unlike other words that have been reclaimed like "queer," wasn't a slur against every member of a certain group but rather an insult against someone's personality. Plus, reclaiming the word bitch wouldn't really change much. If someone wants to say that a woman is an asshole, they'd just call them an asshole. Or cunt.

The Big Transgender Post

This article expects you to have a basic understanding of terminology surrounding the transgender movement, but in case you don't, here's the one-paragraph summary: "Sex" refers to one's maleness of femaleness in the physical sense (ie; your plumbing). "Gender" refers to someone's mental sense of identity of being male or female (what you consider yourself to be or "identify" as). "Female-to-Male" (or FTM) refers to a transgendered¹ person who was born with a female body but identifies as a male. "Male-to-Female" or MTF would be the opposite of that². A person who's not transgendered is called "cisgendered."
I don't really have a blanket acceptance for all transgender issues nor a blanket denial of them. It's a little more complicated with that, so I'm going to list some statements that would generally be used to describe what the transgender rights movement supports, then whether I consider then true or false and why. If any of the issues require further clarification or support after this, I'll write a separate article for them.

• A person is a man³ or a woman based on what they identify with. Sort of. Like many discussions, this one comes down to a matter. Here, we have two different definitions for man,* one stemmed in gender, and the other stemmed in sex. The exact wording that I most often hear for the gender-based definitions is that a male is "anyone who identifies as a male." The sex-based definition I like to use is that someone is male if they're "phenotypically male," that is to say if they've grown male reproductive organs.
  As far as which of these is correct, they both are to some extent. Some people, when they say "male" are referring to someone who identifies as male, regardless of gender. At the same time, some people are referring to anyone who has a male sex when they say it. Really, in a way, these are two separate words that just happen to be spelled and pronounced the same way. So, they're both useable definitions.
  My position, though, would be that the sex-based version is more useable. The reason for this being mostly that it's the meaning that most people are thinking of when they say male, and most dictionaries would agree with it. There are also some inherent problems with the gender-based definition, probably the greatest of which is that it's a circular definition; it includes the word "male" in the definition for "male." It also implies that anyone who doesn't speak English can't really be male, because they probably wouldn't identify with a word that they don't even know. I know this sounds like I'm being pretty ridiculous in my interpretation of this definition, but when a definition doesn't create any meaning in a word besides the word itself, then it's just not a good definition and opens itself up to these problems.
  I can also see how people might see the gender-based definition as sort of a "straw-man," but that is honestly the definition I've heard most often offered by people who consider maleness to be gender-determined. Still, I'm also willing to listen to other definitions if any readers have another one to offer.
• A transgendered person feels a strong compulsion to express their gender which they cannot help. Sure. I mean, I don't have the experience of being any of the people out there who say these feelings are so compelling, so who am I to disagree with them when they tell me how they feel.
• A person should be allowed to wear the clothes and then present themselves in such a way that reflects their gender identity. Yes , with a caveat. This is all about being honest with yourself. If you a person feels that their gender compells them to wear a skirt instead of pants or visa versa, then more power to them. There's really no harm in dressing to express. I put a caveat in here though, with regards to dressing in order to convince people that your sex is something it isn't. I've noticed a pre-occupation amongst transgendered people with their ability to "pass," or present themselves in such a way that no one guesses their sex. This is different than dressing in a certain way for the purposes of self-expression; it's dressing for the purpose of creating an idea in other people's heads, and a false idea at that. I'm not saying that this should be illegal or anything like that, but there is a moral obligation not to, as it is dishonest.
• Transgender people should be free from violence and harassment because their presentation doesn't match up with society's proscription for how people of their sex act. Absolutely. There are very few things in this world that someone can do to warrant violence against them, and choosing not to fall in with society's gender roles is not one of them. Anti-transgender violence is also (I've heard) one of the factors that pressures transgendered people into hiding their birth sex, for their own safety. So any act of violence against transgendered people for anger over dishonesty about sex is having the opposite effect intended.
• A transgendered person should be able to use the bathroom, locker-room, or similar facility which corresponds with their gender. No. This goes back to the first issue I brought up, about what makes someone a man or a woman. The reason that we have separate facilities for men and women has nothing to do with self-identities or gender roles and has everything to do with bodies. Being nude is a very corporal thing. In our society, we have this pervasive idea that seeing a nude person who has the same kind of body as oneself and being seen nude by people of the same kind of body is really no big deal, but seeing or being seen by a member of the opposite sex is something to be avoided, or at least reserved for people one is intimate with. Now, one can certainly argue that this idea is pointless or wrong or whatever. It's not my intention to defend this idea as something necessary, but rather just to point out that it is there and that it is the basis for why we have "men's" and "women's" facilities. So it only makes sense that how we divide people into these facilities should follow along corporal lines. Also, there are some single-user, unisex restroom out there; an idea that I'm totally in favour of.
• Transwomen should be allowed to attend the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. Yes, but there's more to it than that. for those of you who've never heard of it, the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (or MWMF) is an annual music festival built around female artists and has had a long-running rule of only allowing "womyn-born-womyn" to attend. Recently, they started agreeing to sell tickets to transwomen, but informing them that they are violating the spirit of the festival. Then, they eventually just dropped the rule altogether, but I feel it's still an issue worth discussing. I could probably write a whole post on the MWMF, but I'll try to keep it brief here. Preventing transwomen from attending the festival was wrong and discriminatory, but it wasn't wrong because doing so didn't recognize them as women; it was wrong because trying to limit the festival to only women in the first place was bigoted and discriminatory. There has been a noticeable movement in the transgender community to try and gain access to the MWMF, but they're not doing it by saying that they should end their discriminatory admittance policy, but rather that they should just revise it so that transwomen aren't excluded. The thing about how the transgendered movement has treated this policy, is that they've implicitly said "It's okay that you discriminate; you're just discriminating wrong." The fundamental difference between the MWMF and the places mentioned in the above issue is that a music festival has nothing to do with one's sex or body, so it doesn't justify to exclude people based on their sex or body.
• A transgendered person should be allowed to marry someone of their birth sex (and opposite their gender). Yes, but same with cysgendered people. I'm definitely in favour of marriage equality (see previous post), so I don't think sex (or gender) should be a factor that prevents anyone from getting married.
• A person should be legally protected from being discriminated against for employment, based on their gender. I agree. A person shouldn't be disqualified from a job because of their gender, their sex, or whether or not the two "match." The reason being is that none of these things have any baring on a person's ability to work. There are a few jobs that would count as exceptions (e.g. stripper), but these really are just small exceptions and shouldn't allow discrimination in other positions.

¹Some people have a problem with using "Transgendered" as an adjective. I am not one of them.
²Of course, there are more categories out there than "male" or "female," but I'm trying not to over-complicate thing
³For brevity's sake, I'm just going to be talking about how this argument applies to whether or not someone is a man. Everything in this section can be applied to whether someone's a woman, as well.