Yesterday in my college classes, we talked about gender.  I went to some pains to make sure that our conversation about gender was not confused with a conversation about sex - which refers to the anatomic gender that is generally assigned at birth.  Most toddlers are well aware of their sex by about 18 months [...]

I just returned home from a gay dance club.  I like to go dancing - pounding music and blinky lights relax me, apparently, in a zen-like meditative kind of way.  I make no apologies.  Why the gay dance clubs in particular you might be asking yourself?  (Or the answer is obvious, but I never assume…)  [...]

The Western world has been divided into male/female for many years.  This division is slowly dissolving, and not surprisingly it is our young people who are pushing this crusade.
There’s a recent article in the New York Times called Can a Boy Wear a Skirt to School? It’s not a terrible article, although it does make [...]

I recently went over physiology and anatomy with my college students.  Afterward, one of the young men thanked me.  He was clear and direct:
“Thank you for teaching me what is inside a girl’s body.  I never knew, but I really wanted to know.  It’s always been a mystery to me how things happen up in [...]

I am thinking this morning about a blog post by Hugo Schwyzer and The Atlantic article I read yesterday.
Hugo’s post is his response to a question about a bisexual man who is in a monogamous marriage with a woman, and what that means.  The Atlantic article is about transgendered children, the range of reactions and [...]

Happy Friday!
I had a serious post in the works that went back to Wednesday’s post about The Hurried Child, addressing Dr. Elkind’s assertion that middle school and even early high school is too young for sex education and that a class is an inappropriate place for sex education to be taking place.  But it’s Friday [...]

[This post written by guest blogger JustAnotherTeen]
We live in a world where more and more people are accepting of alternative lifestyles. Yet students who self-identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender still report very similar amounts of harassment and negative effects in school as they did in 1999. Recently, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education [...]

I was delighted to read this article in such a “popular” magazine as Time:
Where the ‘Ladyboys’ Are
Monday, July 7th, 2008
By Hannah Beech
Life can be complicated enough for members of the transgender community — the last thing they need is to hesitate between two bathroom doors: Male or female. Luckily for students at the Kampang high [...]

Today I am thinking about the intensely personal nature of -isms.  Mostly about sexism and racism.
These are the two -isms that we talk about the most. Both of these -isms have been highly visible in the democratic primary.
I realized early on that I had a very personal, very emotional investment in Hillary Clinton. Politically [...]

Gender is such a malleable concept.  And it can be difficult for people who are entrenched in the general understanding of gender to understand the variances.
I spoke with  my friend Sarah Dopp here some months ago, but I’m not sure I mentioned her website Genderfork, which explores androgyny and gender variance through artistic photography.
I was [...]