But the thing is, you might not ever know it.
Young people kill themselves because of harassment, torment, bullying, and immense internal pain. You can be the person who stands between them and suicide, but you might never know it. Ideally, none of us would ever know because the someone we’ve influenced has a happy life, [...]
Archives for gender
I might have saved someone’s life today. So can you.
Nakedness and self image
I recently wrote a post about nakedness - nudity, actually - that was sparked by reading an autobiography of sorts by a nude model. That post sparked a lovely conversation with a Naturist from the UK. And then, a few days ago, I showed a bunch of pictures of naked people to my college class.
I [...]
LGB…T…QQIA…LMNOP…what?
I’ve been asked to break down these various initials recently by a number of friends and students, so I thought I’d write a bit on them. LGB is a group of initials that most people are familiar with to one degree or another:
Lesbian (women who are attracted to women)
Gay (often referring to men who are [...]
Thinking about what it means to be transgender
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 [...]
Screwed up gender
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…) [...]
When girls wear tuxes and boys wear heels
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 [...]
That secretive, nebulous, other sex
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 [...]
On gender, sexual orientation, and children
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 [...]
Advertisements - the good, the bad, and the ugly
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 [...]
The 2007 GLSEN National School Climate Survey
[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 [...]
