Arbitrary Marks

If you haven’t listened to the NPR story about two boys who feel like girls and whose parents are responding in divergent ways, go do it now. Forget Thomas Beatie and the hype over a pregnant man and instead consider the choices families must make when their child ask to play with ther opposite-sex sibling’s [...]

For anyone who hasn’t heard the news, a transman named Thomas Beatie is pregnant. I read about the news first in The Advocate, but it seems the story has spread to mainstream media, including Oprah. I’ve watched some clips from MSNBC and other news sources where anchors have made fun of the situation, remarking [...]

This looks to be an interesting book: Sexual Fluidity. “Lisa Diamond argues that for some women, love and desire are not rigidly heterosexual or homosexual but fluid, changing as women move through the stages of life, various social groups, and, most important, different love relationships.” A key phrase is “some women”, and the question is [...]

Suppose it were shown that pharmaceuticals in our drinking water were responsible for increasing numbers of individuals with body dysphoria, or transgenderism. What would that, if anything, say about how we ought to value the phenomenon? Should it change how transgender individuals should perceive themselves? How we should treat them?
(For fuller context and the reason [...]

So I’ve been reading Pat Califa’s Sex Changes and came across a section that deals with the history of transgender people in native tribes. Califa is leery of generalizations about the purportedly “liberated” values among Native American society, as one example. He’s* also concerned about the assumption (that Leslie Feinberg makes) that matriarchal property transmission and food production meant a time of women’s rights.

Here are a few points worth considering when looking at the berdaches and other “third-gender” persons and women’s status in indigenous societies:

To anyone who identifies as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered, the question posed by the recent Tierney Labs blog post in the NY Times is not a new one.  It’s just becoming pressing, with the possibility that genetic manipulation–as opposed to reparative therapy–can influence one’s sexual orientation.
One of the researchers involved in the recent fruit [...]

I’ve blogged a bit about Foucault before, although I am not well-positioned to critique his historiography, which many contend was shoddy. Still, I find his ideas intriguing and am always interested to see how he’s quoted by people to make their points. Foucault, like many philosophers, has a set of views which has evolved over [...]

Gender in clothing and speech patterns, with a little bit about Judith Halberstam’s Female Masculinity.

In which I explain what I meant by “phenomenology of gender” and talk about what I plan to talk about in some future blog posts: Female Masculinity by Judith Halberstam and the problem of gender.

What is it like to be a gender?