Reading Time: 6 minutes When I was 18, I began dating an exceptionally beautiful girl, the daughter of an Italian family who settled in South Africa. I did so to disguise the fact that I was gay. We grew very close through our mutual love of photography. So close that I gave her a key to my front door. […]
Sex & Gender
Exploring sex and gender from the secular perspective.
Posted inDeep Dive
Getting to the root of Christianity’s hair problem
Reading Time: 9 minutes I was never one to blend in with the other kids back in 1960s. My mother made certain of that. She set up a fashion store for kids in a small town in South Africa and used me to model the latest fashions, sending me out to gauge public reaction. I was a mere slip […]
Posted inSex & Gender
Gender is a fundamental structure in our lives, so why do some deny its reality?
Reading Time: 4 minutes There are stark differences in the lived realities of men and women, and sometimes, you just need to listen to learn about gender, as I discovered with my students this semester. It was nearing the end of my First Year Seminar, which of course I’d given the theme of fairy tales, on the premise that […]
Posted inPolitics
Outright Misogyny: The Worst Speech in Recent Times?
Reading Time: 5 minutes This is terrible. It’s a truly awful speech. As the Daily Beast reports: A political-science professor at one of Idaho’s top universities has sparked outrage after openly calling for women to be kept out of engineering, medical school, and law so that they can instead focus on “feminine goals” such as “homemaking and having children.” […]
Posted inReproductive rights
Catholic School’s Students Leave Anti-Abortion Rally
Reading Time: 8 minutes It wasn’t a boycott. It was an actual walkout. And almost all of the students at this surprisingly-large Catholic school participated.
Posted inSex & Gender
You probably don’t understand what Leviticus says against homosexuality
Reading Time: 4 minutes The Old Testament book of Leviticus prohibits gay sex for a very different reason than modern evangelical Chicken Littles usually imagine. Understand gay sex from the Ancient Near East to see that it makes no prohibition against gay sex or same-sex marriage as we understand them today. But before we get to the scholarly critique […]
Posted inSex & Gender
9 arguments Christians make against same-sex marriage
Reading Time: 4 minutes Another day, another article whining about same-sex marriage. Let’s run these arguments through the wood chipper and see if any remain.
Posted inSex & Gender
Seeking the trans people of the past
Reading Time: 6 minutes To learn about trans people, we have to read between the lines of history. Info about trans folks comes to us not from autobiographies or travelogues, but rather largely from legal cases from centuries past. And that info comes to us filtered through the worldview of authority figures who condemned transgender people entirely.
Posted inSex & Gender
A review of “The Body Is Not An Apology”
Reading Time: 5 minutes As a body scholar and feminist, I hunger for ways to explore and inhabit our bodies that are not bound by shame, and Sonya Renee Taylor’s book delivers exactly that.
Posted inSex & Gender
Gender Identity Debated
Reading Time: 2 minutes I have listened to the first speaker in this debate so far but will continue to watch the whole thing. But I just thought I’d share a couple of early thoughts. First, this is why debates about conceptual nominalism and realism are important. Once you understand the distinction, you will see how important one’s understanding […]