gender

The Right to Dress However You Want

by Kate Redburn

New anti-transgender laws should prompt a legal response, but they also require a fundamental recognition: laws prescribing gendered dress codes infringe on everyone's freedom of expression. 

Let Us Now Praise R. DeSantis

by Marc Stein

"I can’t believe it’s taken this long to have a political leader take a stand against gender and sexuality!"

Authors Call for a Rethink of Birth and Motherhood

Peggy O'Donnell Heffington makes an assertive argument that the United States has a long history of official involvement in motherhood, from making reproduction near-compulsory for white women on one side of the color line to eugenics and sterilization on the other. 

Gender-Affirming Care Has a Long History, and Has Affected Non-Trans People Too

by G. Samantha Rosenthal

Medical intervention to make people's bodies conform to their assigned place in the gender binary has a long history; it has been controversial principally when the same treatments have been used by transgender people.

Gladys Bentley: Gender Outlaw

by Cookie Woolner

Gladys Bentley was one of the most popular speakeasy performers in prohibition-era New York, and used the performance category of "drag king" – women playing on stereotypes of masculinity – to be herself. 

Deconstructing "The Child"

by Jules Gill-Peterson

Since the Victorian era, Anglo-American conceptions of childhood have worked ideologically to place children at risk of harm through the justifying idea of love, and hide the reality that only a tiny percentage of young people experience youth as protected, secure, and nurtured. 

Is Messi the Avatar of a Post-Macho Argentina?

by Brenda Elsey

Lionel Messi's tenure at the top of the soccer world has coincided with an upsurge of feminism in Argentina and its sports culture, changes Messi has quietly supported. 

Getting History Right Means Paying Attention to Pronouns

by Lora Burnett

The pronouns of history are "they, them and theirs," not "we, us and ours." Reactionaries want to dissolve the difference students need to understand the past critically. 

Empathy in the Archive: Care and Disdain for Wet Nursing Mothers

by Anna K. Danziger Halperin

"Just like today, women’s decisions in the past about how to feed their babies were shaped by personal preference, to be sure, but the possibilities available are bounded by technological innovations, shifting medical advice, and social, cultural, and economic pressures and practices."

Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz are Wrong about the Weakness of "Woke" Militaries

by Phillips Payson O’Brien

It turns out that hypermasculinity, ruthlesness and reflexive brutality are liabilities in modern warfare. Ukraine is exhibit A. 

Interview: Joyce Berkman on the Value of History and the Historian's Mindset

by Erik Moshe

“It’s much better to develop one’s mental toolbox, one’s skills, rather than necessarily master huge bodies of knowledge.”

Historians Documenting the Lives of Transgender People

Historians like Jules Gill-Peterson argues that the history of transgender people is often hiding in plain sight, and contains as many moments of joy as of discrimination or misunderstanding. 

How We Told the Ongoing Story of Title IX

by Laura Mogulescu

A curator and her team chose to center the work of activists who pushed to determine the scope and meaning of Title IX's prohibition on sex discrimination in education throughout the law's 50-year history. Their exhibit is now open at the New-York Historical Society.

Tucker Carlson Heralds Yet Another "Crisis of Masculinity"

by Mona Charen

Tucker Carlson's recent examination of testicular tanning as a boost to manliness shows the need for societies to support pathways to male expression that don't lead to violence or painful sunburns. 

"Father Knows Best": Anti-LGBTQ Legislation and the Patriarchy

by Judith Levine

The elision of children’s interests and parents’ rights is not just bad grammar, however. It is an expression of conservative “pro-family” ideology, which posits the family as an indivisible unit where everyone’s interests are unanimous.

Does Zelensky's Image Upend Stereotypes about Jewish Masculinity?

by Miriam Eve Mora

The emergence of Ukraine's Jewish president as an exemplar of wartime valor challenges longstanding stereotypes about Jewish men. 

Hating Motherhood

by Judith Levine

Feminist thought that has questioned "the inexorable tie between mothers and children" and imagined women's lives without motherhood have been the "demon texts" of the movement; 

Building a Fitness Culture with Inclusion and Creativity?

by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela

What will it take for the culture of fitness and bodily health to draw in people with disabilities and push out narrow normative ideas of the ideal body? 

Elizabeth Reis on "Bodies in Doubt," Her History of Intersex in America

"People born with bodily differences that fall outside the bounds of “normal” have suffered tremendously, as physicians have tried to “fix” their bodies and their psyches to fit into a narrow conception of acceptability."

The Anti-Valentine: "Dear John" in Military Culture

by Susan Carruthers

The cultural phenomenon of the "Dear John" letter illustrates how wartime has created occasion for the policing of gendered norms of faithfulness and forbearance, as well as a script for breaking them.