On October 12, 2017, the day after National Coming Out Day, I received an email from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) informing me that President Donald Trump was scheduled to appear at the Value Voters Summit, a venue that combines virulently anti-LGBTQ and anti-Muslim “values.” Like I have almost every day since last November’s… Read more →
Category: News
My Story of 20 Weeks
20 weeks. That is the magic number according to the GOP. House Republicans last week passed a bill, which they named the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, banning abortions after 20 weeks except in cases of rape or incest, or when necessary to save the life of the mother. While not expected to pass the… Read more →
Renée Zellweger, Isabelle Dinoire, and the Stakes for Changing the Face
On October 20, 2014, Renée Zellweger attended the Elle Women in Hollywood event, her first appearance in the public eye after a long hiatus. She looked different; people do, over time. Most people do; some work very hard to continue to look exactly the same. Zellweger’s face was exhaustively discussed, dissected, and criticized in the… Read more →
Falling Out of Love with the Civil War
On Thursday morning, as the President of the United States tweeted his tacit support of the Confederacy, three different friends sent me messages. Each was struggling with the same thing: how do we convince our friends and families that statues of former Confederates need to come down? One friend had spent the previous evening in… Read more →
Care Gone Wrong: Bad Moms, Fake Disabilities, and Imagined Illnesses
At first, it seemed impossible that Gypsy Rose Blancharde had murdered her mother. Dee Dee appeared to be her daughter’s most outspoken advocate. She was the strong and devoted caregiver that Gypsy Rose, who appeared far younger than her 23 years and spoke in a Minnie Mouse squeak, required. Or so it seemed. Dee Dee… Read more →
Eighth-Grade Innovator Helps Girls Focus on Class Periods, Not Menstrual Periods
“If men could menstruate,” Gloria Steinem observed wryly in an iconic 1978 essay for Ms. magazine, “[s]anitary supplies would be federally funded and free.” Surely, too, tampons and pads would be stocked in every public bathroom just like toilet paper. Instead here we are, almost 40 years and a powerful women’s movement later, and women… Read more →
History Suggests We Should Be Paying More Attention to Karen Pence
As the U.S. descends into unprecedented political territory with investigations into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia, pundits are scrambling to understand just what Trump is thinking. But history suggests that to understand Trump, we need to look beyond the usual cast of characters and consider some unlikely members of his inner circle. Chief among… Read more →
What Lies Beneath: The Handmaid’s Tale in Trump’s America
I first came across Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale in my junior year of college, when it was assigned for my feminist theory class. I didn’t know much about the novel, but I remember that the professor emphasized how relevant the book’s message was in 1985, when it was first published; in 1990, when… Read more →
Sunday Morning Medicine
A weekly check-up of gender, medicine, and history in the news The WWII love letters between two men. Mending the broken faces of the Civil War. Meet Florence Nightingale, queer statistician. What was life like for women in the Viking Age? The tragic lessons of cinema’s first gay love story. Fascinating vintage photographs of grocery… Read more →
Sunday Morning Medicine
A weekly check-up of gender, medicine, and history in the news Punk rock and public history. Phrenology and the Civil War. Cough killer’s secret ingredient. Child stealing in Victorian Scotland. Trump, Charlemagne, and nostalgia. What doctors can learn from looking at art. The casualties of women’s war on body hair. The legacy of Invasion of the… Read more →