Free Republic

Imagine the heartache of the cis-trans male who opens up Facebook and realizes there’s no gender category for him to choose from. It’s only male and female. This is just too outré for words.  Doesn’t everyone know that gender is a social construct – that gender is malleable and may change from moment to moment? One could be five or six or seven of them before lunchtime and a few dozen more before climbing under the covers and turning into a butterfly, or whatever. Gender is not in the head, you know, it is not in the brain. You are...

Are you confused about your gender? You know, man, woman, trans, queer, neutral...and on and on. Well, there's good news for you people who can't seem to make up your minds. Facebook is adding 50 options to identify what gender your are...or, rather, what you see yourself as...or maybe what you think is hip. From Associated Press: "With a click of a cursor, Jay Brown in Cheverly, Md., went from Male to Trans Male. A few states away, Debon Garrigues of Asheville, N.C., switched from Male to Neutral. In San Francisco, Marilyn Roxie, formerly Female, chose three: Androgynous, Transgender and...

Female professional Iranian soccer players are to undergo mandatory sex tests to prove they are women. The country's covering body for the hugely popular sport is bringing in the sex checks after it was revealed that several top players were men.

The gender gap is alive and well in American politics. Indeed, it may be the defining characteristic of our political system as next year's midterm elections beckon. We're not talking here just about the well-established pattern in which women are more likely to vote Democratic and men Republican in presidential elections. That's true, but it appears to be only the tip of a gender-gap iceberg. On virtually all the hot-button issues that bedevil Washington today—guns, health, how to fix the economy, the state of the Obama presidency—the difference between men and women is striking. And it all adds up to...

"If men are obsolete, then women will soon be extinct—unless we rush down that ominous Brave New World path where females will clone themselves by parthenogenesis, as famously do Komodo dragons, hammerhead sharks, and pit vipers."

If men are obsolete, then women will soon be extinct—unless we rush down that ominous Brave New World path where females will clone themselves by parthenogenesis, as famously do Komodo dragons, hammerhead sharks, and pit vipers. A peevish, grudging rancor against men has been one of the most unpalatable and unjust features of second- and third-wave feminism. Men’s faults, failings and foibles have been seized on and magnified into gruesome bills of indictment. Ideologue professors at our leading universities indoctrinate impressionable undergraduates with carelessly fact-free theories alleging that gender is an arbitrary, oppressive fiction with no basis in biology. Is...

First men became enamoured with grooming regimes, but now it seems the metrosexual man has started talking in a more feminine way too. A new study has revealed that modern men are starting to ‘uptalk’ by rising in pitch at the ends of sentences. The speech pattern is associated with young women from southern California, notably Clueless lead character Cher Horowitz, but is now common amongst younger people.

OAKLAND, Calif. — The weekly meetings of Mouthing Off!, a group for students at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, always start the same way. Members take turns going around the room saying their names and the personal pronouns they want others to use when referring to them — she, he or something else. It’s an exercise that might seem superfluous given that Mills, a small and leafy liberal arts school historically referred to as the Vassar of the West, only admits women as undergraduates. Yet increasingly, the “shes” and “hers” that dominate...

Men and women are different. This self-evident and clichéd claim is no longer as uncontroversial as, historically, it would have been. According to the American Psychological Association, "Gender identity refers to a person's internal sense of being male, female, or something else; gender expression refers to the way a person communicates gender identity to others through behavior, clothing, hairstyles, voice, or body characteristics. ... Transgender people experience their transgender identity in a variety of ways and may become aware of their transgender identity at any age." This statement, which includes a reference to an undefined but apparently defining "internal sense"...

The principal at Marina High School in Huntington Beach had made a vow before one of his students – a transgender teen – was crowned homecoming queen Friday night. "If Marina High School is to make high-profile news during its homecoming week this year," Principal Paul Morrow said before the ceremony, "then we are proud that the message is one of equity and individual respect." Cassidy Lynn Campbell, who was born male but told The Times she always felt like a girl, broke down in tears during the homecoming ceremony at the school’s football game.

<p>Retail giant Toys R Us has agreed to drop sexist marketing and gender stereotyping of its products to girls and boys.</p> <p>The toy store has bowed to pressure from campaign group Let Toys Be Toys, who represent thousands of shoppers concerned with sexism in the toy industry and the impact it's having on children.</p>

(headline shortened to fit) The Standard hotel chain, which has locations in New York, Los Angeles and Miami, has come under fire for making light of violence against women in a new advertisement. The image, which was published in DuJour magazine, shows a woman in a short dress lying face down on a concrete floor, with a black suitcase on top of her. According to a writer for blog MakeMeASammich, the ad 'trivializes violence against women' by using 'victims of said violence as bait.'

...The DOJ has placed its imprimatur upon a fantasy involving a legendary creature: the person of one sex trapped in the body of a person of another sex... ...We have created a rhetoric of “gender identity” that is disconnected from biological sexual fact, and we have done so largely in the service of enabling the sexual mutilation of physically healthy men and women (significantly more men) by medical authorities who should be barred by professional convention if not by conscience from the removal of healthy organs (and limbs, more on that later), an act that by any reasonable standard ought...

Psych: Army Wikileaker had gender ID issuesBy Michael Fink The soldier who leaked hundreds of thousands of classified documents, may have done so because of a gender-identity crisis. That's what a psychologist said at private Bradley Manning's sentencing hearing. Manning apologized, saying he was dealing with a lot of issues when he leaked the material to Wikileaks. He faces 90 years for what's called the largest leak of classified material in U.S. history.

CHAPEL HILL — The governing board of the UNC system voted unanimously Friday to ban campuses from letting students of opposite genders live in the same dorm suites or apartments. The decision reverses a housing policy that was unanimously endorsed by UNC-Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees last year, and it comes just days before the plan was to take effect on the Chapel Hill campus. “Gender-neutral” housing was pushed for more than a year by UNC-CH students who said it would give some gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered students a place to live free of harassment. Opponents, though, didn’t like...

There’s a 50/50 chance that the Boston Common could become the stomping grounds for a group of topless women later this month. August 25 marks national “Go Topless” day, where women from dozens of cities across the country will bare it all in public—some risking arrest—to advance a woman’s right to walk around half-nude. The annual “Go Topless” day always falls around the time of Women’s Equality Day, which marked the passage of the 19th Amendment, in 1920, allowing women to vote. Now, the movement is trying to reduce the gender gap when it comes to accepting that females have...

Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine has a regular column on “Work Advice,” and this week’s topic was “Potty clarity at the office.” A reader complained that “Bob” at the office had decided to become “Barbara,” and began using the women’s bathroom (after a year using a one-toilet unisex bathroom). Since “Barbara” can’t afford surgery, the reader wondered how much time before the federal agency they work for can “take the position she is legally only a cross-dresser and have her use the gender-appropriate bathroom? We are at our wits’ end.” “Work Advice” columnist Karla L. Miller made a beeline for Mara...

I have watched the hype surrounding the latest birth into England's royal family with some interest. Not that I care one whit if the new baby is a boy or girl, or how much the baby weighed, or what names the baby is saddled with for the rest of its life. It just strikes me as humorous that so many people on this side of the pond would pay so much attention to something as common as the birth of a baby. Having said all that, I am glad for the new parents and wish Prince William and Duchess Kate...

Farewell to freshman - Washington State to remove 40,000 pieces of legislation of 'gender biased language'...but manhole survives This week new laws will come into effect in Washington State to form the final piece of a six-year effort to rewrite all state laws using gender-neutral vocabulary. The politically correct crusade will see terms such as 'fisherman', 'freshman' and even 'journeyman plumber' replaced with 'fisher', 'first-year-student' and 'journey-level plumber'. Signalling an end to hundreds of years of accepted language, the move will now see the state's copious laws, including thousands of words and phrases re-written at tax-payers expense.

Now that California looks set to mandate that transgender children be allowed to choose which bathrooms they use and which sports teams they join, it would seem an appropriate time to press for the purging of the remnants of a reactionary age. Indeed, now that gender is, according to the courts, nothing more than an attitude of mind, could we dispense with all the talk of ‘women’s rights’? Such terminology was minted in an era when the silly assumption was made that physiology and genetics had some determinate connection to gender. A good place to start might be women’s sports...