—Iran has the highest rates of rhinoplasties in the world. In China, surgical leg lengthening becomes increasingly popular. Extreme beautification goes global. [The New York Times]

—More schoolchildren are committing suicide or require reconstructive surgery, as U.S. bullying culture expands and intensifies. Both in the classroom and on the Internet, children's cruelty is becoming more violent and sexualized. [NY Daily News]

—Exercising for 60 minutes a day won't actually prevent middle-age weight gain. [Harvard Science, The Daily Beast]

—The real life morality play of Tiger Woods gets some new twists: $30,000-per-hand gambling stints with Michael Jordan, the cheap seduction of his mistresses, and an inner circle of enablers. [Opinionator Blog, Vanity Fair]

—A transgender woman is found dead and naked in her destroyed Queens apartment. [NY Daily News]

Tags: Bullying, china, cosmetic surgery, cyber-bullying, exercise, iran, Michael Jordan, tiger woods, transgender, weight gain, what we're talking about

—To the surprise of no one, South Korea’s Kim Yu-na takes home the gold in women’s figure skating. [New York Times]

—But do her boobs hurt? [Gawker]

—One female writer wonders whether it was a mistake to share custody of her child with her ex-husband. [Salon]

—Despite Asia’s longstanding preference for boys, a new study reveals that more South Korean mothers-to-be now want daughters. [NYT Motherlode]

—Fox News rabble-rousers Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck team up with country singer John Rich for a “Taking Back Our Country Tour.” [Politico]

—A transgender woman will host VH1’s new makeover show Transform Me.[PR Newswire]

Photograph of Kim Yu-na by Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP.

Tags: breasts, daughters, figure skating, Glenn Beck, Kim Yu-na, olympics, racist, Reality TV, Sarah Palin, tea party, transgender

We learned today that Rita Wilson is prepping an HBO series based on Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides' Pulitzer-winner about a girl named Callie who grows up to become a man named Cal. In a bit of fortuitous timing, Salon has posted an interview with professor Gerald N. Callahan, author of Between XX and XY, a new book about intersex people.

Intersex people are born neither male nor female; the descriptor is "an umbrella term that includes people with a tremendous number of genetic conditions, from those born with an extra X chromosome to those with overdeveloped adrenal glands."

There are lots of interesting nuggets here—for example, Callahan's description of biological sex as a spectrum, not a binary system. (Hence the piece's title, "We're all intersex.") That's a concept that many of us are comfortable with vis-a-vis gender identity, but applying that framework to the biological realm was a new notion to me. (Meanwhile, I'm not totally sure I buy Callahan's assertion that gays and lesbians "can fairly easily identify with the classic binary of male and female"—though I suppose that may be true when you compare them to intersex people.)

One thread particularly struck me, given our recent conversation here on Double X about Pop, the "gender-free" Swedish tot. Callahan argues that, if people focused more on the idea that, hey, genitals are lots of fun! (and not just baby-making tools), parents and physicians might be less focused on gender-assignment surgery—which, as he notes, can have disastrous consequences if performed too early and too arbitrarily. The interviewer, Thomas Rogers, asks a perfectly logical follow-up question:

So how do you think these decisions about surgery should be made?

This idea was introduced to me by Joel Frader [professor at Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine], but I think the best situation now is for the parents to be involved, for there to be a team of physicians—a surgeon, an endocrinologist, a psychiatrist—to be involved and for them to try to explain to the parents the most they can do in the most realistic way. In this world it may not be possible to raise a child without a gender, but that doesn't mean that surgery has to be performed. The ideal situation would be that, at a later date, the child could participate directly in the decision that might involve irreversible surgery.

That sounds eminently reasonable, but I would have loved to hear more about how, practically speaking, this "ideal situation" might be accomplished. As Hanna described in her Atlantic piece about transgender children, these decisions often take place under circumstances that are far from ideal.

Tags: gerald n. callahan, intersex, middlesex, salon, transgender

On Wednesday, Hanna asked "Is it normal to be transgender?" On Thursday, Adam Reilly at the Boston Phoenix asked whether being transgender is newsworthy. Reilly analyzes the coverage of Aiden Quinn, the 24-year-old subway driver who crashed a Boston train earlier this month, injuring 50, moments after texting his girlfriend. And hey, by the way, he used to be a woman. Reilly writes:

Given Quinn's admission that he was, in fact, texting prior to the accident, there's a general consensus that he's a dumbass. But there's no such agreement among the Boston media as to whether his switch from identifying as a woman to a man was germane to the larger story.

According to Reilly's story, WFXT-TV and the Boston Herald played up Quinn's sex change. New England Cable News dropped the detail late in its story. And some Boston Globe pieces didn't even mention it. As Globe Metro Editor Brian McGrory told Reilly: "It's certainly a provocative part of his personal history, but the question we asked was, ‘Was it relevant to the crash itself?' And we couldn't determine that it was."

In the spirit of letting the American Psychiatric Association's DSM, the Bible of psychiatry, define what's "normal," it's interesting to turn to another definitive book—the New York Times style guide—for its take on gender identity. Here's how the old Gray Lady handled it. Reporting on Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick's plan, in response to the crash, to ban bus and train operators from having cell phones with them while on duty, the Times never mentions Quinn's sex change. Apparently it considers that fact irrelevant. And the paper does call him Mr.

Of course, the kind of restraint shown by the Times and the Globe, while good for journalism, might be less good for humor. Excessive mentions of gender or sexual identity in a news story makes for some classic, great parody.

Tags: aiden quinn, boston, cell phone ban, deval patrick, mbta, sex change, transgender

On Wednesday, Hanna asked "Is it normal to be transgender?" On Thursday, Adam Reilly at the Boston Phoenix asked whether being transgender is newsworthy. Reilly analyzes the coverage of Aiden Quinn, the 24-year-old subway driver who crashed a Boston train earlier this month, injuring 50, moments after texting his girlfriend. And hey, by the way, he used to be a woman. Reilly writes:

Given Quinn's admission that he was, in fact, texting prior to the accident, there's a general consensus that he's a dumbass. But there's no such agreement among the Boston media as to whether his switch from identifying as a woman to a man was germane to the larger story.

According to Reilly's story, WFXT-TV and the Boston Herald played up Quinn's sex change. New England Cable News dropped the detail late in its story. And some Boston Globe pieces didn't even mention it. As Globe Metro Editor Brian McGrory told Reilly: "It's certainly a provocative part of his personal history, but the question we asked was, ‘Was it relevant to the crash itself?' And we couldn't determine that it was."

In the spirit of letting the American Psychiatric Association's DSM, the Bible of psychiatry, define what's "normal," it's interesting to turn to another definitive book—the New York Times style guide—for its take on gender identity. Here's how the old Gray Lady handled it. Reporting on Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick's plan, in response to the crash, to ban bus and train operators from having cell phones with them while on duty, the Times never mentions Quinn's sex change. Apparently it considers that fact irrelevant. And the paper does call him Mr.

Of course, the kind of restraint shown by the Times and the Globe, while good for journalism, might be less good for humor. Excessive mentions of gender or sexual identity in a news story makes for some classic, great parody.

Tags: aiden quinn, boston, cell phone ban, deval patrick, mbta, sex change, transgender

Judy Berman writes a great story today in Salon's Broadsheet about transgender activists fighting to remove "gender identity disorder" as a category in the DSM, the Bible of psychiatric diseases. The activists argue that they are making the same case gay activists made in the 1970s, when they fought successfully to get "homosexuality" removed as a mental illness. Only, as I wrote in a story earlier this year in the Atlantic, it's not quite so simple.

For adults, the activists' case seems fairly straightforward. Strong feelings of identification with the opposite gender recur throughout history and across cultures. Many transgendered adults suffer a lifetime of shame and heartache before they finally get a sex change. More social acceptance would do them a world of good.

The real controversy centers around children. Many children identify with the opposite gender at a very young age, sometimes as soon as they can speak. And a growing group of parents are taking their kids at their word and letting them live as the other gender as early as kindergarten. I met many of these parents. They are in an impossible situation, and doing what they think is best for their kids. I started out totally sympathetic, until I began to look at the research, both sociological and biological. Existing studies—almost all done on boys—show that the great majority of boys who identify strongly as girls when they are young turn out to be gay men, not transgendered. Since I wrote the story, I've heard from many older gay men who swear that when they were little they insisted they were girls. Does this mean gender confusion should be pathologized? Probably not. But it does mean that gender identity might be like all other identities: fluid, confusing, and not meant for a tidy box, of any kind.

Tags: DSM, transgender

Judy Berman writes a great story today in Salon's Broadsheet about transgender activists fighting to remove "gender identity disorder" as a category in the DSM, the Bible of psychiatric diseases. The activists argue that they are making the same case gay activists made in the 1970s, when they fought successfully to get "homosexuality" removed as a mental illness. Only, as I wrote in a story earlier this year in the Atlantic, it's not quite so simple.

For adults, the activists' case seems fairly straightforward. Strong feelings of identification with the opposite gender recur throughout history and across cultures. Many transgendered adults suffer a lifetime of shame and heartache before they finally get a sex change. More social acceptance would do them a world of good.

The real controversy centers around children. Many children identify with the opposite gender at a very young age, sometimes as soon as they can speak. And a growing group of parents are taking their kids at their word and letting them live as the other gender as early as kindergarten. I met many of these parents. They are in an impossible situation, and doing what they think is best for their kids. I started out totally sympathetic, until I began to look at the research, both sociological and biological. Existing studies—almost all done on boys—show that the great majority of boys who identify strongly as girls when they are young turn out to be gay men, not transgendered. Since I wrote the story, I've heard from many older gay men who swear that when they were little they insisted they were girls. Does this mean gender confusion should be pathologized? Probably not. But it does mean that gender identity might be like all other identities: fluid, confusing, and not meant for a tidy box, of any kind.

Tags: DSM, transgender

A few days late to this one, but author Jennifer Finney Boylan had a great essay in Monday's New York Times about how complex the gay marriage issue becomes one when of the partners is transgender. Because different states have different regulations as to who "counts" as male or female—i.e., whether the determination relies on the gender you were assigned at birth or the gender you self-identify with, and whether or not surgery affects that determination—the landscape can get very muddled very quickly. Boylan quotes a lawyer from a 1999 case concerning a transgendered woman, Christie Lee Littleton, whose biologically male husband had passed away. See if you can manage to follow along:

... Mrs. Littleton, while in San Antonio, Tex., is a male and has a void marriage; as she travels to Houston, Tex., and enters federal property, she is female and a widow; upon traveling to Kentucky she is female and a widow; but, upon entering Ohio, she is once again male and prohibited from marriage; entering Connecticut, she is again female and may marry; if her travel takes her north to Vermont, she is male and may marry a female; if instead she travels south to New Jersey, she may marry a male.

Confusing, right? Even Boylan—an incredibly lucid, intelligent writer—sometimes has a tough time pinning down these complex concepts into simple language. Originally I'd wanted to pull out this paragraph for my blog post, but then for the life of me couldn't understand the last sentence:

Gender involves a lot of gray area. And efforts to legislate a binary truth upon the wide spectrum of gender have proven only how elusive sexual identity can be. The case of J’noel Gardiner, in Kansas, provides a telling example. Ms. Gardiner, a postoperative transsexual woman, married her husband, Marshall Gardiner, in 1998. When he died in 1999, she was denied her half of his $2.5 million estate by the Kansas Supreme Court on the ground that her marriage was invalid. Thus in Kansas, any transgendered person who is anatomically female is now allowed to marry only another woman.

What does "anatomically female" mean here? Someone who was born female, or someone who was born male and has had sex reassignment surgery? After consulting with a friend who works at an LGBT organization on precisely these kinds of language issues, he confirmed that Boylan probably meant the latter. The fixation on surgery and genitalia as some kind of marker for what "makes" a man or a woman is inherently problematic, but it's not likely to go away any time soon—the concept is too culturally hard-wired for most of us to abandon completely. Until then, let's just hope we have more people like Boylan, helping us parse things out, one step at a time.

Tags: same-sex marriage, transgender