Listening to Madness

Newsweek has run an article (May 2, 2009) on patients classified as “mentally ill” refusing to take their meds and making a case for “mad pride.”  You can read it at http://www.newsweek.com/id/195694.

Normalizing Gender for Olympians

An opinion piece in the New York Times by Jennifer Finney Boylan, “The XY Games”, explores the practice of gender testing in the Olympics to determine that female athletes are in fact female. The author discusses the history of this testing, its faults, and the ambiguity of sex and gender. Amongst some of the things that one might want to discuss is the following:

“So what makes someone female then? If it’s not chromosomes, or a uterus, or the ability to get pregnant, or femininity, or being attracted to men, then what is it, and how can you possibly test for it?