Comprendiendo el deseo femenino

Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire
By Lisa M. Diamond
Harvard University Press
352pp
£18.95

17 April 2008

How important are sexual attraction, desire and love in shaping our identities? How fixed are our sexual identities? How much choice do we really have in identifying our sexual orientation(s)? And how can we disentangle the biological, psychological and social contexts of our lives to answer these questions successfully? These are among the many problems that Lisa Diamond sets out to answer in Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire.

Demonstrating equal awareness and sympathy for evidence from genetics, endocrinology, neurology, developmental and evolutionary psychology and social constructionist/feminist perspectives, Diamond also provides a balanced and informed critique of the methodological conduct of previous contributions to the relevant debates. That she opted for a ten-year longitudinal study using in-depth interviews with a self-identified “sexual minority” and heterosexual young women, using extracts from these interviews to support her argument, makes a pleasing change from the more typical surveys or experiments that comprise the majority of research literature on human sexuality.

Cine porno trans

The New Wave of Trans Cinema
The latest transporn breaks down both boundaries and inhibitions
by Tristan Taormino
April 8th, 2008 12:00 AM

I spent my weekend watching transpeople fuck on film. A lot. OK, a lot is a relative term. I mean it took up a chunk of time, but there’s not exactly an abundance of independently produced tranny porn around. In fact, there’s a big disparity within the genre that breaks down by (what else?) gender. Most porn featuring transwomen is slick, heterocentric, and all about fetishizing “chicks with dicks”—it occupies a comfortable, profitable niche in the mainstream adult-film industry. Most porn featuring transmen and other genderqueers is homemade, do-it-yourself, grassroots fare that’s rough around the edges and self-distributed. (Buck Angel is the major exception to this rule—much of his work has mainstream distribution and acknowledgement.) It’s queer, genderfucking, community-based, and political. That’s what was in my DVD player.

Couch Surfers is the second movie from San Francisco–based Trannywood Pictures (trannywoodpictures.com), a project of Brazen Garage Squad, which also owns Eros, the Bay Area’s well-known sex club for men, and one of the few bathhouses in the country that welcomes transmen. The film was shot at Eros, and about half the people involved are current or former employees. As soon as you open the DVD case, it’s clear that this company is working on an entirely different model: How many pornos do you know that come with educational literature? Trannywood’s first production, Cubbyholes, included a well-written booklet on safer sex for transguys; Couch Surfers comes with A First-Timer’s Guide to Playing With Transguys, a succinct, helpful little missive with tips on how to get down with a transmasculine person.

El descubrimiento del espíritu

El descubrimiento del espíritu
Bruno Snell. Trad. de J. Fontcuberta
Acantilado. Barcelona, 2008. 534 páginas, 29 euros

Lecturas como ésta vuelven innecesaria la ficción. También la filología griega puede ser inmensamente seductora. Quienes aman el mundo grecolatino están de fiesta. Un libro así actúa como imán sobre nuestras manos. Quien lo inicia no puede abandonarlo. Todo comienza con un fascinante acercamiento a Homero. El gran filólogo alemán se limita a constatar dos evidencias: en las grandes epopeyas homéricas no existe el alma ni el espíritu. Tampoco el cuerpo. Algo no existe si no puede reconocerse su existencia. Es postulado filológico el berkeleyano esse est percipi. Algo es, existe o se da si es posible percatarse de ello: si se tiene conciencia de esa cosa; si se la puede nombrar.

Homero no podía nombrar el cuerpo. La palabra sôma no significa cuerpo. Corremos siempre el fatal riesgo de confundir el lenguaje homérico con la lengua griega del siglo V. El vocabulario de los trágicos o de Heráclito nada tiene que ver con el homérico. Cuerpo, sôma, significa en Homero cuerpo muerto. Cadáver. Como si sólo en su forma inerte, sustraído el hálito vital, fuese el cuerpo cuerpo. Como si tan sólo en su presencia cadavérica compareciese unificado. En vida lo que desde los pitagóricos llamamos cuerpo no posee palabra alguna. O mejor, tres palabras se reparten la expresión. Palabras que aluden a miembros más o menos coordinados en movimiento.

Lo mismo el alma. No existe, no se da, no puede ser nombrada. Psyche en Homero es principio vital. La propia palabra significa en su etimología hálito. Alude a la respiración. Se reparte su significado con el célebre thymos, tan relevante en Platón. En Homero alude vagamente a un órgano de emociones y sentimientos diversos. Y Noús significa tan sólo percepción intuitiva, inteligencia espontánea, algo relativo al percatarse (ni por asomo nada que implique razonamiento e inferencia).

¿Cuándo, cómo, de qué modo se produce el descubrimiento del alma, del mundo interior, de lo que posteriormente se llamará Espíritu (desde el estoicismo hasta el idealismo)? Aquí aparece la genial intervención de este filólogo especializado en lírica griega. El alma no la descubre la religión órfica, pitagórica, mistérica, eleusina, coribántica (como puede pensarse siguiendo a Edwin Rhode, o al propio Werner Jaeger).

Es una mujer quien inventa el alma. Es una mujer quien descubre el mundo interior. Es una mujer quien desgaja emociones y sentimientos en el sentido en que aun hoy los reconocemos. Sabe complacerse en las cuitas de amor. Reconoce en ella el principio lírico en su quintaesencia. Eso sucede mucho antes de la “revolución psíquica del siglo XII” de que habla en su célebre libro Denis de Rougemont. Antes de trovadores y troveros. Antes de la materia de Bretaña. O de Tristan et Iseult. O de Minnesinger y demás cantores del amor desdichado. Una mujer, además, enamorada de otra mujer. O de otras mujeres. O que trae a Afrodita por testigo para que ese alumbramiento del Alma se produzca. En su natal isla de Lesbos ejerce su papel de partera de la lírica. Da un paso de gigante en relación a Baquílides. O a los primitivos Arquíloco y Tirteo. Prepara el terreno al gran Píndaro. Deja el camino expedito a los grandes trágicos y a los filósofos.

Mujeres bisexuales en el siglo XXI

Bisexual Women in the 21st Century

This book marks a new chapter in research by and about bisexual women.

By Amy Andre

In Bisexual Women in the Twenty-First Century (2003), editor Dawn Atkins, bi-academician extraordinaire, offers readers a collection of some of the finest research coming out of the bisexual academic community in the last few years. In each chapter contributing authors focus on a different element of the experience of bi women. Part of the book’s power and appeal comes from the fact that most of the researchers are bi women themselves, representing viewpoints from diverse members of bi communities. This is a key feature of the book: analysis of the bi women’s community is being conducted by its own members.

Writing styles vary from informal to highly academic, but there is a little (or a lot; see Elizabeth Whitney’s essay “Cyborgs Among Us: Performing Liminal States of Sexuality”) of each author’s personality in every piece. Certainly, each woman touches on the way in which her research resonates personally. In connecting with her research in this intimate way, each author connects with the audience as well. It is clear that this book was written for bisexual women, by bisexual women, and about bisexual women’s lived experiences. As a bisexual woman, student, educator, and researcher, I saw myself in every page of the book, even as I, at times, disagreed with an author’s analysis or conclusions.

The book covers a wide variety of topics, including: the ways in which bi women define “bisexuality” as a word and concept; relationships between various members of the LGBT community; the experiences of bi women in intimate partnerships with men; the role of bi women in sex work communities; analyses of bi women in film and literature; a bi women’s community in England; the difference between queer theory and bisexual theory; and much, much more.

Historia del lesbianismo en Gran Bretaña

Women aloud

Rebecca Jennings’s A Lesbian History of Britain is full of brave and desperate women. For how long gay women will continue to be silenced or censored, asks Margaret Reynolds
Margaret Reynolds
Saturday December 15, 2007

A Lesbian History of Britain: Love and Sex Between Women Since 1500
by Rebecca Jennings
227pp, Greenwood World Publishing, £18.95

My favourite coming-out story is told by a friend who decided that it was time she spoke to her family. So she sat Mum and Dad down on the sofa and began. After a bit her father raised his hand: “OK, OK - You don’t need to go on. I understand. I’ve read How Deep Is My Well?”

It’s funny, but it’s serious too. Because this anecdote suggests some of the popular perceptions about lesbians: father would prefer not to speak their name, but he still has some notion of a public history, and yet muddles up Radclyffe Hall’s notorious title with a prurient Freudian slip. The myths of lesbian life are many. From the legend of Queen Victoria’s view that it didn’t exist, to the stereotype of the hairy-legged, man-hating butch, they are also at the extremes.

Rebecca Jennings’s serious and sensible book rejects the crude and salacious versions, but she also explains and counteracts the silences. For those familiar with queer history there will be little that is new here. But in recent years a great deal of scholarly work has been devoted to seeking out the traces of lesbian existence and tracking the varied manifestations that marked out different historical and cultural contexts. Jennings succeeds in synthesising all of this and in making clear the complicated interaction between what may, or may not have happened “then” and the political motives (or wishful thinking) of historians writing from the perspective of “now”.

Maridos y esposas

LRB 13 December 2007 Terry Castle

Husbands and Wives
Terry Castle

* Don’t Kiss Me: The Art of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore edited by Louise Downie

* Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice by Janet Malcolm
First, a somewhat spittle-laden squawk: how one positively slavers for a good biography of the astonishing French artist known as Claude Cahun (1894-1954). Mention her in conversation and you are likely to draw a puzzled ‘Claude who?’ even from otherwise predatory culture vultures. In my own case – it’s true – certain vile French diphthongs may be part of the problem: the phonetic distinctions between Cahun, Caen, Caïn, Cannes, Cohn, canne, cane, cagne, camp, cône and con remain, sadly, a perpetual trial. Yet it’s also undeniable: though one of the most extraordinary personalities associated with both the French Surrealist movement and the Resistance, Cahun is still scarcely known to an English-speaking public.

Which isn’t to say she has languished in utter obscurity. In the baleful little world of academic ‘gender studies’ (strap-ons and piercings strongly advised) the cross-dressing Cahun has been a cult heroine for a decade or two. Nor is it difficult to see why. She was an inventive and fearless early practitioner of set-up photography: the self-conscious ‘staging’ of images in order to produce a theatrical or conceptual effect. And as with many other set-up specialists, Cahun was her own favourite subject. Though it’s hard to say if she knew the work of either, two of her most notorious precursors in this regard were the Countess of Castiglione (1837-99), a wealthy and eccentric Franco-Italian narcissist who hired a studio photographer to take scores of secret pictures of her in bizarre poses and costumes, and the Stieglitz associate F. ‘Fred’ Holland Day, whose semi-nude impersonation of Jesus Christ on the Cross – at once gauzy, grisly and homoerotic – provoked a scandal when he exhibited the photographs in 1898. The most prominent practitioner of the style in recent years has been the rubber-visaged, now slightly shopworn Cindy Sherman – known particularly for the gender-bending self-portraits she made in the 1970s and 1980s.

Something about the genre seems to invite sexual self-mystification, but Cahun’s photographic experiments are truly extraordinary. In a discomfiting series of self-portraits rediscovered in the 1980s – most of them apparently produced in the 1920s and 1930s with the assistance of Marcel Moore, the lesbian companion with whom she lived as a recluse on the island of Jersey between 1937 and 1954 – the wildly androgynous artist can be seen vamping it up in a boggling array of cross-sex get-ups. Long before dyke-daddy chic Cahun and Moore were mounting an ongoing private drag show with Cahun in all the starring parts.

Historias de transexuales

The Journal of Sex Research. Nov 1, 2004

A chorus of transgender voices

Finding the Real Me: True Tales of Sex and Gender Diversity. Edited by Tracie O’Keefe and Katrina Fox. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003, 293 pages. Paper, $17.95.

Reviewed by Dallas Denny, Gender Education & Advocacy, P.O. Box 33724, Decatur, GA 30033-0724: e-mail: aegis@mindspring.com.

Challenging our own sense of self, looking inward to find who we
are, using the process of autobiography that we know so well, is
producing some very interesting answers that challenge the very
binary structure of the complacent world in which gender was
invented, and by which it has become obsessed. (from foreword
by Stephen Whittle, p. xi)

Strange as it may seem, gender-variant people–those who were out of the closet, at any rate–made almost no contributions to the professional literature on gender variance prior to the 1990s. Exceptions that come to mind are Magnus Hirschfeld in turn-of-the-century Germany and transgenderist Charles (now Virginia) Prince, who presented at sexology conferences and authored and coauthored a number of articles in medical journals from the late 1950s on (e.g., Prince, 1957). With regard to transsexuals, there were no exceptions; not a single transsexual had written or edited a text or been even the second or third author of a journal article.

Transsexuals nonetheless made their voices known. They did so by writing autobiographies. Between 1952 and the end of the millennium, as many as 100 different transsexual autobiographies were published. Even as medical journals speculated on the causes of transsexualism and debated the advantages of different surgical techniques, transsexual men and women were revealing in print their innermost feelings and describing the steps they took to find comfort in their lives. And, in considerable numbers, the public was reading and learning about transsexualism and adjusting its attitudes.

Today, of course, transsexuals and other transgendered people have a significant voice in the literature of gender variance. Still, there is a continuing demand for transsexual autobiographies. They continue to be published in significant numbers (e.g., Boylan, 2003) and continue to influence public attitudes. This is not the case with non-transsexual transgendered people, however. It’s almost as if the criterion for acceptance for publication of an autobiography is a 3-hour genital operation. The personal stories of crossdressers and transgenderists–and for that matter, intersexed people–are rare.

Amigas íntimas: Mujeres que amaron a otras mujeres

Archives of Sexual Behavior.  Volume 36, Number 5 / octubre de 2007

Book Review
Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928
By Martha Vicinus, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2004, 344 pp., $35.00 (hardback), $27.00 (paperback).

Susan Mumm

Dean of Arts and Science, Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3M 2J6, Canada
While less original than some of Vicinus’ earlier books, this volume provides both a valuable synthesis and a wide-ranging discussion of women’s erotic friendships from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Written in accessible language, the book is divided into four sections: same-sex relationships that mimicked heterosexual roles, “queer relationships” constrained by social or legal pressure, intergenerational love affairs, and “modernist refashionings” in the fin de siecle and interwar period. In this book, Vicinus chronicles mostly well-known female pairings, and her argument covers much of the same ground as Faderman did a quarter century ago.

Given the often scandalous nature of the relationships described here, Vicinus, like previous scholars, is working with patchy sources: bonfires and excised letters feature regularly as heirs and executors struggled to hide familial shame. Vicinus returns to the problematic nature of her sources throughout the book, in some interesting discussions of the interpretative difficulties involved in the use of the surviving material.

Vicinus displays her typically careful research in the book; she is widely read in both the standard and more eclectic sources. Although all of the classics of lesbian history are listed in her bibliography, the key concepts of these scholars remain surprisingly unattributed in the text, making this read at times more like a popular trade book than the scholarly book it primarily is. The text is attractively illustrated with well-chosen visual resources and there is a useful appendix giving potted biographies of many of the people discussed in the text, although there are some peculiar omissions, such as Lucy Tait, who is a major character in one chapter.

Placer, procreación y selección natural

Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 51(2) 2006

Sexual Pleasure, Procreation
and Natural Selection
WITH PLEASURE: THOUGHTS ON THE NATURE OF HUMAN
SEXUALITY. Paul Abramson and Steven Pinkerton. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002.
The pulses of vigorous theorizing about sexuality that started up about
thirty-five years ago show no signs of abating. The first pulse came from
feminist writers, who insisted that sex be satisfying to women as well as
to men. Anne Koedt’s (1973) widely discussed essay, “The Myth of the
Vaginal Orgasm,” noted that penile-vaginal intercourse often failed to
give women orgasms. The essay valorized clitoral stimulation by a male
or female partner for this purpose, even when it takes forms that cannot
lead to conception. Soon after, gay liberation gave birth to “social
constructionism,” a perspective that theorized sexual orientation to be a
socio-cultural creation. More recently, evolutionary psychology has
sought to explain sexual behavior and interests as the product of natural
selection and sexual selection.
With Pleasure, by Paul Abramson and Steven Pinkerton (2002),
builds on the foundations laid by feminism, gay liberation and evolutionary
psychology, and thus gives us the opportunity of seeing the uses
to which these developments are being put in current theorizing about
sexuality.1 The volume is a chimera, partly an exposition of scientific
ideas, and partly an effort to persuade readers of the desirability of certain
social and cultural changes. Readers will find an abundance of material
on various aspects of human (and sometimes non-human) sexuality. The
authors not only summarize and sometimes criticize research and ideas of
others, but also develop provocative ideas of their own.
Central to the authors’ project is the goal of reconstituting theorizing
about sex so that its central organizing principle is not procreation, but
pleasure. This is a direction for theorizing that would have been unimaginable
fifty years ago. Social change of the last half-century, including
the widespread use and cultural acceptance of contraception, the more
controversial decriminalization of abortion, the large-scale entry of
women into the paid labor force and their consequent need to control
their fertility, and the flourishing of feminist and gay social movements
enabled this theoretical enterprise.

Hijos de homosexuales

A Helena, futura madre lesbiana

Estuve ayer dudando si colgar el artículo sobre los hijos de lesbianas. ¿No ha quedado ya claro que su adaptación es más que adecuada?¿Que no padecen “confusiones” de ningún tipo? ¿Que lo único que necesitan son figuras de apego estables y que les den cariño? ¿Que esto sucede tanto en parejas homosexuales como heterosexuales? ¿Realmente hace falta insistir en lo obvio? Sí, hace falta…
Después leer un extracto sobre las creencias (no llegan a pensamientos) del antiguo presidente del Gobierno, es evidente que queda una labor dura por delante. Veamos lo que dice Aznar en sus Cartas a un joven español (2007):

- Familia: hombre y mujer. Por mi parte yo creo, Santiago, en una familia compuesta de un hombre y una mujer, con hijos, y extendida a todos los miembros que por costumbre, por consanguinidad o integración, pertenecen a ella. Existen otras formas de convivencia, homosexuales o heterosexuales. Hay que respetarlo. Pero no estoy de acuerdo en que se considere cualquier situación equivalente a la familia de la que te hablo. Ni equivalente, ni alternativo.
- Hijos de homosexuales. No sé, y creo que nadie lo sabe, qué pasará cuando un niño o una niña no puedan llamar padre ni madre a quienes se dicen sus progenitores pero que en muchos casos no lo van a ser. ¿Qué idea del mundo y de la realidad van a tener unos niños así criados? ¿La de que todo es posible? ¿La de que las leyes pueden dar satisfacción a todos los deseos?

Los hijos de lesbianas están bien adaptados

Children Of Lesbian Couples Are Doing Well, Study Finds

ScienceDaily (Sep. 30, 2007) — A study of families in the Netherlands indicates that children raised by lesbian couples “do not differ in well being or child adjustment compared with their counterparts in heterosexual-parent families.”

“The findings in the Dutch study are identical to those in a very large number of U.S. studies,” said Robert-Jay Green PhD, director of Rockway Institute, a national center for research and public policy on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues. “Children do well in loving families, regardless of whether there are two moms or a mom and a dad involved.”

The study was conducted by Henny Bos, Frank van Balen, and Dymphna van den Boom of the University of Amsterdam.

¿Qué deja perplejos a los asesores sexuales?

Don’t Ask the Sexperts Dan Savage, Dr. Ruth, and others on what still mystifies them.
Compiled by Morgan Smith
Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2007

Slate asked seven people who earn their livings thinking and writing about sex what they’ve never been able to figure out about it. Some of our sexperts have academic backgrounds, some religious, and others have just logged a lot of hours talking to people about their habits and pleasures. They say there’s still a lot of mystery left.

Ian Kerner is the author of She Comes First, He Comes Next, and other sex advice books.
Why do most men still know more about what’s under the hood of a car than the hood of a clitoris, and why, in our post-Sex and the City culture, are women faking it more than ever?

Em & Lo are sex and relationship writers and authors of Buh Bye: The Ultimate Guide To Dumping and Getting Dumped.
We’ve never been able to understand why virginity is still defined strictly in terms of penile penetration. Does that mean all lesbians are lifelong virgins? What about gay men who just aren’t that into anal sex? (There are plenty of them.) And how is it possible that a straight couple can engage in oral sex, manual sex, mutual masturbation, and possibly even anal sex (if you believe the rumors about Catholic school girls) and still claim they’re “saving themselves for marriage”? Sure, intercourse’s role in baby-making elevates it a bit among sexual acts. But these days, birth control, family planning, and reproductive technologies mean that intercourse is less a means to an end and more a pleasurable end in itself. Add to that the influence of feminism and the gay rights movement, and you’d think that there’d be a few more seats at the official sex table. Of course, if we defined “loss of virginity” as merely “mutual orgasms,” millions of American women would become born-again virgins overnight. Any kind of orgasm? Er, ditto. While we’d hate to heap any more sexual pressure on women, we think a dedication to making sure all parties end up sexually satisfied should be the gold standard. Did you and your partner climax, or at the very least have a really, really good time? Then hand over that V-card.

Disputas teóricas sobre la transexualidad

August 21, 2007
Criticism of a Gender Theory, and a Scientist Under Siege
By BENEDICT CAREY

In academic feuds, as in war, there is no telling how far people will go once the shooting starts.

Earlier this month, members of the International Academy of Sex Research, gathering for their annual meeting in Vancouver, informally discussed one of the most contentious and personal social science controversies in recent memory.

The central figure, J. Michael Bailey, a psychologist at Northwestern University, has promoted a theory that his critics think is inaccurate, insulting and potentially damaging to transgender women. In the past few years, several prominent academics who are transgender have made a series of accusations against the psychologist, including that he committed ethics violations. A transgender woman he wrote about has accused him of a sexual impropriety, and Dr. Bailey has become a reviled figure for some in the gay and transgender communities.

To many of Dr. Bailey’s peers, his story is a morality play about the corrosive effects of political correctness on academic freedom. Some scientists say that it has become increasingly treacherous to discuss politically sensitive issues. They point to several recent cases, like that of Helmuth Nyborg, a Danish researcher who was fired in 2006 after he caused a furor in the press by reporting a slight difference in average I.Q. test scores between the sexes.

“What happened to Bailey is important, because the harassment was so extraordinarily bad and because it could happen to any researcher in the field,” said Alice Dreger, an ethics scholar and patients’ rights advocate at Northwestern who, after conducting a lengthy investigation of Dr. Bailey’s actions, has concluded that he is essentially blameless. “If we’re going to have research at all, then we’re going to have people saying unpopular things, and if this is what happens to them, then we’ve got problems not only for science but free expression itself.”

To Dr. Bailey’s critics, his story is a different kind of morality tale.

Gays en Irán

Ser homosexual en el país de Ahmadineyad

Gays iraníes relatan la dureza de vivir en un régimen que niega su existencia y que mantiene la pena de muerte para los ‘desviados’

ÁNGELES ESPINOSA  -  Teherán
EL PAÍS  -  Internacional - 30-09-2007

“Entonces, ¿yo no existo?”, exclama incrédulo M., un gay acomodado de Teherán ante la afirmación de que “en Irán no tenemos homosexuales” pronunciada por el presidente, Mahmud Ahmadineyad, en la Universidad de Columbia el pasado lunes. “Lo que debiera hacer es informarse antes de hablar para no meter la pata como con el Holocausto”, añade Taha, de los pocos gays iraníes que ha aceptado hablar con este diario. La discreción es la norma de supervivencia en un Estado cuyo código penal establece la pena de muerte para quien mantiene relaciones homosexuales. Algo que también ocurre en países aliados de EE UU como Pakistán, Arabia Saudí o Yemen.
“Ahmadineyad sólo tiene que darse una vuelta cualquier tarde-noche por el parque Daneshju para descubrir que en su país sí que hay homosexuales”, sugiere un estudiante universitario. El Daneshju es uno de los típicos lugares de encuentro gay de Teherán. Quizá el más democrático. A diferencia del centro comercial Jam-e Jam, donde el ambiente pijo hace que sus camisetas ceñidas y sus cejas arregladas pasen desapercibidas, en el parque confluyen chicos tanto del norte rico como del sur más modesto. A menos que alguno se muestre extremadamente cariñoso, la policía no suele intervenir.

Como en el caso de los heterosexuales, la República islámica considera inmoral cualquier muestra pública de afecto. De acuerdo con la moral que institucionalizó la revolución islámica de 1979, toda relación fuera del matrimonio heterosexual es ilícita y punible.

El arcoiris de la evolución

Nature 429, 19 - 21 (06 May 2004); doi:10.1038/429019a

Sexual diversity and the gender agenda

SARAH BLAFFER HRDY

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is professor emeritus in the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis, California 95616, USA. Her most recent book is Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection.

Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People
Joan Roughgarden
University of California Press: 2004. 472 pp. $27.50, £18.95

CHRISTIAN DARKIN
Rather than being one coherent book, the narrative of Evolution’s Rainbow shuttles between three interwoven agendas. The first is a passionate cry from the heart for greater understanding of sexual diversity in nature and greater tolerance for the many gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, transgenders and others who do not fit comfortably into male or female binary categories.

The author, eminent Stanford biologist Joan Roughgarden, who is herself a transgendered woman previously known as John, cites poignant case studies that illustrate the anguish leading up to decisions to switch genders. As one such transgendered woman put it: “I’ve laid everything I’ve achieved in life — job, relationship, family, health, future — on the table, and it seems fate will decide what I am allowed to keep, if anything. It’s kind of like starting life all over again.” Roughgarden even includes rare practical advice on how to inform your boss that you intend to switch genders without losing your job. Few readers of Nature will disagree with the main tenets of what is essentially a human-rights agenda, even if they don’t agree with all of Roughgarden’s interpretations or policy recommendations.

The second, and for me most interesting, book-within-a-book provides a cornucopia of information about sex and gender diversity across human societies and the natural world. There are vignettes about homosexuals in Ancient Greece, eunuchs in Rome, hijras in India, and Native American ‘two-spirits’. Roughgarden then takes us on a whirlwind tour through the zoological counterpart of human gender studies, introducing fish that change from females into males; intersex kangaroos that have a penis as well as a pouch equipped with mammary glands; kangaroo rats, in which up to 16% of a population have both sperm- and egg-related plumbing; intersex bears that give birth through the penis; hermaphroditic whales; and homosexual black swans that turn out to be more successful at rearing young than their heterosexual counterparts.

Invisibilidad lesbiana en las entrevistas de trabajo

Lesbians hide sexuality for job interviews
3rd September 2007

PinkNews.co.uk writer

Lesbians frequently hide their sexuality in job interviews by changing the way they dress, a study revealed today.

Many lesbians admitted disguising their sexuality by dressing ‘gender neutral’, and most thought they would never get a job if they dressed how they really wanted.

Researchers Dr Helen Woodruffe-Burton and Dr Sam Bairstow, who conducted the study at Cumbria and Glamorgan University, gave the problem a name - ‘My interview dilemma’.

They claim lesbians are caught between their need to express their identity and the pressing requirement to conform to societal norms.