Gender Roles & Politics

Gender according to, and as we experience it in, the wider world, in history and in the present, including in law and policy, all kinds of relationships and interactions, and the ways we may have grown up learning gender.

Articles and Advice in this area:

Article
  • Heather Corinna

Hanne Blank is not a virgin. (She’s almost 37 and she’s been living with her life partner for nine years – we just thought we’d get that out of the way.) But she is a historian, a writer, and an expert on virginity, having written the first-ever history of the subject, “Virgin: The Untouched History.”

Article
  • Audra Williams

I remember when I was seventeen, I tried on some new ideas. One of my ideas was that notions of “right” and “wrong” were false creations of society, and did not actually exist. Yeah, it didn’t make much sense back then, either.

Article
  • Heather Corinna

The more common meaning and implication of the term came to change around the 13th century and derived a sexual, sexist and moralistic meaning. With that change, the word now implied that staying a virgin until marriage guaranteed that a woman would uphold the family honor by passing from father to husband as an object that was owned – her virginity, her own body, was a thing of value that would be owned by her father, until such time as ownership of her virginity, body and sexuality would be transferred to her husband.

Article
  • Malcolm Gin

The author of this article is Malcolm Gin, who identifies as a 31-year old intergendered person. In this article, Malcolm explains a great deal about sex, gender, gender identity, and what you can do if you find out (or worry) that you might not be “normal” in terms of your own gender identity. Read on, and find out what it’s like to be a “boy” who isn’t actually a boy, and what life can be like for people with non-standard gender identity.