Word: genderism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Ware is "transgendered," which means her mental gender--her deepest awareness of her identity--doesn't correspond to the parts she was born with. Though she has become an activist in the past year or so, Ware struggled with these feelings for years. Now, at 45, she is happy with her inner and outward selves, the latter feminized with hormones and women's clothes. Ware isn't yet "transsexual," but she does plan to undergo what doctors call "sex-reassignment surgery" when she and her beau David can afford it; it will cost about as much as their new Nissan...
Since transsexuals burst on the scene in the 1950s, when a G.I. went from George to Christine Jorgensen, journalists have periodically revisited the subject in tones varying from the dryly medical to the hotly sensational. But today many forms of gender nonconformity have actually become mainstream. In the past five years, several movies, plays, tabloid shows and famous cross-dressers like RuPaul have moved drag from the fringes of gay culture to prime time. Even Teletubbies, a show for toddlers, features Tinky Winky, a boy who carries a red patent-leather purse...
Less noticed, however, is that gender nonconformists have been working together, with some remarkable successes, to build a political movement. Their first step was to reclaim the power to name themselves: transgender is now the term most widely used, and it encompasses everyone from cross-dressers (those who dress in clothes of the opposite sex) to transsexuals (those who surgically "correct" their genitals to match their "real" gender...
Brown University settled a heated six-year legal battle over the equality of women's athletics last week, a feud that has drawn national attention to the definition of gender equality in sports...
...goods. A 1997 study commissioned by the advocacy organization Children Now and the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 71% of girls ages 16 and 17 said the female characters on TV were unrealistically thin; in fact, the girls chose males predominantly as the TV characters they most admired. Recognizing gender stereotyping is one thing, but successfully resisting it is quite another. "All the attractive women on TV and in the movies are skinny," says Rona Luo, a 14-year-old student at New York City's Stuyvesant High School. "It's not so easy to hold out and think...