Here’s some gender material I have been saving up.

– A while back I linked to an interesting set of questions about trans people in the New York Times. That was just Part I of a series. Here’s the whole thing: Part I, Part II, Part III.

– Pauline Park give some interesting information about LGBT traditions amongst Asian and Pacific Islander people.

– Encouraged by their success with “Intelligent Design”, religious fundamentalists have set up a fake academic society of pediatricians to promote fake anti-LGBT “science” to schools. Mercedes Allen has details.

– If you are in the UK, there’s a new organization that needs your support: Trans Media Watch.

– Based on a simplistic view of mammal biology, people often claim that sex is intrinsic to all animals: your chromosomes determine whether you are male or female, they say, and you can’t alter that. Of course we now know that not all mammals, indeed not all humans, have such simple biology. Chromosome mix-ups are surprisingly common, and chromosomes don’t necessarily correlate with gender identity. But the system we use is not common to all animals. Insects have a different system, and birds are different again (Wikipedia has a brief and non-technical overview). And recent research has discovered that in fruit flies most cells in the body are identical, regardless of sex.