Angela Franks

Sometimes life is stranger than art. Suppose you were a novelist, and your book's protagonist is the genderqueer founder of a web start-up who calls herself Sebastian. Suppose the novel charts this character’s further transformation into a stay-at-home mom now going by her birth name of Mary and . . . . Continue Reading »

A Berkeley student approaches two older women. She has a flier in her hand. “Hey, happy No-Pants Day!” she exclaims, in the state of undress to match her words. One woman waves her off. The other is Judith Butler, perhaps the most famous theoretician of gender and its undoing. Butler laughs and . . . . Continue Reading »

In the late 1960s, a sociologist described French theorist ­Michel Foucault (1926–1984) as “a sort of frail, gnarled samurai who was dry and hieratic, who had the eyebrows of an albino and a somewhat sulfurous charm, and whose avid and affable curiosity intrigued everyone.” Claude Mauriac, . . . . Continue Reading »

Andrea Long Chu, a biological male, explained in a 2018 op-ed for the New York Times why he desired radical surgery that would equip him with ersatz female genitalia. Chu was on estrogen and had already been castrated. He wrote: Next Thursday, I will get a vagina. The procedure will last . . . . Continue Reading »

R. Marie Griffith's work is well researched, but conceptually thin. Continue Reading »