Changing Sex, and Changing Teams

By IAN LOVETT

May 6, 2013

LOS ANGELES — Not so long ago, Toni Bias dreamed of playing in the W.N.B.A. But after starring on the girls’ junior varsity basketball team as a high school freshman, Toni came out as transgender last summer, began going by the name Tony and started transitioning to male. . . Read More

Cross-Court Winner

Renée Richards (1934– ), from Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame.

By Emily Bazelon  Oct. 25, 2012

This piece comes from Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame, edited by Franklin Foer and Marc Tracy, and published this week by Twelve.

Before Renée Richards became a star of the professional women’s tennis circuit, she was a nice Jewish boy—the puritz, or prince, of her household. Richards was born in 1934 as Richard Raskind, known to everyone as Dick. The child of two doctors in Forest Hills, Queens, Dick spent weekends fetching tennis balls for his father on dirt courts by the Long Island Railroad tracks.

In public, Dick was a self-assured athlete, captain of the Yale tennis team and one of a small number of Jews picked for his fraternity. But he had begun surreptitiously dressing up in his sister’s clothes at age 9. In the privacy of his college dorm, he shaved his legs and disguised his genitals, urgently trying to give life to his female side. By this time he’d named her Renée, French for “reborn.” . . . Read More

When Talking About Children's Gender, Words Matter

Diane Ehrensaft, Ph.D.

Developmental and clinical psychologist; mental health director, Child and Adolescent Gender Center

 

1 March 2012

Over the last year, there is no question that transgender and gender-nonconforming children have become more visible in our media and culture than ever before. Most recently, a Colorado Girl Scout troop ignited a national controversy by stepping up to include a transgender child as a member of their troop. And a very unconventional young boy, Roscoe Kaan, who wears girls' clothing and wants to play Sandy in his school's production of Grease, is a featured character on the popular Showtime series House of Lies. . . Read More

Born This Way?

BETH SCHWARTZAPFEL

MARCH 14, 2013

Transgender activists believe that when children insist their birth sex is the wrong sex, their wishes should be honored. Dr. Kenneth Zucker disagrees. . . Read More

LIFE TIMES Boys No More

Discrimination against girls in Pakistan is so strong that families cross-dress their daughters as boys so they can move more freely about town 

MUDASSAR SHAH

FROM ISSUE #619 (24 AUG 2012 - 30 AUG 2012)

LAST DAY OF FREEDOM: Rafiqa Sayed enjoys her last day dressed as a boy, and plays with a toy gun. Her parents dressed her as a boy so she could go to school in Peshawar.For as long as she can remember Rafiqa Sayed has been dressed like a boy by her parents, she even went to a boy's school in Peshawar. She had grown to like being a boy, but last week when she turned 10, Rafiqa suddenly had to be a girl.

She is among many young girls known as bacha posh (girl in boy's clothes) whom parents dress up as boys just so they can move about more freely and go to school in the conservative culture of this arid and rugged border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. . . Read More

Gender-identity clinic opens for children

'What's hard for some people to wrap their head around is that this condition actually exists,' pediatrician says

March 24, 2013|By Rex W. Huppke, Chicago Tribune reporter

At about age 6, there was dissonance in Jae's life.

"I started to play with dolls and to do all these things that girls would do," Jae said. "But people would say, 'Why are you doing that? You're not supposed to do that.' And I thought, 'I'm just doing what I want to do.'" . . . Read More