Originally posted at Elizabeth Anne Wood Consulting Therapists commonly tell their clients that you need to name a problem before you can fix it, and this is just as true for social change as it is for individual change. Still,…
Yesterday, Pam Belluck of the New York Times reported that the World Health Organization is working toward removing transgender identity from the list of mental health disorders in its International Classification of Diseases. Removing it from the list of mental…
Today marks three years since my mother's death, and I want to remember her by sharing with you a piece I read at BedPost Confessions at Woodhull's Sexual Freedom Summit this past August in Alexandria, VA. It is adapted from a chapter…
Last week the internet was on fire with the question “what makes a woman?” Over the last two days, the case of Rachel Dolezal, has shifted the focus to what makes a white woman, or what makes a black woman…
There is no single answer to the question “what makes a woman.” Women are not born women. They are born babies, and many of those babies are assigned as female then raised as girls. Some are not. Some are assigned as male and raised…
Editor's Note: Recently on Sex In The Public Square I posted a critique of the criminalization of poor parents who fall behind on their child support. Today I've invited a dear friend, someone I've known since the 6th grade, to…
Yet the state, and many citizens, use them as proxies in the fight to protect systems of privilege and oppression. Walter Scott may have been running from Officer Michael Slager, who shot and killed him on April 4, because he was afraid of…
You know that I’m working on a book about sexuality, aging, illness, and dying, and that it’s a mother-daughter memoir, and so you know that issues about parents’ sexuality and the care that hospitals and nursing homes afford them are…
Looking for a court challenge to obscenity laws? Try Oregon, where the laws regarding exposing minors to obscenity are already so broad as to be hard to fit within the bounds of the constitution. How bad are the current laws?…
The recent hospitalizations and arrests at Wesleyan University, initiated by the indulgence in a club drug called Molly, is prompting a lot of self-examination on the campus, and I can imagine that much of that self-examination is at risk of…