[This article was first published on November 23, 2011 ]

My partner, Kaylia, has many friends who are part of the transgender community. These are people who don’t fit the traditional gender roles in that they are living as members of the opposite sex, are undergoing medical procedures to change sex, don’t find themselves fitting into either male or female sex roles, or are biologically not clearly male or female to begin with. The tendency in society in general (and here in Fresno in particular) is to treat these people with confusion, fear, and/or skepticism as to their gender or lack thereof. Natalie of the Skepchick blog argues , with a good deal of success, that this is due to a discomfort that people have with having their notions of gender challenged.& While I agree, I think that it also comes from a basic miscomprehension of what, exactly, gender is to begin with. Gender and sex are not the same thing, and this seems to be at the root of much of the problem.

[This article was originally posted on March 16, 2012 ]

So, the Blunt Amendment (full text here ) was voted down two weeks ago. The Blunt Amendment, for those not in the know, would have altered the requirements placed on employers that provide health insurance to their employees so that they would not be required to have insurance coverage that provided services that the employer or the insurance company finds morally objectionable. As spelled out in the amendment itself:

[This originally appeared on Anthroslug’s personal blog on April 2, 2012 .]

I loathe the term “the Friend Zone.” It is one of those terms that seems to get thrown around without much thought, generally by men as an excuse for why they have had little success with dating and/or sex. My dislike for this term comes from my often-stated dislike for sloppy thinking and irrational claims, and as such I am not going to get into a discussion of whether or not the idea of the Friend Zone is born out of issues pertaining to privilege or misogyny (besides, [more articulate individuals than myself have already done so]](https://morethanmen.org/posts/00516_nomads-of-the-friendzone/)). Instead I will explain that my dislike for the term and concept comes from the sheer idiocy of it.