The XX Factor: What women really think.

"We're All Intersex"

We learned today that Rita Wilson is prepping an HBO series based on Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides' Pulitzer-winner about a girl named Callie who grows up to become a man named Cal. In a bit of fortuitous timing, Salon has posted an interview with professor Gerald N. Callahan, author of Between XX and XY, a new book about intersex people.

Intersex people are born neither male nor female; the descriptor is "an umbrella term that includes people with a tremendous number of genetic conditions, from those born with an extra X chromosome to those with overdeveloped adrenal glands."

There are lots of interesting nuggets here—for example, Callahan's description of biological sex as a spectrum, not a binary system. (Hence the piece's title, "We're all intersex.") That's a concept that many of us are comfortable with vis-a-vis gender identity, but applying that framework ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)

He Had a Sex Change. So What?

On Wednesday, Hanna asked "Is it normal to be transgender?" On Thursday, Adam Reilly at the Boston Phoenix asked whether being transgender is newsworthy. Reilly analyzes the coverage of Aiden Quinn, the 24-year-old subway driver who crashed a Boston train earlier this month, injuring 50, moments after texting his girlfriend. And hey, by the way, he used to be a woman. Reilly writes:

Given Quinn's admission that he was, in fact, texting prior to the accident, there's a general consensus that he's a dumbass. But there's no such agreement among the Boston media as to whether his switch from identifying as a woman to a man was...

(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Is It Normal to be Transgender?

Judy Berman writes a great story today in Salon's Broadsheet about transgender activists fighting to remove "gender identity disorder" as a category in the DSM, the Bible of psychiatric diseases. The activists argue that they are making the same case gay activists made in the 1970s, when they fought successfully to get "homosexuality" removed as a mental illness. Only, as I wrote in a story earlier this year in the Atlantic, it's not quite so simple.