Kudos to Australia for recognizing that some people might not be well served by a passport system that marks you only as either “M” or “F” and does so on...

No names will be named in this essay. Which I guess makes it philosophy. Technically I am trained to do philosophy. I got my masters and my Ph.D. in a...

Reading Frank Bruni’s recent review in the New York Times of Provocateur, a chic bar in the meatpacking district, got me thinking about an argument I’d had recently with a...

What tools does a university administration have at its disposal to shut up critics on its own faculty? The University of Minnesota wants to know. The university’s administration is exploring...

The first time the Dr. Oz show called me, I was simply too tired to deal. The story of Caster Semenya — the track athlete whose sex had been called...

I’d like to say I was shocked when a colleague sent me the warning letter from Eli Lilly relaying results of a French study that indicate a 30 percent increased risk...

Last week, the journal Human Nature published via open access an article I wrote following a year of historical research. That article, “Darkness’s Descent on the American Anthropological Association: A...

It was one of those messages I get occasionally, this time from a man who had suddenly realized we were just a few blocks away from each other. The writer’s...

In my e-mail in-box a few weeks ago, I received a polite message from a woman named Sarah Hoffman who was writing to ask why I was being such a...

I was invited to join the Seattle Growth Attenuation and Ethics Working Group — collective author of the lead article in the current issue of the Hastings Center Report — but...

(Garrison,NY) Just in time for baseball’s opening day, a series of articles in the Hastings Center Report asks what constitutes fairness in elite sports and what it takes to stop cheating. New...

More children than ever are undergoing medical interventions for nonmedical reasons. As parents consent to an increasing variety of procedures, the ethical and legal debate grows louder. These essays visit...

Cheating evolves constantly. Many athletes have been banned from the Olympics and other major events for taking banned substances. Gene doping is on the horizon. Questions have arisen about which...

Principal Investigator: Erik Parens Funder: National Endowment for the Humanities A child with a noticeable facial anomaly, short limbs due to achondroplasia, unusual-looking genitals, or some other norm-challenging feature may suffer as...

For those following the SUPPORT Study controversy, the New England Journal of Medicine published this week a letter to the editor organized by Ruth Macklin, Alice Dreger, and me, and signed by 45 “physicians,...

Australia passed legislation in September giving transgender and intersex passport holders the option to identify themselves with an X for “indeterminate sex.” Navi Pillay, the United Nation’s high commissioner for...