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Gender & Sexuality

Secularism’s Saints

Two recent books about Mormon women highlight the success of the church in redefining itself as a modern liberal religion. But to become that, the Latter-day Saints dramatically reworked both their theology and history.

Peter Coviello

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Gender & Sexuality

Gender & Sexuality, Science & Nature

Science Won't Settle Trans Rights

Appeals to the biological facts conceal a deeper contest over political equality—and scientific authority itself.

Anne Fausto-Sterling

Gender & Sexuality

Who Is an Ally?

Before allies were included in the LGBT movement, they had never been afforded equal footing within a social justice movement. But is this an effective strategy for building solidarity?

Micki McElya

Gender & Sexuality, Law & Justice

‘Flexible’ Family Leave Is Lousy Feminism

Balancing work-life pressures is often considered the holy grail, but men can still opt out of these policies. To move the needle on gender inequality, the state needs to take more coercive action. 

Gina Schouten

Gender & Sexuality

What’s Wrong with Queer History?

In our search for a useful past, we need to be careful whom we name as the heroes of queer history.

Samuel Clowes Huneke

Gender & Sexuality, Reading Lists

Stonewall At Fifty

A gay liberation reading list. 

Rosie Gillies, Boston Review

Gender & Sexuality

Pleasure and Danger

Linda Hirshman’s new book "Reckoning" poses a false dichotomy between two kinds of feminism: those fighting for sexual liberation and those fighting for equality. We don’t have to give up one for the sake of the other.

Judith Levine

Gender & Sexuality

Is Pete Buttigieg the Face of Stonewall?

The press has crowned Buttigieg the inheritor of Stonewall’s legacy, but this doesn’t square with what we know of Stonewall activists and the world they hoped to create.

Micki McElya

Gender & Sexuality, Science & Nature

Who's Your Daddy?

The meaning of fatherhood remains elusive, even in the age of DNA-based paternity testing.

Nara Milanich

Gender & Sexuality, Reading Lists

Sex Work Is Work

—and why consent isn’t the same thing as good sex. An International Whores Day reading list.

Rosie Gillies, Boston Review

Gender & Sexuality

Toward a Democratic Hedonism

Debate over Title IX affirmative consent standards has assumed that consent is the best basis for a feminist sexual politics. But what if it isn’t?

Joseph J. Fischel

Gender & Sexuality, Reading Lists

Abortion’s Past and Future

“I was a teenager back then, pregnant and desperate. Too terrified to make the midnight trip to the back alley.”

Matt Lord, Boston Review

Gender & Sexuality

Gay Liberation Behind the Iron Curtain

A gay golden age in East Germany reveals that Soviet politics were more dynamic than we admit—and that gay rights has less to do with democracy than we tend to assume.

Samuel Clowes Huneke

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