Have you seen the Summer’s Eve videos featuring vaginal puppeteering (by way of a talking hand) asking for more V-love? The videos promote using scented cleansing and deodorant products to freshen your vagina.

Let’s get one thing straight up front: Vaginas don’t need cover-up. In fact, douches and other scented products are more likely to cause irritation and infection. The vagina is very good at cleaning itself, so if Summer’s Eve really believed in its tagline, “Hail to the V,” it would leave our vaginas alone.

But making money off women’s insecurities about their bodies never grows old for Summer’s Eve. Its newest ads targeting black and Latina women play on racial and ethnic stereotypes in addition to playing on women’s insecurities.

So how do you point out the ridiculousness of this campaign? Imagine, as Stephen Colbert does, what would happen if men’s genitals were the focus of such advertising. Hail to our best satirists.

Boston area readers may be interested in an event happening tonight at the Cambridge Hospital: Mara Hvistendahl, author of “Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men” will be speaking about her new book. Mara will be joined by OBOS executive director Judy Norsigian, who will be highlighting some of the reproductive rights-related work of OBOS’ global partners and speaking about the forthcoming edition of “Our Bodies, Ourselves.”

The event begins at 8 p.m. and will take place at the Learning Center A/B on the 3rd floor of The Cambridge Hospital, 1493 Cambridge Street. Hope to see some of you there!

When discussing how sports benefits girls — which many of us are doing today as part of the National Women’s Law Center Rally for Girls’ Sports Day — I keep coming back to the idea of community.

While sports certainly has many individual health and social benefits for girls, it also gives girls a space to develop relationships based on teamwork and respect. Bolstered by their team, girls are able to step in front of their larger school community and exude confidence and pride that might be missing in other parts of their lives.

Girls’ relationships with that larger community, however, are often complicated when schools in underserved neighborhoods have trouble providing girls (and all athletes, for that matter) with a safe space in which to perform.

Here in Chicago where I live, Chicago Public Schools are struggling with many inequity issues. CPS is at the top of the list of schools against which NWLC has filed administrative complaints for Title IX violations. The district has a whopping 33 percent sports participation gap between girls and boys (the next closest complaint is for the Sioux Falls School District with a 15.6 percent gap). See the NWLC’s briefing paper (pdf) for more vivid detail.

But poverty and the constant threat of violence also play a big role in forming sports communities. A recent story by Lisa Pevtzow in the Chicago Tribune highlights the struggle of the girls basketball team of the Rowe-Clark Math and Science Academy in Humboldt Park, a neighborhood on the west side of the city. Because of lack of facilities, the team — along with other boys’ and girls’ teams at the school — have had to walk to a nearby YMCA to practice:

Keeping close together, the players make their way past boarded-up buildings, crumbling sidewalks and a gantlet of drug pushers and users who tug on their coats, grab at their equipment and hurl abuse.

“If we don’t respond, they call us names. It can be very scary,” said team member Ronye Scott, a junior at the Humboldt Park high school.

Thankfully, the school has just broke ground on a new gym of their own that should be ready for next year. But the past experiences of the students will most certainly linger — and act as a reminder of how a safe athletic environment needs to be a right for girls and all athletes.

Marlon Tobin, athletic director and assistant principal at the school, told Pevtzow some of those telling stories:

“We have to beg, borrow and steal space for our programs,” Tobin said. “We’ve already tapped out everything in the neighborhood that’ll let us in.”

Beyond causing inconvenience, the lack of gym facilities has created a significant safety problem, he said. A year ago, a group of Rowe-Clarke students were jumped on their way to play soccer. More recently, Tobin said, the school learned the hard way not to let the girls soccer team walk down the street in their shorts and jerseys, because they were harassed when they did.

“We tell kids to do the right thing and play sports, and now we have to tell them it’s not safe,” Tobin said.

Plus: For more reading about the importance of girls in sports, check out these posts compiled by the NWLC.

Our Bodies Ourselves recently received a wonderful picture of pre-teen girls watching one of their moms get a pelvic exam, complete with mirror and flashlight, along with a note about how the nurse-practitioner conducting the exam explained everything that was being done in simple, straightforward language.

As a way to underscore how much young women across the country are able to learn about their bodies through such critically important show-and-tell learning, we are inviting women to share with us (anonymously is fine) stories of how nurse-practitioners and other ob-gyn clinicians (including nurse-midwives, family physicians and obstetrician-gynecologists) have taken the time to teach them more about their bodies through use of speculums (some with flashlights built in!) and mirrors, participation in the “whiff” tests, and other approaches that directly engage women in the learning process.

In an era where the “yuck” factor is used to inappropriately encourage risky douching practices and use of scent-filled vaginal products that may be harmful to overall vaginal health, it is important to remember how valuable this kind of education during a clinical pelvic exam can be.

Moreover, clinicians who incorporate these recommended educational practices are helping to offset a conservative trend toward restricting information about women’s reproductive and sexual health. Access to books like “Our Bodies, Ourselves” is denied in some schools and libraries; self-knowledge is considered shameful or even dangerous.

Please share with us your stories as clinicians who provide such exams or as women who may have benefited from them. You can either add your story in the comments below, or email office@bwhbc.org. And feel free to share and re-post this call

We plan to post these anonymously on the Our Bodies Ourselves website so that young women will be encouraged to respond with a “Yes” the next time their ob-gyn clinician might offer them the option of seeing their own cervix or learning more about their vaginal secretions.

We would also welcome emails and letters from ob-gyn clinicians who might be able to cite articles in the medical literature that point to the benefits of this kind of education. Our mailing address is available here.

Thank you for taking part in this discussion!

Gretchen Reynolds, writing for the Well blog at The New York Times, reports that gender still matters a great deal in health research. It’s just difficult for some scientists to remember that.

Reynolds focuses on a pair of studies by David Rowlands, MD, a senior lecturer with the Institute of Food, Nutrition and Human Health at Massey University in New Zealand, in which he attempted to determine the importance of protein in the recovery from hard exercise. The first study, completed in 2008, involved only male cyclists and found that ingesting protein had a significant long-term effect on overall athletic performance.

After Rowlands published those results, which were in line with conventional wisdom, female cyclists asked him to include them in any further studies. To his credit, he decided to repeat the entire experiment again with the female cyclists.

The results completely contradicted the original study. Not only did women fail to see benefits from ingesting protein — their legs actually felt more tired and sore.

The reason for the discrepancy — and what role estrogen plays in all this — still puzzles Rowland. In any case, the bigger lesson was obvious: excluding women from research is scientifically unsound.

The danger of using male bodies to represent all bodies became very clear once again last week when Northwestern Medicine in Chicago announced a new formula for figuring out a women’s maximum heart rate, considered a critical number in constructing an optimum workout.

The traditional formula (subtract a person’s age from 220) has led some women to experience frustration and exhaustion from workouts that should have been exhilarating, writes Tara Parker-Pope. The new formula for women, based on new research, is 206 minus 88 percent of age.

The new formula will also more accurately predict the risk of heart-related death during a stress test.

“Now we know for the first time what is normal for women, and it’s a lower peak heart rate than for men,” said Martha Gulati, MD, assistant professor of medicine and preventive medicine and a cardiologist at Northwestern Medicine and lead author of a study published June 28 in the journal Circulation. “Using the standard formula, we were more likely to tell women they had a worse prognosis than they actually did.”

“Women are not small men,” Gulati added. “There is a gender difference in exercise capacity a woman can achieve. Different physiologic responses can occur.”

Next up for Gulati: an iPhone app that will make quick calculations using the new formula.

Plus: For some historical context, the Society for Women’s Health Research provides a brief outline of efforts waged in the late 1980s and early 1990s to require that women be included in federally funded clinical research. It ended in the NIH Revitilization Act, which was signed into law in 1993.

Several prominent blogs have recently covered the story, first reported by Alice Dreger and Ellen K. Feder at  Bioethics Forum, of pediatric urologist Dix Poppas and his research involving clitoral surgery on young girls and young intersex patients to make their genitals less “masculinized” — that is, less large.

The research, conducted at New York Presbyterian Hospital, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, is troublesome for a number of reasons, including lack of indication of an underlying medical problem. In each case, the clitoris was deemed simply  too large, whatever that might have meant to the girls’ parents or the girls’ physicians.

Not only are the surgeries, as well as the accompanying attitudes and ethics, hugely problematic, but there are also issues with the follow-up study, which involved applying a cotton applicator and/or a vibrating device to determine how much nerve sensitivity was retained. Poppas was stimulating the genitalia of young children for the purposes of research, and it’s not clear to readers of the related research papers that those patients had a clear ability to consent or withdraw consent or how the potential for psychological harm was addressed.

The ethics of this research and how it was approved in the first place are quite important. But here’s another issue to consider: The articles in which this research was described were published in The Journal of Urology, a prominent journal, in October 2007 (see “Nerve Sparing Ventral Clitoroplasty: Analysis of Clitoral Sensitivity and Viability,” and “Nerve Sparing Ventral Clitoroplasty Preserves Dorsal Nerves in Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia“).

They appeared online even earlier, in August 2007. The citations were included in the PubMed database, which is publicly accessible. So the news has been out there, for anybody to find and call attention to, for almost three years. But it didn’t cause alarm or outcry until Bioethics Forum, a project of The Hastings Center, brought the findings to the attention of a wider audience.

Another example of an awareness delay is the cervical cancer experiment in New Zealand, in which women with cervical carcinoma in situ were monitored instead of being fully treated (or informed of the lack of treatment), and many of them went on to develop invasive cervical cancer — most without ever realizing they were part of an experiment in the first place. (Here’s a slideshare presentation I did, explaining the experiment).

Initial “natural history” reports from this experiment were published in the medical literature in 1970, but there was little public attention or outcry until two women’s health activists published an investigation in 1987. In both cases, ethically problematic research was published but didn’t attract public attention or outcry for some years after the fact.

What can we do about this? Of course, many of us don’t have access to expensive journal subscriptions to read the full-text of such researchers’ questionable methodologies. We can, however, set up saved search strategies and alerts in publicly available citation databases (e.g., PubMed), and monitor the results for items that ding our warning bells.

There’s a lot of talk currently about e-patients (loosely defined as internet-savvy health consumers) with regards to researching medical conditions and treatments, but perhaps more activist-minded e-patients, and other online activists, should play a role in monitoring the broader biomedical research landscape. We know there are institutional review boards to monitor research on the front end, but what about research such as Poppas’s work, which is approved and published with little fanfare?

So, readers, what topics would you like to see in a search strategy set up to monitor these type of issues? What procedures or terms are always worth a review for the ethics and inclusion criteria? For example, I’d expect any research on prisoners should get a second look, and the combination of the clitoroplasty terms and the age groups in the Poppas citations might raise a red flag.

More broadly, how can women’s health and other human rights activists most effectively monitor the biomedical literature for ethical lapses and violations? I’m interested in hearing your ideas, and am happy to put my medical librarianship skills to work for better monitoring strategies.

Nancy Chodorow’s “The Reproduction of Mothering” was an instant feminist classic when it was published in 1978. One of the most visionary conclusions was her call for men to take an equal role in the caretaking of children. If they don’t, she argued, women would grow up with a distorted perspective on their own relationships with men.

More than 30 years later, Chodorow’s call appears as challenging as ever — at least in the United States, where parental leave is still unpaid (putting us behind 177 nations, including Haiti and Afghanistan, that provide all women, and in some cases men, income and time off after the birth of a child) and only 12 weeks long, which discourages even willing men from taking over child-rearing duties.

Four years before the publication of Chodorow’s landmark text, however, Sweden had already become the first country to replace maternal leave with parental leave, and Sweden has continued to break new ground by spurring a revolution in male attitudes toward and male participation in childcare. Katrin Bennhold of The New York Times writes:

85 percent of Swedish fathers take parental leave. Those who don’t face questions from family, friends and colleagues. As other countries still tinker with maternity leave and women’s rights, Sweden may be a glimpse of the future.

In this land of Viking lore, men are at the heart of the gender-equality debate. The ponytailed center-right finance minister calls himself a feminist, ads for cleaning products rarely feature women as homemakers, and preschools vet books for gender stereotypes in animal characters. For nearly four decades, governments of all political hues have legislated to give women equal rights at work — and men equal rights at home.

Swedish mothers still take more time off with children — almost four times as much. And some who thought they wanted their men to help raise baby now find themselves coveting more time at home.

But laws reserving at least two months of the generously paid, 13-month parental leave exclusively for fathers — a quota that could well double after the September election — have set off profound social change.

Bennhold goes on to describe the positive effects of this change, such as a lowering of divorce rates and an increase in shared custody when a divorce does occur. It has undeniably transformed what it means to be a man.

Birgitta Ohlsson, European affairs minister, puts it in the terms of an old feminist maxim: “Now men can have it all — a successful career and being a responsible daddy. It’s a new kind of manly. It’s more wholesome.”

For more on how father’s leave in Sweden came to be so popular, read this side piece on politician Bengt Westerberg, who in the 1990s “championed the introduction of the first dedicated father month — 30 days of paid parental leave that could not be transferred to the mother — to encourage reluctant men like himself to do their bit and overhaul Swedish society in the process.”

Despite the fact that Sweden and other countries are far ahead of the United States when it comes to supporting fair and equitable childcare, it’s important to remember that progressives in the United States have been fighting for some form of paid parental leave for almost 100 years.

Yes, 100 years. As Sharon Lerner reminds us in the Washington Post:

As far back as 1919, when the Model T was switching from a crank to an electric starter, the U.S. government came close to signing on to an International Labor Organization agreement, supported by 33 countries, that said women workers should receive cash benefits in addition to job-protected leave for 12 weeks in the period surrounding childbirth. That same year, Julia Lathrop, the chief of the Labor Department’s children’s bureau, issued a report on international maternity leave policy in which she decried the United States as “one of the few great countries which as yet have no system of State or national assistance in maternity.” She had recently returned from Europe, where Germany and France had paid-leave laws that had been in place for decades.

The entire article is a very enlightening history lesson — revealing the twisted politics that have held back justice and common sense for far too long. For more on that subject, check out Lerner’s new book, “The War on Moms: On Life in a Family-Unfriendly Nation.”

When Los Angeles-based artist Joanne Mitchell wrote to us with news of the removal of a gender-oriented work from the Bucharest International Biennale, we asked her to share the information with readers. Joanne’s piece “Our bodies, ourselves – the book, I mean” will be showcased as part of the organization’s 40th-anniversary celebration in 2011.

By Joanne Mitchell

The Bucharest International Biennale opened last week without “Tit for Twat,” a 20-year long, ongoing project made by a former teacher of mine, the artist Kaucyila Brooke.

“Tit for Twat” is a three-part epic that takes the form of photo montage, and re-imagines the creation story from the perspective of two lesbian protagonists (view it here). It is intelligent, challenging work, sweetly sprinkled with just the right touch of humor – exactly the caliber of work I aspire to make as a lesbian-feminist artist.

The work was supposed to have been installed as part of the Biennale at Bucharest’s Institute of Geology but was shockingly pulled at the last minute by the director of that institution.

Kaucyila has consistently challenged conventional thinking on gender and sexuality throughout her long and distinguished career as an artist and as a teacher at California Institute of the Arts. It is troubling that her work is being kept from view during this international event.

Kaucyila was influential in support of my project “Our bodies, ourselves – the book, I mean” while I was a student of hers at CalArts. She contributed a wonderfully engaging story about her experience with “Our Bodies, Ourselves” that I present in a video installation. My project tracks the history of the book “Our Bodies, Ourselves” and offers viewers an opportunity to engage critically with the history and trajectory of the women’s movement. I will be presenting the project as part of the 40th Anniversary Celebration of Our Bodies Ourselves in Boston in 2011.

Here are some statements on Kaucyila’s behalf:

Kaucyila Brooke’s “Tit for Twat” is a challenging piece of artistic literature about some of the most important topics affecting our humanity. It is a deeply thought out and literate investigation into the stability of gender categories and our deep mythopoetic narratives of origin. Some viewers will not like it, some will outright disagree. But these dissenters and others will all find wholly new dimensions of thinking about humanity’s fixed categories of being.

None of that can happen in the face of censorship, a form of silencing cloaked in cowardly evasiveness. The Arts are one of the very few global cultural spaces where repressions of difference may — and indeed must be — freely explored for humanity to find ways to move on, allowing discovery, discussion (however contentious), and progress towards a more tolerant world. It is a grievous blow to that future tolerance that the Bucharest Biennial has allowed Art’s precious freedom to be compromised in the interest of pathetic inoffensiveness.

- Ellen Birrell, Artist, Publisher and Editor, X-TRA, a Quarterly Journal of the Arts

Jacques Rancière claims “a new form of political subjectivity that would accept the point that we start from equality, from the idea that there is a universal competence – that there is a universal capacity that is involved in all those experiments and that we are trying to expand – to expand the field and the capacities of that competence.”

In “Tit for Twat” by Kaucyila Brooke, Madam and Eve are standing on the edge of human evolution, curiously embarking on a journey through space, time and history. Intellectually fascinated by the idea of “nature,” they decide to visit various historic gardens, to question the biblical assumption of heterosexuality (Adam and Eve), and to deal with their relation towards other theories of origin. Especially in a Catholic country, the piece is highly provocative but don’t we need provocative works in order to discuss future ways of living?

In our times of passage, a time that implies a certain chaos, structures are going to disappear and the new is not yet at the horizon. Especially in uncertain times, we have to open our minds, we have to be able to ask questions, we have to show critical works and we have to discuss them — but not to exclude them. No religious or political authority can provide us with a clear definition of meaning, or communicate a socially sanctioned aspiration for the collective implementation of a utopia or a promise of redemption.

Therefore, the act of censoring works (without even discussing it) is against society, is against all that contemporary art stands for today and questions the intent of the Bucharest Biennial as a whole. Believe in your audience and give them the opportunity to decide for themselves.

- Bettina Steinbrügge, Co-curator of Forum Expanded/Berlin International Film Festival, Associate curator of La Kunsthalle, Mulhouse

“Tit for Twat” will not be seen at the Biennale, but you can view images and text from dialogue balloons online at http://www.kaucyilabrooke.com. Please share this with anyone interested in feminist art and censorship.

View all Women’s Health Heroes. Voting closes May 14. Background info here.

Entrant: Kelsey Chapman
Nominee: Shirley Kailas

When I arrived at Kenyon College, in the middle of nowhere Ohio, I was another insecure freshman girl who hated her body and was afraid to speak out. Luckily, I happened to become involved with campus organizations filled with wonderful and powerful women who helped me find my voice and speak out against sexism and sexual assault, eating disorders and the thin ideal, and many other important feminist health issues. During this time, I met one particular woman who changed not only my life, but those of everyone around her.

At first I was intimidated by Shirley Kailas (left in photo), an outgoing, beautiful, smart and powerful feminist. She was the president of Epsilon Delta Mu when I met her, which, despite being a sorority, was one of the most active and most heard feminist groups on campus.

In addition, she was an important part of the Crozier Center for Women and the college’s women’s and gender studies department. I watched as she put together a “this is what a feminist looks like” campaign in response to sexism on campus, help organize Take Back the Night, and address sexual assault and eating disorders on campus.

It was not until I expressed my interest in starting a “Love Your Body” group that I got to know her personally. We began speaking about the increased amount of over-exercise and disordered eating on campus and decided enough was enough. The group flourished because of Shirley’s dedication and passion. She single-handedly brought Courtney Martin, author of “Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters,” to speak on campus, and over 200 people attended. In addition, she helped to lead and promote “Fat Talk Free Week” on campus and was a main proponent of Eating Disorders Awareness Week.

While her leadership in these campus-wide organizations and events is quite impressive, her personal influence is one of the main reason I am nominating her for this ward. I have watched her become a kind of respected counselor among friends. Women who have been sexually assaulted, who have developed eating disorders, or have friends with these issues, have begun to flock to her for guidance.

As an undergraduate, she has become a beacon of hope to women on this campus, and in her home of New York City — something that many of us cannot claim to have done in a lifetime. I have no doubt that she will one day be featured in the news for her accomplishments to women’s health, as she has already had a major effect on the attitudes and health of the women on Kenyon College’s campus. Thus, I nominate her for this award, to acknowledge what she has done and what she will do for women everywhere.

View all Women’s Health Heroes. Voting closes May 14. Background info here.

Entrant: Dr. Srividya Nair
Nominees: Dr. Nick Karras and Dr. Sayaka Adachi

A woman’s identity is indelibly linked with her sexuality; historically and currently, it is under attack in nearly every arena. We are left feeling inadequate and ugly no matter what role we are assigned by society. And yet it seems we are less aware of our sexuality and beauty now than in any other time. Told by endless number of pseudo pundits that we must look like her or have that body to be sexy, it is difficult to have confidence in our selves and our bodies.

The work that Drs. Nick Karras and Sayaka Adachi are doing as sexologists is profound and enduring. They have published a book, “Petals,” and an accompanying DVD that are transformative — not just in the realm of art and body consciousness, but also in medicine and health. And when combined with their counseling, their work truly has an amazing potential to change lives not just in the field of sexuality but also in the field of clinical medicine.

My life (amongst many others) has been enriched, and I have become more aware of the beauty of the female body by their work and their friendship. They deserve this award with no qualifications. Drs. Nick Karras and Sayaka Adachi have put the power over ourselves and our bodies back in our hands.

Ever wish you could meet Cyndi Lauper — or Tegan and Sara or Margaret Cho? Or ask Katha Pollitt or Kate Harding or Rebecca Traister to edit your manuscript? Or wear the iconic blazer Princeton Professor Melissa Harris Lacewell appears in on “The Rachel Maddow Show”?

You’ll have your chance today — but only today — to make these and other dreams come true.

Head on over to the Women, Action & Media auction, where you’ll find 53 amazing items, including:

* dinner with Jessica Valenti

* autographed guitars from Ani DiFranco, Aimee Mann, Emmylou Harris and Patty Griffin

* an original DTWOF comic strip by Alison Bechdel

* a customized recipe by Lisa Jervis

* lunch with Baratunde Thurston and a tour of the offices of “The Onion”

* Sarah Haskins records your outgoing voicemail message

* signed books and posters by the likes of bell hooks, Marjane Satrapi, Jane Hamilton, Suzan-Lori Parks, Jennifer Weiner and Venus and Serena Williams

* much, much more

WAM! — the annual conference turned national organization that is fighting for gender justice in media — is raising for money for its launch as a national organization, with WAM! chapters in all 50 states and beyond.

It’s a great cause — and you can do your holiday shopping. Seriously, there are great deals to be had. And no one else will give (or get) the same gift!

Bidding ends at 9 p.m. EST. Good luck!

New York Times columnist Gail Collins appeared on The Colbert Report earlier this week to discuss her new book, “When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present.”

in 1960, women were prohibited from serving on juries and it was perfectly legal to not hire women because of their sex. The book opens with the story of a woman who was kicked out of traffic court for daring to wear pants (and she was there to pay her boss’s ticket).

One of today’s biggest problems, said Collins, is that “half the workforce is female now, and we still haven’t figured out who’s supposed to take care of the kids.”

Colbert appeared shocked. “The women take care of the kids,” he said.

The reason, he added, is simply biological.

“I cannot produce milk. I’ve tried. It’s painful and it doesn’t work.”

Enjoy.

Under the unfortunate headline, “Which Side Are You On?,” the Washington Post has published an interesting article about the struggle to define gender and how that struggle has played out in legal cases around the country.

The article discusses the now well-known story of 18-year-old South African runner Caster Semenya, “who has been put through ‘gender verification’ amid suspicion about her muscular physique and low voice.” Testing was ordered after Semenya’s won the 800 meters at the World Athletics Championships back in August in record time. Though physical exams indicated that Semenya has both male and female characteristics, family members stressed her gender is not in question.

“This is a woman who was raised a female. She will always be female, no matter what people say,” said Semenya’s uncle.

Semenya’s case may be unique for the publicity it attracted — including embarrassing scrutiny and harsh comments from her fellow runners. Yet private battles are waged every day over issues such as sex designation on a driver’s license, or the legality of marriage when a person is transgender.

“These cases have left judges, doctors and athletics officials — those tasked with drawing a bright line between the sexes — struggling to find a reliable gender test, some trait that divides all men from all women,” writes David A. Fahrenthold. “But scientists say they don’t have one yet.”

That’s because “male” and “female” is not always an either/or classification. The story details the perhaps surprisingly high occurrence — one in every 100 people — of “disorder of sex development,” which refers to “congenital conditions in which development of chromosomal, gonadal, or anatomical sex is atypical.” Conditions may include androgen insensitivity syndrome, in which people do not respond to testosterone despite the presence of XY chromosomes. (The continuum of AIS is explained more fully at the Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome Support Group; here is AISSG’s U.S. chapter. Our Bodies Ourselves also recommends the Accord Alliance, which offers a useful glossary and identifies advocacy and support groups for specific DSDs.)

Alice Dreger, a professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern University, tells the Post that officials could look at whether an athlete was raised as a boy or a girl, or they could look at some laboratory threshold, such as the amount of male hormones in an athlete’s blood.

Then she delivers the best quote in the piece: “To me, it’s no different than deciding where the foul line is … The line is not drawn by nature, it’s a line we draw on nature.”

Gender, after all, is as much a social construction as it is a biologically determined “fact.” And it can be as much of a performance as it is an irrevocable identity.

A tangent: Visit Dreger’s website. She wrote a terrific “Media Advisory on Sex Verification” to help reporters understand the issues at play in Semenya’s case. It’s a very accessible FAQ that should be required reading for all. For more on the importance of language, here’s her summary of a 2007 talk delivered at the Kinsey Institute on the history and politics of the term “intersex”; the adaptation of alternative terms, including “disorders of sex development”; and the whole trouble with nomenclature.

As debates over sex and gender identity continue, the state you live in may determine your gender. The Post story includes these examples:

In the D.C. suburbs, for instance, many authorities have decided on a simple test: Surgery makes the gender. In Maryland and Virginia, for instance, officials will alter the sex on a driver’s license if presented with proof of sex-reassignment surgery. The District, by contrast, doesn’t inquire about surgery: It requires that a medical provider or social worker attest that a person has a new “gender identity.”

But nationally, legal experts say that some courts have balked at the very idea of a sex change. Some state appeals courts have said someone born a man remains so, no matter how their bodies have changed.

In one 2002 case — voiding a marriage between a man and a transgender woman — the Kansas Supreme Court based its gender test in part on . . . Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary. Male, the dictionary said, meant “designating or of the sex that fertilizes the ovum and begets offspring: opposed to female.”

By that logic, the court said, the transgendered woman was not female, at least not in Kansas.

“Judges are very anxious; you can feel their anxiety,” said Katherine Franke, a director of the Gender and Sexuality Law Program at Columbia University Law School. “They don’t want to pick a rule, because they know it’s arbitrary.”

Women in the developing world are the focus of the Aug. 23 edition of The New York Times Magazine.

The main feature is an essay adapted from a new book by Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff and former Times correspondent Sheryl Wudunn. Titled “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide,” the book and its companion website look at three major abuses against women: sex trafficking and forced prostitution; gender-based violence including honor killings and mass rape; and maternal mortality. Here’s the intro:

In the 19th century, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape.

Yet if the injustices that women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitical sense the opportunity they represent is even greater. “Women hold up half the sky,” in the words of a Chinese saying, yet that’s mostly an aspiration: in a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it’s not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos. There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. That’s why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution.

Change, however, may not be that simple. In a separate article, “The Daughter Deficit,” Tina Rosenberg probes why discrimination against girls persists even among wealthier, more developed areas:

To be sure, development can eventually lead to more equal treatment for girls: South Korea’s birth ratios are now approaching normality. But policymakers need to realize that this type of development works slowly and mainly indirectly, by softening a son-centered culture. The solution is not to abandon development or to stop providing, say, microcredit to women. But these efforts should be joined by an awareness of the unintended consequences of development and by efforts, aimed at parents, to weaken the cultural preference for sons.

Other stories in this magazine issue look at women and philanthropy; a Q & A with Secretary of State Hilary Clinton on plans to push women’s rights issues on the international stage; a reporter returns to a school for girls in Afghanistan that was the site of a violent attack; an interview with Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the only female head of state in Africa; a look at the “feminist hawk” position that advocates the use of force to aid women; and a poignant “Lives” column that concludes with an HIV-positive 16-year-old’s simple plea: a safe place to be a girl.

Plus: If you want to share the work that you’re doing to educate and empower women, Kristof is collecting personal stories on his blog that describe efforts by individuals and organizations worldwide. Some of the submissions will be highlighted in future columns; three winners will be chosen to receive a signed copy of the book. You can also submit photos that capture the theme of women’s empowerment.

Clinton Prioritizes Women’s Rights: “Clinton intends to press governments on abuses of women’s rights and make women more central in U.S. aid programs,” writes Mary Beth Sheridan at the Washington Post. “But her efforts go beyond the marble halls of government and show how she is redefining the role of secretary of state. Her trips are packed with town-hall meetings and visits to micro-credit projects and women’s dinners. Ever the politician, Clinton is using her star power to boost women who could be her allies.”

“It’s just a constant effort to elevate people who, in their societies, may not even be known by their own leaders,” Clinton told WaPo. “My coming gives them a platform, which then gives us the chance to try and change the priorities of the governments.”

Whole Foods Fight: I’ll be posting a more studious healthcare round-up, but for the moment: The New York Times Opinionator blog did a nice job pulling together comments from around the web about the anti-government healthcare reform op-ed written by Whole Foods CEO John Mackey that has some shoppers calling for a boycott.

One commenter recalls a food boycott from years ago that was more win-win: “I *loved* the Domino’s boycott way back when. Pro-choice cred PLUS I don’t have to eat cardboard pizza!”

Our Genders, Our Rights: The summer edition of On The Issues Magazine discusses a topic that the editors describe as “both utterly fundamental and wildly revolutionary: gender norms and gender identity.”

Among the many offerings: “How a Feminist Found Her Sexism,” by Helen Boyd (with image at left by Gavin Rouille); “Trans Health Care Is A Life and Death Matter,” by Eleanor J. Bader; and “Virtual Switching, or Playing Games?” by Georgia Kral.

The Gender Politics of “Mad Men”: Cheers to Feministing for making Mondays that much better with a weekly feminist analysis of the popular AMC series “Mad Men,” and to RH Reality Check for hosting an ongoing “Mad Men” salon. And don’t miss Crystal Merritt’s insider perspective, as an ad woman and feminist.

New Column, Great Advice: Jaclyn Friedman is one of our favorite people for many reasons. She runs the annual Women, Action & Media conference as part of her role at Center for New Words; she co-edited, with Jessica Valenti, “Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape“; and now she’s writing a weekly column for Amplify Your Voice, a project of Advocates for Youth.

Read Friedman’s “Open Letter to Miley Cyrus,” which should be shared with all 16-year-olds.

Ovarian Cancer Surgery and Fertility: According to a new study published in the journal Cancer, five-year survival rates for stage 1 ovarian cancer patients were the same for patients who had both ovaries removed and women who had only the cancerous ovary removed, reports the L.A. Times. Though ovarian cancer occurs most often in postmenopausal women, up to 17% of ovarian cancers occur in women 40 or younger and that rate is believed to be rising.

Plus: Chicago Tribune health columnist Julie Deardoff writes: ”One of every 1,000 pregnant women in the U.S. has cancer, a relatively rare but stark convergence of life and death. For these women, treatment is possible. But it comes with a host of terrifying decisions for the family.”  The story focuses on Sarah Joanis, who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer at age 26.

“Menopause, the Musical”: “This isn’t retro; it’s just old,” Anita Gates writes in The New York Times of the eight-year-old musical that, despite corny songs and stereotypes, has been produced in 14 countries and in more than 200 American cities. “Who calls menopause the change of life? Edith Bunker, maybe, on the 1970s sitcom ‘All in the Family.’ And she would have been in her 80s by now. Women who read ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves’ in their youth don’t use euphemisms.”

The musical is underway at the South Orange Performing Arts Center, and while Gates is clearly not enamored with the premise, she is a fan of the current staging and cast: ”And thanks to a shift from self-deprecation to self-actualization (and a few nice costume changes), by the end, against all odds, the show is actually exhilarating.”