I chaired a session at a conference yesterday, and unfortunately had to add these remarks to the traditional thanks and compliments to the organisers with which I opened the discussion: There are 22 panellists and moderators for today's conference, and we are all men. I see only one woman in this room out of more than thirty people. This isn't good ( Read more... )

Like a lot of people, I suspect, I was intrigued and surprised when this year's James Tiptree Jr Award was shared between Cloud and Ashes by Greer Gilman (who I once had dinner with in Boston, though she will have forgotten) and this manga by Fumi Yoshinaga. I was sufficiently intrigued at any rate to put it on my Christmas list, and my kind sister ( Read more... )

This is a book that I found very difficult to put down once I had unwrapped it yesterday. Mary Roach has written a hilarious account of scientists carrying out research on one of the most fundamental of human activities. It's something that most of us spend a lot of time (perhaps too much) thinking about anyway, but the stories of those who are ( Read more... )

A while back I noted the awful Langbehn-Pond case, where a dying woman's partner was kept from her bedside by a Florida hospital; attempts to sue the hospital for discrimination eventually failed. The story is dreadful and the hospital's conduct simply indefensible morally - as the judge pointed out in his summing-up: the defendants’ lack of ( Read more... )

Like a number of you, I imagine, I woke this morning to find news of the latest livejournal screwup in several places on my friends list. Users, we were told, were henceforth to be forced to specify their gender as either "male" or "female", with no allowance for those who do not want to be identified by gender, for shared accounts, for robots or ( Read more... )

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  Ask Nicola: trembling with rage
  Woman denied the right to comfort her dying partner because they were a same-sex couple
  (tags: sexandsexualityandgender ushealth)

1) If you care about my views on the politics of gender and sexuality, I invite you to run your eye through my livejournal entries with the gender and sexuality tag and draw your own conclusions.

2) I don't like loyalty pledges. dougs has it right.