Katherine Franke is a Professor of Law and Director of the Gender and Sexuality Law Program at Columbia Law School. She teaches courses in gender equality, police brutality, sexuality and queer legal theory. Her research has focused on gender and racial equality and well as the regulation of sexuality in domestic, transnational and international contexts. Her website is: http://www2.law.columbia.edu/faculty_franke/index.htm, information about the Gender and Sexuality Law Program is at http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/gendersexualitylaw/, and the Program's blog is: http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/genderandsexualitylawblog/.
Male athletes–think Armstrong, Phelps, jockeys–have “physical traits” considered responsible for superior performance, while elite female athletes are increasingly being tested and “treated” for “Disorders of Sexual Development.”
Just as it is wrong to make better health care available only to those who can afford it, so too, it is wrong to make coverage contingent on a life that looks like the Brady Bunch. Good health care should not depend on wealth or hetero-patriarchy.
When South African athlete Caster Semenya won the 800 meter track competition last month in Berlin, some observers questioned Semenya’s “real” sex and she was forced to undergo testing.
In the intervening almost 20 years since David Souter was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Bush the First, much has changed. Let’s hope that the issue of the nominee’s personal life is one of them.
The White House’s appointment of Luis de Baca to be the head of the Trafficking In Persons office suggests that it appreciates the importance of a harm reduction approach to the problem of trafficking.
Should the Army have exempted a mother from active-duty service because she has two young children, when her husband could have cared for them?
Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano and her team are important players in setting a new agenda for fighting human trafficking. But we have reason to be concerned about how they’ll do it.
