Gender & Identity

Our guest today is actor and transgender activist Laverne Cox.

Sante, who was assigned male at birth, says changing genders was a strange and electric idea that lived in the recesses of her mind for years. Then, in 2021, she was playing around with a gender-swapping feature on a face-altering app and she had a breakthrough.

Aidan Key explains why U.S. schools are seeing an increase in transgender students and how educators can respond to anti-LGBTQ curriculum measures. His book is Trans Children in Today's Schools.

Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson explains how new laws about teaching race, racism, gender identity and sexuality have created new fears and burdens in schools and classrooms.

In her new memoir, This Body I Wore, she writes about coming of age and into adulthood in an earlier era, when she didn't have the language or knowledge to understand what it meant to be trans.

Morris, who died Nov. 20, transitioned to female in 1972 when she was 46. She later reflected on gender in her memoir, Conundrum. Originally broadcast in 1989.

RuPaul is the most successful drag queen of all time. His reality competition series for drag queens, RuPaul's Drag Race, is now in its 12th season. He'll talk about how he began his career, broke thru to wider audiences, and how he uses drag to challenge preconceived notions of gender and identity.

In 2015, a woman named Dee Dee Blanchard was found stabbed to death in the Missouri home she shared with her teenage daughter, Gypsy Rose.

Sarah McBride was the first transgender person to speak at the political convention of a major party. Now she's the spokesperson for the LGBTQ rights organization the Human Rights Campaign.

Ursula K. Le Guin, who wrote popular science fiction and fantasy books from a feminist perspective, died on Monday at the age of 88.

Jill Soloway — who identifies as genderqueer and prefers the gender neutral pronouns they/them/their— created the Amazon series Transparent based on their own experience as the child of a transgender woman. Now they have a new Amazon series called I Love Dick.

Kylar Broadus is a lawyer and activist and the first openly transgender person to testify before the U.S. Senate.

In Susan Faludi's new memoir In The Darkroom she investigates the enigma that always has been her father, and considers the various strains of gender, ethnicity, religion and family that, perhaps, go into making someone who they are.

When writer Jill Soloway's father came out as a trans woman, Soloway says, it was a huge relief. And it helped her create the series Transparent about "boundaries, legacy, gender, family."

The new drama, which launches Friday on Amazon Prime, stars Jeffrey Tambor as a transgender woman coming out to her three grown kids. Tabor acts the role without any hint of cheap humor.

Modeled after the groundbreaking feminist health manual Our Bodies, Ourselves, the book details the social, political and medical issues faced by transgender people.

In Dallas Buyers Club, Leto plays Rayon, a transgender woman who is living with HIV and a drug habit. Rayon becomes an unlikely friend to Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey), a rodeo cowboy who starts smuggling HIV drugs from Mexico in the 1980s after he's diagnosed as HIV-positive and given just a few weeks to live.

Both Close and co-star Janet McTeer have received Academy Award nominations for their roles in the period drama. Set in Dublin before World War I, it centers on a woman who finds more freedom by living life as a men.

Husband and wife actors Felicity Huffman and William H. Macy have collaborated on the new offbeat feature Transamerica. Macy is the executive producer on the project, which features Huffman as a male-to-female transsexual who is contacted by the son she never knew she fathered.

Novelist Jeffrey Eugenides is the author of the novel The Virgin Suicides which was made into a movie. His new novel, Middlesex, is about a contemporary hermaphrodite. Eugenides' fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review and Best American Short Stories. He currently lives in Berlin, Germany.