Author: TheGuardian

On October 21, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration was considering defining gender as biological and immutable – based on genitalia at birth. As a transgender individual, and particularly as a person who has been advocating for transgender rights for the past 25 years, this news came as a gut punch. Since 1995, I have been working to explain gender to anyone who will listen. My sex at birth was female, and I was raised as a girl. But in 1995, when the word transgender was still brand new, I came out and socially transitioned, beginning...

There is an epidemic of HIV/Aids in the United States, and the reason you may not have heard about it is because of who it harms: black men who have sex with other men. If white men were being infected at the horrifying rate that African-Americans are, it would be front-page news. When I give lectures on Aids, I will often tell incredulous audiences early in my presentation that one in every two gay and bisexual men in the US are projected to become HIV positive in their lifetime. Later, I tell them that, more specifically, the Centers for...

Photo by Gage Skidmore and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 Political violence in the United States has tended to come in two forms. The first consists of simply unhinged acts, like John Hinckley Jr shooting Ronald Reagan in the hope of impressing the actress Jodie Foster, or Timothy McVeigh hoping to bring down the government with a bomb. The second is more systematic and sinister: the violence used to keep down groups who threaten the social and political order. This is the violence of strikebreakers and the KKK. It is the violence that killed Emmett Till, an African-American teenager...

Donald Trump has attacked what he called media “hostility” in a speech to a campaign rally following a wave of pipe bombs sent to senior Democrats, prominent critics and the broadcaster CNN, during a midterms campaign rally in Mosinee, Wisconsin, on October 24. The US president, who earlier said at the White House that he condemned the attempted bombings and that a “major federal investigation” was under way, followed this with a plea for unity at the Mosinee rally. “Any acts or threats of political violence are an attack on our democracy itself,” he told the crowd. “We want...

November 11, 2018 marks the 100th anniversary of the official end to the Great War, later known as World War I. To honor the historical event, Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson has restored, colorized, and added voices to footage of the western front, bringing the soldiers unforgettably back to life. To mark the centenary of the first world war’s end, Peter Jackson has created a visually staggering thought experiment, an immersive deep-dive into what it was like for ordinary British soldiers on the western front. This he has done using state-of-the-art digital technology to restore flickery old...

Just a year ago we were dealing with an historically devastating Atlantic hurricane season. It was marked by the strongest hurricane – Irma – ever observed in the open Atlantic, the near total devastation of Puerto Rico by a similarly powerful category 5 monster Maria, and Hurricane Harvey – the worst flooding event in US history. At the time, I commented here and elsewhere about the role climate change had played in amplifying the destructive characteristics of these storms. Not to be outdone, the 2018 Atlantic hurricane season, initially predicted to be quiet – quelled by an incipient El...