Sex Gender

In her flowing crimson cape, thigh-high leather boots and metal-studded red leather bustier, Cardinal is a bow-and-arrow-toting femme fatale. But not only is Cardinal not real--she's a character in the popular computer game "Ultima Online"--she's not really female. Cardinal is the alter-ego of Kenn Gold, a 33-year-old former Army sergeant with thorny green-and-black tattoos covering both of his muscular arms.

They weren't looking to make a political statement or to be pioneers of gender liberation. Each just wanted a familiar, decent roommate rather than a stranger after their original roommates left to study abroad. That's how Pitzer College sophomores Kayla Eland, female, and Lindon Pronto, male, began sharing a room this semester on Holden Hall's second floor. They are not a couple and neither is gay. They are just compatible roommates in a new, sometimes controversial, dormitory option known as gender-neutral housing that is gaining support at some colleges in California and across the nation.

It is a safe bet that few women ever wanted to mother Clint Eastwood. The steely, narrowed eyes. The rugged jawline. The thin-lipped sneer. This is the face of a man to save the homestead from marauding Indians, to stare down an outlaw in a saloon. But not to cuddle. Now, take Paul McCartney--he of the doe eyes, chipmunk cheeks and teddy bear chin. Ten thousand teeny-boppers can't be wrong. The man is adorable.

Kristine Wise remembers driving from San Diego to Victorville to visit her brother and seeing haunting messages on the freeway signs. Instead of the speed limit or the miles to the next town, she envisioned: Beware of Snipers. Watch Out for Bombs. 40 miles to Baghdad. Death Ahead. "It was horrible" said Wise, who served in Iraq with the Army in 2003 and 2004. The disturbing images are part of the anxiety and panic attacks she has suffered since serving as a supply clerk just as the insurgency was becoming proficient at killing Americans with roadside bombs and suicide attacks.

Whispering like conspirators, the two cousins hook their thumbs in their belt loops, skim cocky eyes over the women and swivel, stiff-legged from their hips, like the men they have become. Across the room, and a few steps away on the gender spectrum, a man with shaggy hair wrinkles a pug nose in the mirror and struggles to drape a silky scarf over his head in the style of Islamic womanhood.

Using growth hormone to make short kids taller isn't the first time medicine has sought to manipulate the height of healthy children. Estrogen treatment to halt female growth -- recently in the news because of a report about a Seattle family using medical interventions to stop the growth of their severely disabled daughter -- was used for decades beginning in the 1950s to slow the growth of healthy girls.

Her relatives had always described her as a colicky baby. When Luo Cuifen was 26, she found out a likely reason why. Doctors discovered more than two dozen sewing needles embedded in her body, some piercing her vital organs. X-rays of her head and torso look like a dart board. Doctors believe the needles were driven into her body when Luo was days old. One in the top of her skull could only have been stuck there when the bones in her head were still soft.

They weren't looking to make a political statement or to be pioneers of gender liberation. Each just wanted a familiar, decent roommate rather than a stranger after their original roommates left to study abroad. That's how Pitzer College sophomores Kayla Eland, female, and Lindon Pronto, male, began sharing a room this semester on Holden Hall's second floor. They are not a couple and neither is gay. They are just compatible roommates in a new, sometimes controversial, dormitory option known as gender-neutral housing that is gaining support at some colleges in California and across the nation.

After years of narrowing the gap with males on the SAT college-entrance exam, female students in this year's high school graduating class fell further behind, the College Board reported Tuesday. The widening gap renewed questions about the fairness of the high-stakes test, which is used by the nation's top colleges and universities as a criterion for admission. The SAT has come under increased scrutiny since February, when UC President Richard C.

Caster Semenya started to run almost as soon as she could walk. She played soccer with the boys in her rural village. At school races, she'd lap the other girls -- sometimes twice or more. Even then, according to friends quoted by South African news reports, girls teased her about looking like a boy. Semenya shrugged it off and kept on running. But after she exploded onto the athletic stage Wednesday in the World Championships in Berlin, beating her nearest rival in the women's 800-meter race by a whopping 2.45 seconds, the question was back: Is she really a she?

Bringing home the bacon is less and less a man's job these days. According to a Pew Research Center study released Tuesday, a larger share of men are married to women whose education and income exceed their own. In 1970, 4% of husbands had wives who made more money than they did. In 2007, that share rose to 22%. "As women have made these extraordinary gains in working and education, men have been able to share in these gains through marriage,"...

When the new New International Version of the Bible is unveiled in 2011, don't look for androgynous vocabulary that had rankled some evangelicals. In fact, as soon as the latest version is published, the gender-neutral Today's New International Version will vanish. "If we want to maintain the NIV as a Bible that English speakers around the world can understand, we have to listen to and respect the vocabulary they are using today," said Keith Danby, president of Biblica. New Testament scholar and author Bart Ehrman doubts the revision has as much to do with the evolution of the English language as the orthodox trends in evangelical thought.

Caster Semenya started to run almost as soon as she could walk. She played soccer with the boys in her rural village. At school races, she'd lap the other girls -- sometimes twice or more. Even then, according to friends quoted by South African news reports, girls teased her about looking like a boy. Semenya shrugged it off and kept on running. But after she exploded onto the athletic stage Wednesday in the World Championships in Berlin, beating her nearest rival in the women's 800-meter race by a whopping 2.45 seconds, the question was back: Is she really a she?

Heart transplant patients are as much as 25% more likely to survive if the sex of the donor is the same as the patient's, researchers said Wednesday. The results surprised experts because, for most types of transplants, sex differences are irrelevant as long as a good immunocompatability is achieved.

Contrary to the long-standing image of female bonobos as the peaceful matriarchs of their species, scientists have observed the creatures capturing, killing and eating young monkeys in the lowland evergreen forests of Salonga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The discovery undermines the conventional wisdom that hunting among primates is an outgrowth of male dominance and aggression, according to a study published Tuesday in the journal Current Biology.

The notion that boys are better than girls at math simply doesn't add up, according to a study published today in the journal Science. An analysis of standardized test scores from more than 7.2 million students in grades 2 through 11 found no difference in math scores for girls and boys, contradicting the pervasive belief that most women aren't hard-wired for careers in science and technology.

Peggy Biro didn't plan to be a truck driver. But in 1996, laid off from her grocery-store management position and going through a bitter divorce, she began to consider it. "They said you can be away in the truck 30 days at a time; I said that sounds like a good runaway job to me," said Biro, who lives in the Northern California town of Anderson. Five years later, she has remarried and settled down with Pomona-based KKW Trucking.

A 1966 World Championships gold medal in the women's downhill may be retroactively awarded to former French skier Marielle Goitschel because the winner turned out to be a man, a skiing official said Friday. Erika Schinegger of Austria, who won the gold medal at Portillo, Chile, discovered during medical tests later in her career that she was in fact a man, according to a new autobiography.

For THOSE who have poured themselves a stiff cocktail at the end of an awful day -- or a spat, traffic ticket or office crisis -- it's official: You are likely trying to distract yourself from negative emotions. And if this is how you tend to respond, you're more likely to be a man than a woman. A Yale University study finds that under stress, women report more sadness and anxiety than men, but men report more craving for alcohol.

"The Dangerous Book for Boys," a nostalgic kind of Boy Scout manual, was such a sensation that it was bound to create a new publishing genre. The book by brothers Conn and Hal Iggulden has sold more than 1.4 million copies and spawned all sorts of copycat books that celebrate the joys of a simpler, more rough-and-tumble boyhood. The obvious question was, what about the girls?