“My child has just come out as transgender. What do I do?” These days, it seems that no matter how you respond, someone will judge you harshly. These questions take on special urgency as the average age of coming out as trans is steadily dropping, and there are increasingly effective treatment options for transforming bodies….
Kyla Gillespie’s just-released memoir, TransFormed, tells the story of growing up in Nanaimo, B.C. as a girl who never felt at home in her body. Her story includes playing professional women’s hockey in the early 2000s, alcohol addiction, same-sex attraction and relationship breakdowns. Starting in 2011, Gillespie officially changed her name to Brycen and began…
I grew up in a small town about a hundred kilometres from Vancouver. Surrounded by hobby farms and forests, I spent much of my childhood swimming in lakes, building forts and riding my bike. Gay people were barely spoken of in my family, and were rarely, if ever, encountered. It’s hard to overemphasize how culturally…
Last month, I discussed a large, well-designed study of early school math ability in girls and boys. At the start of Grade One, the study found no difference between boys’ and girls’ math abilities. Some girls and boys perform well, while others struggle, but girls generally match boys’ performance on standardized math tests. Yet four…
People differ in their mathematical ability. We all know this. Some of us suffered through high school math classes; others excelled. When looking at the overall distribution of scores on standardized math tests, a curious fact emerges: male students, on average, score higher than female students. Of course, individual females can have very high scores,…
“Imagine waiting until the minister says, ‘You may now kiss the bride,’ for your lips to meet your husband’s for the first time,” Carly said dreamily. We sat in a circle, cocooned in our sleeping bags on the church floor. Carly was the beautiful, vivacious older girl in our Pentecostal youth group, while I was…
In 2018, when Donna Strickland won the Nobel Prize in Physics for her work with lasers, she was still only an associate professor at the University of Waterloo. University faculty are usually hired as assistant professors and then promoted to associate status before finally, when successful, being promoted to full professors (usually just called professors)….
I have grown up in a Christian culture that consistently portrays God as a “he.” What if we begin to describe God with multiple pronouns including “they,” “she” and “he”? I believe this would benefit Christians and improve our perceptions of God. The English language is not stagnant. As John McWhorter recounts, when “thou” fell…
Many current controversial ethical issues lead back to Genesis. Climate change. The role of women in church and society. Treatment of Black and Indigenous peoples. Who should be allowed to get married. The problem is not the text itself. Christians so often find themselves having to apologize for harms done because of the filters used…
In the early days of the pandemic, governments had to decide: who will speak for us? In 10 key locations across Canada, women serving as public heath officers have taken on those increasingly public roles. “The women we’re seeing on the national stage during the pandemic are being celebrated for both their compassion and their calm under pressure,” write Andrea Gunraj and Jessica Howard from the Canadian Women’s Foundation.
Is God male or female? A few columns ago, I used the feminine pronoun “she” in referring to God. Several people have contacted the Editor wondering whether that was a misprint and, in other cases, expressed disappointment and even shock about such usage.
|
Uploaded
Failed
|
 |
