Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2017 i National Geographic Magazine

REDEFINING GENDER This glossary was prepared in consultation with Eli R. Green of the Center for Human Sexuality Studies at Pennsylvania’s Widener University and Luca Maurer of the Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Education, Outreach, and Services at New York’s Ithaca College. They are co-authors of the book The Teaching Transgender Toolkit. Agender: Describes a person who does not identify as having a gender identitythat can be categorized as man or woman or who identifies as not having a gender identity. Androgynous: A combination of masculine and feminine traits or a nontraditional gender expression. Cisgender (pronounced sis-gender): A term to describe a person whose gender identity matches the biological sex they were assigned at birth. (It is sometimes abbreviated as “cis.”) Gender binary: The idea that gender is…

WHEN JEONGMEE YOON’S DAUGHTER was five, she wanted to wear only pink. Yoon, a South Korean photographer, knew that her child’s preference was shared by legions of young girls. But she was so intrigued by that seemingly universal inclination that she began the “Pink and Blue Project,” an ongoing photographic series of the two colors that are most frequently associated with girls and boys worldwide. “I wanted to show the extent to which children and their parents, knowingly or unknowingly, are influenced by advertising and popular culture,” Yoon says. “Blue has become a symbol of strength and masculinity, while pink symbolizes sweetness and femininity.” Linking gender with these colors is relatively recent, according to Jo Paoletti, a University of Maryland American studies professor. In the 19th century pastel colors were…

Since 2006, the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report has tracked progress toward ending gender inequality by measuring women’s and men’s educational attainment, health and survival, economic participation, and political empowerment. A decade of data shows that equality is closest to being achieved in health and education—10 countries have already reached that. But women still lag behind economically and politically: Not a single country has reached parity in those arenas. In some countries, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, shrinking the economic gap means lowering the barriers that keep women from working outside the home. In others, like the United States, it entails getting more women into leadership roles—and increasing their pay. “What you can measure,” says the forum’s Saadia Zahidi, “you can address.” Progress can happen…

Shadrack Nyongesa’s appointment with the knife was set for shortly after dawn. Since the previous morning, the uncircumcised 14-year-old from the Bukusu tribe in western Kenya had been jingling a pair of feathered cowbells against metal braces lashed to his wrists. As he pumped his arms and danced on a dirt yard under a mango tree outside his father’s house, older friends and relatives paraded around him brandishing sticks and guava branches and singing songs about courage, women, and alcohol. In the afternoon Shadrack and his entourage made a ritual visit to the home of a maternal uncle, who gave him a cow, but not before slapping him in the face and barking that he looked like a sissy, not someone ready to become a man. The boy, who had…

Gallup interviewed more than 148,000 people from 140 countries about their quality of life. 48% OF WOMEN 72% OF WOMEN 58% OF WOMEN 70% OF WOMEN Employed full or part time World average, 2015 Feel safe walking alone at night in the city or area where they live In classic Disney animated films, a female character receives seven times the praise for her appearance as for her skills and actions. When linguists Carmen Fought of Pitzer College and Karen Eisenhauer of North Carolina State University analyzed the dialogue from 12 Disney movies, they found that in early films 60 percent of compliments to females related to looks and just 9 percent to abilities. Such patterns send children “a message about what it means to be a girl or boy,” Fought…

Sierra Leone is one of the worst places in the world to be a girl. In this West African country of about six million people, cleaved by a vicious civil war that lasted more than a decade and more recently devastated by Ebola, simply being born a girl means a lifetime of barriers and traditions that often value girls’ bodies more than their minds. Most females here—90 percent, according to UNICEF—have undergone female genital mutilation (FGM), which initiates them into adulthood and is supposed to endow them with marriage appeal, but also is a culturally ingrained way of controlling their sexuality. Nearly half of all girls marry before age 18, and many become pregnant much younger—often a couple of months or so after their first menstrual cycle. Many are victims…

The difference in appearance between a species’ males and females is called sexual dimorphism. The term implies that there’s a bisecting line between sexes, a clear divide. But in the animal kingdom, a lot of creatures straddle it. The natural world is replete with hermaphrodites, animals that may outwardly appear male or female but have the reproductive organs of both. Their less common cousins are gynandromorphs, animals that are a mosaic of male and female traits—say, the size and coloring of one with the genitalia of the other. Rarer yet is the bilateral gynandromorph (above), an animal that’s half him and half her, split at the midline. The phenomenon has been documented in birds, crustaceans—and butterflies. Evolutionary biologist Josh Jahner explains “what most scientists think happens” to form these outliers:…

She has always felt more boyish than girlish. From an early age, E, as she prefers to be called for this story, hated wearing dresses, liked basketball, skateboarding, video games. When we met in May in New York City at an end-of-theyear show for her high school speech team, E was wearing a tailored Brooks Brothers suit and a bow tie from her vast collection. With supershort red hair, a creamy complexion, and delicate features, the 14-year-old looked like a formally dressed, earthbound Peter Pan. Later that evening E searched for the right label for her gender identity. “Transgender” didn’t quite fit, she told me. For one thing she was still using her birth name and still preferred being referred to as “she.” And while other trans kids often talk…

Alexandra lives in a peaceful, leafy subdivision in a suburb of Dallas, Texas, with her parents, a brother, a sister, and at the moment, five dogs— her family rescues dogs. Alexandra, who is 22 years old, rescues people. In high school she was president of the teen board of a suicide hotline. Before that, she and friends had founded a blog on Tumblr for suicidal adolescents. She gave out her cell phone number and counseled people who called, tracking down their Facebook friends and even calling the police. When adults found out, they told her to stop immediately, terrified that amateurs might inadvertently do harm. “I had no training—it was really reckless on my part,” Alexandra said. “At that time I saw it as heroic. Now part of me thinks…