What a great idea! I'm so pleased you started this. Women totally deserve more attention. It's pathetic that anyone even needs to point out that women are important because we're 51% of the population. Everything that keeps women's issues in the forefront is to be encouraged.

Also, I love your illustration. So sassy, chic, and clever.

"Whatever may become of Abramoff, Reed, DeLay and their luckless co-conspirators, the Colson path will not be open to them. When you've spent a lifetime exploiting religion for profit and power, it's a lot harder to convince anyone that you've undergone a jailhouse conversion."

This zinger shows what I love about Joe. This is the most brilliant sentence I've read all week. Joe Conason is the single person most responsible for my renewing my Salon Premium membership year after year.

what, if any, limits you believe there are or should be on the powers of a president during a war, at wartime? And if the global war on terror is going to last for decades, as has been forecast, does that mean that we're going to see, therefore, a more or less permanent expansion of the unchecked power of the executive in American society?

This is the whole issue in a nutshell. Someone asked Bush this to his face and he couldn't or wouldn't give a straight answer. This scares me. We have to keep asking this question again and again until we get some real answers.

Now there's a "Christian flag"?! God, save us from your followers.

Waldman says Leroy spoke of SRS (sex reassignment surgery) as "hacking it off," a sure sign that they don't know what they're talking about. SRS uses penile-inversion vaginoplasty, basically it's still there, it just goes in instead of out. It's reshaped, not discarded. This is a little-known fact, except to those who have actually learned something about the subject. It would have been easy to research the facts about SRS if you wanted to claim that status, but "Leroy" seems to have been careless with the facts.

I hope the fraud won't reflect badly on transsexuals. Probably not, since they had nothing to do with it.

Considering that Norah Vincent has been bashing the transgendered for years, refusing to allow any legitimacy to their very difficult lives, one might have hoped that a quasi-transgender experience such as this could break through her prejudice, allow her to understand what a tough existence the transgendered have to lead. I can't tell from this review if she ever honestly faced up to these implications of her experiment. When she said her female gender identity was determined by her brain, she might have reflected that the female gender identity of transwomen is just as undeniable in their brains too, just as immutable and intractable. This could have been an opportunity for her to drop her prejudice and see transwomen as humans who suffer constantly, year after year, the way she did. But she could go back to her regular life afterward. Transgender is a lifetime sentence with no reprieve.

When John Howard Griffin's book Black Like Me caused a sensation in the Sixties, Malcolm X remarked: imagine what it's like for blacks who can't quit being black like Griffin did! Race was the big national issue back then, and Grace Halsell should be remembered for Soul Sister, the female answer to Black Like Me. Maybe in the present day, gender issues are coming to the forefront of the American mind, and this book for all its awkwardness around gender is a worthwhile exploration of matters that intimately concern us all, as Andrew O'Hehir sensed, the very meaning of being human.

What this book brought home to me is how I was never male... even though I was supposed to be male growing up. The male worldview that seems utterly alien to a woman like Norah Vincent was always just as alien to me, I never could fit into it. If only she could understand that I can't be male any more than she did, and if I were to be forced into maleness against my will, I would wind up as mentally ill as she did, and for very similar reasons. I had to openly come out as female to save my sanity. I can only hope that the insights gained by this experience would allow N.V. to lose her transphobia and accept us as human beings too.

What is the point of this idiot article? To highlight the gaping empty fart-boy* vacuity at the core of commercialized masculinity? We already have a pResident in the White House who has been giving us that for years. This kind of drek will be the ruin of Salon. Enough articles like this and thinking women like me will cancel subscriptions in droves. What's that giant suckingsound I hear? The decline and fall of Salon's subscription numbers, by Benoit Denizet-Lewis et al.

*that expression got there as a typo, but when I looked again, I realized "fart-boy" must be an over-the-hill fratboy, witness the subject of the article! C'est un bon mot trouvé.

See you there, Sarah.

Medea Benjamin rocks.

I've done lots of street actions with Code Pink. They welcome any men who want to join in. I never saw any gender discrimination.

Lincoln did have military experience, though nothing to write home about. He briefly held the rank of captain in the Illinois militia in 1832 during the Black Hawk War, although he did not see action. He wrote after being elected captain by his peers that he had not had "any such success in life which gave him so much satisfaction."