Recently, my local morning news channel aired a story about a body discovered in a city park. Sadly, that’s not especially unusual. I was still a little bleary from having just gotten out of bed, so I don’t recall many details. I think they said the body was aged thirty or so, but I remember very clearly that they said it was the body of a man. I remember this because, being of a cynical turn of mind whenever I am conscious at all, I asked my wife -- “How do they know it was a man?” My wife ignored me, of course, either because she was asleep or because she knows a rhetorical question when she hears one. So, I put it to you: In a world in which gender is a characteristic entirely at the whim of the individual – how does one determine the gender of a corpse? Does a corpse have the gender it thought it did when it was alive, or does it cease to have a gender when it ceases to have the power to choose one for itself? To echo the old philosophical wheeze...(Read Full Article)