NEWSBYMARC DADIGAN

During his famous and infamous career, John Hopkins psychologist John Money revolutionized the way society viewed gender, popularizing the notion that nurture was as powerful as nature in the creation of gender identity.

Unfortunately, Money possessed an unhealthy dose of hubris, and tested his theories by performing sex reassignment surgeries on infants and toddlers who had ambiguous genitalia and other conditions. Horrific doubt was cast upon his treatments when one of his patients, David Reimer, committed suicide.

As an infant, Reimer's penis had been mangled in a circumcision accident. Money, believing sexuality was "malleable" at that age, removed it and turned Reimer into a girl. Reimer never identified as a woman, struggled with his identity for most of his life, later castigated Money and eventually took his own life.

Though Reimer was the victim of a terrible accident, many of Money's patients were people who were born with what are now called Intersex conditions. This is different from transexuality, which describes people who have transitioned or are transitioning to a gender that's different from their assigned sex.

George Washington University basketball player Kye Allums had been playing a role for most of his life: though he was born a female, he said his physical anatomy didn't match how he felt internally. For years, he kept silent until the stress of his predicament started affecting his game and his playing time.

"As soon as it affected my basketball, I knew it was serious, and I had to do something," Allums said at a press conference, in which he announced that he was a transgendered man playing on the women's basketball team. Afterward, an effusive Allums was beaming and told interviewers happily, "It feels like a dream."

This September he legally changed his name and told his team. The university's sports department now officially refers to Kye as a male. It's believed that Kye is the first openly transgendered athlete to play Division I sports, and Kye has said that he's received an outpouring of support and tolerance since making his announcement.

It's likely there will soon be other transgender athletes following in Kye's brave footsteps as an increasing number of teenagers and young adults are identifying as transgendered, and in the past two years, the NCAA received 30 inquiries about policies regarding transgender athletes, according to Inside Higher Ed. A large part of this progress is because of the work of two groups: the National Center on Lesbian Rights and the Women’s Sports Foundation.

As the White House pushed to pass the Dream Act this month, a number of relevant personal stories have surfaced in support of it.

They’re tales of young adults who arrived in America at a tender age, who grew up here and see this as the only country they’ve known. Yet as they become adults, they lack citizenship and access to the rights they need to become productive people. Fearing deportation or worse, they live in a limbo, not exactly Americans but not anything else either.

While many of these young people would be accepted by their country of origin, there are millions of refugees and immigrants worldwide who exist in a similar No Man’s Land but with no country willing to claim them as their own.

Considered one of the silent global human rights travesties, the predicament of the world’s stateless people is starting to come to prominence with the help of activists, NGOs and refugee groups here in the states.

A stateless person is usually defined as someone who is not legally considered a national by any country. How countries dole out citizenship is how they decide, whether right or wrong, who belongs and who doesn’t, and the stateless peoples of the world are the losers of this arbitration.

There are a variety of ways people become stateless: an ethnic group might be expunged from their home country, discriminatory laws might restrict birth registration, or nationality in a country might be based solely on descent. Without any citizenship, stateless people can claim few basic human rights and are often prone to being exploited by traffickers or treated inhumanely by their host government. They also are often restricted in their access to basic human rights such as health care and education as well as fair employment.

Children today spend as much time consuming media as they do sleeping, so it's probably not surprising that children find it easier to identify the image of Ronald McDonald than Jesus.

Research has shown that children can identify child-oriented brands by the age of three, but that doesn't mean they're equipped with the ability to analyze advertisements.

Corporate advertisers are finding new and intrusive methods to influence children to buy their products, which, like McDonald's food, is often damaging to their health and mental well-being. Our cash-strapped public schools have become an increasingly tempting target for advertisers, especially the peddlers of unhealthy sugary foods.

Most recently, the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood disclosed a disturbing partnership between Scholastic Inc., a global book publisher known for education materials, and SunnyD, the purveyor of the sugary orange-like drink that's loaded with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS).  The SunnyD Book Spree encourages teachers and parents to have their students collect SunnyD labels  in order to exchange them for up to 20 free books.  In the Scholastic web site's tips for parents, it encourages them to organize SunnyD parties to spur label collections, start SunnyD Book Spree groups on Facebook and post SunnyD fliers at grocery stores and local libraries.

Perhaps to settle all doubts whether they're the union's most rabidly prejudiced state, Arizona voters last week banned the use of affirmative action in college admissions because it discriminates against white people.

But for this fuzzy logic to pass muster, voters had to ignore or remain blissfully ignorant of the myriad ways the college admissions system is already skewed to favor kids who are rich, mediocre and white.

The SAT  is probably the system's most efficient instrument at creating an uneven playing field. I know this because back in high school I, a mediocre white student of privilege, was a beneficiary of the SAT.

I scored a little over 1200 the first time, but because my family could afford it, I took an SAT prep class,  studied some vocabulary lists, and with minimal effort improved my score by nearly 200 points.

Overnight, I transformed myself into a legit elite private school applicant, and, of course, it had nothing to do with my abilities as a student or my intelligence.

Rich kids have greater access to prep classes, prep books and tutoring than low-income and many minority students, and, thus, are more likely to do well. The College Board, the pseudo non-profit that designs and promotes the test, argues coaching doesn't make a difference, but then why does it sell SAT prep books for $25 a pop?

The Maori welcoming ceremony began with a towering woman with emerald, tattooed lips singing a summoning song. A phalanx of elders wore traditional capes, and wielded rough staffs introduced themselves in Te Reo, the Maori language.

This spring I traveled as a journalist with the Winnemem Wintu, a small California tribe, to cover their journey to commune with the New Zealand salmon, genetic descendants of the fish that once spawned in their river, the McCloud.

While inspiring, the trip unfortunately also revealed a cruel irony. After two weeks of being treated as esteemed ambassadors from a sovereign nation, the Winnemem would return to the United States and promptly cease to exist.

As the University of Oregon's football team battles it out for the No. 1 BCS ranking this season, Duck fans seem far too eager to forget about what happened last year.

After the Ducks made their first Rose Bowl since 1995, several players, including star quarterback Jeremiah Masoli and star running back Lamichael James, were arrested in the off-season. Athletic Director Mike Bellotti, likely sensing trouble, fled his position to become an ESPN analyst, but not before collecting a super shady $2.3 million severance package that was arranged only three days before he resigned.

But now in the midst of Oregon's latest run,  all of the off-season skullduggery is seemingly forgotten even though little has changed except the quarterback (Lamichael James is still on the team).

Duck fans, like those at most universities,  would rather bask in victory than face an undeniable truth: big-time college sports are bad for higher education, and, in turn, bad for American society.

[Change.org welcomes writer and narrative journalist Marc Dadigan to the Education blog. --Eds.]

There’s a long, dark history of Indian boarding schools that’s rarely taught in American classrooms. The original motto was “kill the Indian, save the man.” Students at these schools had their native culture and language literally beaten out of them.

A few boarding schools still exist, and many Indians are not far removed from these haunting memories. So it’s no wonder some Indians view modern public schools with suspicion as their students drop out at a rate that’s twice the national average. The UCLA Civil Rights Project recently issued a report documenting this phenomenon, calling it a “crisis” that threatens the future of the American Indian community.

It’s a crisis that’s become more real to me in the last two years as I’ve worked with the small Winnemem Wintu tribe (only 123 of them remain) from Northern California.  Their chief and spiritual leader, Caleen Sisk-Franco, is a former educator herself, and she once ran a chain of charter schools that succeeded with at-risk Indian students by weaving native culture into the curriculum.

Not surprisingly, her efforts were upended by stifling bureaucracy and by district leaders who didn’t appreciate her efforts and her lack of interest in prepping students for standardized tests.

Now her tribe faces a pressing dilemma: With their numbers dwindling, do the young Winnemem go to public schools, where they’re likely to struggle and possibly fail because their teachers don’t understand their culture?