Gender

As Mayor Rendell has announced his top appointments over the past three weeks, some people have quietly steamed about something that was missing: women. Judith Harris was picked for the post of city solicitor, but the other two Cabinet members so far are men. As for the fire, police, streets, health, human services, recreation, public property, water, procurement, revenue and licenses and inspections commissioners - they're all men, too. Two relatively minor posts have gone to women: Commissioner of Records (V. Chapman-Smith)

Anticipating by several weeks a point raised at the hearings for Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an astute and careful reader wrote in to argue against my use of the grammatical word gender when I ought to have employed the biological word sex, as in the phrase "diversity based on race and gender. " Unwilling to believe that I could have committed such a glaring violation of diction, my critic very graciously assumed a case of editorial tampering. The error, however, was my own and now, having had it brought to my attention, I am keen to its insidious spread and morbidly curious as to how I could have been so easily ensnared.

SEPTA's gender-specific weekly and monthly passes are under fire. The Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations yesterday denied SEPTA's motion to dismiss a complaint from a bus passenger - a pre-operative transsexual female - who said she was challenged by a driver who suggested that she was male. SEPTA had argued that it is a state agency and therefore beyond the jurisdiction of the commission. SEPTA's passes, good for a week or a month, specify if the holder is male or female.

A bored pronouncement from an ultrasound technician, or a sealed envelope anxiously torn open back at home - these did not, to Tanisha Pollard, seem like adequate ways to deliver such momentous news as the gender of her first child. Instead, the 26-year-old Lawnside resident and her boyfriend, Da'Rius Lemon, invited their families to join them for a "gender-reveal party," an increasingly popular way to inject a little ballyhoo into the prenatal condition. "This is my first child, so I just wanted to find a fun way for us to find out what we were having, and to share that - rather than a text message or an e-mail.

The world's entertainment factory, the land of Disney and Hollywood and Broadway, the USA has become synonymous in this waning century with the extravagant performance, the wow 'em, shock 'em, knock-their-socks-off, captivating spectacle. Apparently we have it all wrong. You want spectacle? Check out last century. Look up Victorian England. Try 19th-century Iran. "People in the 19th century were the first to get interested in the idea of the spectacular," says Robert Ryan, an English professor at Rutgers University-Camden.

The woman beside me pats her rounded stomach and rolls her eyes to the ceiling, exclaiming, "Is she ever active today!" The "she" in this action won't be born until March. But my pregnant companion already knows the gender of this gestation. I have grown accustomed to the attachment of a pronoun to a fetus by now. Most of the women I know of her age and anxiety level have had "the test" and gotten the results. Over the past two decades, through amniocentesis and then CVS and sonograms, a generation of parents has received a prenatal exam, a genetic checkup on their offspring.

For centuries, boys have been taught that the path to manhood means learning to be stoic, to never show fear, and to strive to produce. Gender-based rules have also restricted young girls, but have been challenged by the women's movement. Now, it is time to take a new look at the lives of men and boys, say officials of the all-male Haverford School who are participating in a research project that attempts to evaluate how boys learn and develop best. Haverford School psychologist Michael Reichert and assistant headmaster Tim Blankenhorn are scheduled to report on the project, "On Behalf of Boys," tomorrow during the 1997 National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS)

Expectant parents can spend months arguing the relative merits of naming the baby Chloe or Sara, Justin or Michael. But medical advances portend more fertile ground for disagreement. The up-and-coming after-dinner debate: Shall we order a boy or a girl? Currently, a baby's gender can be determined as early as 10 to 12 weeks into pregnancy with a test called chorionic villus sampling. Amniocentesis can do the same at 16 weeks. But it is now possible in the laboratory to separate the X and Y chromosomes in a man's sperm with 75 percent accuracy prior to conception.

America just passed a little milestone on the long journey toward equality. For the first time in Congress' 207-year history, one state is represented by an equal number of women and men. And that state is - surprise - Kansas. Since Sheila Frahm succeeded Bob Dole in the Senate last week, the Kansas delegation in Washington numbers three women and three men. As far as historians of Congress can tell, that sort of gender balance has never happened in Congress from any state.

In the minutes before she was murdered, Nicole Brown Simpson put her two young children to bed, lit candles, put music on the living-room stereo, drew a bath and ruffled the sheets on her bed. Was she preparing for a romantic rendezvous, as O.J. Simpson's lawyers have suggested, or merely looking forward to some private time after the kind of hectic day a single mother knows well? How you view the question - not just how you answer it - may depend on whether you are a man or a woman.