When I was growing up, yearning with my pals to be a track star, one of our heroes was Bruce Jenner. He won a gold medal at the 1976 Olympics in the decathlon, and he adorned our Wheaties boxes. We all wanted to be Bruce Jenner.

Sex and gender are such befuddling mysteries even for those of us who are in the mainstream that you'd think we'd be wary of being judgmental. Yet much of society clings to a view that gender is completely binary, when, in fact, there's overwhelming evidence of a continuum.

Neither Western donor countries like the U.S. nor poor recipients like Cameroon care much about Africans who are poor, rural and female.

The conflict in Darfur could escalate to where we're seeing 100,000 victims per month.

When I was growing up, I wanted to adopt, because I was aware there were kids that didn't have parents.

My family was very Halloween-friendly, for all of the religion and whatever was going on.

Growing up, we were a poor yet tightknit family. My mother worked multiple jobs and always made sure that her kids never had to want for anything.

I was born into a climbing family.