‘It would be nice to live in a world in which maleness and femaleness were firm and unwavering poles. People can be forgiven for wanting to live in a world as simple as this, a place in which something as basic as gender didn’t shift unsettlingly beneath our feet. But gender is malleable and elusive, and we need to become comfortable with this fact, rather than afraid of it.’ — New York Times op-ed contributor Jennifer Finney Boylan, in an Aug. 3 article about the Beijing Olympics organizers’ announcement to have a ‘gender determination lab’ to test female competitors suspected of being male.