In the next two weeks, it will be my honor to talk to actress, author, and activist Calpernia Addams for an upcoming podcast! Please submit your questions, comments, and thoughts to guide the interview in the comments section.


Born genitally male, Ms. Addams served for four years as a field medical combat specialist (HM 8404) in the Navy and with the Marines during the first Gulf War. Upon her return as a decorated war veteran, set out to become one of the top showgirls in Tennessee. During one of her popular performances at a nightclub in Nashville, Calpernia met Pfc. Barry Winchell. Winchell was one of those exceptional human beings who truly loved a person for who she is, not what her physical manifestation dictates. According to an an article in The New York Times:

The caption on the photo accompanying the May 13th New York Times article, "Love on the Girls' Side of the Saudi Divide," read, "Shaden, who is veiled at 17, spoke with her father as her younger sister looked on in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in March 2008." As I ate breakfast, I stared at the picture. My initial look revealed only a girl who was maybe nine or ten years old wearing a white shirt and black sweater and an older man with a silver mustache wearing white. Where was Shaden? I squinted, pulled the paper closer to my face, and finally noticed her. Covered in the shapeless black fabric of an abaya, I didn't see Shaden at first because to my Western eye she is an utter non-entity, a black void that fills the space between her dad and younger sister. Immediately, I felt sorry for Shaden for her lack of presence. Then I wondered how a different culturally trained eye would see the photo. Would someone from, say, Saudi Arabia notice Shaden first, then her sister and father? (And if so, does that make it OK that Shaden is not allowed to show her face in public, under any circumstances, ever again, because people there still "see" her?)

* Listen here:
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* Download this podcast to your computer by "right clicking" here and selecting "save link as". A transcript is available, for easy reading.

Last Friday, Carly Fiorina called BlogHer to answer some of your questions as "victory chair" in the presidential campaign of presumptive Republican nominee and Senator John McCain (R-AZ). As you'll hear in the podcast above, "Carly," as the former CEO of Hewlett Packard asked to be called, covered a lot of territory in our podcast interview, including:

Like nearly every holiday in the United States, Mother's Day seems to be as much about getting people to indulge in commercialism (Buy Mom this! Buy Mom that!) as it is about honoring your mother. While I am very happy to give my mom and mother-in-law cards telling them how awesome they are and give them a small token of my appreciation, I also like to celebrate all the mothers who have birthed social progress and given me the gift of more human rights. Make no mistake about it: many of the bravest, loudest, pushiest social reformers were moms. They thought about their lives and their children's futures, and they knew that to give their kids the best chances for success, barriers had to be broken.

My mother has never been the most political person in our family. Pregnant with me at 18-years of age, her life was preoccupied with things like bassinets and receiving blankets instead of the economy and war.

However it was my mother who wrote the note to my high school principal on MY 18th birthday excusing me from class so I could go register to vote.

It was also my mother who encouraged me to get involved in anything and everything regardless of what our Catholic neighborhood shunned or what our relatives said.

"I've been going to the Tribeca Film Festival for a couple of years now and one of the strongest parts of the festival has been the documentaries. Each year I manage to see a couple that I can't get out of my head. This year one of the films was Lioness, a film about women soldiers on the front lines in the war in Iraq. Yes, women soldiers are on the front lines in Iraq.