LGBQT

Wednesday

Teresa Mull

Trump scores feminist victory with trans sports Executive Order

File this under sentences that shouldn’t have to be written, but President Donald Trump just signed an executive order barring biological males from participating in women’s sports. The Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports order, reports ESPN, “gives federal agencies, including the Justice and Education departments, wide latitude to ensure entities that receive federal funding abide by Title IX in alignment with the Trump administration's view, which interprets ‘sex’ as the gender someone was assigned at birth.” The move seems like a no-brainer, and most Americans will likely roll their eyes, turn on the Super Bowl this weekend to watch the most testosteroned of muscley, macho men bash each other to the ground and not give the chromosomes a second thought.

women's sports

Thursday

Amber Duke

Real uncensored stories of detransitioners

Prisha has a crushed larynx from weekly testosterone injections; she cannot sing or even talk for long periods of time without feeling pain. She also describes feeling “phantom breasts” — similar to someone who has lost a limb — from her double mastectomy. Chloe will forever live with broader shoulders, wider hips, a more angular jaw and “severe atrophy” of her reproductive organs.  Ritchie is completely numb in his genital area, minus the pain he feels when trying to dilate his “neovagina” or use the restroom. It typically takes ten minutes for him to empty his bladder and it almost always ends in a mess.

Tuesday

David Christopher Kaufman

The folly of LGBT sympathy for Hamas

Beyond Hamas’s ruthlessness — and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fecklessness — one thing that’s become increasingly clear since the October 7 attack on Israel is that social justice groups and identity crusaders no longer possess even a shred of seriousness. How could they, with feminist organizations still questioning the legitimacy of Hamas’s sexual violence against Israeli women? Or lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans groups insisting that “queer issues are Palestinian issues” — despite Hamas’s paper trail of violent queer death? Or the folks from #BlackLivesMatter unwilling even to consider in the slightest that Jewish lives matter too?

queers for palestine hamas lgbtq

Wednesday

Amber Duke

The trans genocide that wasn’t

You shouldn’t make a habit out of watching the daily White House press briefings unless you want to get much dumber, but every now and then they are good for some cheap entertainment. On Monday, for example, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre decided to dedicate precious podium time to “Transgender Day of Remembrance.” GLAAD, an LGBTQ+ activist organization, says that Transgender Day of Remembrance is meant to commemorate “transgender people whose lives were lost in acts of anti-transgender violence.” TDOR (they really like their acronyms, huh?) was started in 1999 by a transgender activist in memory of Rita Hester, a transgender woman whose murder remains unsolved. I found it a bit interesting that the catalyst for TDOR was an unsolved murder case.

Friday

Dave Seminara

Welcome to the woke World Cup

The World Cup has just begun and it’s already shaping up to be the wokest iteration of the world’s grandest sporting event in history. Twelve years ago, corrupt FIFA officials awarded the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, a Gulf state of less than three million people and about the size of Connecticut. In the intervening years, most of the criticism of this decision focused on the bribery scandal that engulfed FIFA and claims from human rights groups that some 6,000 migrant laborers died on the job during the frenzied construction of eight stadiums and other buildings for the tournament. Attacks on the host country have broadened in recent days, focusing predominantly on Qatar’s laws criminalizing homosexuality.

Monday

H.W. Crocker III

Reading Flannery O’Connor under quarantine

I recently had a bout of Covid. The symptoms were pretty mild aside from persistent brain fog, which in my case has been a good cover for creeping senility. A much younger friend of mine confessed that she and her family celebrated their defeat of Covid with a summer beach holiday in Delaware. She and her husband still had a bit of Covid-brain — enough, apparently, that when they drove back, they came back in one car. They had driven up in two. It took them four days to figure this out. My own sense of disorientation, confusion, and fatigue has not been so dramatic. I might have fired off the odd, undiplomatic email. But I often do that. I might have wondered about where I left my reading glasses. But they are invariably suavely tilted back on my head.

Thursday

Christopher Sandford

Patty Murray is no longer endearing

Someone once asked Johnny Depp about the secret of good acting, and he replied: “I pretty much try and stay in a constant state of confusion just because of the expression it leaves on my face.” Okay, maybe Depp’s not someone to hold up as a sage on the human condition. But I think we can at least agree that he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to projecting the sort of halfway engaging befuddlement that earned him a reported $90 million as Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. I mention all this only in so far as it applies to seventy-one-year-old Patty Murray, Democrat from Washington state. Murray won her primary election on Tuesday ahead of what could be a sixth consecutive term in the US Senate.

Tuesday

Casey Chalk

America the busybody neighbor

Imagine a neighbor who is constantly in everyone’s business. Perhaps you have such a person, or persons, in your own community. The neighbor complains about the paint colors of shutters, the height of lawn grass, and the number of cars parked on the street. You better hope he doesn’t find out about your backyard chicken coop if it's prohibited in your county. It’s bad enough to have neighbors like this, constantly on the alert, monitoring everyone’s behavior, and complaining to everyone in earshot. But imagine if an entire country was like this. Actually, you don’t have to imagine. For that is America — at least the foreign policy establishment and the powerful elite institutions like corporate media and the academy that influence it.

neighbor

Monday

Teresa Mull

Pennsylvania’s hipster Democrat

News stories covering the primary races for Pennsylvania's US Senate seat generally go like this: Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman is the Democratic frontrunner pulling ahead big time; now let’s talk about the tit-for-tat attack ads between Republicans Dr. Oz and Dave McCormick for twelve paragraphs. Sure, the Republican primary is developing every day, as Oz and McCormick exchange polling leads faster than Kyle Busch and Kyle Harvick. But at the end of the day (on May 17), GOP voters will have one of two, nice-looking, middle-aged, super-rich Trump wannabes representing them. What happens after the primary is where things really get interesting. Fetterman stands around six feet, eight inches tall and frowns a lot.