Trans issues

Thursday

Alexander Larman

Time to slay J.K. Rowling’s ‘Fantastic Beasts’

Next week marks the release of the third J.K. Rowling-scripted Fantastic Beasts film, a series that has overstayed its welcome. This latest iteration is subtitled The Secrets of Dumbledore. As if to wrong-foot those who would smirkingly speculate that one of Dumbledore’s secrets is his sexuality, the film opens with the old wizard and his former lover-turned-nemesis Grindelwald (now played by Mads Mikkelsen, replacing a disgraced Johnny Depp) mourning the end of their love affair, which at least makes the homosexual subtext hinted at in previous films explicit. But that, alas, is about it for any kind of coherence, or interest, or originality.

Tuesday

Chadwick Moore

Attacks on the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law are about control

The alphabet people screamed in bloodcurdling unison Monday as Florida governor Ron DeSantis coolly signed into law the Parental Rights in Education bill. Dubbed, in lockstep, by activists and the mainstream media the "Don’t Say Gay" bill, the words "gay," "homosexual" or anything similar don’t appear anywhere in the six-page law. Quite clearly, the law states that "a school district may not encourage classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students." A few things to note here: "primary grade levels" are defined in Florida as age three to grade three.

desantis

Sunday

Amber Duke

What it’s really like to play sports against men

The left is now arguing that the people most upset about biological men like Lia Thomas and Laurel Hubbard competing in women's sports are the ones who otherwise don't care about or watch women's sports. It's nonsense, just like the argument that men can't have an opinion on abortion, but allow me to present my credentials nonetheless. I was a three-sport varsity athlete in high school, and was most accomplished as a goalie for the field hockey team. I broke my school's record for saves in a season and was named Defensive Player of the Year in my region. Alas, I wasn't quite good enough to be recruited to a Division I team, so I opted to play on the club team at Georgetown.

men UPenn Swimmer Lia Thomas (Getty Images)

Friday

Michael Warren Davis

The trans debate shows we’re all supremacists

Why did Lia Thomas bother changing his name? According to the gender-studies mavens, it wasn’t strictly necessary. A trans woman doesn’t need a vaginoplasty or breast implants. He doesn’t even need to wear dresses. He doesn’t have to date men, or watch Downton Abbey or merge into traffic without checking his blind spots. Those are all socially constructed ideas of femininity. Trans women don’t have to conform to these sexist, patriarchal norms. Womanhood is a state of mind. The question, of course, is: what kind of state? The LGBT lobby refuses to answer that question. The official line is that anyone who identifies as a woman is a woman. If Hugh Jackman came out today and said, “Oi, mate, I’m a sheila,” a sheila he’d be. Fair dinkum.

Tuesday

Amber Duke

Lia Thomas doesn’t deserve our compassion

Reka Gyorgy showed commendable courage this weekend for finally speaking out against the National College Athletic Association's rules regarding trans competitors. The Virginia Tech swimmer and Olympian was bumped out of a finals spot in the 500 free due to transgender University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas's participation. In a letter posted to her Instagram account, Gyorgy wrote, "It feels like that final spot was taken away from me because of the NCAA's decision to let someone who is not a biological female compete... [Thursday] is the result of the NCAA and their lack of interest in protecting their athletes." Gyorgy is one of the first NCAA female swimmers to speak publicly about the negative impact Thomas's participation in the sport has on women.

lia thomas

Wednesday

Amber Duke

Opposing child gender transitions is ‘intolerant,’ says college president

The president of the University of North Texas, Neal Smatresk, said in a campus-wide email Tuesday that students who oppose medical transitions for children suffering from gender dysphoria hold "intolerant views". Smatresk's email was sent to the campus community in response to an event hosted by the Young Conservatives of Texas with Texas House candidate Jeff Younger, who has proposed banning surgical and medical interventions for children who claim to be transgender. "I know the last several days may have felt particularly difficult for the transgender members of our community, due to the intolerant views of a handful of campus members," Smatresk wrote.

gender north texas

Tuesday

Terry and Katie Schilling

Why we pulled our kids out of public school

Public schools have had a rough few years. Since the start of the pandemic, parents have pulled more than one and a half million kids out of the public education system and turned elsewhere. Anecdotally, Catholic and other private schools in our area have wait-lists miles long now, filled with public school refugees. By some estimates, too, homeschooling rates doubled between spring and fall of 2020, and haven’t dropped significantly since. We were part of the public-school-to-homeschool exodus in early 2020 — and in our opinion, a lot of the public commentary attempting to explain the phenomenon misses the mark. Most theories focus almost exclusively on Covid lockdowns. There’s certainly a lot there to be angry about.

public school

Thursday

Jesse Singal

Netflix’s Chappelle of hate

The difference between what I call accuracy and right-side norms within newsrooms is simple. Accuracy norms require journalists to get to the truth. Right-side norms require journalists to prove they’re on the “right” side of controversies. If this includes obscuring or spinning certain facts, so be it. For reasons ranging from politicization to the gutting of smaller and traditional outlets, most American journalism now adheres to right-side norms. Consider the Dave Chappelle controversy. If you don’t yet have an opinion about the jokes Chappelle makes about transgender people in his Netflix special, The Closer, watch it to get them in full context. There’s been enough bloviating about the jokes themselves.

Netflix

Monday

Peter Wood

Michelle Goldberg and the art of the Big Lie

Lies come in all shapes and sizes, colors, odors, textures and tastes. Some are only little white lies, but more often the accompanying adjective suggests something unpleasant. Damnable lies used to be the most condemned, but today the foulest of all perfidious, incarnadine, silken and sulfurous lies are Big Lies. Thus when New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wants to reassure progressive voters that they can ignore the story about a ninth-grade girl who was raped (i.e. forcibly sodomized) in a girl’s restroom in a Loudoun County, Virginia school, she serves up her diversion under the title “The Right’s Big Lie About a Sexual Assault in Virginia.

big lie

Friday

Kat Rosenfield

The PR campaign at the heart of the war on Netflix

What remains unsaid about The Closer? In the past two weeks, countless thinkpieces have tackled the controversy around Dave Chappelle’s new special by trying to determine where its content falls on the line between funny and offensive, provocative and hateful, punching up versus punching down. Some analysis has been thoughtful; some has been shallow and reactionary. But virtually all of it centers on the question of whether Netflix should have removed or censored the special for being “harmful” to vulnerable people. That notion is one that Netflix executive Ted Sarandos summarily rejected in a statement sent to employees, writing that “while some employees disagree, we have a strong belief that content on screen doesn’t directly translate to real-world harm.

chappelle netflix

Thursday

Stephen L. Miller

Biden’s State Department is a laughingstock

Last week, the State Department learned that twice this summer China had tested a new hypersonic missile weapon with nuclear capabilities. According to the Financial Times, the rocket employed a “fractional orbital bombardment” that also had the guidance ability to “glide” around the earth in orbit. The test reportedly stunned the Biden administration, and comes on the heels of a string of embarrassing global events for the US, including the fall of Afghanistan and Russia opting not to raise natural gas supplies to Europe after the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Secretary of State Tony Blinken reacted with a series of “deeply concerned” letters. The State Department had once again been caught flat-footed. But fear not: Blinken has his priorities straight.

state department

Thursday

Ben Sixsmith

Dave Chappelle’s last special is no masterpiece

Dave Chappelle is a member of a dying breed — a remnant of an age that has been drifting into history. That’s right. Dave Chappelle is a comedian who does not have a podcast. I do not begrudge comedians their podcasts. (After all, I am a writer with a Substack.) As a comedian who has not blessed us with his every thought and memory, though, Chappelle has maintained his mystique. His specials are events, and his last special, The Closer, is doubly so. Critics and reporters have been focusing on its allegedly offensive jokes at the expense of trans people. I would like to shove these subjects to one side for a moment and ask the most vital questions. Is it funny? Yes. Is it very funny? No. Chappelle is a tremendous performer.

dave chappelle

Monday

Kat Rosenfield

The woke are abolishing women

Last week, the Lancet medical journal became briefly internet-famous when it published the following sentence on its Twitter account: ‘Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected.’ The sentence is a pullquote from a bigger article, but boy does it capture the imagination on its own. Like a Hieronymous Bosch painting, you can return to it again and again, always finding something new and surprising to appreciate. There’s the musicality of it, all those four- and five-syllable words that roll pleasantly off the tongue. There’s the faintly macabre invocation of ‘bodies’, followed by ‘with vaginas’, suggesting a collection of corpses accessorized with (but not necessarily attached to) a bunch of birth canals.

vaginas

Thursday

Katherine Dee

Why are young women writing homosexual erotica about men?

In the 2010s, fanfiction had a serious moment in the United States. After nearly 30 years of hiding — first in handmade snail-mail fanzines, then in closed-off fan communities online, then on websites like LiveJournal, Fanfiction and AO3 (An Archive of Our Own) — ‘geek culture’ broke into the mainstream. For a moment, fanfiction was everywhere. Finally, it wasn’t just the diehard fans who wanted to participate: it was everyone or, at least, what felt like everyone. Reporters took notice. Vulture published ‘It’s a Fan-Made World: The Fan Culture Revolution’. VICE commented on the ubiquity of fanfiction about the boy band One Direction and the impact of Fifty Shades, among other things. Jezebel and BuzzFeed both marveled at the Omegaverse, not once, but twice each.

slashfiction fanfiction

Tuesday

Mary Harrington

The trans war on the body

'Families marching five by five Hurrah! Hurrah! Families marching five by five Hurrah! Hurrah! Some people choose their family And they love each other so proudly And they all go marching in The Big Parade!' In June, the Journal of Medical Ethics spelled out what it means in practice to teach children that family bonds are optional. If the world is to ‘take LGBT testimony seriously,’ argued Maura Priest, a bioethicist at the Arizona State University, then ‘parents should lose veto power over most transition-related pediatric care’. In many states, this is already well-established. In 2015, Oregon passed a law giving minors the right to receive transgender medical interventions at taxpayers’ expense, and without their parents’ consent.

trans jessica yaniv progressive misogyny

Tuesday

Rod Dreher

Viktor Orbán is winning his culture war

Budapest Even supporters of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán acknowledge privately that the Pegasus scandal is a hard blow to the embattled leader. Last month’s news that government spies had employed Israeli software to commandeer the smartphones of journalists, activists and government opponents confirmed the worst authoritarian stereotypes of Orbán, who will be running for his fourth consecutive term in 2022. These allegations, if true — and many Orbán backers with whom I spoke assume that they are — will likely displace what was Orbán’s greatest liability heading into next year’s vote: that he and his Fidesz party oversee a vast web of public corruption.

viktor orbán

Saturday

Chadwick Moore

Let’s be honest about birthing people

Thrusting women who identify as men and then have babies into the spotlight has been a strange priority during the first few months of Biden’s America. Just three days before Mother’s Day, Rep. Cori Bush, a Democrat from Missouri, sent Twitter ablaze while testifying before the Democratic Oversight Committee on some conspiracy theory called the 'Black [sic] maternal health crisis’. The crisis, it turns out, isn’t that community’s abortion epidemic but the country’s legion of racist OB/GYNs, apparently. ‘Every day, Black [sic] birthing people and our babies die because our doctors don't believe our pain. My children almost became a statistic. I almost became a statistic,’ Bush wrote on Twitter ahead of her video testimony.

birthing people

Friday

Jarvis Dupont

It’s rude to stare at a woman’s penis

After months of lockdown stress, I decided to treat myself to an afternoon of pampering at a health spa. I felt sure my anxiety-ridden bones would benefit from a nice long soak in some warm, soothing, vitamin-infused waters. I convinced myself that a deep massage, followed by a detoxifying celery juice smoothie would exorcise my inner demons and factory reset my mind’s iOS to pre-COVID levels of tranquility. Oh, dear reader, how wrong I was. For I had omitted to include the torrent of anti-trans bigotry I would encounter at the spa. As traumatic as it is, I shall relive my experience for you here so that it may never be repeated. As a trans woman, I am no stranger to uneducated TERFs and their ‘gender critical’ ignorance.

penis

Monday

Jarvis Dupont

Trans Koreans are Koreans

(If this were a documentary, I would open with the track ‘Turning Japanese’ by The Vapors which, yes, I know that’s the wrong ones, but I still think it would work so please have that song in mind as you read the opening paragraph.) Today something beautiful happened. A tortured soul was finally able to present themselves to the world as their authentic self. YouTube star, songstress and social media guru Oli London came out as Korean. Oh, and also nonbinary too, but to be honest all that gender stuff is getting a little old these days. When almost every social media influencer is either nonbinary or genderqueer, the market becomes somewhat oversaturated. Like what happened with Beyblades.

trans koreans korean

Sunday

Jesse Singal

What the media gets wrong on gender reassignment

Two things can be true at the same time. First, the Republican-backed state laws banning medical gender-transition treatment for youth — one has already passed in Arkansas — are a very bad idea. Second, there is a serious dearth of solid evidence in this area of medicine — and some reasons to be genuinely concerned about these treatments. If you’re a consumer of mainstream American media, you’ve likely received a heaping dose of the first message. But the second, if you’ve encountered it at all, has probably been presented to you as a deeply unscientific, bigoted talking point. This is a problem. It’s impossible to unpack what’s going on here without summarizing the recent history of youth medical transition.

trans thirteen gender