Members of the House committee investigating the Capitol riot may not be done seeking testimony. They say they may subpoena former VP Mike Pence and are waiting to hear from Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. https://t.co/nf8fN6FjsL
— The Associated Press (@AP) June 20, 2022
Tuesday:
… The committee chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., recently said the committee was still “engaging” with Pence’s lawyers, while also suggesting it may not be necessary for him to appear because of testimony from many of Pence’s closest aides.
Committee members also hope to learn more about Ginni Thomas’ own effort to keep Trump in office and the potential conflicts of interest posed on her husband as a result on Jan. 6 cases that come before the Supreme Court.
Republican state Rep. Rusty Bowers, the Arizona House speaker, is scheduled to testify at the committee’s hearing Tuesday focusing on state officials who were contacted by Trump and the White House as Trump tried to overturn the results. Bowers is likely to be asked about emails he received from Thomas urging him and other state officials to set aside Biden’s 2020 win and choose their own set of electors.
“We have questions for her and we may have questions for him as well,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif.
Thomas has publicly indicated that she “can’t wait” to appear before the committee after receiving their request by letter last week…
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., said that in the end, the public will have a clear picture of a “failure of the oath” by Trump.
“I think what we’re presenting before the American people certainly would rise to a level of criminal involvement by a president,” he said.
Kinzinger also said that he and his family have received threats because of his role on the committee. He spoke of his concern that “there’s violence in the future. … And until we get a grip on telling people the truth, we can’t expect any differently.”
Schiff appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Lofgren was on CBS’ “Face the Nation” and Kinzinger spoke on ABC’s “This Week.”
This, from Megan Rapinoe, reads as a very decent summation of the correct answer to any “trans person in sports” debate, and also, a pristine example of what personal politics look like when you operate with the value of compassion first. pic.twitter.com/7YjYc5MRdg
— foster kamer. (@weareyourfek) June 19, 2022
And yes, apologies to @seanmgregory, whose wonderful interview this is from: https://t.co/NXYP9N4xUj
— foster kamer. (@weareyourfek) June 19, 2022
— Lefty Patriot (@JillsPal) June 19, 2022
COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Sunday / Monday, June 19-20
Baud
The left wing party won on Colombia. It seems like elections around the world are producing mixed results.
prostratedragon
That Dreyer tweet: if by some miracle everything else could be forgiven, the thing I couldn’t would be the huge waste of time and energy due to so much gratuitous shitheadism.
raven
It was 60 at 6am, it ain’t gonna last but it’s great!
sab
@raven: Projected high to day in N Ohio High 70s. Tomorrow high 90s.
OzarkHillbilly
I like to say, “Don’t just do something, sit there!” The time taken to fully evaluate a thing, comes back in triplicate when one doesn’t have to undo the inevitable hurried mistakes.
Baud
@prostratedragon:
I don’t understand the tweet. He’s not going to fight the predators?
OzarkHillbilly
@raven: Currently 59 here, but we’re expected to hit 95 today.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: He’d rather be quilting but he’s gonna have to spend his time fighting the idiots.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
Thanks. I misread “intended” as “intend”.
debbie
He seems to have deleted it from his feed, but Adam Kinzinger’s wife received quite the letter from someone:
Elizabelle
Saw that about the Colombia result. The victorious “leftist/former guerilla leader” was up against what was described as a “businessman.”
I guessed voters saw that, thought “Bolsonaro!” and voted “hard pass!”
debbie
@Elizabelle:
I also heard he was being compared to TFG.
OzarkHillbilly
@debbie: From Business Insider: Kinzinger says ‘there is violence in the future’ after receiving mailed threat to ‘execute’ him, his wife, and 5-month-old baby
Kay
Maybe there’s more in the interview, but I don’t think Rapinoe’s answer is great. Obviously a lot of the people arguing against trans women in sports are acting in bad faith but the response to that can’t be setting up a strawman of “every scholarship” or “every sport” or “every title” and then easily knocking it down.
Baud
Trans people get the most support when the topic is athletes in women’s sports.
“I fully support trans people’s right to live their lives but….”
Yet violence and discrimination against trans folks proceeds apace with little interest.
Mimi
@debbie:
The pro life party, threatening a baby and new parents. Who are white and heterosexual. They’re probably even Christian.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone
Elizabelle
@debbie: Double hard pass!
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
rikyrah
@OzarkHillbilly:
Kay
I mean they’ve now hitched their wagon to Christopher Rufo, who is an absolute scumbag and proudly bad faith actor so maybe Rapinoe’s argument doesn’t matter if we’re comparing sides but “every” is just bad.
Baud
@Kay:
Nah, Kay. You know the rules. Any imperfection on our side cancels out any evil on theirs. Both sides are the same.
Betty Cracker
I like the way Rapinoe frames the trans girls in sports issue — that’s a sensible and compassionate way to express it, IMO. Someone here (I think Sister Golden Bear?) pointed to a resource that lays that approach out in greater detail, citing the gigantic number of NCAA contests and Olympic trial events that take place each year and noting that inclusion of trans girls hasn’t had an effect.
What the experience of those thousands of yearly events means is we’ve already run and continue to run an experiment that demonstrates trans girls/women don’t dominate girls’/women’s sports. Lia Thomas is the wingnut cause célèbre, but she’s an edge case because she was already an elite swimmer prior to transitioning. Like Rapinoe said, “we can figure it out” if our experience changes, but starting from the assumption of a problem doesn’t fit the copious evidence we already have.
Gin & Tonic
@raven: I think that was our high temp yesterday.
debbie
@OzarkHillbilly:
I cannot comprehend how death threats became the go-to reaction in this country.
Baud
On topic
debbie
@Kay:
Where the hell did he come from? All of a sudden, he’s everywhere, like black mold or something.
Emma from Miami
Open thread? I need some advice.
My dog was diagnosed with Cushing’s disease about 8 months ago. He’s on pills, plus eye drops for possible glaucoma. Now he has been diagnosed with diabetes, which could be, according to the vet, a side product of the Cushings. The treatment are twice daily insulin shots.
On to the question. My dog is almost 16, which is, by schnoodle’s standards, living on borrowed time. He is the standard older dog going downhill with dignity in spite of the illnesses of old age. Cushing’s disease is a death sentence; there is no cure and all one can do is keep them comfortable through medication, proper food, and exercise. Cushings can also trigger a number of related illnesses, of which the diabetes might have been one. In other words, there is very little one can do to prevent all the future issues.
I am torn between just continuing to take palliative measures for the remainder of his life and going full blast with treatment. What would you do? Both my father and my sister said that at this point it should be a quality of life issue and that a regimen of daily shots would just make him miserable in his last days.
Help?.
OzarkHillbilly
Kay
@Baud:
Christopher Rufo is going to to turn out to be a gift. A wholly malicious and dishonest person on an absolute crusade and they all went along with him as long as it was “CRT” or whatever the fuck other panic they were on about. Now they’re stuck with him. Watching Andrew Sullivan plead with him is great. Too late! You made this monster.
Tony Jay
@Kay:
Rapinoe appears to be turning the ‘male after puberty = unfair testosterone doping’ claim at the heart of the anti-trans in sport argument back on those making it by pointing out that, if they were right, male-to-female trans athletes would be winning everything, but they’re not, so the argument falls down on basic prodding and shouldn’t be taken seriously, never mind made the basic stepping-on-point for all discussion on the topic.
Again, for clarity, if the argument being made that male-to-female trans athletes have an unfair advantage was correct, it would be obvious in every competition where they competed. It’s not. So the argument fails.
Sounds fair enough to me.
Gin & Tonic
@Emma from Miami: I’m with your dad mostly, but daily shots are no biggie. We had a dog on twice-daily insulin for five years, and it was fine. He knew when we were drawing the syringe, would come over, sit down and wait.
But 16, you know…
O. Felix Culpa
@debbie:
Excellent description. Toxic and potentially deadly scum.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I am, at this very moment, wearing my “Nevertheless She Persisted” T-shirt
Another Scott
@Betty Cracker: +1
We went through these arguments back in the days of Renée Richards. Yes, there might some day be corner cases where someone, somehow has an “unfair” advantage. But that hasn’t happened yet.
Cheers,
Scott.
OzarkHillbilly
@debbie: They can’t win the argument. Death threats are all they have left.
Tony Jay
@Kay:
Agreed.
Quoting from yesterday’s dead thread on the subject.
In a world where political and social movements pay people large sums to craft simple messages, that set of tweets from Rufo should definitively end the current stage of ‘Trans Panic’ and set the stage for massive pushback.
It’s all there. The proof that it’s all being artificially manufactured for political aims. The open calculus that their scheme relies on falsely redefining words and phrases in order to trick voters. The admission that they’re lying, they know they’re lying, but they think they can get away with it because people are stupid.
Every single time this fake issue is raised, every single Dem and human rights realist simply has to point to these ‘Rufo Rules’ and hammer home the simple and irrefutable fact that Republicans invented this conspiracy theory knowing it would put schools and teachers and children in danger from the Right’s own radicalised base and they did it anyway because they have nothing else.
No ifs or buts, no highbrow head shaking or arched eyebrows of scoff – the Right raised this slimy motherfucker to national prominence and he just tweeted out the notes he took on a criminal fucking conspiracy.
Use them. Reframe the issue. Win. Save Lives.
Kay
@debbie:
He came from attacking public schools. He opposes the existence of public schools ideologically but idiot centrists and so called “liberals” don’t follow, value or understand public schools so they were too stupid to recognize it.
None of these attacks could get traction without support from centrists and so-called liberals. Their buy in is essential. They mainstreamed Rufo. Hey, it sells substack subscriptions. You gotta churn out something clickey to get people to pony up 60 dollars a year for long winded, pretentious versions of Fox News.
Brachiator
@Kay:
The situation for Trans athletes has become more dire. I wonder how many will be excluded because of this recent ruling.
It is absurd that this policy is being defined as “inclusion.”
OzarkHillbilly
They are correct that it is a quality of life issue but wrong to presuppose that the shots will make him miserable. Do the shots, he’ll let you know how he feels about them.
satby
@debbie: It became the go to response as soon as it the death penalty could be administered with impunity even to misdemeanor or no offenses via the open carry, stand-your-ground, castle doctrine laws.
debbie
@Kay:
His wiki page says his newsletter has all of 2,500 subscribers. Yawn.
Kay
@Tony Jay:
I think it’s mushy because it always starts with “all” or “every” and then goes to figuring out individual cases and issues. She should take the edge cases on directly, because that’s also respectful of the girls or women who would be/may be negatively affected by the edge cases. They count too.
debbie
@satby:
Also the anonymity of the internet. it’s all just so pathetic.
satby
@Emma from Miami: Animals can adapt well to insulin shots, but as his cascade of health issues continue you may want to let him go when palliative care isn’t helping. I believe quality of life is more important than longevity too; but insulin can aid in that quality for a while.
Kay
@Tony Jay:
I think with their alliance with absolute scumbags on the Right they’ve ceded moral ground. That’s an opportunity for Rapinoe to be aware of the edge cases and sympathetic to the girls or women who feel it’s unfair. Don’t give that to them.
satby
@Tony Jay: Exactly the point I thought Rapinoe was making too.
satby
@debbie: That threat was mailed to Kinzinger’s home “from the area”. Not quite completely annonymous, and I assume under investigation.
Tony Jay
@Kay:
I think we’ll have to agree to disagree on this one. What’s an edge case? A case where the athletes who didn’t win are claiming that the trans athlete possibly gained an advantage? How would anyone prove that? Why those cases and no others?
You get my point? It’s one that Rapinoe also raises. The argument is that going through male puberty always gives an unfair advantage, but all of the available evidence (as in, actual results on the field of competitive sports) says this simply isn’t the case because trans athletes aren’t winning everything, they’re not even winning a lot.
So, in those individual cases, as Rapinoe says, since the weight of evidence is against the trans = unfair advantage argument, what’s the problem with starting from the position that the women who won those individual events/contests/races/whatever did so because they were better on the day.
Which is where the “Heaven forfend a trans athlete actually win anything” comes in,
O. Felix Culpa
@Brachiator:
Isn’t transition before age 12 is illegal in places like Texas? More retrograde states are likely to pass similar laws, so this is a ban without calling it one.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: I loved that freak-out from Andrew Sullivan! This tweet from a Texas Monthly editor describes the dynamic so well, IMO:
O. Felix Culpa
@satby:
Sadly true. See: George Zimmerman.
WereBear
@OzarkHillbilly: Even I, all thumbs, would rather quilt than fight idiots.
At least, at the end, I have my first quilt.
Tony Jay
@Kay:
Not to put words into Rapinoe’s mouth, but given that she’s a professional athlete herself and given her stated opinion on the “that former man cheated me out of victory” argument, I wouldn’t expect her to have (or to fake) much sympathy for the ones making it.
Don’t take this the wrong way, but that’s verging on “But their feeeeeeeeelings“. What about the feelings of the trans athletes being called cheats, those denied the opportunity to compete, and the families of trans children who have self-harmed or even committed suicide because of these arguments? Wouldn’t Rapinoe giving what she seems to consider unearned validation to the non-trans ‘victims’ also be unfair to all of those people?
Greatest respect, but I think you’re wrong on this one.
JWR
I take it most of you have seen this one, but WTF?
WereBear
@Emma from Miami: If he shrugs off shots, why not? At that point it would be palliative care because the diabetes will do damage.
At this point, if he hides from it, then keeping him comfortable would be not giving him the shots.
If it helps, I have never seen heroic treatment worth it in the age/illness scenario you describe.
satby
@WereBear: Well, in the covid thread I mentioned an incident yesterday that I hope has ripples. Not that it will affect the vile POS I was arguing with, but the witnesses; including the black guy who runs the booth next to me and who wasn’t about to get into an argument with a white MAGA guy.
My neighbor says he likes to hear them talk all crazy and he kind of eggs them on with “I didn’t know that”. I told him his silence was understandable but assent. And I asked him if some crazy ass called him a slur should I just ” be quiet and enjoy the crazy talk” or should I speak up and tell that person off? Acknowledging I have the safety of being white to do so; but being silent has ceased to be an option for me.
Ok, edit: not that I’ve ever shied away from a fight.
satby
@JWR: I hope that force is sued into oblivion.
germy shoemangler
Ginni “can’t wait to testify” and yet the committee has yet to hear from her.
[narrator]: She won’t be testifying.
Tony Jay
@germy shoemangler:
Ginni “can’t wait to
get her crinkled mitts on all of that lovely ‘fighting fund’ money raised by donations from trucklebrained wingnuts waittestify”A girl’s gotta have some walking around money.
Betty Cracker
@Tony Jay: I also like the way Rapinoe framed the issue, but on the “feelings” issue, as a practical matter, we’ve also gotta be mindful that most voters aren’t where we are on this, at least in the U.S.
A year or two ago, I would have probably bought the “trans girls will dominate girls’ sports” argument because I simply didn’t know there was copious evidence to the contrary. (I wouldn’t have been a cruel asshole about it because I’m not a Republican, but as a mom who has had a school sports-playing daughter, I would have been their target audience for this crap.)
Hillary Clinton attracted some controversy on this for a recent interview in which she seemed to suggest that Democrats should downplay trans rights issues. I don’t think it’s clear that’s what she meant, but it is true that most Dems aren’t where we are on this, so we can’t just assume everyone of good will agrees. It will take education.
geg6
@Emma from Miami:
With the caution that my Lovey is much younger than your pup (she’s 7), she was diagnosed two years ago with diabetes. She gets two shots a day and it generally doesn’t bother her. She often comes and gets me if I’m late with one of them. I give her belly rubs and a small treat after the injection. Not sure how an older dog will react, but Lovey got used to it within a day or two.
NotMax
Jolly Juneteenth!
germy shoemangler
glc
@Emma from Miami:
Not much to add to previous replies but it seems like you could try the shots and see whether the dog has a strong opinion. Ours has Cushings and other less severe ailments, and a variety of pills, but we haven’t had to confront that particular issue.
Immanentize
@NotMax:
Blech! Reading this thread, and the newspaper, has made me decidedly unjolly.
Although it is supposed to be a beautiful day in Medford.
zhena gogolia
@Gin & Tonic: I’m so sorry for your loss in Ukraine.
geg6
@geg6:
Also too…
I don’t know how big your dog is, but Lovey is about 25-28 pounds and the needle we use is teeny tiny. She barely feels it.
Tony Jay
@Betty Cracker:
Oh agreed, that’s a fair point.
BUT, someone like Rapinoe, with her public profile, clearly stated opinions on the topic, and the weight of evidence in her corner isn’t the person to be making it.
She’s in the, pardon my harsh phrasing, “You lost, suck it up, stop making excuses, stop spreading lies and just train harder” corner and she’s convincing there because she’s got credibility, she means it.
It’s for other people to stake out the “Obviously we feel the pain of anyone who doesn’t get to be one of the tiny percentage of athletes who experience the searing thrill of winning” corner. Rapinoe clearly doesn’t fit that space and would only look fake trying to.
Politics and public relations, eh? Not my field.
Immanentize
Y’all mentioned that the leftist/former FARC adjacent fellow won the presidency in Columbia. Did folks also notice that the country also elected it’s first Black Vice President? Just the picture of her has increased my hope.
WereBear
Because it will never blow back on him, he thinks? I doubt that’s accurate.
WereBear
I do not either, but will not engage if my rage level is too high. I wish my encounters all had that safety valve working. But if I can help by stepping in, I try to intervene.
Another Scott
@Kay: The Manhattan Institute mainlined Rufo by giving him a platform and paying him. That’s his power, not the few thousand people reading his substack.
William Kristol is on the board of the MI. All the hosts of the oh so serious talking head shows and all the hosts of the dinner parties and junkets should be asking him whether he supports Rufo and his rhetoric that is endangering others. Call them out. Shun them when they enable these monsters.
Grr…,
Scott.
Starfish
@O. Felix Culpa: Transition before the age of 12 is illegal everywhere. The only thing you can do for kids under the age of 12 is puberty blockers. You cannot do major cosmetic surgery, and you cannot make decisions that mess with their ability to have children. You cannot remove breasts that have not developed yet. It is absurd nonsense.
O. Felix Culpa
@Starfish:
Goes to show what I don’t know. Which makes the point even stronger: the FINA ban is the opposite of inclusion.
Gin & Tonic
@zhena gogolia: There will be more.
Elizabelle
@Immanentize: Did not know about VP to be Marquez. Wow.
And the FTF NYTimes foreign desk did a very good article on the Colombia elections. Also: the “leftist former guerilla” president-elect is a “longtime legislator.” Did you pick that up in other headlines and blurbs? Me neither.
Francia Márquez — a former housekeeper and activist — is Colombia’s first Black vice president.
[Oh come on, just say it NYT, that is a conservative trope.]
Betty Cracker
@Tony Jay: That makes sense to me; Rapinoe’s lane is the proven winner lane. I do think politicians and regular folks should approach the issue with sympathy and data.
Sort of tangentially, I read an advice column this weekend about girls and boys playing sports together. (My conceit is that I’d be great at writing an advice column, even though I can’t manage my own relationships half the time!)
Anyhoo, a parent of a boy on a baseball team wrote in to complain that ever since the organization decided to let girls play, her son was benched and it wasn’t fair. A girl who is really athletic and tall for the age group was dominating the position he used to play, and the mom wondered if she had standing to complain.
The advice columnist said nope.
In an earlier discussion of this issue here, someone said all teams should be co-ed and made the point that immutable, non-gender related physical characteristics (height, etc.) and dedication are the real difference-makers. I would definitely NOT go that far because I think there’s value to team sports beyond competition results.
But there’s truth to the idea that physical characteristics unrelated to gender ensure uneven opportunities. If Simone Biles and I were the same age and possessed similar levels of dedication and physical skill (ha!), the fact that I am a whole foot taller than her would give her a huge advantage over me at the elite level, all other things being equal. There are similar disparities across all other sports.
Sure Lurkalot
@Immanentize:
2nd day in a row FTFNYT opines about how it’s too hard to prosecute Trump.
Me too.
Starfish
Rapinoe is more aware of the anti-trans arguments than the people here are. Given that she is a lesbian, she has probably seen more TERFs than most people here from the time before the TERFs hooked up with the extreme right wingers. When it was TERFs talking about women’s sports being dominated by men, the big villains were always Caster Semenya and Fallon Fox. Here is an article from Out Sports on Fallon Fox and how she was being treated by the TERFs.
Most athletes in K-12 sports are not going to go on to college sports or Olympic sports. Rapinoe is right. We should err on the side of inclusion. We want kids to be exercising. Elite sports and scholarships are where this stuff gets distorted. Places where kids can get injured like wrestling already have things like weight classes.
nclurker
@Emma from Miami:
going thru the same with my 13 yr old rescue pit.
had a cancerous mass removed in october last
(mangia sarcoma).bad hips and other age related probs.
vet prescibed a cyto toxin daily,which i did daily for months,
but now do every other day due to he feels better on the skip days.
have decided that quality of life is paramount.
Another Scott
@Betty Cracker: Good points.
I think a lot of people miss the main points of sports.
It’s not so that Johnny and Janie can show everyone how great they are and fill their shelves with trophies. It’s so that Johnny and Janie can know what it’s like to suffer crushing defeat and have to go out the next week and try to do it again. It’s so Johnny and Janie can figure out ways to work with others who are much better, and much worse, at the task at hand than they are. It’s so Johnny and Janie can learn that improvements in skills don’t happen instantly – that it takes weeks and months and years of practice and determination and learning how quickly one heals after an injury.
Contra ‘Red’ Sanders, winning isn’t “the only thing”. In fact, it’s one of the very least important things.
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
They were super excited about coming for the black school teachers. Just gross.
Maybe it isn’t fair on my part to expect Rapinoe to come up with a nuanced, perfectly balanced statement anyway. She’s a professional athlete, not a spokesperson for anyone.
Kay
@Starfish:
I thought about that too- we have some female wrestlers and they seem to have figured that out, for just ordinary high school sports anyway.
O. Felix Culpa
@Another Scott:
You’re not really from America, are you. //
brendancalling
@Kay: I’ve paid little attention to Rufo—run of the mill anti-gay/racist piece of shit who’s not fit to shine my gay kid’s shoes—but I do have to admit it’s fun to see a creep like Sully begging the leopard not to eat his face.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
I read the interview and I didn’t object to it for that – I don’t think she really said that. I objected to it because she bought the premise behind the question which is that Democrats are focusing on trans issues. It’s a ridiculous assumption in the question and I don’t think Democrats have to answer those. She can correct him. Insist he rephrase.
Republicans seem to me to be focusing on trans issues. That the interviewer decided to pull this bullshit switcheroo just doesn’t have to be tolerated.
Kay
@brendancalling:
I paid a lot of attention to him because I read quite a bit on the politics of public education. It’s its own section of Twitter :)
They were all over it early, because conservatives attack public education once a year and have since Goldwater. Nothing Rufo is doing is new- it’s just more extreme and with CRT he was able to get buy-in from some influential so-called “liberals and centrists”, people like Jonathan Chait, who doesn’t really support public schools anyway.
BellyCat
Easy solution for the trans issue might be 3 types of each sport: women, trans, men?
Just imagine the outfits and theatrics of the trans cheering squads. I’d be TOTALLY down for shaking that aspect up. Of course, Fox Sports would refuse to broadcast….
catclub
@Gin & Tonic: not sure about drawing a syringe, but I could definitely see using an insulin pen with short 34gauge needles. Those are virtually painless.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: That’s a great point. It’s 100% Republicans who are focused on trans issues, CRT, etc., and making bigoted fools of themselves into the bargain. There’s an opening there when media figures frame questions that way.
gvg
@Kay: I read her answer as pointing out that the hater side was starting from the assumption that all the male to female athletes would beat all the only women athletes and that that was absurd, and wasn’t happening. I did not think she was arguing that point of view. In other words, it seemed to me she was saying the opposite of what you suggest?
narya
@Another Scott: This is a great point. I was already in high school when Title IX passed, so I saw few/none of the benefits of it myself, but I did play sports. What I’ve seen, I think, among women of my age-ish, is that people who’ve played sports have the experience of playing hard against a person/team, and then shaking hands afterward–it’s not personal. I am mediocre, at best, at sports, and did not have enough raw talent to excel at anything I played, but MOST people don’t! But the playing, the learning to do something physical, is worthwhile in and of itself, and I’ve continued to do new things.* (I do believe I could have done better with more experience at an earlier age, but that simply wasn’t available when I was a kid.) I want all kids to have opportunities to do stuff, for the pure joy of movement.
*Things I have tried: field hockey, basketball, running, handball, lacrosse, squash (both kinds), racquetball, yoga, pilates.
OzarkHillbilly
‘Fluffy’ crab that wears a sponge as a hat discovered in Western Australia
It’s really kinda cute.
UncleEbeneezer
@Tony Jay: Exactly. The fact that most of us can only name a single handful of successful, elite Transgender athletes, proves that the whole panic is bullshit. And since it is often framed in a “women’s rights” way, it is great when people like Rapinoe and Billie Jean King stand up for Trans-inclusivity in sports.
I also routinely note that the arguments of assumed physical dominance we hear from the other side sound almost identical to those that were used to justify racial segregation in sports only a few decades ago. Which should be pretty telling…
Brachiator
@Betty Cracker:
Height, weight, upper body strength, center of gravity are correlated with gender. But this is not an issue with every sport.
Jockeys all tend to be small bodied. I think they use weights to take into account some differences between jockeys. But I have never heard that there are any significant gender issues related to riding or guiding a horse.
I was watching some of the recent college track and field championships. I wondered if there was any overlap between the fastest women and the slowest men in, for example, the 400 meter run. But I didn’t care enough to look it up.
Elizabelle
Correction: had not read the FTF NYTimes yet (always the last paper I check, because FU to them), and they DID properly identify Colombian president-elect Petro as a longtime senator, in their website blurb. My bad. And I was happy to see that.
So many readers never read the stories; just see the headlines and blurbs.
ETA: But, if some readers see “sharply new path” and think Shining Path (the Peru guerrillas), it’s all good. Anyway, I hope these new leaders can survive in a world beset with pandemic and other issues (Putin-induced oil shocks, etc) beyond their control.
Another Scott
@Brachiator: Yeah, there’s lots of overlap, and of course things change over time.
Google tells me the (male) winner of the first (modern) Olympic marathon had a time of 2:58:50. The current shortest women’s time is 2:14:04.
There are certainly gender differences that can be important in some sports. But organizing bodies should err on inclusiveness and not wade into the othering mine field of deciding who is somehow female or male enough.
Cheers,
Scott.
Mike in NC
A little bit of light waterboarding might make Ginni Thomas more receptive to the J6 committee’s questions.
JML
high school, college, and Olympic athletics competitions shouldn’t have to be the focus for trans rights, and it stinks that it’s become the public face for so much of this fight, because the reality is competitive sports at those levels very quickly become a shitshow. Having the NCAA in the middle of this? What a mess. (and save us from the IOC, the most corrupt sporting organization this side of FIFA having anything to say here)
We’re at a time where college athletics are coming into a new crisis point, where revenues are way up for the biggest schools in D-I, but the costs and competition are also spiraling. For everyone else, the money is way, way down. D-II is increasingly a mess, where fewer schools can generate sufficient revenues any longer to support their sport portfolios, so they need to reduce the number of sports…but football skews rosters so badly on the men’s side that you have to have 3-4 additional women’s sports if you want to have football. But each additional sport costs even more. And any time you reduce the number of sports, a school is likely to get sued under Title IX (and lose), even if it’s just for past sins. But if you cut football, people lose their minds (even if they no longer actually go to the games). D-III is doing better, because it’s non-scholarship, which saves a ton of money. It’s also generally non-revenue at this point.
But it feels like the people who are pushing out hate against trans people are using athletics as their lever, because they know people even now still aren’t objective about sports, and with all the other complexities involved in competitive athletics at higher levels they can make it look like the trans people are the real reason things are getting screwed up for their beloved sports and ruining something they care about…for people who don’t have a personal connection to someone who is trans yet. It’s the newest method to pretend they’re not really bigoted (let’s be clear: they fucking well are), just “concerned” about sports and “fairness”. (they don’t give a damn about either, and trans people competing doesn’t even make the top ten issues that college athletics has these days)
Betty Cracker
@UncleEbeneezer: As hypocritical as it is, wingnuts framing anti-trans arguments in terms of women’s rights is diabolically clever because there’s a ton of unfinished business on women’s rights, maybe especially in this country, which seems backwards on that score in comparison to many peer nations. It’s a classic crab-bucket politics play.
raven
@Emma from Miami: Make a decision and try not to second guess yourself. We nursed Bohdi along and let him go when it was obvious he was miserable.
Chief Oshkosh
@OzarkHillbilly: I wonder if he’s figgered out where all that violence ripened from, who planted the seeds and watered the sprouts. I doubt that he can admit to himself that he tilled that soil and carried the water. Same with Cheney. I’m glad they are on the right side of the crisis and I sure don’t want them harmed, but that’s about it.
Baud
@Mike in NC:
Why do you think Lynn Cheney is co-chair.
Brachiator
@Elizabelle:
This is very cool. I had not been paying attention to the election in Colombia and knew nothing of the various candidates.
Typical bullshit. Her very existence, not just her politics, is seen as divisive to some idiots.
Immanentize
@OzarkHillbilly: Does this cap come in a chartreuse for the summer season?
Elizabelle
@Baud: Liz Cheney.
We all keep doing that one.
rikyrah
@Betty Cracker:
Look at what level we’re talking about.
How many athletes competing ever get to the level of where they are SERIOUS NCAA , let alone Olympic level. The pool itself is small as hell.
Baud
@Elizabelle:
We are old.
UncleEbeneezer
@Another Scott: What’s really gross is that so much of this stuff exposes an assumption that no Trans athlete should ever win a trophy that could have gone to a Cisgender athlete. They won’t say it out loud, but that is the gist of their position. It’s the same sense of entitlement that is used against affirmative action.
debbie
@OzarkHillbilly:
Silly crab!
Brachiator
@Another Scott:
Sports organizations have had to deal with this for years, going back to the era of performance enhancing drugs that would also tend to make female athletes more “masculine.” This happened a lot with some Soviet Bloc athletes during the Cold War era.
There are also current issues involving some female athletes who naturally do not fit narrow gender definitions.
And this also overlaps with performance affecting regimes, drugs and medications that are evaluated as to whether they are “natural” or not.
I think that sometimes athletes give blood samples that can be evaluated in the future if for example an undetectable substance might be found years from now to have unfairly been used to help an athlete.
The various bodies have been doing these types of evaluations long enough not to be bigots or assholes, or to bow to political pressure.
Baud
If it weren’t for trans people, I could have been a contender. I could have been somebody.
Another Scott
@UncleEbeneezer: Absolutely.
They want to tilt the playing field so that only their chosen tribe can win. First it was only “amateurs” (i.e. white people from money who could afford to spend time training while not being paid), etc., etc.
Why didn’t they exclude Michael Phelps when he obviously had an “unfair” advantage (his unusual body structure)??
People aren’t the same. Good athletes are not like everyone else. Disingenuously chasing “fairness” is just another opportunity to exclude people who aren’t in the in-group.
Cheers,
Scott.
Omnes Omnibus
It seems to me that Rapinoe is correct. We should begin from a point of inclusion. Now, if (and I am pulling this out of my ass as a hypothetical) an Olympic champion power lifter transitions well after developing male musculature and carries over that capacity post-transition, I could see a discussion taking place. I would assume something like is the kind of edge case that Rapinoe had in mind. FWIW I don’t know enough about the science to know where I would come down on the power lifter example. But I know I’d rather say yes to people living and completing as who they really are as baseline than any other standard.
UncleEbeneezer
@Betty Cracker: Very true. Especially since so many Women’s Rights advocates have operated on the idea that “Women” = Cisgender Women, for such a long time (which is understandable given their history and life experiences, though outdated).
James E Powell
@Baud:
Good one!
Van Buren
@Emma from Miami: I had a dog live 8 years with Cushings. I think you need to see how the dog tolerates the shots. If it is traumatic, then don’t continue them.
I don’t mean for it to sound so glib. It’s not easy.
TaMara
@Emma from Miami: I’m on the side of quality over quantity. Is there any chance the doctor could prescribe Metformin pills vs. shots? That maintained one of my cats and was definitely easier on him than shots. He may have lived longer with insulin shots, but he would have been miserable.
WeimarGerman
Open-thread so I’d like to request a topic for more in-depth discussion. Is anyone interested in understanding more about the recent SCOTUS rulings that seem to expand the Border Patrol’s ability to conduct warrantless searches anywhere within 100 miles of any border? I was a shocked when I was informed of this by my son, but verified it at https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone.
Would this allow some future administration to re-badge DEA offices as CBP to evade the 4th amendment? Lots of questions on this and what it will take to reaffirm the 4th Amendment.
VOR
I do not think most people understand the effort required to transition. It sometimes feels like the Republicans think trans is just a man putting on a dress for the day as a lark. So he can visit the women’s rest room. Or win a race. Cue TFG’s recent remarks about teaching transgender.
And then there is the reality of intersex people who do not fit in a neat little binary male/female bucket. I suspect when that sports agency talks about people transitioning prior to the age of 12 they are talking about intersex people picking a gender, or more likely, having their parents or doctor decide for them.
rikyrah
@JWR:
I will continue to say this.
The police force makes up 40% of the town’s budget.
Good paying jobs with benefits.
With their overall lack of education, they couldn’t possibly get a comparable job anywhere in the region.
I believe, with my whole chest, that the department IS NOT demographically comparable with the town.
And, that they don’t even live in the town.
WaterGirl
@Emma from Miami: I’m sorry you’re having to think about this.
Some dogs live for years with Cushings. My sister’s dog did.
I am a data girl, so before deciding that 2 insulin shots a day would be destructive to your boy’s quality of life, I would want to know how he reacts being given the shots. If, after the first few, his reaction is ho-hum no big deal, then I think you know your answer.
If after the first several it’s a constant fight and he HATES them, then you probably also know your answer.
My rule of thumb is that “As long as they’re in it, I’m in it.” When they are done, I’m done. And my older dogs have always told me when they are “done”, I have never had to guess.
JeanneT
@Emma from Miami: I think you try the treatment and see if it makes him feel better. He may feel peppier with the diabetes in check. You may be able to create a ritual of treats and cuddling around the shots that is really rewarding to both of you. But if you find getting and giving the daily shots affects your relationship and/or if it causes you both distress more than it improves his daily life, you can make your decision to discontinue.
Baud
@VOR:
It’s because that’s what right wingers would do.
Ken
@Baud: No, Republicans do it for important reasons, like attending a frat party or charity event.
MrKite
@Baud:Fitting that the dateline is Hungary.
O. Felix Culpa
@Omnes Omnibus:
Agreed.
Brachiator
@UncleEbeneezer:
This may largely be true. But there was also a time when for some sports journalists and the general public “Women” = Nice Real Women and Them Lesbians. I recall reading some stupid and hateful sports stories which implied that the best female golfers and tennis players were gay, and that “normal” women could not compete at the highest levels against gay women.
There are always bigots who come up with categories that conveniently rationalize their biases.
J R in WV
@narya:
“Squash (both kinds)”??
I’ve done squash in a PE class in college long time past. Small wooden room with odd finishing details, like a dead zone from which the ball won’t bounce. Kind of like racquetball but for the dead part of the front wall and dimensions being a little different.
What’s the other kind of squash? Patty pan? ;~)
Sister Golden Bear
@Omnes Omnibus:
Not a hypothetical at all. The first trans women athlete* at the Olympics, since trans athletes were first allowed to compete in 2003, was in fact a weightlifter. She washed out in the first round.
Also, it should be noted, that the rules to prevent trans woman “from having an unfair advantage” — e.g. maximum testosterone levels — have so far been exclusively used to disqualify Black women athletes from international competitions.
*There have been several trans men athletes in the Olympics over the years, but all the trans people in sports hysteria never seems to mention trans men/boys.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: liz
ETA: And anyway, it’s Lynne
Narya
@J R in WV: two different balls—one squishy, one hard.
brantl
Andrew Sullivan, world-wide award-winning putz.
Another Scott
@WeimarGerman: I think Popehat talked a tiny bit about this on his Twitter feed.
As always, there are a couple of things to keep in mind:
1) With enough sensible Democrats in office, the laws can be changed.
2) CBP doesn’t have enough people to round us all (or even a large fraction of us) up. Yes, they can do damage, especially if a RWNJ administration is overseeing them.
I’d start with Popehat – he’s pretty level-headed and understands how federal prosecutions work.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@Another Scott:
E.g. https://mobile.twitter.com/Popehat/status/1534540389545218048
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.