Good news from Minnesota

Donald Trump has another reason to invade us: this state stands for trans rights.

Today, the Minnesota Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in Cooper v. USA Powerlifting, affirming that transgender athletes have the right to compete in sports without discrimination under the Minnesota Human Rights Act (MHRA). The decision also clarified the harmful precedent set in Goins v. West Group only applies in the employment context, and the court did not consider whether to overturn Goins because Cooper’s case is not an employment case.

“This ruling sends a clear and powerful message: transgender people have a right to enjoy public spaces in Minnesota like sporting events, restaurants, and movie theaters, free from targeted discrimination,” said Jess Braverman, Legal Director at Gender Justice. “This decision is a historic victory for fairness, equity, and the fundamental rights of all Minnesotans.”

This ruling clarifies that all public accommodations in Minnesota, including sports organizations, must ensure their policies comply with Minnesota’s anti-discrimination laws. The implications of this decision extend well beyond sports to other facets of public life. This ruling reinforces the principle that every person deserves equal access to opportunities and spaces where they can thrive and belong.

Cool. Can we just replace the federal supreme court with the Minnesota supreme court?

That’s some persecution complex you’ve got, Anna Krylov

I wish people would stop running to Richard Dawkins for quotes defending regressive policies in science. He has nothing worthy to add, and it just damages his reputation more. Leave him in peace, to fade away gracefully.

His latest contretemps is to accuse the journal Nature of abandoning science for social justice. He provided no evidence that Nature was compromising science.

A leading scientific journal has defended its efforts to boost the diversity of researchers cited in its pages after an academic accused it of abandoning science to pursue a “social justice agenda”.

The criticism of Springer Nature group, which publishes the journal, was made by Anna Krylov, an American professor who has been a supporter of President Trump’s drive to stop American universities from promoting diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) in their admissions policies.

Richard Dawkins, the British evolutionary biologist, backed Krylov and said that too many journals were “favouring authors because of their identity group rather than the excellence and importance of their science”.

Krylov has a prestigious position at USC and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She’s also a crank. She wrote an atrocious article equating soap companies using inclusive language in their advertising to Soviet-style purging of history, which was much loved by the right-wing opponents of DEI. Her latest criticism is even more absurd and contrived.

Krylov, a chemistry professor at the University of Southern California (USC), said she had been invited to act as a peer-reviewer — a scientist asked to provide independent scrutiny — of a study being published in the journal Nature Communications.

In an open letter to bosses at Springer Nature, she said the topic was “within my field of expertise” and that she would “normally welcome the opportunity”, but asked if she had been contacted “because of my expertise in the subject matter or because of my reproductive organs”.

Wait, what? She’s highly qualified, she has expertise in the field, and her response to a routine request to review a paper is to ask if it’s because she has ovaries? The request says nothing about her sex, but is all about her skills, and she is reaching ridiculously hard to take offense. I would suggest that maybe her imposter syndrome has grown massive and malignant, but I think it more likely that she has found an angle that gets her a lot of attention. Either way, it’s a ridiculous complaint.

And look — she gets support from Richard Dawkins!

Reposting Krylov’s letter on X, Dawkins said: “Nature used to be the world’s most prestigious science journals”, but claimed it was now among many who placed emphasis on the background of authors rather than only on “the excellence … of their science”.

Nature is still among the world’s most prestigious science journals, and he has not shown in this complaint that the excellence of their science has diminished.

Unless…

Maybe he thinks Anna Krylov is such a poor scientist that he’s dismayed that she was asked to review a paper? That asking Anna Krylov to review a paper is evidence that Nature is scraping the bottom of the barrel nowadays? This could be a devious insult, you know.

Nah, near as I can tell, Krylov is an extremely well qualified chemist who is just afflicted with a petty and unjustified need to find offense in everything.

Once upon a time, Anna Krylov would have been unable to get a job in academia, and would have been discouraged from getting a college degree, let alone a Ph.D., and things have changed to the point where universities are doing their best to not discriminate against women or minorities (but not always succeeding). Now she wants to block progress in dismantling barriers, for some unfathomable reason, to the point she’s inventing slights against her career. It’s pretty bad when recognition that you’re a good scientist is used as evidence that scientific skills are being deprecated.

You didn’t know you’d wake up this morning to hear an old man raving about teenaged boys’ sperm counts

RFK jr went on a rant about sperm. It’s a national security threat, you know!

Today, the average teenager in this country has 50 percent of the sperm count, 50 percent of the testosterone as a 65-year-old man. Our girls are hitting puberty six years early, and that’s bad, but also our parents aren’t having children.

Parents who want to have children do not have access. I have seven children. I feel that God has blessed me with that and I can’t imagine how different my life would be if I did not have that blessing.

Sperm counts are known to decline with age, meaning a teenage boy is likely to have a much higher count than a man in his late sixties, according to experts.

our parents aren’t having children… think about that one for a moment.

Then consider Parents who want to have children do not have access. Access to what, you may ask, and also what makes them parents if they don’t have children? My head hurts reading whatever that ratfucker has to say about health.

It’s true that sperm counts have been reported to be declining, although very poor sampling of a variable parameter adds some doubt to the conclusion. We tend not to get sperm counts from teenagers! But I’d agree with him that environmental hazards, especially the ones that big capitalist corporations tend to spew everywhere, are almost certainly damaging the quantity and quality of gametes humans are producing. We should probably do something about that, but Republicans aren’t going to change anything that might affect the bottom line of Dow or Monsanto, so seeing a lackey of corporate interests piously expressing concern about forever chemicals contaminating the environment leaves me unmoved.

Also, making babies is a more complex process than just having a man making sperm (that’s probably the smallest part of the problem). Conception requires a consenting woman, and also requires that the parents have the time and money and interest to invest in raising a child. If you want more healthy babies in America, provide better medical care with low cost first — pumping up male sperm counts accomplishes nothing if no one wants or can afford children.

As for RFK jr himself — he has six children by two mothers (I think he’s counting his current girlfriend’s child as his own, which is fair). All of his marriages ended in divorce, and one was exceptionally acrimonious, and one of his former wives died of suicide. I don’t think he should be talking about “blessings”. He’s an old rich fuck and is not a role model for successful parenting. One of the causes of his divorce was the discovery of a book where he listed all of his extramarital affairs!

Wait…I thought conservatives blamed feminism for declining birth rates, but now it’s all due to those tainted, poisoned men shooting blanks? Cool.

People have been policing masculinity for a good long while

I suspect most of my readers are not manly, masculine “he-men,” according to this declaration by Edward K. Strong.

Men Are Becoming Less Manly, Scientist Thinks
Men today are not as roughly masculine as they used to be, according to Dr. Edward K. Strong, of Palo Alto, California, noted psychology professor at Stanford University. He set forth this conclusion in an article in the current issue of the Journal of Social Psychology.
The only he-men are engineers and farmers, he stated in an account of a survey of divisions of interest among the sexes. But if you are a minister, a lawyer, a doctor, a writer or a newspaperman, you have feminine interests, which have become stronger with each generation.

Although…how can you trust Dr Strong? He was neither an engineer or farmer, but was a psychologist, a mere academic who wrote books like The Psychology of Selling and Advertisement and The Psychology of Selling Life Insurance. He reeks of “feminine interests.”

Also, he’s dead. The article is from 1936.

Sympathetic pains…rising, rising

Damn, this review hurts for a couple of reasons, but it really shouldn’t. When people say stupid, hateful, hypocritical things, they should be rebuked and their errors made public, right? Especially when they have so amply demonstrated that they are deserving. But sometimes the criticism is so savage that I can feel a faint echo of the pain.

The well-regarded video essayist Shaun has a new target, and just eviscerates a group of people over the course of FOUR HOURS (admission: I’ve only made it halfway through it so far). The people are the authors behind Krauss’s new book, The War on Science, and the video runs on for so long because he thoroughly debunks each and every one of them. Krauss himself gets thoroughly demolished, but then it goes on to document the terrible opinions of Christian Ott, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne, and more. I get briefly mentioned and for a second I was terrified that I was going to get shredded, too, but fortunately Shaun is agreeing with my position.

If ever I have to go up against any of the authors, I’m going to have to review this video again and take notes, because no one emerges unscathed.

Wow, that was really brutal…and accurate.

Only the heterosexuals are safe

Wait, no, that’s not true — the Republicans are gunning for everyone who is tolerant of other people’s sexual orientation. The gays are just next in line.

This is reminding me of the 80s, when Ronald Reagan was leading an affable campaign of hatred. Rand Paul is a hardcore anti-gay crusader, always has been, but in the current political climate he’s more free to expose himself.

One of the people who resigned in opposition to the destruction of the CDC was Demetre Daskalakis, who Paul has decided was unfit for his position anyway.

Asked about the resignations on Tuesday (2 September), Sen. Paul said: “One of the guys that is the biggest proponent of doing all this is the guy who describes the risky behaviour that he and his lifestyle involve.

“A guy that is so far … out of the mainstream, I think most people in America would discount his opinion because of the things he said in the past. He does not represent the mainstream of anything in America,” he went on.

“He should have never had a position in government. He brags about his lifestyle, you know, this whole idea of bondage and, you know, multiple partners and all that stuff. He brags about that stuff, but he’s got no business being in government. It’s good riddance.”

Being out of the mainstream in one’s personal preferences and behavior has never (or should never) be a criterion in determining one’s expertise in doing science. I thought Paul was a Libertarian? To be honest, being a Libertarian should disqualify you from ever holding office, but fortunately I don’t have the power to make that decree.

Even worse, there is a candidate running to replace Dan Crenshaw, which normally I’d approve of — he’s poison. But the person running against him is Valentina Gomez, a woman who is upset that there are lesbians in the WNBA, who wants to take a flamethrower to books that “groom” children.

The video ends with an image of Gomez smiling into the camera, holding an AR-15 with an ammunition holder tied around her waist in front of a Tesla Cybertruck.

Charming. Fortunately, she has little hope of getting elected — she previously ran for the Secretary of State of Missouri, and came in 6th place with 8% of the vote. That’s more than she deserved, but it tells you about the power of being rabidly anti-gay.

Never learn anatomy from social media

It’s another anatomical atrocity from the bowels of the internet. Be amazed at the magnitude of the physical differences between men and women (although I hope this was exaggerated by some online comedian.)

I had no idea that women’s larger hips were all filled with an enlarged bony structure, contrary to my limited experience, or that women’s feet evolved specifically for wearing high heels.

They’re feminizing dinosaurs now!

So much of the nonsense about the gender binary is projection, and imposition of cultural biases on top of biology. Case in point: this very silly post that claims that putting feathers on dinosaurs is a woke attempt to make them more feminine.

Male and female birds and dinosaurs had feathers, it wasn’t like a drag queen draping themselves in a feather boa. Also, the change in size is, I think, an echo of the Jurassic Park velociraptors, which were portrayed as much larger than the fossils showed — it was a case of Spielberg making them bigger to be more threatening, most definitely not scientists shrinking them down to make them more feminine.

Whoever was trying to make this case has not raised chickens, which given the right temperament can be utterly terrifying in their ferocity, despite being small and feathered.

I kinda like Quakers…but not all of them

Quakers are just one step removed from humanists, but with an even greater commitment to social justice. I like that, although I could never join a group with any vestige of god-belief. Still, I appreciate them.

The Quakers in Britain have been promoting equality and tolerance for a long, long time, to the point where one subgroup has split off and formed their own little sect, Sex Matters to Quakers, which is associated with a broader group called LGB Christians. Notice the missing “T” — they’re one of those groups that makes a special point of not recognizing trans people. It’s like supporting Black Lives Matter except for the Senegalese (I have no problem with Senegal, I just picked a random African nation), which really just says you’re bigoted against one group. You’re still a bigot. I don’t like these Quakers.

We reached a point about three years ago when there were enough of us to attempt to become a ‘Quaker recognised body’. Our primary aims were to bring Quaker members and attenders together: to speak truth to power, that is, biological truth to gender-ideological power; and to state that women are adult human females and men are adult human males.

SMtQ fired off a letter to their parent organization protesting the existence of trans-inclusive restrooms, which is another signal that they are not good people. The Quakers in Britain got the letter, which was also broadcast all over the place, and so the Quakers responded with a long letter rejecting their request. It’s a good letter, maybe a bit over-long, but thorough in shutting down the protest. I’ll pull out a few points that I thought were particularly clear.

• Deliberate misgendering of a person is transphobia.
• Referring to trans women as men is transphobia.
• Assuming a trans person poses a risk simply for being trans is transphobic.
• Stating that trans men are vulnerable and “groomed” into transition is a
transphobic trope.
• References to “trans activism” as anything other than the legitimate effort to
protect and advocate for the rights of people who are trans or non-binary is
transphobic.
• Alleging that Quakers have been “infiltrated” by trans activists is a transphobic
conspiracy theory and we are particularly offended by it.
• The notion that supporting and advocating for the safety, wellbeing, and
inclusion of trans people could be damaging to the Religious Society’s
reputation, or even “might be the thing that finally destroys them” is shocking
and dangerous. It is fearmongering, threatening, and extreme.

It concludes with a statement of principle that I can agree with.

“As Britain Yearly Meeting, we have minuted commitments in recent years: to care for our planet, to become an anti-racist church, to make reparations for historical injustices, to welcome and affirm those who are transgender, nonbinary, and gender diverse. Much work has been done on all these by some individual Friends and Quaker meetings, as well as by our yearly meeting staff and committees. However, some have disagreed with the actions and approaches of others. This has been a cause of pain and anguish. We have heard in ministry that the strength of a church lies in how it is able to disagree with itself. In Quaker discernment, unity is not the same as unanimity. Minority views may well continue to exist. Among ourselves, we need to find kinder ground for our disagreements.
Can we find joy? Can we bring joy?”

You go, Quakers! Excepting those weirdos among you.