I did not know that Chaya Raichik, the hatemonger behind Libs of TikTok, had an official position in Oklahoma schools. But she did. She was on the Oklahoma Department of Education’s Library Media Advisory Committee, placed there by the far-right extremist, Ryan Walters, who runs things in that state, unfortunately.

Raichik specifically targeted one school district for her hate campaign.

One of these instances was at the Owasso School District (just outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma). In 2022, Chaya Raichik targeted an Owasso teacher for speaking out in support of LGBTQ+ students who lacked acceptance from their parents. Raichik’s post was shared thousands of times on social media and resulted in the teacher getting condemned and harassed until they resigned. The posts Raichik made about the teacher were later deleted, but have been archived. It’s unclear what prompted the deletion of the posts by Raichik. We know Raichik’s Libs of TikTok posts have contributed to a culture of intolerance against LGBTQ+ youth in schools, and now this hate may be manifesting beyond mere threats.

She deleted a bunch of those posts? Why? Has she learned some shame?

No, that’s not it.

This month, a non-binary 16-year-old student at Owasso High School was brutally murdered in the girl’s restroom. According to local news outlets and family, Nex Benedict was beaten by three older female students. The mother of Benedict’s best friend told KJRH News that “one of the girls was pretty much repeatedly beating [Benedict’s] head across the floor.” Reports say Benedict was unable to take themselves to the nurse’s office after a teacher finally intervened in the brutal assault. For reasons that remain unclear, Owasso High School refused to call an ambulance for 16-year-old Nex Benedict, who died from their injuries in the hospital the next day. A motive for this killing has not been shared by law enforcement, but we know that schools in Oklahoma have been specifically pushing violent eliminationist rhetoric against transgender and non-binary youth— a fact exemplified by the state’s hiring of Chaya Raichik following her incitements of terror against the state’s schools over LGBTQ+ rights.

This is not a murder mystery, even though the MSN headline is “16-year-old Owasso student who died unexpectedly was laid to rest”. Died unexpectedly? They were brutally beaten to the point they couldn’t walk, and died in the hospital the next day. They were killed by those three students, who had been incited to the act by Chaya Raichik. That’s 4 people, at least, who need to be arrested for manslaughter, for a start.

Maybe Ryan Walters should be fired, too.

CripDyke has a thoughtful post on this crime. Go read that.

We can make all kinds of arguments about what defines or doesn’t define a sex, but it really doesn’t matter — especially when it’s from a stock vanilla cishet person like Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, or me. What we should be discussing is the lived experience of trans people who are better acquainted with the actual life in a trans body.

So they did.

The report, called the 2022 US Trans Survey, presents an early look at findings from a survey of more than 92,000 people who identify as binary or nonbinary transgender adults. It is the first such report since the NCTE produced a survey of more than 28,000 individuals in 2015. Individuals were asked a variety of more than 600 possible questions. No respondent received all questions.

Importantly, the transgender survey is large but is not random. Although surveyors weighted the responses to try to account for biases, people who took the survey might still be unrepresentative of transgender people living in the US as a whole.

The report found that 94% of transgender individuals who live at least part of the time in a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth – in other words, who “transitioned” – were either “a lot” (79%) or “a little more satisfied” (15%) with their lives. Nearly 98% of respondents were receiving some kind of hormone replacement therapy, which made them “a lot” (84%) or “a little” (14%) more satisfied with their lives.

I don’t think the report will convince the opposition to shut the fuck up, unfortunately. I predict two responses. One, they’ll focus on the 6% (although it’s actually less than 1% who were unhappy after hormone treatments or surgery) and shriek about their ruined lives while ignoring the majority of successful outcomes, and not bothering to ask what went wrong in that minority. Two, they’ll point to the study as proof that they were right all along, see how seductive the trans lifestyle is? I remember how the anti-gay people moaned about how appealing the self-indulgent, self-gratifying, sybaritic gay life was, and how we must ban all gay references to keep our children from falling into the trap. This is the same thing. They’re going to call this study trans propaganda and ignore the actual data.

The one thing I can say as a stock vanilla cishet person is that no, I’m not going to suddenly shed all my sexual preferences and change my interests because I see somebody else having a good time. I’m going to be happy for them. What’s the matter with those people who’d rather others were unhappy?

It looks like it’s Jerry Coyne. Those two need to be separated — every time they get together they start hooting and jumping on the furniture and throwing unmentionables out the window.

In case you’re curious to know what outrageous insanity the science advisor, Juliet Gerrard, said, it’s this: “Sex and gender are different but related things. Neither is binary. For an accessible introduction to why sex isn’t binary, Wikipedia is not a bad place to start.”

Are you reeling in shock? No? Neither am I. That’s actually an eminently sensible statement, since sex and gender are different but related, and neither is binary. This is the kind of thing biology professors all around the world, at least those who aren’t poisoned by an ideological freak-out, are saying all the time. That’s a mundane, normal, healthy expression of our current understanding of the science of sex. Calm down, guys.

I have a couple of other objections to Dawkins’ statement.

1. Pretending to not know what gender is is childish and stupid, well beneath him. Yeah, Richard, you can look up “gender”. It’s what we’d expect of a serious scholar.

2. Biologists do not define sex by gamete size. Gamete size is one of the many consequences of sexual development, and not the only one.

3. Come on, complaining about “Generation TikTok”? Do you also shake your cane at those kids on your lawn? Face it, we’re older than most people, the young’uns will be taking over the world soon enough. Get used to it.

You know, those two olds are making the rest of us look foolish. If you can’t keep up, Grandpa, go back to gumming your pablum while watching Wheel of Fortune. Some of us still have brains that are relatively uncalcified and can enjoy watching the world progress around us.

Did you know that Richard Dawkins began his career as an ethologist? He got his Ph.D. studying animal behavior under Niko Tinbergen. If you’re an ethologist, you might study things like courtship behavior and parental investment and feeding strategies etc., etc., etc. Dawkins studied how animals make choices.

That was in 1966. Apparently he’s forgotten all that ever since.

Somehow, an awful lot of biologists study sexual behavior — like lekking, or sexual displays, or fidelity, and on and on — that don’t necessarily involve sperm collection or measuring ovulation or that kind of thing. It is absurd to insist that only gametes define sex. I recognize spider sexes by the morphology of their palps, and by their differences in behavior, not gametes. I see the birds flying outside my window, and I discriminate sexes by color, primarily. To say that biologists have better things to do than study gender is ridiculous. Every biologist who looks at the plumage of birds or watches the courtship of spiders is studying a phenomenon far removed from basic gamete formation yet is an indispensable, unavoidable, intrinsic consequence of sex in that species…and the animal isn’t getting a semen count before engaging in it.

This is true of human biology, too. People don’t have to check their gonads before engaging in all kinds of sexual behaviors; they would rather not have to worry about the sex police telling them what they can and can’t do, and generally they disregard the prudes in private anyway. You can be a feminine man or a masculine woman, or any shade in between or beyond, and gametes don’t come into play at all, except in reproduction. Reproduction is not the sole function of sex.

Dawkins is just being an extreme reductionist to the point he’s making himself and his position look silly. Go ahead, all you reactionary biologists, rant about how there can be only two true sexes because people have some cells that are almost never seen in public, in defiance of all the other valid signals they openly display. Better biologists will go on recognizing all the factors that define sex without your self-imposed, narrow-minded blinders.

P.S. Dawkins is not an embryologist. No, sex isn’t solely determined by chromosomes embryologically, but by a battery of influences that shape the embryo, including a few genes on some chromosomes. He is an evolutionary biologist, and he doesn’t recognize that the fluidity of sex determination mechanisms suggests that maybe biology isn’t as rigid as he thinks?

A GOP Super Pac asked their members what their gender was. The choices are mildly surprising.

We men have to complain, though, that they left out our genders: alpha, beta, sigma, and cuck.

From Jerry Coyne fans!

I am appalled at the ad hominem attacks which you – as a scientist – seem willing to deliver against people like Prof Jerry Coyne et al.

No, no, no. An ad hominem attack would be something like “Coyne’s cowboy boot fetish is stupid, therefore his ideas about trans people are wrong.” Just pointing out that his ideas about transgender biology are stupid is not an ad hominem.

This is just an annoyance. A lot of my hatemail flings around the “ad hominem” accusation without understanding it.

Having read pretty much all of Coyne’s comments on this issue it is quite apparent that he is not a transphobe as you falsely claim.

As the definition of a phobia is ‘an irrational fear’ this means that I too am not transphobic.

OK, this is another common trope: literal dictionary translation of a term to weasel out from under it. That’s not how it works. A transphobe is someone who opposes allowing trans people rights and opportunities, who has an irrational contempt to justify their biases.

If you’re not afraid, then why oppose them at all? I mean, I would concede that I am “Republicanphobic,” because I am afraid of what they’re doing to our country, but not transphobic, because even if I thought they were wrong (I don’t), I’m not at all concerned about letting them participate in sports or write books or talk to people about their experiences. Leave them alone!

So perfect I had to use it:

Why on earth would you then presuppose that JK Rowling, Helen Joyce, Kathleen Stock, Richard Dawkins et al are ‘transphobic’ – particularly as all of them have expressed supportive views towards the trans community.

Oh, wow. Rattle off the names of some of the most notorious transphobes in the public sphere, and then think it excuses you and Coyne because you’re just like them. OK, you win, you’re no more transphobic than Rowling & Joyce & Stock & Dawkins. Great defense.

Utter nonsense on your part.

However, what Coyne and I share in common is in the defence of biological women, and in their right to retain women-only spaces and sports etc, and which should not be invaded by individuals who possess male genitalia and male musculature, but who wish to be regarded as women.

Perhaps you need to take a step back and consider the rights of (biological) women who have fought against male oppression for centuries?

Great. Now we get the “biological women” canard. We’re all biological, you know, we’re all people. All these traits people use to put people into two categories exhibit a wide range of overlapping variation. The one reason Coyne fans have retreated to basing their arguments on gametes is because there, at least, they can find one criterion that is binary…never mind that all the other features are not, and can contradict the evidence from gametes. Get used to it — humans are complicated and don’t fit into just two bins.

I do wonder if your personal attacks represent the weakness of your position on this issue?
They certainly represent a failure on your part to adhere to Science.

Back in the day men who wished to dress as women regarded themselves as being cross-dressers, or transvestites. What they never claimed to be was a ‘woman.’

I consider extreme reductionism — such as claiming that human identity can be reduced to two simple categories — to be a failure of science. Simplistic explanations make me skeptical.

Has it occurred to you that unsubstantiated, unscientific views like yours are actually doing harm to the cause of trans people, a group of our fellow humans who no doubt you would want to claim you support?

You haven’t demonstrated that my views are unsubstantiated or unscientific. The basis for your disagreement is that you don’t like my position because it contradicts your superficial biases.

Also, I kind of suspect that denying their existence does more harm to the cause of trans people.

As a result, the extreme right and extreme left will no doubt welcome you into their nasty little cliques with open arms…..

Both sides! The correct answer is in the middle!

This is just like slapping down creationists.

Orac called out Jerry Coyne on Threads!

Coyne was mad because SBM didn’t endorse his favorite flavors of transphobia — they rejected the hateful nonsense of people like Katherine Stock and Abigail Schreier. How dare they! SBM quoted an article that criticized Helen Joyce’s bad biology, which, unfortunately, Coyne is committed to supporting. This is embarrassing.*

The prohibition of trans women in female sports is to assure fair competition for women, not “mental and physical health”.

Joyce is no scientist. Joyce’s Twitter bio includes the line “show me the 3rd gamete & we can talk.” Joyce considers the term “TERF” a slur. It is evident throughout the painstaking reading of her online footprint and book that she labors under confusion, ignorance, and lack of scientific knowledge. And, of course, Joyce believes that trans activists are suppressing research.

I like the third gamete quote because it is indeed the presence of only two types of gametes that is the definition of sex: men have small mobile ones and women large immobile ones. And yes, “TERF” (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) is indeed a slur by gender activists against “gender-critical feminists” like Joyce. Here’s the very first result I got when I googled TERF. DEROGATORY!

Oh, he likes “the third gamete quote”. He thinks he can shut down all those people arguing for trans rights by shouting Show me the third gamete! which is so incredibly stupid. No one is arguing that there is a “third gamete”. This claim is directly comparable to a creationist saying Show me a dog giving birth to a cat!, something no evolutionary biologist thinks is possible, that isn’t a conclusion from evolutionary theory, that reveals such a deep misunderstanding of the concept they’re trying to criticize that they ought to be just cast into the depths and ignored forever more.

There isn’t a third gamete, but no one is talking about gametes, except for the likes of Jerry Coyne and other TERFs. We are talking about the rights of full grown adult human beings, who are far more than a puddle of ejaculated goo or a sloughed off membrane. People are far more complex than a single-celled component of their bodies, and I would hope Coyne would realize that there are many more than two kinds of humans, and understand that what he’s trying to do is reify a category.

It really comes down to his narrow definition of sex: men have small mobile ones and women large immobile ones. Nope. No one defines their sex by the kind of gametes they produce — sex is complex and diverse and idiosyncratic for everyone, and we all use varied criteria for identifying the sex of others and ourselves. Coyne has arbitrarily decided to be extremely reductive and key everything on one cell, because that supports his claim that there should be only two sexes, contrary to everything we can see.

As for his whine that the word TERF is DEROGATORY, yes it is. It’s a terrible thing to be, no matter what words you use: gender critical or regressive dickhead or anti-trans, I don’t care. The derogatory nature of the term comes from the inherent substance of the person, not the dictionary. You could call them “sweet baboos” and they’d still stink, and the name would still be derogatory, because it is attached to an unpleasant and hateful person.

* Sorry, not linking. You can look it up if you must — the bit I’ve included is a direct copy & paste, you’re not going to find that I’ve misquoted him. He really said that.

See the nice couple? They have a busy career making videos and writing books. They seem to be enjoying their life.

Geri and Jay Hart are the pen names of a married woman and man who serve in executive positions at two well-known organizations in the U.S. They frequently participate in civic and charitable events and appear in their local media. Although their careers keep Geri and Jay well occupied individually, their top priority is being together. During shared times they enjoy exercising, traveling, eating healthy food, and—of course—exploring and savoring their sexuality. See select videos and follow them on OnlyFans, X (formerly Twitter), and PornHub @SexyHappyCouple.

“Geri and Jay Hart” are pseudonyms — they do a lot of sex stuff, and want their privacy. Somebody leaked their actual names, and…uh-oh, Jay Hart’s real name is Joe Gow, and he was the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. You can imagine how that went down.

Former University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow said Thursday that the school’s governing board fired him because members were uncomfortable with him and his wife producing and appearing in pornographic videos.

The Universities of Wisconsin Board of Regents, which oversees UW-Madison, UW-La Crosse and 11 other regional campuses, voted unanimously during a hastily convened closed meeting Wednesday evening to fire Gow.

After the vote, Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman and regents President Karen Walsh issued statements saying the regents had learned of specific conduct by Gow that subjected the university to “significant reputational harm.” Rothman called Gow’s actions “abhorrent” and Walsh said she was “disgusted.” But neither of them offered any details of the allegations.

No details. I glanced through their stuff (blushing all the way), and it’s all very explicit, but the focus is on consent and mutual pleasure. I didn’t see anything abhorrent or disgusting…well, maybe a tightly-puckered sphincter of a prude would dislike them. They fired him because he had a happy, cheerful sex life, something none of the regents would ever have.

They’re also planning to have his tenure revoked.

Unless there is evidence of non-consensual behavior, none of this should happen. Unless we’re going to fire everyone for the ‘crime’ of being sexual, there are no grounds for dismissal here.

There’s an interesting counterpoint in the case of Bridget Ziegler, the far-right co-founder of Moms for Liberty, who was discovered to have an interesting sex life — she was involved in a three-way sexual relationship. Again, as long as it’s consensual, no big deal; her husband, on the other hand, was accused of raping their partner, which is a big deal. Ziegler was not fired for her sexual activities, and I have no problem with that, although she should have been fired for extraordinary hypocrisy, since she rode into her position by condemning others for their sex acts. At least some people realize that. This student zeroed in on the real problem.

Calls for Ziegler to resign her position on the Sarasota School Board continue to this day, and a public hearing was recently held, with parents and students demanding she step down. One Sarasota parent, Sally Sells, explained the issue wasn’t what the Zieglers do in the bedroom. “Most of our community could not care less what you do in the privacy of your own home, but your hypocrisy takes center stage,” Sells said. Former Sarasota student Zander Moricz drove home that point. “Bridget, you deserve to be fired from your job because you are terrible at your job, not because you had sex with a woman,” Moricz said.

The kids are all right.