Tuesday, February 28, 2023

Southern Baptists kick out Saddleback Church for having a woman pastor

A while back, I wrote about "What’s Odd About ‘The Purpose-Driven Life’" for Medium. I'm thinking of the Purpose-Driven Life's author, Rick Warren, right now, because I learned from another writer on Medium that the Southern Baptist Convention kicked his Saddleback Church out of the denomination. It's because the church has a woman pastor. Given other general behaviors of the denomination, it doesn't surprise me, but the event is worth noting.

See also my posts on this blog: Evangelicals disappointed in Trump's behavior and Inconsistencies in crediting suffering and success to God

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Saturday, February 25, 2023

NYT letter about the paper's coverage of trans people

Wemple's opinion in the Washington Post:

"The New York Times is racked with internal dissent over internal dissent — a development stemming from multiple open letters sent last week to newspaper management taking issue with the paper’s recent coverage of transgender youth.

* * *

The NewsGuild of New York, which represents Times journalists, tells the Erik Wemple Blog that Times employees have been called into 'investigatory meetings' related to their participation as signatories. An informed source says that disciplinary actions are underway.

The tough talk from management prompted a rebuke from Susan DeCarava, president of the NewsGuild, which is in the midst of contentious collective bargaining negotiations with the Times. The coherence of the don’t-attack-your-colleagues rule is questionable, noted DeCarava, since the paper in 2020 published a critique by op-ed columnist Bret Stephens of the Times’s own 1619 Project."

His conclusion: "Though a general prohibition on criticizing the work of colleagues is destined to fail, newspaper leaders are correct to respond firmly to an advocacy petition. Journalists, after all, are paid to cover such efforts, not join them."

— "The New York Times newsroom is splintering over a trans coverage debate." (unpaywalled) Opinion by Erik Wemple. Washington Post. 24 Feb 2023.

To which I commented:

"Re: Mr. Wemple's conclusion: "Though a general prohibition on criticizing the work of colleagues is destined to fail, newspaper leaders are correct to respond firmly to an advocacy petition. Journalists, after all, are paid to cover such efforts, not join them." I'm struggling to understand why, if the coverage is the problem, more coverage is the answer. (Including meta-coverage of other people's advocacy about coverage.) The NY Times coverage of trans issues is biased, damaging, and inaccurate. The exact problems with the coverage have been pointed out many times by many people, including myself, so I won't repeat those complaints here. At least some Times employees agree that issues affecting trans people should be reported on differently, but the Times is saying "no" and is demonstrably not paying anyone to do this coverage appropriately. So what recourse is available to journalists who disagree on the facts as they're being reported and also as a matter of conscience regarding cis people's treatment of trans people? How can institutional change be achieved?"

And then I wrote "Why There’s Still An Argument About NYT Coverage of Trans People". It's a 5-minute read on Medium.

Alejandra Caraballo tweets Feb 20, 2023: 'In 1986, the New York Times published a William F Buckley column calling for the forced tattooing of those with HIV/AIDS on their FOREARM. Had this been enacted, there certainly would've been holocaust survivors getting a 2nd government mandated tattoo.' She included a screenshot of the old NYT article: ‘But if the time has not come, and may never come, for public identification, what then of private identification? Everyone detected with AIDS should be tatooed [sic] in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.’

Here's the NYT Archives link she provided to the Buckley column.

This continues:

On April 14, 2023, Alejandra Caraballo tweets a screenshot of a four-paragraph letter from Ben Ryan dated April 6 in which he's looking for physicians who don't specialize in gender-affirming care and want to express their 'misgivings' about it. She comments: The New York Times and Benjamin Ryan are writing another transphobic hit piece looking for providers who 'have misgivings about gender affirming care.' Providers and advocates should ignore any outreach or requests for comment from Ryan as he is another Jesse Singal.

August 2023 update:

Parker Molloy:

"The Times is, sadly, a joke. Just like when Erick Erickson shot holes in a Times editorial calling for gun control in the wake of a 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino and was later rewarded with space in the paper to make a very laughable case for trying to find 'common ground' with people who hold differing opinions (Erickson has since suggested murdering his political opponents by throwing them out of helicopters), the Times has once again debased itself by gifting Coulter a platform to promote her Substack."

— "Our Homelander Moment, Our Homelander World: Ann Coulter is writing for the New York Times. How did we get here?" Parker Molloy. Substack. August 23, 2023.

abstract green color

GLAAD tweeted August 24:

GLAAD tweeted Aug 24, 2023: Yesterday, @nytimes published yet another biased, anti-trans article. This morning, we’re at the NYT headquarters holding them accountable.' There's a photo and video attached to the tweet.
The photo GLAAD attached to their tweet. A black van displays a message: Dear New York Times: Stop questioning trans people's right to exist and access to medical care. Yesterday's story about trans healthcare: pushes debunked lies from an anti-trans extremist, lacks context, and ignores the science of healthcare for transgender people.

That URL on the van is: glaad.org/nytimes

Parker Molloy says: "On the topic of trans health care, the Times response to criticisms of its activism was… to complain that everyone else was an activist, not them."

A century and a half ago the NYT was publishing articles saying the North should stop talking about slavery and for sure the South would get its own act together as soon as the North ceased to be so annoying.

In the Intelligencer (New York Magazine), Jonathan Chait argues that trans people are kind of to blame.

Similarly, see: Progressives need to engage with the specific questions about youth gender care: Abstract values of freedom and equality don't deliver all the answers, Matthew Yglesias: February 16, 2023

"The only thing I want to see from these newly expanded staff bios is somebody finally disclosing which writers and editors at the Times are trying to litigate their fights with their gender-questioning kids in the pages of the newspaper" (Tom Scocca, February 4, 2024, on Bsky)

Washington Post reporter Erik Wemple on this topic.

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Friday, February 24, 2023

2013 Boston Marathon bombing

In Episode 8 of my novel, Most Famous Short Film of All Time, set in early 2015, there's a passage about the Boston Marathon:

"Not last April but the one before, the Marathon bomber hid in a driveway in Watertown. He had to hide somewhere, so he found a boat, climbed in, and lay bleeding under a tarp. An infrared camera from a helicopter saw the outline of his body. Is that glamour or pishogue: the way the terrorist appears, or the way the cops see the terrorist? Both, I suppose. It’s the same gun, whether you’re pointing or being pointed at. Anyway, the infrared image printed in the newspaper looked like the cover of Life of Pi: the curled outline of the fearsome foe inside the lifeboat."

Once I wrote a little article about the Marathon bombing. I'm reposting it here, for anyone who'd like that context.

On Monday, April 15, 2013, two bombs exploded on Boylston Street in Boston's Copley Square near the finish line of the marathon held on the Patriot's Day holiday. Packed with small nails to maximize damage, the bombs injured almost 200 people, three of whom died.

The Boston Marathon is a world-renowned annual outdoor event that draws about 20,000 pre-qualified athletes and a half-million spectators. The bombs had been placed in trash cans outside a sportswear store and a coffee shop.

aerial photo of Boston Marathon
Image: The finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon, before bombs exploded and the race was called off. Source: Wikimedia Commons

First responders rushed to the aid of the wounded before the smoke had even cleared. The police locked down Copley Square as a crime scene and immediately began communicating to the runners – many of whom were still streaming across the 26-mile course toward the finish line, not yet knowing what had happened – that the race was over and that they could not proceed. Doctors performed many amputations and other life-saving treatments at nearby hospitals.

Due in part to the immediate uncertainty about the city's safety, a number of significant events that evening were canceled, including a Boston Symphony Orchestra performance and a Boston Bruins hockey game. But the next day, most people were back to work.

The day after the bombing, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino announced they would fundraise for the victims through a new charity. A simple placeholder website said "The One Fund Boston" would seek charitable organization status retroactive to April 16. The financial company John Hancock made the first donation of $1 million. The Boston Bruins and the Pittsburgh Penguins announced they would auction off jerseys to support the fund.

The Red Cross said they had received sufficient blood donations. The Salvation Army was operating mobile kitchens. The Kraft family offered to match $100,000 donated through the New England Patriots and New England Revolution Charitable Foundations. The Vince Wilfork Foundation announced that all donations through April 2013 would go to the bombing victims.

Funds to support individual families affected by the bombing sprang up on various online crowdfunding sites. Many raised hundreds of thousands of dollars within a single day, setting fundraising records for what was then relatively new technology.

The April 16 print edition of the Boston Herald carried a number of poignant articles. Writing from Washington, D.C., Kimberly Atkins reported "eerie scenes of caution, alert, fear and sadness reminiscent of the days after the 9/11 attacks. In a place where the threat of terrorism is an ever-present reality, the attack in Copley Square was taken personally." Michael Graham wrote that the attack "did something to me that eight years of living, writing and talking in this city couldn't: It made me a Bostonian...Today, it's my town."

The Boston Globe newspaper dropped its paywall, temporarily displaying a message:  "BostonGlobe.com is currently available to all readers."

On Thursday, April 18, thousands of people came to an interfaith prayer service in honor of the victims at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. Mayor Menino, recovering from a lengthy illness and a recent surgery for a broken leg, rose from his wheelchair and addressed the crowd: "No adversity, no challenge, nothing can tear down the resilience in the heart of this city and its people." President Obama also appeared and exhorted the city: "We finish the race."

Especially because two active members of the Humanist Community at Harvard were severely injured in the bombing, leaders of that community made an effort to help shape the interfaith service so that it could include and represent people who do not believe in God. Their effort was unsuccessful, but in the face of that challenge, they planned their own vigil to be held in a park the coming Sunday. They planned to give atheists, agnostics, and humanists a place to gather, grieve, and express their emotions.

Police identified the two men believed responsible for the bombings. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in a standoff with police in the early hours of the morning on Friday, April 19. The cities of Boston and Cambridge and other surrounding towns were put on lockdown for the entire day (6 a.m. to 6 p.m.) while police searched door-to-door for his younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. (After deciding not to move the trial, jury selection began in Boston in January 2015 from the largest pool ever in Boston. Tsarnaev was eventually sentenced to death.)

Public transit was shut down, residents were not permitted to leave their homes, and most businesses were closed. (Dunkin' Donuts, however, remained open at strategic locations to provide free aliment to cops.)

This article was originally posted to Helium Network, which went offline at the end of 2014.

Chaya Raichik, "Libs of TikTok"

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Thursday, February 23, 2023

Anti-transgender legislation fight in Montana

fawn

January 2024

"Over 10,000 Christians signed a petition that condemned the banning of Representative Zooey Zephyr, a Montana Democrat and the state's first transgender lawmaker, from the state's House floor on Wednesday after she reportedly breached decorum.
* * *
'If you vote yes on this bill [Senate Bill 99, which banned gender-affirming care for minors], I hope the next time you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands,' Zephyr said. In response, Republican House Speaker Matt Regier deemed her statements as a breach of decorum. As a result, she was barred from the House floor in a 68-32 vote, meaning that she will not be allowed to debate or speak on legislation for the remainder of session, which ends next week." — Thousands of Christians Condemn GOP's 'Fascist' Silencing of Trans Lawmaker, Fatma Khaled, Newsweek, April 30, 2023

Breached decorum? What?

Who makes a "blood on your hands" comment? Senator Lindsey Graham (R–SC) on January 31, 2024. You will hear zero Republicans tell him that he breached decorum.

CSPAN tweets on January 31, 2024 that Sen. LindseyGrahamSC said: 'Mr. Zuckerberg, you and the companies before us, I know you don't mean it to be so, but you have blood on your hands. You have a product that's killing people.'

What the Republicans don't like is dissent. Especially when a trans person does it.

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Monday, February 20, 2023

Global Early Modern Trans Studies: Symposium at Folger

Empress Theodora
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Sunday, February 19, 2023

From Jimmy Carter's biography

Observations from The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter by Kai Bird, Crown Publishing Group, 2022.

James Earl Carter, Jr. was born Oct 1, 1924 and grew up in a small town with fewer than 500 people. His father, who held segregationist beliefs, was a farmer, “growing peanuts, corn, and cotton and drawing ‘rents’ from his Black tenants.” The family lived in “a three-bedroom single-story house assembled from a Sears, Roebuck kit. The structure lacked electricity and insulation and had no running water until 1935, when Carter’s father bought a small windmill to pump water from the backyard well into a water tank.” And: “Although electricity came to Atlanta in 1884, it took more than a half century to reach [the small town of] Archery in 1938.”

At age 21, he graduated from the Naval Academy and married Rosalynn Smith.

Carter, though “a southern white man,” was “the first president to feel entirely comfortable worshipping and speaking in a Black church.”

“Many in the Washington pundit class ridiculed his soft Georgian twang and peanut farmer persona.”

“He personally disapproved of abortion, but he always defended a woman’s right to choose and lobbied for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. He criticized busing as a tool of integration but ardently supported affirmative action.”

“…he was willing to sacrifice some social programs—but not the defense budget—in an effort to control what he thought were inflationary budget deficits. … Liberals complained that he could have spent more on social programs to stimulate job creation and less on a defense budget still premised on Cold War assumptions.”

“His self-confidence bordered on arrogance. As a Southern Baptist he was painfully self-aware that his pride was the deepest of sins.”

“He put solar panels on the roof of the White House before they were economical. He talked about climate change before it was ever fashionable.”

“As a white boy growing up in South Georgia, Jimmy Carter lived a childhood steeped in segregation and a culture of white supremacy. And yet his childhood playmates were mostly African Americans. His only neighbors were Black tenants. He experienced from the ground the great chasm between America’s beliefs about itself and the reality of inequality, poverty, and racism.”

In 1955,

“a dozen of Carter’s peanut warehouse customers paid him a visit and suggested that he join the White Citizens’ council—basically the Klan in business suits. When he politely declined, they offered to pay on his behalf the $5 annual membership fee. At this, Carter lost patience, angrily took out his own $5 bill, and announced that he’d sooner ‘flush it down the toilet’ than give it to the White Citizens’ Council.”

As governor of Georgia, Carter worked to reform the judiciary and prisons, but “reluctantly signed a bill that reinstated the death penalty” (which his wife opposed); “no one was executed during his four-year tenure.” He appointed liberal judges, “including the first Jewish judge to the Georgia Court of Appeals.”

Books that influenced him

"He read books by theologians and philosophers, including Paul Tillich, Soren Kierkegaard, and the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was murdered in a Nazi concentration camp. He took to quoting Tillich on how ‘religion is a search.’ From Karl Barth he accepted the notion that the Bible could not be read literally. He read the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. In 1965, his good friend William Gunter lent him a copy of Reinhold Niebuhr: On Politics—essays that ratified what he already believed: that he could be both a successful politician and a good Christian. ... ‘One of my greatest regrets,’ Carter later said, ‘was not meeting Niebuhr before he died [in 1971].’"

"...when [James] Fallows had first met Carter in August 1976, the presidential candidate had made a point of saying that he had read Fallows’s 1971 book The Water Lords, a Nader study-group report on water pollution in Savannah."

crocus
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What was wrong with Emily Bazelon's NYT article in 2022?

Here's a brief summary from Erin Reed on Substack:

"The allegations against The New York Times' coverage of transgender issues were numerous. Current and former contributors pointed out that the publication has used derogatory terms for transgender people. For instance, in Emily Bazelon's story, "The Battle Over Gender Therapy," one of the first trans youth who received puberty blockers was referred to as "patient zero” — extremely dehumanizing language that compares trans people to an infection. Multiple experts featured in the article have since noted that their work was misrepresented. I recently pointed out that organizations like Genspect are presented with no context as "an international group" without noting that they are explicitly campaigning for an end to gender-affirming care up to the age of 25 and that they are not a medical or professional organization. Upon investigating the journalists covering these stories, it was found that they tend to follow almost exclusively anti-trans sources and groups that call for an outright elimination of transgender people from society. It is clear that the reporters' media diet comes from people who oppose transgender individuals."
— "I Signed A Critical NYT Trans Letter. Their Response Is Insulting." Erin Reed, Substack, Feb 17, 2023. Consider subscribing to Erin's work to support her.

Lots of people have written about the Bazelon article and the Baker article that followed.

Here's another NYT article in 2022

Parker Molloy refers to "a Times article ["They Paused Puberty, but Is There a Cost?" November 14, 2022], co-written by Megan Twohey [with Christina Jewett], who seems set on torching the positive reputation she earned after reporting on Harvey Weinstein, that wildly played up concerns about bone density."

Molloy continues:

"And in response, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) released a statement calling out factual inaccuracies and undue speculation in its piece. Naturally, the Times ignored this criticism, with anti-trans activists inside and outside of the company brushing it off as coming from an advocacy group.

But WPATH isn’t an 'advocacy group;' it’s a group of medical professionals that help set the standards of care for transition-related health care. The group’s goal isn’t to expand trans rights, but simply to set the guidelines trans people have to follow. And they are pretty thorough, often restrictive guidelines, at that."

Later, a study found not quite so profound effects on bone density. So the newspaper had just been "picking up the topic of trans teens and essentially deciding that there are too many trans people out there and something should be done about that."

See also

See also my breakdown of Pamela Paul's four most recent op-eds in the NYT: "How to Argue Transphobically That You’re Not Transphobic". It's a 10-minute read on Medium.

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Sunday, February 12, 2023

Jared Yates Sexton's 'Midnight Kingdom'

In The Midnight Kingdom (2023), Jared Yates Sexton recalls

"tabloids from the grocery store checkout detailing an invisible world where monsters walked among us and a secret machinery whirred just under the surface of the material realm. She [my grandmother] died still believing this conspiracy theory, still desperate to understand why her life had played out as it had. She needed a story to explain it, to make sense of why she had suffered so terribly in the Great Depression, why she had lost friends and family in battles fought in lands she would never see, and why, having won the peace and then war with Satan’s empire, the heavenly kingdom promised to her by preachers and televangelists had failed to materialize."

"It was in 2015 that I first realized this affliction that troubled my family had become a pressing, existential threat." As a journalist at MAGA rallies, he found that people only wanted to talk about "conspiracies and evil plots."

A bit of what's discussed in the book:

History

Christianity began as "a persecuted cult on the fringes of society" that was fascinated by acts of martyrdom. Christianity aspired to "a homogenous society ordered by its own tenets and beliefs," and Christians "portray[ed] themselves as holders of an unconquerable divine truth so potent and so undeniable that even the leaders of the Roman Empire were desperate to snuff it out." It became "the official religion of Rome, and eventually the mythology through which the modern world was formed." That story, he says, "is the story of how systems of domination are constructed, solidified, and weaponized."

A difference between Judaism and Christianity:

"While Jewish thought tended to view Satan as 'a symbol of the tendency to evil within humanity,' the Christians believed they were engaged in an active and dire war against the literal personification of evil. This battle defined Christian mythology and was a worldview based on 'transcendent reality' divorced from empirical evidence and based on 'visions' and faith."

Unfortunately, "the church was still under attack by evil forces as long as there remained a single nonbeliever."

The "Great Chain of Being," was "an ordered hierarchy beginning with God, traveling down," and the feudal system justified itself by that idea, joining kings and churches.

How does one know if one is saved? Whether salvation is under a person's control (as in Lutheranism) or preordained (as in Calvinism), their wealth is considered an indicator of God's favor.

Even when religious arguments gave way to scientific arguments in the Enlightenment: "It was unthinkable to many white Enlightenment figures that people of color should be treated equally, let alone that they should rise up, displace their oppressors, and attempt self-rule."

In colonial America, secret societies of rich white men like the Sons of Liberty "effectively merged their economic concerns with the apocalypticism of scripture, charging that 'monsters in the shape of men' were doing the business of Satan, and that 'touching any paper' with the derided official stamp meant that one would 'receive the mark of the beast' as forewarned in the Book of Revelation."

21st century

Though "Obama was a moderate neoliberal president who idolized Ronald Reagan and touted policies designed by Republicans in coordination with corporations," Republicans portrayed him as the evil socialist of their conspiracy theories. Donald Trump repeatedly went on Fox News "to further the racist conspiracy theory that Obama had not been born in the United States, making him ineligible for the presidency, and claiming that somebody told him that Obama was secretly a Muslim. The national conversation was effectively hijacked," and

"Millions of Americans were shoved into an alternate reality populated by white supremacist paranoid fantasies, leftover demons of the War on Terror, and Christian fears of persecution and apocalypse, set within the frame of the New World Order narrative that diverted blame from neoliberalism to shadowy, evil forces lurking behind every corner. By the spring of 2010, the consequences were already becoming apparent. Nearly a quarter of Republicans believed Obama was the Antichrist and an overwhelming majority were confident he was a secret Muslim socialist with plans to take their guns before handing America over to a one-world government."

Trump "won the vote of roughly 80 percent of all white evangelicals, owing a debt to their sense of cultural and political persecution, not to mention their leaders’ praising Trump as being heaven-sent." Like Obama, Trump upheld neoliberal policies.

soldier gives something to small children
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The CIA under Allen Dulles

Jared Yates Sexton begins his book, The Midnight Kingdom, talking about his grandmother's beliefs in the 1980s: "The center of evil in the world, she had been assured by those same preachers and a bevy of politicians, rested in Moscow; it wasn’t even debatable whether the Kremlin was in league with Satan. The Soviet Union was the kingdom of the Antichrist, she believed."

Where did that belief come from?

Decades ago, there was "Allen Dulles, a veteran of the Office of Strategic Services and the longest-serving and arguably most influential director of the CIA." When he took over: "The CIA became a force unto itself that acted upon the affairs of the rest of the world, engaging in secret activities that were unknown to its victims, the people of the United States, and even government officials as high-ranking as the president, all of it created, directed, and implemented by individuals who had never been elected and faced no possibility of electoral consequences."

He goes on:

"Under Dulles, the CIA carried out coups and subversive actions, traded in psychological operations that both skewed and obliterated truth, illegally experimented on and surveilled American citizens, orchestrated assassinations, and fought an undeclared secret war in pursuit of strengthening America’s political and economic interests, most often in assistance of the aims of wealthy individuals and the nation’s corporations. The battle against Soviet Russia, predicated on false and biased information and in service of the political and economic interests of a privileged few, meant deploying any measures imaginable, including overthrowing democratically elected leaders, carrying out coordinated assassinations, sacrificing entire populations of civilians, and creating wars out of thin air. The CIA was dedicated to achieving its objectives at any cost, all while obfuscating its methods and intentionally casting doubt on the very notion of objective truth. It’s hardly any wonder that, in this environment and in these times, paranoia as a cultural state and a political weapon became so omnipresent and so significant."

That's part of how the Soviet Union got linked to conspiracy theories and the idea of evil.

"As the Soviet Union was cast as the embodiment of Satan in the modern world," Sexton writes, "once more Americans saw evil spirits conspiring in the darkness and plotting the nation’s destruction."

You may also be interested to read about Christiana Spens's book, The Portrayal and Punishment of Terrorists in Western Media. See: "On the Ritual of Political Scapegoating". It's a 10-minute read on Medium.

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Books that influenced Chelsea Manning

In her memoir README.txt, Chelsea Manning shares some books she read during her political awakening. She was influenced by Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States; David Carter's Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution; Susan Stryker's Transgender History; Rob Epstein's documentary The Times of Harvey Milk; and she learned about Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, and the Compton's Cafeteria uprising. She read Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America. Then there was trans history—Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, Some Assembly Required: The Not-So-Secret Life of a Transgender Teen, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, and issues of Transgender Studies Quarterly.

I wrote more about Chelsea Manning's memoir. See: "A Queer Life Before WikiLeaks". It's a 6-minute read on Medium.

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Chelsea Manning's gender awakening in her memoir 'README.txt'

Chelsea Manning's memoir. Content warning: rape

When Chelsea Manning was 11, one night she was doing her homework when her father came home and began yelling, hitting her with a belt, "drunkenly waving his twelve-gauge shotgun." The next day, the school saw she was bruised, but she "lied about the assault to the social worker, clearing my father's name." Her mother was also alcoholic. The following year, her parents decided to divorce.

She became a soldier in the U.S. Army. One night, a man who claims to be an officer raped her. He did so by threatening to accuse her of sexual misconduct, and she knew that "the mere accusation alone would sink my career, especially under Don't Ask, Don't Tell. There would have been all kinds of questions about what I was doing with him parked in the car." Thus, in the moment, perceiving no alternative, she allowed him to assault her, and she felt at the time that the "most profound betrayal" was "my own complicity." The next morning, she overslept her alarm, leading to "write-ups and punishments - no one offered help or asked questions." After that, she slept as much as possible and relied on caffeine and cigarettes while awake. "My personality broke," she writes.

After that, she discovered trans people posting videos of themselves online. To her, this seemed different from "abstract, dry medical reading about gender-affirming surgeries or the best cocktail of hormones to use." Seeing and hearing the faces and voices of trans people was "a reflection of myself - some future me, or some version of myself in a parallel universe." That's how she realized she was a trans woman.

I wrote more about this book. See: "A Queer Life Before WikiLeaks". It's a 6-minute read on Medium.

woman in green light
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Saturday, February 11, 2023

ADF doctrine on human biological sex

The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a U.S. conservative Christian legal adovcacy organization, defines itself as "the world’s largest legal organization committed to protecting religious freedom, free speech, marriage and family, parental rights, and the sanctity of life."

As seen today, February 11, 2023, the ADF includes these two statements in its "Doctrinal Distinctives":

"We believe God creates each person with an immutable biological sex — male or female — that reflects the image and likeness of God.
We believe God designed marriage as a unique conjugal relationship joining one man and one woman in a single, exclusive, life-long union, and God intends sexual intimacy only to occur within that relationship.

Regarding the first, Max K. Strassfeld writes in a footnote to Trans Talmud: "In the time period during which I was preparing this manuscript, the statement of faith for the ADF changed to include this language, perhaps signaling a greater focus on trans issues." Trans Talmud was published April 2022, and Strassfeld's footnote indicates that he accessed the ADF's statement on December 28, 2021.

In a Think article (December 20, 2019): "Courts, of course, tend to look askance at being asked to rule that an employee should be allowed to harm their employers and co-workers based on 'philosophical beliefs' they've decided are both 'biological truths' and tantamount to religious canon." Paradoxical, isn't it? If it were a simple fact, it wouldn't require a religious or philosophical belief to see it, and if people ever needed protection for their belief in this fact, they shouldn't need to seek that protection on grounds of the freedom of religion, right? They'd simply be correct? And others would simply be incorrect? And the dispute would not be a matter of religion, right?

In a March 22, 2022 Twitter thread, TygerSongbird wrote:

dinosaur skeletons arranged as if they're in a fight with each other, tyrannosarus vs stegosaurus
Jules Suzdaltsev @jules_su tweet: conservative logic is weird, if you’re a groomer why would you go through all the work it takes to live as a trans person in a transphobic society when you can just become a priest and the most gullible adults on earth will just hand you their children on a silver platter
Jules Suzdaltsev @jules_su tweet: and if those kids speak up, they get punished and called liars, & if you actually get caught they’ll just send you to another parish with a fresh batch of kids - just seems easier than risking being murdered at the grocery store for wearing heels
Jules Suzdaltsev @jules_su tweet: and on an aside, it’s genuinely funny that the same people screaming about 'immutable biological evidence' to justify their transphobic beliefs also fundamentally believe you can create an entire woman out of some dude’s rib? Jun 6, 2023
Gillian Branstetter is tweeting on May 17 2023 that the ADF offered ACPeds $15,000 to tell them why youth standards of care are wrong so they could sue in support of their efforts to criminalize this care.
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Friday, February 10, 2023

A Campfire of a Book Description!

Three people and a pink convertible. Detail from the book cover of Most Famous Short Film of All Time. Author: Tucker Lieberman. Cover artist: Cel La Flaca.

I'm reading (and here I'm sharing) How to Write a Damn Good Fiction Book Description — IBR Book Marketing Series (Part 5) by Joe Walters

Psssst!! "Part 3: Promise the reader what they will gain by reading this book" says:

Screenshot with text: ...keyword or two, perhaps another bolded blurb, and a catchy last line. If I'm thinking of the office-person story, I’d definitely make sure I'd talk about how office-person will learn something about themself and their coworkers along the way. I'd make it clear that it’s an office fantasy, a book about work that's not about work, and written in the style of Winnie the Pooh. 'Oh, bother.'

You guys. You guys. I have! just! the thing!

Most Famous Short Film of All Time: Ghosts and goddesses beckon Lev Ockenshaw. Oh, bother. Fortunately, he's got a pill for that. In 2014, Lev is happily telling campfire stories in Boston with his longtime friend, Stanley, and his coworker, Aparna. One day, he receives an anonymous, threatening email referring to the company where he and Aparna work. He reports the threat to his boss, but is not believed. Most Famous Short Film of All Time is a non/fiction-hybrid philosophical novel, a metaphysical cage fight about belief, prejudice, perception, ethical action/inaction, undoing/redoing decisions, trying harder, being excellent to your friends, being a fictional character, being trans, the nature of time, and burning things that do not serve.

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Wednesday, February 8, 2023

Gender-neutral God

England supposes God doesn't need gendered pronouns after all:

The Church of England will look into the use of gender neutral terms to refer to God in prayers, but the centuries-old institution said on Wednesday there were no plans to abolish current services.

The issue reflects growing global awareness about the assumed usage of pronouns causing offence or upset to those who do not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth.

"Christians have recognised since ancient times that God is neither male nor female," a spokesperson for the Church said. "Yet the variety of ways of addressing and describing God found in scripture has not always been reflected in our worship."

— "Church of England explores gender neutral God," Muvija M, Reuters, 8 Feb 2023

Also:

The Rt Rev Dr Michael Ipgrave, Bishop of Lichfield and vice-chair of the liturgical commission responsible for the matter, said the church had been “exploring the use of gendered language in relation to God for several years”.

“After some dialogue between the two commissions in this area, a new joint project on gendered language will begin this spring,” he said. “In common with other potential changes to authorised liturgical provision, changing the wording and number of authorised forms of absolution would require a full synodical process for approval.”

The specifics of the project are as yet unclear.

— "Church of England to consider use of gender-neutral terms for God," PA Media, 7 Feb 2023

The Times (UK) also has an article (paywalled) (7 Feb 2023, by Kaya Burgess)

rainbow cathedral
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Monday, February 6, 2023

Literary submissions - early 2023

Brevity on Submittable
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Climate tweets (Feb 2023)

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