Two steps forward, one step back

Most Minnesota high schools have settled something well: there will be no further discrimination against transgender students in athletics.

Capping months of emotional debate that brought tens of thousands of e-mails, the board overseeing high school athletics in Minnesota overwhelmingly said yes Thursday to opening up girls’ sports to transgender student-athletes.

The decision by the Minnesota State High School League will take effect in the 2015-16 school year, making the state the 33rd to adopt a formal transgender student policy.

The board set out criteria for determining whether transgender students who were born male but identify as female can be eligible for girls’ teams at the nearly 500 schools in the league’s membership. State law already permits girls to compete in boys’ sports.

Except (there’s always an “except”)…

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Troll logic

Alanah Pierce has been responding to trolls who harass her with threats, abuse, and sexual slurs in what I would have thought was an effective way: she retweets their comments to their mothers. Does your mother know what you’re saying with that mouth?

I thought it was brilliant. But I’ve never understood the mind of a troll, and now some of these boys, with their mothers’ approval, are suing her for defamation. That’s nuts — the only defamation is exposing their own public words to another member of the public. But look how they rationalize it:

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“some girls would like to be entomologists too”

Abdo Publishing has a line of children’s science books, including one titled “Bugs”, which a seven year old girl, Parker Dains, read with enthusiasm. And then she discovered that the series was called “the Biggest, Baddest Books for Boys“. So she wrote to the publisher, as uppity young ladies are wont to do.

So she wrote to Abdo, telling the publisher that “I really enjoyed the section on Glow in the Dark bugs and the quizzes at the end”, but that “when I saw the back cover title, it said ‘Biggest Baddest Books for Boys’ and it made me very unhappy. It made me very sad because there’s no such thing as a boy book. You should change from ‘Biggest, Baddest Books for Boys’ into ‘Biggest, Baddest Books for Boys and Girls’ because some girls would like to be entomologists too.”

It’s unbelievable what the publisher did next.

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Cosby & Temple divorce

Good news: Bill Cosby has resigned from the Temple University board.

US comedian Bill Cosby has resigned from the board of trustees of Temple University in Philadelphia amid ongoing allegations of sexual assault.

He said he wanted to act "in the best interests" of the university where he studied as an undergraduate.

I’m glad to hear it. Temple has a commendable mission, and Cosby was no longer a good representative for it.

“Ghomeshi was the way he was, and that I had to figure out how to cope with that”

It’s not just that Ghomeshi was a sexual harasser, it’s that management worked so hard to protect him from the consequences of his actions. The account by Kathryn Borel is damning — Ghomeshi didn’t rape her, he just made incessant, crude advances in the office, to the point where Borel was desperate for the administrators at CBC to step in and take action, and they didn’t.

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About that story about customizing vaginal odors…

There’s an ugly turn. The story about a company creating probiotics to make vaginas smell like peaches is wrong, that’s not what the company was trying to do; instead, the “biotech entrepreneurs” who presented it as their own were lying, did not understand the project, and completely mangled the purpose. According to the actual founder of the company,

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I get email

Do you ever get that kind of email that makes you want to compulsively wash your hands? The kind that makes you think, “Well, this computer is completely soiled, time to get a new one”? I do. Here’s an example, and this is how it starts:

Rape is a controversial topic, i get that. But we need to keep a sober mind and try to analyze rape in a way that is rational and objective.

A lot of people are against rape and the reason why they are, are well-known to almost anybody. But i have to offer a different perspective on this controversial topic

You’re probably done already. Just that announcement that they’re going to “analyze rape in a way that is rational and objective” is puke-inducing…you know they’re not, but are instead going to try rationalizing abusing human beings. You are excused if you have no desire to read further, because I guarantee you, it gets worse. Much worse.

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