How about if we just call it “The Homophobic Space Telescope”?

I learned three disappointing things about NASA today. There’s been an ongoing kerfuffle over the name of the James Webb Space Telescope, because Webb presided over a remarkably homophobic culture at the agency. Now internal documents about the debate over naming it have been revealed.

Internal NASA documents obtained by Nature reveal fresh details about the agency’s investigation last year into whether to rename its flagship James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). A group of astronomers had led a community petition to change the name, alleging that the telescope’s namesake, former NASA chief James Webb, had been complicit in the persecution and firing of gay and lesbian federal employees during his career in the US government in the 1950s and 1960s.

I already knew all that. Those aren’t the new disappointments.

One was that this problem goes all the way back to 1969, when a judge ruled on a firing case.

Although the documents reveal that key decisions were made in meetings and not over e-mail, they still show agency officials wrestling with how to investigate the allegations and control public messaging over the controversy. As early as April 2021, an external researcher flagged wording from the 1969 court ruling to NASA officials. It came in the case of Clifford Norton, who had appealed against being fired from NASA for “immoral, indecent, and disgraceful conduct”. In the decision, the chief judge wrote that the person who had fired Norton had said that he was a good employee and asked whether there was a way to keep him on. Whomever he consulted in the personnel office told him that it was a “custom within the agency” to fire people for “homosexual conduct”.

“I think you will find this paragraph to be troubling,” wrote the external researcher to Eric Smith, the JWST’s programme scientist at NASA in Washington DC. “‘A custom within the agency’ sounds pretty bad.”

Troubling? You think? The NASA personnel office considered it customary to fire anyone exposed as gay?

That’s old news, you say. What isn’t old is how the modern agency carried out their investigation.

The second disappointment is that they contacted 10 straight astronomers who said discrimination against gay people wasn’t a problem, and that was part of their ultimate decision to bury the controversy. Does anyone else see a problem with their methodology?

And then the third surprise.

The revelations about NASA’s decision regarding the JWST come at a time of increasing concern over the way the agency handles issues of identity. Earlier this month, employees at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, were told that they would no longer be able to include pronouns, such as she/her or they/them, in their display names in agency computer systems. After the move was discussed on Reddit and the astronomy community reacted negatively on other social platforms, NASA put out a statement that employees could continue to include pronouns in their e-mail signature blocks.

How authoritarian of them. So this month the administrators were openly transphobic, while pretending that oh no, they were never ever homophobic? I don’t think I believe them, especially since they tried to hide their findings.

What next?

As a cis-het relatively healthy white male person in a stable financial position, I’m getting worried. Who can I victimize next? We’ve trampled on the rights of people of other races, lord knows if you get sick you are fucked, The Gays are mocked and abused, we are definitely punishing the poor for being poor, and we’re deep into our campaign to humiliate and torture trans people.

But…once we’ve achieved our goals and completed The Cis Agenda, what are we to do? Who’s the next group (who isn’t us, obviously) we can beat down and abuse to make ourselves feel good about ourselves? I feel like we’ve reached the final frontier, the end of history. “When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.” Or perhaps more appropriately, what do schoolyard bullies do when they’ve beaten up all the smaller kids at the playground?

Are you feeling some pity for the privileged cis folk yet?

I knew it was a horror show when I saw the name Barb Anderson

Everything she touches turns to poison. If you’ve never heard of her, she’s a notorious Minnesota hate-monger, a nasty, more bitter version of Michele Bachmann. She’s the master hater behind the Minnesota Child Protection League, one of those misleadingly-named right-wing organizations that swoops into schools to protect the kids from bullying, which usually translates into defending the bullies right to torment LGBT kids. She’s simply an awful person.

MCPL’s lead spokesperson is Barb Anderson, a ubiquitous figure in the school bullying debate. Anderson has long volunteered as a researcher for the Minnesota Family Council, which led two failed battles against marriage equality. She was also a vocal opponent of LGBT safety in the Anoka-Hennepin School District where she helped launch the Parents Action League. PAL is listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center because of its adamant demands to have the ex-gay movement in the Anoka-Hennepin School District.

Anderson has made some extreme statements about LGBT people, so much so that GLAAD has added her to its Commentator Accountability Project.

For example, she once said, “The greatest threat to our freedom and the health and well-being of our children is from this radical homosexual agenda that is just so pervasive.”

She was bad news several years ago, when a wave of suicides was sweeping through the Anoka-Hennepin school district — nine kids dead by their own hand in a couple of years. It was horrific. The school district was highlighted in a Rolling Stone (Massive trigger warning: that article recounts the personal experiences of many young people who were viciously bullied, and graphically describes several suicides).

There was another common thread: Four of the nine dead were either gay or perceived as such by other kids, and were reportedly bullied. The tragedies come at a national moment when bullying is on everyone’s lips, and a devastating number of gay teens across the country are in the news for killing themselves. Suicide rates among gay and lesbian kids are frighteningly high, with attempt rates four times that of their straight counterparts; studies show that one-third of all gay youth have attempted suicide at some point (versus 13 percent of hetero kids), and that internalized homophobia contributes to suicide risk.

Administrators denied that there was a problem with gay kids being bullied. They want to stop all bullying, which is a common defense for avoiding conflict with special interest groups targeting LGBT rights. They can’t possibly single out LGBT kids for protection, despite the fact that they’re getting bullied because they’re LGBT. They won’t even acknowledge that the behavior of these kids is perfectly normal, so they avoid useful approaches, like inclusive sex education. No, they just close their eyes to the issues, because they’d rather offend families of the bullied kids than the MCPL. They’ll even go so far as to blame “gay activists” for the problems.

The Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Center for Lesbian Rights have filed a lawsuit on behalf of five students, alleging the school district’s policies on gays are not only discriminatory, but also foster an environment of unchecked anti-gay bullying. The Department of Justice has begun a civil rights investigation as well. The Anoka-Hennepin school district declined to comment on any specific incidences but denies any discrimination, maintaining that its broad anti-bullying policy is meant to protect all students. “We are not a homophobic district, and to be vilified for this is very frustrating,” says superintendent Dennis Carlson, who blames right-wingers and gay activists for choosing the area as a battleground, describing the district as the victim in this fracas. “People are using kids as pawns in this political debate,” he says. “I find that abhorrent.”

That is explicitly Barb Anderson’s approach. If LGBT kids are being bullied and committing suicide, that’s the fault of the kids themselves and of schools that permissively tolerate the pied piper of perversion and that GSAs [Gay-Straight Alliances] will draw more confused and questioning youth into gay experimentation which will lead schools to affirm sexual disorders, which is why all those kids killed themselves.

Anti-gay backlash was instant. Minnesota Family Council president Tom Prichard blogged that Justin’s suicide could only be blamed upon one thing: his gayness. “Youth who embrace homosexuality are at greater risk [of suicide], because they’ve embraced an unhealthy sexual identity and lifestyle,” Prichard wrote. Anoka-Hennepin conservatives formally organized into the Parents Action League, declaring opposition to the “radical homosexual” agenda in schools. Its stated goals, advertised on its website, included promoting Day of Truth, providing resources for students “seeking to leave the homosexual lifestyle,” supporting the neutrality policy and targeting “pro-gay activist teachers who fail to abide by district policies.”

Asked on a radio program whether the anti-gay agenda of her ilk bore any responsibility for the bullying and suicides, Barb Anderson, co-author of the original “No Homo Promo,” held fast to her principles, blaming pro-gay groups for the tragedies. She explained that such “child corruption” agencies allow “quote-unquote gay kids” to wrongly feel legitimized. “And then these kids are locked into a lifestyle with their choices limited, and many times this can be disastrous to them as they get into the behavior which leads to disease and death,” Anderson said. She added that if LGBT kids weren’t encouraged to come out of the closet in the first place, they wouldn’t be in a position to be bullied.

It’s deja vu all over again. The Anoka-Hennepin catastrophe, fomented by Barb Anderson and her cronies, was nine years ago. So she pulled up stakes and moved to another school district to dispense her venom. The latest episode? The Becker school district invited the MCPL and Barb Anderson to present an alternative view point at a meeting of the school board.

That’s right. The fools running the Becker school district invited a known hate group to speak to the board about adopting their hateful policies. So they did.

The school board invited the Child Protection League to speak at a special meeting following outrage from some community members when OutFront Minnesota — an organization supporting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights — presented at an August meeting.

The Child Protection League describes itself as an organization committed to protecting children from exploitation and indoctrination. Barb Anderson helped form the group, along with the Parents Action League, which was designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its anti-gay rhetoric and involvement in the Anoka-Hennepin School District when it saw a rash of suicides and a lawsuit claiming the district didn’t respond to harassment on the basis of sexual orientation.

GLAAD, an LGBTQ advocacy organization, also lists Anderson on an anti-LGBT watchlist for saying LGBTQ antibullying efforts are the “pied piper of perversion” and affirm sexual disorders.

Anderson was not at Monday’s meeting but Child Protection League Board Chair Julie Quist spoke about children’s books she said violated the beliefs and norms of the community by accepting different gender identities. Quist previously served as district director for U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann. Also speaking were former Becker board members Betsy Armstrong and Chris Klippen.

Armstrong spoke for about 50 minutes and was interrupted several times by protesters — mostly Becker students — questioning her statements or chanting “gay rights are human rights.”

She spoke mostly about what she called the “worrisome” increase in the number of transgender youth in the last decade and cited possible reasons as anxiety, autism or sexual trauma exacerbated by peer and social media influences — something Armstrong called a “social contagion.”

Armstrong also referenced a Bible quote that says God created two sexes — male and female — and said people who follow religious teachings are constitutionally protected and their opinions ought to be given equal consideration.

Notice one aspect of their tactics: emphasizing trans kids. Focusing on gay kids, while still something they do, has had diminishing returns as homosexuality is gradually, increasingly acceptable. Trans kids are fair game! Let’s pick on them until the community wakes up to the fact that this all the same horrendous game of finding someone to ostracize and abuse.

The kids are all right, though. They showed up to protest, and were a lot more intelligent than the sick grownups who brought on this spectacle.

Hundreds of students, parents, and residents in the Becker, Minnesota School District showed up, mostly to protest, a special presentation by an anti-LGBTQ group that offered what it called an “alternative viewpoint” on transgender people. The group, the Minnesota Child Protection League, has been cited by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“This is disgusting,” said Skyler Seiler, identified by Fox9 as a transgender student at the school. “I can’t believe this, we are humans too. I don’t know why they’re treating us like we’re not. Is it not your job, as school board members, to make students feel safe and welcome?”

The school board on Monday voted to allow the group, which Fox9 says is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBTQ hate group, to deliver the special presentation. It’s unclear why the school board agreed to allow a third party organization to deliver a message of hate and discrimination that directly affects the students and families it is supposed to support, protect, and defend. It’s also unclear if that information was vetted or fact-checked before being delivered. Attendees say the group’s information was not from credible sources.

“Human rights don’t have two sides so bringing in another side just doesn’t make sense to me,” Heather Abrahamson told Fox9.

“They were not credible sources that they were citing, and it was completely biased and really offensive and insulting,” Maggie Seiler said. “This is painful, I’m sure those kids in there feel even more ostracized and like the school doesn’t back them and like they have even less rights.”

Those kids would be right. It was school board members who brought in the hate-mongers and who argued that “free speech” trumps the kids’ right to learn in a safe environment. They don’t care about the students, prioritizing the horrid discriminatory religious beliefs of people like Barb Anderson over the experiences of people who have to live with the discrimination.

Look, people, you probably don’t like the optics of citizens turning out en masse to call you a bigot. There’s a solution: never ever pay attention to hate groups like the MCPL or the Parents Action League or the Minnesota Family Council. Don’t invite them to your meetings. Burn their recommendations. Drive them out. Or get more of this from the families you claim to support.

Idaho: Stupid as potatoes, evil as Black Scurf

More than 100 people rallied on March 3, 2020, at the Idaho Capitol in support of transgender students and athletes during the 2020 legislative session. The Idaho House on Tuesday passed a bill that would criminalize providing gender-affirming medical care for trans minors.

The state is a playground for racists, white nationalists, and the religious right, which I guess should make it no surprise that their house of representatives passed a hateful, regressive bill to make health care for trans kids a felony.

The Idaho House on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed a bill that would bar gender-affirming medical care for transgender children. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Bruce Skaug, R-Nampa, would alter current state code that outlaws female genital mutilation. The new code would make it a felony to provide minors with puberty blockers, which stop or delay puberty, hormones or transition-related surgeries. The House passed the bill on a near-party-line vote. Rep. Fred Wood, R-Burley, a retired physician, opposed it. Other Republicans said the bill will preserve the ability to procreate and would protect children from regretting gender reassignment later in life.

I guess it’s something that one Republican opposed it, but also understandable: he’s a doctor, and this is a bill that targets doctors.

I am fascinated by the Republican rationale. It’s about “preserving the ability to procreate”, but puberty blockers don’t affect that, they just delay it, which ought to be considered a good thing, unless you really want 13 year olds to have children. Which is odd, since Idaho has long had a reputation for being the place to go for cheap, fast weddings. I can thank Idaho for my existence, since my parents eloped to Idaho to get married against my grandparents’ wishes when my mother was somewhere around 17 years old. (I think they’ve tightened up their laws a bit since the 1950s.)

It’s going to be a long struggle for Idaho lawmakers if they think their mission is to prevent teenagers from ever having regrets.

The sponsors of the bill are sick, sad puppies.

The ability to procreate is a fundamental right that must be protected, Skaug said. Don’t let their bodies be sterilized. Rep. Ben Adams, a Nampa Republican, quoted the Bible’s account of gender, after saying his transgender cousin had a mental health problem.

Again, puberty blockers don’t sterilize people. Some transgender men can still have children, and some transgender women can still impregnate other women. Procreation is a choice, not something that Republicans get to enforce, and no, the only mental health problem on display in the Idaho house is Republicanism. If they really cared about mental health, maybe they should ask qualified people how to treat it, rather than the Bible. Those qualified non-bigots seem to have a different take on it.

“It is so disappointing that some politicians in Boise have decided to follow Texas and Alabama down the path of imposing felony criminal penalties upon doctors who are simply doing their jobs. By making it impossible for doctors to provide care for their patients, transgender youth are denied the age-appropriate, best practice, medically-necessary, gender-affirming care that a new study just found reduces the risk of moderate or severe depression by 60% and suicidality by 73%.”

“Every kid in Idaho deserves the chance to grow up feeling safe and respected for who they are. Denying someone medically-necessary health care simply because you don’t approve of who they are is textbook discrimination. Decisions about what kind of care is appropriate for young people should be left up to the young person and their parents, in consultation with health care professionals, not by politicians looking to score political points at the expense of the well-being of transgender youth. It’s critical that the Senate listens to medical professionals, parents, and kids and refuse to entertain this flagrantly discriminatory legislation any further.”

This is all part of conservative agenda. Ever hear of ALEC? They write the laws.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a pay-to-play network of conservative state lawmakers and business lobbyists that writes model legislation, claims that it no longer works on social policy. But videos of ALEC-led events, obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), tell a very different story.

At the 40th anniversary meeting of the Council for National Policy (CNP) in May, ALEC leaders boasted about their extensive efforts to advance state legislation to severely restrict access to abortion and limit the rights of trans students, as well as voter suppression bills.

I am not surprised. Idaho Republicans are stupid potato-brains who need a lot of help writing their evil laws.

You’re doing it wrong if you’re inspired by Texas

Yeah, do not follow the lead of Governor Abbott, he’s just the worst. But now look at Alabama — you know those pathetic kids who join the school bully’s gang, and follow him around and get gleeful when the abuses someone? That’s Alabama.

The Alabama Senate has approved some abomination called the Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act. Wow. When the Republicans preemptively engage their contradictory name generator, you know the actual content is going to be bad. This is another bill to criminalize safe medical practices.

Senators voted 23-4 to approve the measure, dubbed the Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act, sponsored by Republican Senator Shay Shelnutt. The bill now heads to the state House of Representatives, which has already approved a companion bill.

The two bills would make it a felony for medical professionals to treat transgender minors under the age of 19 with gender-affirming care. Violators could face up to 10 years in prison or a $15,000 fine.

The bill also requires school staff in the state to disclose to parents that “a minor’s perception that his or her gender is inconsistent with his or her sex.” Essentially, teachers would be required to “out” transgender students to their guardians — regardless of whether they are ready to do so.

Where’s the “compassion” and the “protection” in that bill? Here’s another surprise (not a surprise):

During Tuesday’s debate, Shelnutt said that he has never spoken to a transgender youth before, adding that he did not know that such treatments were being done in the state when he introduced the bill last year, AP reports.

Ignorance kills.

Monday is going to be tricky

Our student body is fairly liberal and open-minded, but I still have to address a somewhat fraught topic in genetics tomorrow. We’ll be talking about sex determination, and this is a subject in which the science is clear, but also contrary to the conventional wisdom among non-scientists. I’ll be starting with the early 20th century idea that sex was entirely chromosomal and binary and work them up to the modern understanding that it’s bimodal, but non-binary, and a heck of a lot more complex than a single chromosome throwing a switch. I’m either going to get some pushback from more conservative students (which I will welcome!), or everyone is going to just shrug and tell me they already knew that, boomer.

Also, may I say that I really detest this explanation that I see all over the internet?

That’s also wrong. Sex varies on more than a single dimension, and we ought not to lump everyone with a variation from the stereotypical category as “intersex”. A lot of the older sources and some of the newer ones seem to be fond of calling everything that doesn’t fit their narrow binary “abnormal” or “deviant”.

Now I have to explain all that in a one hour lecture on the genetics of sex. Wheee.

OK, back to fussing over this lecture. That’s my day, that and putting together a summary of this week’s lab.

Holy crap, Harvard took it to another level

This is stunning. In the investigation into the accusations against Comaroff, Harvard decided to turn the investigation around and dig into the accuser’s personal history. So they got private psychotherapy records of one of the women, without her consent (how did they do that? Patient confidentiality doesn’t matter anymore?), and then turned them over to Comaroff.

I am flabbergasted. This is such a blatant violation of ethics that the university and that private therapist need to be censured. Or worse, that’s just plain criminal.

I am becoming confirmed in my belief that university administrators everywhere are tainted with evil.