The Washington Post has a nice article about Christine Jorgensen, the woman who became famous in the 1950s for her transgender surgery. There’s the usual, expected tales of bigotry — exclusion from bathrooms (that never changes), discrimination, prurient curiosity about her genitals, the New York Post declared that she wasn’t really a woman, etc. — but one thing stood out for me. When she went off to Denmark for her surgery, she informed her parents, and they replied back:

It was also time to tell her parents the reason for her trip, which she had withheld for fear of causing them hurt and confusion. In the letter that was soon to be shared with the rest of America, she reassured them their daughter was “healthier and happier than ever.”

Though her parents struggled to grasp the full meaning, they cabled back: “We love you more than ever.”

Awww. That’s how it should be for everyone — there are a lot of parents today, 70 years later, who need to learn what loving your children involves.

For those not familiar with upper midwestern geography, Minnesota is right next to North Dakota. The largest city in North Dakota is squished up right next to the border, with Moorhead, Minnesota paired up right next to it. North Dakota is extremely conservative (although Fargo is less so), while Minnesota is fairly liberal. This leads to interesting situations.

Fargo hosted popular Pride events for many years. But no more!

A contentious political climate coupled with safety concerns and summer construction has prompted two Pride events historically held in Fargo to move to Moorhead.

Both Pride in the Park and the Pride Parade, noted as the area’s largest rural Pride celebrations, are set to begin in August and will be held in Minnesota and will not enter downtown Fargo.

Don’t worry. The organizers are not abandoning North Dakota, but have simply made a pragmatic decision that Minnesota is safer.

“Logistically, we are still finalizing event details, but we are excited to hold two of our major community events in Minnesota this year,” Diederich said. “With that said, we belong in North Dakota and we are not leaving. We will still hold events in private event spaces in the community where many of us work and live.”

I once worked in an animal surgery, and one night a 150 lb dog hooked a claw under an experimentally exposed carotid artery and exsanguinated itself. I walked into the room in the morning to find a lake of blood turning dark brown, full of fibrous clots, and the poor dog dead in the middle of it. I don’t know why I suddenly thought of that. Maybe it has something to do with the choice of colors in this map.

That’s the current state of anti-trans legislation in the US, a spreading pool of hate oozing up the middle of the country. Florida has already gone necrotic.

They also have maps of the legislative status in 2022 and 2023 where you can see the reds darkening over time as the evil spreads — you can also see that Minnesota has been getting bluer, at least. There’s a sickness in this country that is getting worse.

All I can say is…you go, girl.

Boebert built her career on sanctimonious, though often incoherent, lectures on the supposed threats to the family of leftist sexual “depravities” like same-sex marriage or contraception use. She also filed for divorce last month, a fact that only got into the press this week. This follows other comical examples of Boebert’s “family values,” such as celebrating teen pregnancy or standing by her now-to-be ex-husband after he exposed himself to teen girls in a bowling alley.

Her choice to leave Jayson Boebert might be the first sign that there’s functioning brain activity in Lauren Boebert’s skull. As the bowling alley story suggests, the guy is a creep. He started dating then-Lauren Roberts when she was 16 and he was 22 years old. She dropped out of high school to give birth to their first child at 18. They got married two years later. During this time, he was arrested on domestic violence charges after a fight with her. In August, he was still at it, getting the cops called on him for reportedly threatening neighbors.

She’s a great big evil hypocrite who is taking advantage of liberal social policies, but that’s exactly what they are for — to give even evil fucks the right to self-determination. Even right-wing Republicans who aren’t very bright.

This story is tasty gossip. But it’s also a window into an aspect of red state life that hasn’t been much discussed, one which is likely fueling the ugly surge in misogynist rhetoric and policy being pushed by Republicans, especially the men. The dark little secret of red state life is there’s a lot of Lauren Boeberts out there: Conservative women who disavow feminism, but, when given a shot at more independence for themselves, gladly use hard-won rights like divorce and abortion. Republican men are getting increasingly angry about even this minor loss of control over women.

This is exactly how transphobes think trans athletes think.

Cackling as the steps of the dastardly plan crystallized in her mind, local trans teen Brie Chandler told reporters Tuesday that she had hatched a nefarious plot to undergo years of medical treatments and counseling to win at swimming. “It’s oh, so simple: several years of sweet-talking medical professionals, receiving hormone therapies, and enduring complex gender-affirming surgeries, and that swimming trophy will be mine!” said the 17-year-old high school senior, who provided a step-by-step account of her knavish conspiracy to take fourth or even third place in a high school or Division III collegiate swimming competition by transitioning to a female identity. “I don’t even want to be a woman—I just want to win at swimming. Imagine how I’ll laugh with glee up there on the winners’ podium, knowing that all I had to do was lie about my gender identity issues through months or years of psychiatry sessions, take a shitload of androgen blockers, go to speech therapy, and recover from multiple invasive surgeries! Those feelings of isolation as my family members struggle to accept my social transition, the bureaucratic headaches of having to change my legal documents to reflect my correct identity, and becoming more likely to be the target of harassment from strangers will be nothing compared to holding that trophy in my devilish little hands!” The trans teen noted that there was only one thing threatening her nefarious ploy to change her gender to beat several girls at a regional swimming competition, which is that she doesn’t know how to swim.

Maybe it’s just me and my overall lack of interest in sports, but I always wondered what was so valuable about a trophy or an entry in a record book that you would go through so much upheaval, and so much public vilification, to get a small and hypothetical edge in a competition. Is it possible that being trans doesn’t extirpate one’s interest in sports?

You know, the inevitable dumb one.

If there are more than two sexes, name a third one.

The correct answer is, obviously, “Your mom.”

But seriously, if I tell you something is a range or continuum, you don’t refute me by telling me I have to name every shade. When I was a child, I learned that there are 7 colors, precisely 7, in the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Then when I got older I learned that there are hundreds of wavelengths between 400 and 700 nanometers. And then when I got older still I learned that color is the product of combinations of wavelengths, like chords, and the numbers got larger still. And then I learned about photoreception and color vision, and discovered that colors were a property of visual processing derived from context and relative distinctions in illumination and intensity, and there’s nothing fixed about them. I read David Marr in the 1980s, you know.

Then someone comes along and insists that the stuff they learned in kindergarten is the absolute rock solid truth.

Hey, I bet you this person is also one of those who mocks the abbreviation LGBTQIA+ because there are too many letters in it and we keep adding more.

I’ve noticed a strange new dogma: sex is defined by the size of your gametes. You’re either making big ones or little ones (or none at all, but let’s ignore that, because we’re trying to invent a binary distinction), and some people plop down some simplistic claim, like that “women produce large gametes,” as if it is definitive and absolute. Other people are noticing this phenomenon.

There are those, politicians, pundits and even a few scientists, who maintain that whether our bodies make ova or sperm are all we need to know about sex. They assert that men and women are defined by their production of these gamete cells, making them a distinct biological binary pair, and that our legal rights and social possibilities should flow from this divide. Men are men. Women are women. Simple.

It’s stupid. It’s the new arbitrary definition to replace the Y chromosome excuse, and it’s got all the failings of any attempt to reduce a complex biological process to a single phrase.

For humans, sex is dynamic, biological, cultural and enmeshed in feedback cycles with our environments, ecologies and multiple physiological and social processes.

So when someone states that “An organism’s sex is defined by the type of gamete (sperm or ova) it has the function of producing” and argues that legal and social policy should be “rooted in properties of bodies,” they are not really talking about gametes and sex biology. They are arguing for a specific political, and discriminatory, definition of what is “natural” and “right” for humans based on a false representation of biology. Over the past few centuries this process of misrepresentation of biology was, and still is, used to deny women rights and to justify legal and societal misogyny and inequity, to justify slavery, racialization, racism and to enforce multiple forms of discrimination and bias. Today dishonest ascriptions of what biology is are being deployed to restrict women’s bodily autonomy, target LGBTQIA+ individuals broadly and, most recently, attack the rights of transexual and transgender people.

It’s embarrassing that there are actual scientists, biologists even, who dismiss all the complexity of post-zygotic development to shrink people down to nothing more than their gametes. It’s the new fad, though. We’re just going to have to wait this out as the bigots adopt yet another arbitrary definition to rationalize their weird-ass idiotic biases.

Let’s see the logical conclusion of this nonsense.

You may say that’s incredibly stupid, but mark my words: the people who want to control women’s reproduction and legislate sexuality are nodding along and thinking that’s a really useful point.