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Good day! It’s Tuesday, Aug. 18. It’s National Couples Day, which Trump will celebrate as soon as he can find Melania.
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The most recent Fast Forward looked at how Missourians rejected GOP efforts to silence them and a padded bra controversy in the bicycle racing world. You can read it here. Find all past newsletters on the Fast Forward homepage.
🌞 The sun rose in Boston at 5:54 a.m. and will set at 7:40 p.m. for 13 hours (Boo!) and 46 minutes of sunlight. The Old Farmer’s Almanac says Cat Nights began yesterday. There’s an old Irish legend that witches can turn themselves into cats eight times and return to their witchy form, but when they do it the ninth time on Aug. 17, they remain a cat. (Might be the origin of that nine lives stuff.) No wonder they scream in the middle of the night. (“Who took my hat? What happened to my broom???”)
⚾️ Hey, sport: At the start of the Red Sox season, full of hope as always, I subscribed to NESN 360, the Sox paid streaming service which is the only way New Englanders can see all the games. They stunk up the joint almost immediately; by mid-May, they were 18-26, dead last in the AL East. Not interested in watching more losses, I canceled my subscription.
Then, in late June, they swept the Yankees in four games, and the winning stuck. By the All-Star break, they were in third place. By Aug. 7, they were sitting on a 9-game winning streak and were 15 games above .500. So naturally, I resubscribed.
Since then they’ve gone 3-7 and I’m convinced I must be the jinx. Subscribe, and they lose. Cancel, and they win. I think the Sox should pay me to not subscribe.
⛹🏻♀️ The facts about transgender female athletes
It’s difficult to keep up with all the culture wars that conservatives launch in a lame attempt to cover up the fact that they haven’t the slightest idea how to govern. Eliminating diversity in the government and military, refusing to appoint or promote women and people of color, banning books in libraries, sanitizing history at public monuments, threatening private companies that have progressive social policies, viewing all immigrants as an existential threat, pushing Christianity into all segments of public life, proclaiming that the US is a white Christian nation. And on and on. It’s so tiring.
And now they’re back attacking transgender athletes, especially women, because of course it’s always women.
It was revived by a recent controversy in the WNBA. An Indiana Fever player, Sophie Cunningham, mentioned in an interview that she didn’t think transgender women and girls should be able to compete in female athletics as a matter of fairness. That led some other players and coaches to voice their support for transgender women to play in women’s sports.
Fans at some WNBA venues have booed Cunningham, while some have held signs in support.
There are no trans women in the WNBA, and major college athletic associations in the US, such as the NCAA, don’t let trans women compete in women’s categories. The governing bodies of major international sports federations are increasingly restricting or banning trans women from elite female categories, including the International Olympic Committee. Trump has threatened to withhold federal funding from schools and states that allow trans women to play women’s sports, and the Supreme Court has backed him.
Cunningham’s opinion is not an unreasonable view on the face of it, primarily because the science is simply incomplete. (About two-thirds of Americans agree with her.)
But it’s also a view that allows conservatives to ignore the real danger to women — straight white men (remember the Epstein files?) — and an opinion that is fraught with all sorts of devastating consequences and repercussions for transgender individuals.
First, the biology
In the US, about 0.8% of adults and 3.3% of youths aged 13 to 17 identify as transgender. Their physical bodies don’t match how they feel inside. Among the adults, about 1/3 identify as trans women, 1/3 as trans men, and 1/3 as non-binary.
BTW, the binary view of human gender is quite ignorant. There aren’t just two genders, men with XY sex chromosomes, testes, a prostate, and a penis; and women with XX sex chromosomes, ovaries, fallopian tubes, a uterus, and a vagina.
In fact, like so much in our diverse and messy natural world, there are more than 30 different human intersex variations and many atypical sex chromosome combinations. That’s because chromosomes, hormones, and physical anatomy can line up in all sorts of ways.
A person can have a missing sex chromosome or an extra sex chromosome (variations include X, XXY, XYY, XXX, and more).
A person can be born with both ovarian and testicular tissue — and sometimes one of each. A person can have XX chromosomes and ovaries, but the external genitalia of a male. A person can have XY chromosomes and testes, but the external genitalia of a female. And on and on.
Nature ain’t perfect, folks.
Now, these intersex variations are separate from transgenderism. One is physical, while the other is one’s internal sense of gender identity. However, people with these intersex variations are more likely to experience varied internal gender identities such as transgender or binary, probably because of hormone differences in t