It looks like nature (weather and geography) are once again impinging upon "identity" and politics.
Second, is it better to have a live son than a dead daughter, killed in a weather/geography-related accident? California prefers taking on the risk, I guess.
Come on, that's specious and you know it. It's not a general rule that defining gender based on self-ID makes you more likely to be killed in a blizzard. It's a freak situation caused by clashing legislation and a state border. If the geography was slightly different you could have a situation when it was the decision to define based on biological sex that caused you to take the dangerous route.
Pretty sure his comment was tongue-in-cheek. I thought it was funny because typically it is indeed nature that is being denied in efforts to prioritize identity. In this case, it's accidental, that's what makes it funny.
No, it's not. California was not given the choice of "define gender based on self-report or stop kids dying in snowstorms". And my point is, if you're as willing to rewrite the news as the OP and yourself are, the exact same logic would have caused you to condemn your own side if the geography was slightly different. No principles here, just the desire to demonize anyone who disagrees with you, whether it makes sense or not.
The geography is not different, is my point. Your hypotheticals are irrelevant. The point of the original article is to show how politics are being prioritized over the material needs of students and constituents. Yes, it would be equally stupid if the issues were switched. But they are not!
I'm not arguing with the article, am I? I'm arguing with the OP above who's pretending that the story is about California making a deliberate decision to support trans rights at the expense of risking students dying in blizzards. So I did a reducto ad absurdum to show how arbitrary the OP's basis is for this, because were it not for geographical fluke he'd have to be arguing the opposite point. And frankly I think you're arguing in bad faith here, because I find it hard to believe you're unable to understand this simple point.
That's not a bad idea in principle, but they would need to get the US Congress and the legislatures of California and Nevada to agree with them. See my comment below.
Great article. I too wish you had had the resources to stick around and try to get someone on the pro side to talk, because this decision does seem like a prime example of knee-jerk public virtue signaling and if its proponents disagree with that assessment, I’d like to hear why. I rue the loss of stable funding for journalism too—especially local journalism and investigative journalism of all kinds. We seem to be living through an age where money has drained away from everything that matters.
He DID call them girls! "Trans girls" he wrote several times. The way English grammar works is that the noun gives the broad category, and then the adjective narrows it. The adjective does not change the category of the noun, which was "girls". So "trans girls" are a subset of "girls", according to the rules of English grammar, which I'm sure Jesse knows. So this was a deliberate, intentional lie on his part.
"Fake girls" isn't really correct, either. It does imply that the (real) girls are fake in some material way, such as being nice to you to your face and then talking dirt about you behind your back. "She's so fake," we might say about her, or "she's so phony!" We don't mean she doesn't exist, just that she is not what she seems. "Fake girls" is a convenient label to point out the whole trans ideology as bull-shit and bat-shit. The absurdity of a "fake" girl who's not a girl at all but really a boy is being parodied.
We might describe a counterfeit bill or a forged painting as "fake" but they aren't really so. They are a piece of real paper with real ink, or a piece of real canvas with real paint, on them. What's false about them is what they are represented to be, that their value is claimed to be (much) more than it really is because we are being deceived about who made them. Once the true creators of the bill and painting are unmasked, their value collapses, except to certain eccentric collectors and fanciers of counterfeit objects.
So we shouldn't use the noun "boy", "girl", "man" or "woman" in any other use except as its biological meaning. A "trans" girl is a boy. Period. We may say he identifies as the opposite sex, thinks he should have been the opposite sex or believes he isn't "really" one sex or the other. We should say, if we want to give any uptake at all to the idea of trans, "he is a trans-identified boy who wants to play girls' sports with girls even though he will be cheating them and possibly injuring them." That better communicates the perversity of all this.
Just a quick copyediting quibble: "Sierra" is already plural. It's never "the Sierras." Don't add the S.
I grew up on the east side of the Sierra, about three hours south of Carson City. Reno was our big city, too, and this is an extended part of my childhood backyard. "Sierra" is one of the shibboleths that locals use to ID the flatlanders. It suggests that you're the kind of person who heads out in January without chains in the trunk, or might try to cross Death Valley in July in broad daylight.
Not loving "the Donner Pass," either. It's just Donner Pass.
Understand your point, Sara, but in the English vernacular, we refer to chains of mountains in the plural. The Rockies. The Alps. The Himalayas.
I don’t know why or exactly when Californians started calling the Sierras “the Sierra.” Sometime in the 70s, starting with TV meteorologists, IIRC. I call it the Sierras.
Californians started calling them "the Sierra" back in 1548, when Juan Cabrillo (who was the first Spanish explorer up the California coast) applied the term to the Santa Cruz mountains. By 1776, it was being used on Spanish maps to indicate the present range.
Sierra is Spanish for "a range of mountains" or "high country" (Sierra Nevada = "snowy mountains"). The plural is already contained in the Spanish word. No Spanish speaker is going to get this one wrong. And neither is a native Californian who knows their state. Ansel Adams once said: "To add an s is a linguistic, Californian, and mountaineering sin."
I started living in the Sierra in 1958, just a few weeks after I landed on the planet. The old-timers (some of whom dated to the previous century back then) I grew up with never added an S, and native Sierrans still don't today.
Maybe so. Nevertheless, we in the U.S. and the rest of the world don’t call California “Las Californias” as the Spanish did, or Alta California, either.
Sierra-area natives may prefer “the Sierra.” Others may choose to use the locution of Sierra residents, or else follow standard English practice of using the plural for a range of mountains.
It may just be a regionalism, the way Angelenos put the definite article “the” in front of all their highway names (“the 101,” “the 405”), while Northern Californians just “take 101,” without “the.”
Edit: Oh. When I got to California in 1970, nobody I knew and nobody on local or national TV called it the Sierra. Usage changes, though.
But we digress.
Edit: Pleased to make the acquaintance of another No. Cal. fan of Jesse Singal.
I mean, if you really insisted on the primacy of Spanish here then "The Sierra" is a solecism and should be "La Sierra" (the West not lacking in El/La/Los placenames, after all).
It's nice to see a real life Shibboleth roaming in the wild though.
There's a singular to Alp. The Matterhorn is an alp, among many other alps.
When you use "The Rockies" to refer to the Rocky Mountains (a form of metonymy), there are individual mountains involved, e.g. Mount Elbert.
Sierra also means "saw" in Spanish. The points of the mountains are like the teeth of a saw blade. There is no singular peak referred to as a sierra, the singular word sierra refers to a range of mountains. Mount Whitney is not a sierra, it's part of a sierra.
Now, one could refer to "The Sierras" as that set of ranges including the Sierra Nevada and the Sierra Madre... but nobody does that.
Funny -I live in Nevada City and trip up way more on “the donner pass” than “the sierras.” The latter is at least something people actually say (and lots of deep backcountry aficionados that I hang out with - so while they may not be local by housing they sure do spend a LOT of time back there)
Don't try having a conversation about this story with ChatGPT if you're gender critical. OpenAI is clearly on the gender identity ideology bandwagon, and as a result ChatGPT will spit up one trans activist talking point after another.
The Democrats who control the California legislature would never do that. Like all Democrats in office nationwide, they do the bidding of the transqueer cult.
I don’t doubt you, but don’t kid yourself — a GOP legislature would do the exact same thing if the circumstances were reversed.
My point, anyway, is that this is the sort of story that doesn’t exist in a well-functioning representative democracy. Which we are not at this point in time.
All of these coastal refugee parents though they were “exempting” themselves from the California madness by moving to TTUSD. Yet they keep voting for it—and are afraid to admit it publicly.
This is a great story that unravels the many complexities that face school districts now with interscholastic competition, and how the trans issue complicates everything further. How typical for this issue that Truckee truckled under the weight of ONE complaint from a trans-identified alum. Thanks for sharing, Jesse.
Re "An avalanche had killed nine skiers during a guided trip." This is misleading, suggesting a bunch of tourists and one guide. More correctly, all 9 were highly experienced locals: six backcountry skiers and three guides from Blackbird Mountain Guides. They knew the high avalanche risks and chose to go anyway. And they didn't split up into smaller groups as they should have in light of the storm and heightened avalanche risk. This may seem like a small point, but it's about good journalism, something you have claimed to champion. And yes, I actually agree with you about transgender women in women's sports. But the idea of putting the rights of one person with a Y chromosome ahead of the rights of many genetic women is hardly new in our society.
Enjoyed the piece. Got a real sense of place from it. It sounds like the school have been put in a very difficult spot.
As a UK reader, it reminds me a little of back during Covid, when Wales and England’s rules on spectator events differed. Chester City Football (soccer) Club’s ground was literally bisected by the border (although almost entirely in Wales) and there was a big fuss about an English club having to adhere to the stricter Welsh rules.
They are really not exaggerating here, as someone who likes to go skiing from the Bay Area the pass basically shuts down for at least a few hours every time there’s a decent sized snow storm because it’s impossible to keep it plowed when snow is falling at inches per hour. So students would definitely get stuck on one side of the pass or the other on a regular basis (I bet the other districts in the Sacramento area aren’t in love with this either).
I guess another thing I have personal experience with is my wife is quite involved with the local school district and while the local officials are generally very dedicated to doing the best for the kids, the state ed department is completely useless and loves saddling local districts with unfunded mandates that benefit nobody. So this whole mess is completely in character.
I'm in agreement with Jesse's usual takes on transgender youth healthcare and generally believe sports should be segregated by biological sex. I appreciate Jesse's reporting here without bringing ideology into his reports. The barriers, especially safety matters, to moving games and meets to CA districts clearly argues strongly for remaining in the NIAA.
I agree the TTUSD Board of Trustees is in a tight spot, but they must and should adhere to CA law. I'd hope a legislative solution might be found- an exemption for safety or repeal of the law.
By referring to boys as girls, Jesse DOES bring ideology into his reports. Ideology is the only basis on which a boy can possibly “be” a girl. I enjoy his writing up to that point.
It's verbally cumbersome. He refers to "trans girls" and otherwise to girl's soccer, etc. Replacing "trans girls" with "biological boys who claim to be girls" seems excessively and unnecessarily verbose.
Why would they want to do that? asks Rip Van Winkel who has just woken up. Wouldn't the other boys at the school ridicule them and beat them up as fags? And why on earth would the school system, or the girls, let them? Because the boys think they are women? You effing kidding me? And so what if they do? That doesn't answer my question, Mr. Van Winkel presses, as to why the girls and the school system would buckle to those demands? Teenage girls letting teenage boys see them naked, and then getting pounded in competition? You're saying Someone in Authority thinks it's a real thing, that boys really can be girls, inside like? What's next? Drugs and operations to make them look more like girls? What? You're already doing that? I'm going back to my cave. Glad I don't have kids.
As far as I am concerned, trans girls and trans-identified boys are boys. I only refer to them as such. Furthermore, they have no more business competing as girls against girls in girls' sports than do any other boys. But even some gender critical writers such as Jesse Singal deem it necessary to nod to their trans status.
As to why the school district allows this, it is because it is practically a religious belief among most Democrats that trans females are females and trans males, males. By "religious," I mean that their views are based on belief bordering on faith because there is no science or past human experience to back it up. That makes disagreement with their views on trans people more than a difference of opinion; for them, it is as immoral to dissent from orthodox progressive ideas about gender, gender identity and trans people as to be a racist. It is all rooted in a nihilistic sort of philosophy that had a long incubation period in academia before it escaped campus, became popularized and was widely accepted by liberals and progressives as received truth.
cumbersome, but necessary for clarity. There's something pretty nutty about the guys who want to play girl sports, and parents who want their boys to play girls' sports. I don't have too much empathy with them, apart from the fact that saner views were persistently censored.
"Boys" meaning biological boys, those phenotypes resulting from XY chromosomes. Yes. But in any discussion of transsexual issues a distinction is worthwhile, regardless of one's beliefs.
I don't think XY makes a biological boy, you need an SRY gene and a somewhat functional androgen receptor. Those are biological girls because the default plan is female and they were unable to go through the process of masculinization. If you have a functional androgen receptor and an SRY gene, you are a boy by a sane clinical and biological perspective. It's really rare that one of those boys is absolutely focused on being female from an early age and those are the types of boys who are entirely disinterested in dominating girls in sports. Boys who wanna kick butt against girls arent necessarily AGPs but something like it is going on
The union of a sperm with a Y chromosome and an egg makes a boy in such a large proportion of all the times that it happens and leads to a live birth that it is specious logic to bring complete androgen insensitivity into the argument. These babies look like girls at birth and are rare as hen's teeth. They are biological mistakes, not part of the range of normal development.
The issue we are talking about here is boys who have always looked like boys and grew up as boys now claiming to be girls. They will almost always have a Y chromosome. The main reason to test for SRY (normally located on the Y chromosome) in athletic sex testing is that PCR for the SRY gene is cheaper and quicker than the laborious preparation of a karyotype that visualizes chromosomes microscopically.
The default plan is not female. Development of full female anatomy along Mullerian lines requires many genes on two X chromosomes -- one is suppressed early in uterine life -- and the absence of the anti-Mullerian hormone secreted by the male embryonic testis. Otherwise the XX conceptus will not develop female internal organs., and of course neither will any XY conceptus. It is correct only to say that the default appearance of the external genitalia (vulva and a few centimetres of vagina) is female. An XY conceptus with CAIS will not have ovaries or a female reproductive tract. He'll have testes that have nothing to descend into but no other male anatomy that requires androgen effect to develop.
Maybe he doesn't want to be dismissed by persuadable members of his target audience (not us) that he is just another right-wing transphobe who can be safely ignored.
That would be my guess, but allowing Genderologists to dictate the language we use to talk about their insane takeover of society is how we got so deep into this mess in the first place.
Yes, exactly. It is a big blind spot, even if used for strategic reasons. It does make it take a heartbeat longer for even a hardened cynic like me to realize some sob story about a "transgender athlete" denied by religious fanatics the opportunity to play "her" sport is really a guy. If authors said simply, even if sympathetically, "He feels he has a human right to play girls' hockey," every sensible person would say, "The Hell he does!" But as soon as you call him a transgender girl, people of good will start thinking that maybe there is an issue of kindness and fairness that needs to be examined and indulged. Is it ever fair to ban some girls from girls sport? they ask.
The whole thing reminds me of the scene in Blazing Saddles -- Happy One Hundredth Birthday, Mr. Brooks! -- where the new sheriff is about to be lynched by the townspeople when they realize he is black. He escapes by drawing his own six-shooter and pretending to take himself hostage. "Y'all back off or the n* gets it!" in a deep stage voice. The townspeople are fooled into having sympatico for the guy they were going to lynch a few seconds before and they let the "gunman" take his "hostage" across the street to the safety of the town jail.
I wonder what the district's legal theory is. Is the state doling out the money? Because otherwise, violating federal law is clearly a worse idea than violating state law that contradicts federal law, given how courts work (and it is a safe bet that the SC will stay Conservative in the next few years).
Now you've got me wondering: how do the more touristy restaurants around the Donner Pass try to theme their food around what the area is famous for? I get the feeling that it's not as simple as selling witch-themed meals in Salem.
They ignore it. There are no drive-through fast food places, and only one brick-and-mortar Taco Bell , along the north Tahoe shore communities (not counting Truckee, which has a McDs west of downtown just off the freeway on Highway 89).
So, restaurants tend to be high-end, or try to imitate high-end.
Tourists tend to be affluent, snobby , entitled and obnoxious, at least the worse cases. Some are classic, sadistic SF Bay Area tech bro sociopaths or delusional new age leftards (some of the people that died in the big avalanche). They are all more than happy to have paved over any remnant of traditional local working class culture, unless it is fetishized.
So far, no one has fetishized Gold Rush era cannibalism.
A couple points.
It looks like nature (weather and geography) are once again impinging upon "identity" and politics.
Second, is it better to have a live son than a dead daughter, killed in a weather/geography-related accident? California prefers taking on the risk, I guess.
Come on, that's specious and you know it. It's not a general rule that defining gender based on self-ID makes you more likely to be killed in a blizzard. It's a freak situation caused by clashing legislation and a state border. If the geography was slightly different you could have a situation when it was the decision to define based on biological sex that caused you to take the dangerous route.
Pretty sure his comment was tongue-in-cheek. I thought it was funny because typically it is indeed nature that is being denied in efforts to prioritize identity. In this case, it's accidental, that's what makes it funny.
KateP is correct. (I'm glad you found the irony/humor in it!)
Except this is the situation, so your hypotheticals are pointless
No, it's not. California was not given the choice of "define gender based on self-report or stop kids dying in snowstorms". And my point is, if you're as willing to rewrite the news as the OP and yourself are, the exact same logic would have caused you to condemn your own side if the geography was slightly different. No principles here, just the desire to demonize anyone who disagrees with you, whether it makes sense or not.
The geography is not different, is my point. Your hypotheticals are irrelevant. The point of the original article is to show how politics are being prioritized over the material needs of students and constituents. Yes, it would be equally stupid if the issues were switched. But they are not!
I'm not arguing with the article, am I? I'm arguing with the OP above who's pretending that the story is about California making a deliberate decision to support trans rights at the expense of risking students dying in blizzards. So I did a reducto ad absurdum to show how arbitrary the OP's basis is for this, because were it not for geographical fluke he'd have to be arguing the opposite point. And frankly I think you're arguing in bad faith here, because I find it hard to believe you're unable to understand this simple point.
Maybe truckee should vote to join Nevada.
That's not a bad idea in principle, but they would need to get the US Congress and the legislatures of California and Nevada to agree with them. See my comment below.
Great article. I too wish you had had the resources to stick around and try to get someone on the pro side to talk, because this decision does seem like a prime example of knee-jerk public virtue signaling and if its proponents disagree with that assessment, I’d like to hear why. I rue the loss of stable funding for journalism too—especially local journalism and investigative journalism of all kinds. We seem to be living through an age where money has drained away from everything that matters.
"trans girls"? Really Jesse? That's the language you choose to use?
So-called "trans" "girls" are BOYS.
I know you know this Jesse.
So why do you lie to us, your paying subscribers?
Why do you gaslight us? Why do you assault our eyes with the written lying language of the transqueer cult?
I'm out. Canceling my paid subscription now.
At least he didn't call them "girls" the way the mainstream media does.
He DID call them girls! "Trans girls" he wrote several times. The way English grammar works is that the noun gives the broad category, and then the adjective narrows it. The adjective does not change the category of the noun, which was "girls". So "trans girls" are a subset of "girls", according to the rules of English grammar, which I'm sure Jesse knows. So this was a deliberate, intentional lie on his part.
According to this logic, "fake girls" is equally incorrect. Put down Strunk and White and pick up Huddleston and Pullum.
"You said 'fake girls' but they're clearly *real boys*." Haha come on.
"Fake girls" isn't really correct, either. It does imply that the (real) girls are fake in some material way, such as being nice to you to your face and then talking dirt about you behind your back. "She's so fake," we might say about her, or "she's so phony!" We don't mean she doesn't exist, just that she is not what she seems. "Fake girls" is a convenient label to point out the whole trans ideology as bull-shit and bat-shit. The absurdity of a "fake" girl who's not a girl at all but really a boy is being parodied.
We might describe a counterfeit bill or a forged painting as "fake" but they aren't really so. They are a piece of real paper with real ink, or a piece of real canvas with real paint, on them. What's false about them is what they are represented to be, that their value is claimed to be (much) more than it really is because we are being deceived about who made them. Once the true creators of the bill and painting are unmasked, their value collapses, except to certain eccentric collectors and fanciers of counterfeit objects.
So we shouldn't use the noun "boy", "girl", "man" or "woman" in any other use except as its biological meaning. A "trans" girl is a boy. Period. We may say he identifies as the opposite sex, thinks he should have been the opposite sex or believes he isn't "really" one sex or the other. We should say, if we want to give any uptake at all to the idea of trans, "he is a trans-identified boy who wants to play girls' sports with girls even though he will be cheating them and possibly injuring them." That better communicates the perversity of all this.
Yes, there are such things as negating adjectives, but "trans" is not one of them. "Trans women are women" goes the mantra.
"Oat milk", "wooden hamburger (child's toy)", etc do not agree with you, even if we take your other positions for granted
Just a quick copyediting quibble: "Sierra" is already plural. It's never "the Sierras." Don't add the S.
I grew up on the east side of the Sierra, about three hours south of Carson City. Reno was our big city, too, and this is an extended part of my childhood backyard. "Sierra" is one of the shibboleths that locals use to ID the flatlanders. It suggests that you're the kind of person who heads out in January without chains in the trunk, or might try to cross Death Valley in July in broad daylight.
Not loving "the Donner Pass," either. It's just Donner Pass.
Understand your point, Sara, but in the English vernacular, we refer to chains of mountains in the plural. The Rockies. The Alps. The Himalayas.
I don’t know why or exactly when Californians started calling the Sierras “the Sierra.” Sometime in the 70s, starting with TV meteorologists, IIRC. I call it the Sierras.
Californians started calling them "the Sierra" back in 1548, when Juan Cabrillo (who was the first Spanish explorer up the California coast) applied the term to the Santa Cruz mountains. By 1776, it was being used on Spanish maps to indicate the present range.
Sierra is Spanish for "a range of mountains" or "high country" (Sierra Nevada = "snowy mountains"). The plural is already contained in the Spanish word. No Spanish speaker is going to get this one wrong. And neither is a native Californian who knows their state. Ansel Adams once said: "To add an s is a linguistic, Californian, and mountaineering sin."
I started living in the Sierra in 1958, just a few weeks after I landed on the planet. The old-timers (some of whom dated to the previous century back then) I grew up with never added an S, and native Sierrans still don't today.
Maybe so. Nevertheless, we in the U.S. and the rest of the world don’t call California “Las Californias” as the Spanish did, or Alta California, either.
Sierra-area natives may prefer “the Sierra.” Others may choose to use the locution of Sierra residents, or else follow standard English practice of using the plural for a range of mountains.
It may just be a regionalism, the way Angelenos put the definite article “the” in front of all their highway names (“the 101,” “the 405”), while Northern Californians just “take 101,” without “the.”
Edit: Oh. When I got to California in 1970, nobody I knew and nobody on local or national TV called it the Sierra. Usage changes, though.
But we digress.
Edit: Pleased to make the acquaintance of another No. Cal. fan of Jesse Singal.
I mean, if you really insisted on the primacy of Spanish here then "The Sierra" is a solecism and should be "La Sierra" (the West not lacking in El/La/Los placenames, after all).
It's nice to see a real life Shibboleth roaming in the wild though.
There's a singular to Alp. The Matterhorn is an alp, among many other alps.
When you use "The Rockies" to refer to the Rocky Mountains (a form of metonymy), there are individual mountains involved, e.g. Mount Elbert.
Sierra also means "saw" in Spanish. The points of the mountains are like the teeth of a saw blade. There is no singular peak referred to as a sierra, the singular word sierra refers to a range of mountains. Mount Whitney is not a sierra, it's part of a sierra.
Now, one could refer to "The Sierras" as that set of ranges including the Sierra Nevada and the Sierra Madre... but nobody does that.
Funny -I live in Nevada City and trip up way more on “the donner pass” than “the sierras.” The latter is at least something people actually say (and lots of deep backcountry aficionados that I hang out with - so while they may not be local by housing they sure do spend a LOT of time back there)
So, is the possessive, the Sierra's?
Bodies play sports, not feelings. Feeling like a girl doesn't negate the physical advantages of a male body, even before puberty.
Don't try having a conversation about this story with ChatGPT if you're gender critical. OpenAI is clearly on the gender identity ideology bandwagon, and as a result ChatGPT will spit up one trans activist talking point after another.
Seems like the easiest solution would be to legislatively exempt this particular school district from California’s gender-identity mandate.
The Democrats who control the California legislature would never do that. Like all Democrats in office nationwide, they do the bidding of the transqueer cult.
I don’t doubt you, but don’t kid yourself — a GOP legislature would do the exact same thing if the circumstances were reversed.
My point, anyway, is that this is the sort of story that doesn’t exist in a well-functioning representative democracy. Which we are not at this point in time.
I completely agree. Our government is now nothing more than two competing cults, MAGA and TQ.
All of these coastal refugee parents though they were “exempting” themselves from the California madness by moving to TTUSD. Yet they keep voting for it—and are afraid to admit it publicly.
This is a great story that unravels the many complexities that face school districts now with interscholastic competition, and how the trans issue complicates everything further. How typical for this issue that Truckee truckled under the weight of ONE complaint from a trans-identified alum. Thanks for sharing, Jesse.
There's no indication that the alum was trans. Just another social justice warrior...
Really excellent work and writing, Jesse.
I second this!
Re "An avalanche had killed nine skiers during a guided trip." This is misleading, suggesting a bunch of tourists and one guide. More correctly, all 9 were highly experienced locals: six backcountry skiers and three guides from Blackbird Mountain Guides. They knew the high avalanche risks and chose to go anyway. And they didn't split up into smaller groups as they should have in light of the storm and heightened avalanche risk. This may seem like a small point, but it's about good journalism, something you have claimed to champion. And yes, I actually agree with you about transgender women in women's sports. But the idea of putting the rights of one person with a Y chromosome ahead of the rights of many genetic women is hardly new in our society.
I don't feel misled at all by that phrase
ok.
Enjoyed the piece. Got a real sense of place from it. It sounds like the school have been put in a very difficult spot.
As a UK reader, it reminds me a little of back during Covid, when Wales and England’s rules on spectator events differed. Chester City Football (soccer) Club’s ground was literally bisected by the border (although almost entirely in Wales) and there was a big fuss about an English club having to adhere to the stricter Welsh rules.
They are really not exaggerating here, as someone who likes to go skiing from the Bay Area the pass basically shuts down for at least a few hours every time there’s a decent sized snow storm because it’s impossible to keep it plowed when snow is falling at inches per hour. So students would definitely get stuck on one side of the pass or the other on a regular basis (I bet the other districts in the Sacramento area aren’t in love with this either).
I guess another thing I have personal experience with is my wife is quite involved with the local school district and while the local officials are generally very dedicated to doing the best for the kids, the state ed department is completely useless and loves saddling local districts with unfunded mandates that benefit nobody. So this whole mess is completely in character.
I'm in agreement with Jesse's usual takes on transgender youth healthcare and generally believe sports should be segregated by biological sex. I appreciate Jesse's reporting here without bringing ideology into his reports. The barriers, especially safety matters, to moving games and meets to CA districts clearly argues strongly for remaining in the NIAA.
I agree the TTUSD Board of Trustees is in a tight spot, but they must and should adhere to CA law. I'd hope a legislative solution might be found- an exemption for safety or repeal of the law.
By referring to boys as girls, Jesse DOES bring ideology into his reports. Ideology is the only basis on which a boy can possibly “be” a girl. I enjoy his writing up to that point.
It's verbally cumbersome. He refers to "trans girls" and otherwise to girl's soccer, etc. Replacing "trans girls" with "biological boys who claim to be girls" seems excessively and unnecessarily verbose.
I prefer the phrase "trans-identified boys."
Why not just call them "boys"?
Boys who want to play on girls' sports teams.
Why would they want to do that? asks Rip Van Winkel who has just woken up. Wouldn't the other boys at the school ridicule them and beat them up as fags? And why on earth would the school system, or the girls, let them? Because the boys think they are women? You effing kidding me? And so what if they do? That doesn't answer my question, Mr. Van Winkel presses, as to why the girls and the school system would buckle to those demands? Teenage girls letting teenage boys see them naked, and then getting pounded in competition? You're saying Someone in Authority thinks it's a real thing, that boys really can be girls, inside like? What's next? Drugs and operations to make them look more like girls? What? You're already doing that? I'm going back to my cave. Glad I don't have kids.
As far as I am concerned, trans girls and trans-identified boys are boys. I only refer to them as such. Furthermore, they have no more business competing as girls against girls in girls' sports than do any other boys. But even some gender critical writers such as Jesse Singal deem it necessary to nod to their trans status.
As to why the school district allows this, it is because it is practically a religious belief among most Democrats that trans females are females and trans males, males. By "religious," I mean that their views are based on belief bordering on faith because there is no science or past human experience to back it up. That makes disagreement with their views on trans people more than a difference of opinion; for them, it is as immoral to dissent from orthodox progressive ideas about gender, gender identity and trans people as to be a racist. It is all rooted in a nihilistic sort of philosophy that had a long incubation period in academia before it escaped campus, became popularized and was widely accepted by liberals and progressives as received truth.
cumbersome, but necessary for clarity. There's something pretty nutty about the guys who want to play girl sports, and parents who want their boys to play girls' sports. I don't have too much empathy with them, apart from the fact that saner views were persistently censored.
What does "biological boys who claim to be girls" say that "trans girls" does not?
"trans" girls" assumes the conclusion--they're in no way girls
“Boys.”
"Boys" meaning biological boys, those phenotypes resulting from XY chromosomes. Yes. But in any discussion of transsexual issues a distinction is worthwhile, regardless of one's beliefs.
I don't think XY makes a biological boy, you need an SRY gene and a somewhat functional androgen receptor. Those are biological girls because the default plan is female and they were unable to go through the process of masculinization. If you have a functional androgen receptor and an SRY gene, you are a boy by a sane clinical and biological perspective. It's really rare that one of those boys is absolutely focused on being female from an early age and those are the types of boys who are entirely disinterested in dominating girls in sports. Boys who wanna kick butt against girls arent necessarily AGPs but something like it is going on
The union of a sperm with a Y chromosome and an egg makes a boy in such a large proportion of all the times that it happens and leads to a live birth that it is specious logic to bring complete androgen insensitivity into the argument. These babies look like girls at birth and are rare as hen's teeth. They are biological mistakes, not part of the range of normal development.
The issue we are talking about here is boys who have always looked like boys and grew up as boys now claiming to be girls. They will almost always have a Y chromosome. The main reason to test for SRY (normally located on the Y chromosome) in athletic sex testing is that PCR for the SRY gene is cheaper and quicker than the laborious preparation of a karyotype that visualizes chromosomes microscopically.
The default plan is not female. Development of full female anatomy along Mullerian lines requires many genes on two X chromosomes -- one is suppressed early in uterine life -- and the absence of the anti-Mullerian hormone secreted by the male embryonic testis. Otherwise the XX conceptus will not develop female internal organs., and of course neither will any XY conceptus. It is correct only to say that the default appearance of the external genitalia (vulva and a few centimetres of vagina) is female. An XY conceptus with CAIS will not have ovaries or a female reproductive tract. He'll have testes that have nothing to descend into but no other male anatomy that requires androgen effect to develop.
Yes, there is a blind spot there.
Maybe he doesn't want to be dismissed by persuadable members of his target audience (not us) that he is just another right-wing transphobe who can be safely ignored.
That would be my guess, but allowing Genderologists to dictate the language we use to talk about their insane takeover of society is how we got so deep into this mess in the first place.
Yes, exactly. It is a big blind spot, even if used for strategic reasons. It does make it take a heartbeat longer for even a hardened cynic like me to realize some sob story about a "transgender athlete" denied by religious fanatics the opportunity to play "her" sport is really a guy. If authors said simply, even if sympathetically, "He feels he has a human right to play girls' hockey," every sensible person would say, "The Hell he does!" But as soon as you call him a transgender girl, people of good will start thinking that maybe there is an issue of kindness and fairness that needs to be examined and indulged. Is it ever fair to ban some girls from girls sport? they ask.
The whole thing reminds me of the scene in Blazing Saddles -- Happy One Hundredth Birthday, Mr. Brooks! -- where the new sheriff is about to be lynched by the townspeople when they realize he is black. He escapes by drawing his own six-shooter and pretending to take himself hostage. "Y'all back off or the n* gets it!" in a deep stage voice. The townspeople are fooled into having sympatico for the guy they were going to lynch a few seconds before and they let the "gunman" take his "hostage" across the street to the safety of the town jail.
I wonder what the district's legal theory is. Is the state doling out the money? Because otherwise, violating federal law is clearly a worse idea than violating state law that contradicts federal law, given how courts work (and it is a safe bet that the SC will stay Conservative in the next few years).
Now you've got me wondering: how do the more touristy restaurants around the Donner Pass try to theme their food around what the area is famous for? I get the feeling that it's not as simple as selling witch-themed meals in Salem.
They ignore it. There are no drive-through fast food places, and only one brick-and-mortar Taco Bell , along the north Tahoe shore communities (not counting Truckee, which has a McDs west of downtown just off the freeway on Highway 89).
So, restaurants tend to be high-end, or try to imitate high-end.
Tourists tend to be affluent, snobby , entitled and obnoxious, at least the worse cases. Some are classic, sadistic SF Bay Area tech bro sociopaths or delusional new age leftards (some of the people that died in the big avalanche). They are all more than happy to have paved over any remnant of traditional local working class culture, unless it is fetishized.
So far, no one has fetishized Gold Rush era cannibalism.
Maybe Armie Hammer is a good skier and has fantasized about opening a restaurant? lol
Truckee is not Salem. Salem is a very lame town, and not just the witch stuff