This time around, we have to wear face masks, so I used the little PA to call the numbers instead of relying on my loud mouth as had been my practice. Each round continues till there are three winners. Their prizes are books of coupons good at the Hospital canteen. I don’t know whether back in the day they could have cashed them in for cigarettes. All I know is that the veterans enjoy the games, and we enjoy thanking them for their service with a bit of fun.

The VA Hospital is not far from the Palace of the Legion of Honor, founded in 1924 as a memorial to Californians killed in World War I. It’s a full-scale replica of the Palais de la Légion d’Honneur in Paris, with one cast of Rodin’s The Thinker in the courtyard (and more Rodin inside). I wonder in how many wedding party pictures The Thinker shows up, as opposed to the colonnades; it’s a popular spot for such photography. Just below the main parking is a spot with a great view of the Golden Gate Bridge.

The collection is fabulous, and includes a couple of recreated French mansion rooms. The special exhibits downstairs tend to be a tad on the small size; the de Young gets the larger ones. This day I viewed the new exhibit on the Etruscans, who flourished as city states during the first millennium B.C. until Rome took them over. The art objects are beautifully crafted, and the statues and funerary images have what’s called the Etruscan smile: the people depicted look like they’re happy to see you. Women had high status in Etruria, and “Roman” numerals and aqueducts were their inventions.

The museum closed at a good time to take advantage of being close to the Pacific Café, a wonderful little seafood bistro. They don’t take reservations; you sign up and get handed a glass of wine to drink while you wait. I checked the menu on my phone, and saw they are looking for a buyer so the founders can retire at the end of the summer. I can’t imagine nobody would jump at the opportunity, but may have to make more opportunities to make the long trek out there just in case. I had the parmesan-encrusted halibut, which was ambrosial.

Meanwhile, it seems I can’t stay on top of the news, via alt media (usually more comprehensive than traditional media these days), without the trans controversies bullying their way in, or being commented upon. A story came up about a woman convicted of stolen honor crimes getting moved into a halfway house, but objecting to having to share a room with “a man pretending to be a woman.” For wanting common privacy, she was sent back to prison for another six months. While looking for a link to a version of the news story with a less blunt description, I discovered he had been sent to prison on child pornography charges. Ewwww!!!

There is a lot of nastiness on social media coming from both sides, and I’d like to stand up for women’s rights without getting down into the gutter—though getting gutter-adjacent may be unavoidable. I prefer terms like “trans-identified male,” which is perfectly descriptive without the undue dignity of “transwoman” or “transgender woman,” or capitulating to the false equivalence of “cis” woman. I think this is important because, as George Orwell pointed out, those able to tell you what you may say are capable of telling you what you may think. I like “cosplayers” because it’s descriptive of the people who want to live as women and be accepted as women but still keep their penises.

My bottom lines have to do with respect for women’s boundaries, as regards private spaces and athletics. There’s also leaving be tomboys and girls struggling with female puberty (who doesn’t?) instead of pushing them toward social and medical transition, and leaving children be in general. This certainly isn’t too much to ask, and yet even polite requests get met with hostility from trans rights activists.

Most of the boundaries are clear and simple. Some of them have gotten more complex, thanks to a general refusal to acknowledge that women are, and are by right, the best judges of our boundaries. By the time you read this, Australia’s highest court will have handed down a decision in the appeal of a high court panel’s declaratory judgment in Tickle v. Giggle—an event that is apparently going to be livestreamed on YouTube, which has some law nerds rubbing their hands together in glee. And, yes, being one of them, I will do some kind of deep dive.

Giggle for Girls is a woman-only social media created by Australian Sall Grover. Roxanne Tickle is an Australian transsexual whose application for membership was rejected, on principle and with the aid of facial recognition technology. As an AI search will tell you, “The court determined that the app’s requirement for users to appear visibly female disproportionately disadvantaged transgender women and was not a reasonable condition.” Thus, the verdict of “unlawful indirect discrimination” on the basis of gender identity.

Tickle is a midlife transitioner who, sad to say, looks like a man in a dress, as a good number of midlife transitioners do. Moreover, Grover says that even the beta version of Giggle was “swamped by men,” by whom I presume she means the obvious dudes who’ve wrecked lesbian dating sites and apps for the rest of us. And yet, Tickle’s had surgery that presumably included vaginoplasty, and has been issued an updated birth certificate. Legally, Tickle has a case.

And yet, Grover has a case, too. She alleges the panel misinterpreted of the legal definition of “sex” under the Australian Sex Discrimination Act, “which extends beyond biological reality in a way that risks diluting the legal protections specifically designed for women and girls.” She claims a failure to recognize the Giggle App as a lawful “special measure” under the Act, designed to achieve substantive equality for women by providing a female-only space. Obviously, she means female at birth. A further ground for appeal is that the panel denied her side’s ability to fully present the broad social and legal consequences of the ruling, thereby risking setting a precedent that could erode the ability of women to lawfully maintain spaces and organizations based on sex.

Obviously of interest to lesbians.

In the U.K., the Supreme Court has held that transsexual women may have female citizenship, but with limits (such as access to redress under anti-sex discrimination laws). We may see a parallel Australian decision in this case, one that could be said to be both fair and unfair at the same time. We may be watching the burning down of the self-ID and automatic affirmation scheme that has enabled so much mischief at women’s expense. Collateral damage will likely be involved.

At any rate, the decision webcast will be at 10 AM Sydney time, which means 9 PM of the previous day here in the Pacific Time Zone. I’ll be tuned in, and cocktails will be served.

And how much of our taxpayer money have they been spending on that? I don’t know, but I read a social post recently in which a mother whose teen got a double mastectomy at Kaiser said she paid a $200 copay for an operation that put $25,000 in a surgeon’s pocket.

These days, I can’t even hazard a guess as to the ratio of essential to elective surgeries this represents. By essential, I would mean early-onset severe gender dysphoria cases for whom sex change surgery is the treatment of last resort. If there’s anyone like that among those who snuck across the border to take advantage of this false charity, there’s still the question of whether their surgery is the responsibility of California taxpayers. I think that equation is harsh but fair.

Meanwhile, the move by states to stop issuing birth certificates and driver’s licenses with amended sex markers, to revert them upon renewal, and even to revoke them has prompted me to take a look at the current document regimes at the state and federal level. My introduction to the topic was way back in the day, when it took a surgeon’s confirmation of sex reassignment surgery to get an amended birth certificate. You could say that was back when that was the equivalent of “safe, legal, and rare.” Very simple and equitable, you could say. That practice expanded to all states but one, and it was easy to assume that people who deserved that new start were getting it without the weirdos getting inappropriately empowered.

California’s change from complete surgery to a physician’s certification of “appropriate medical care” came to my attention through someone’s social media brag that they were able to get their testes removed without having to lose the penis, and their California birth certificate amended on that basis. I actually contacted the California Department of State to inquire about that, and got a response explaining the new legal regime. Little did I realize that the entire landscape was changing, with a range of state practices akin to the post-Dobbs abortion regime.

Kansas’ rescission of birth certificates and driver’s licenses had struck me as extreme, but a one-off. I was wrong. Mississippi has a new law requiring new, renewal, or duplicate driver’s licenses, learner’s permits, or commercial licenses to reflect sex at birth. A report I read said it was uncertain whether licenses existing licenses would be reverted, despite the text I just paraphrased. (RTFM, people.) Other articles reporting that noticed that Tennessee had enacted something similar three years ago.

Obviously, I was out of touch—let’s call it blissfully ignorant. So, I did some poking around, as is my wont. One of the things I looked up was the current statistics on how many trans-identified people have had genital surgery or intend to. Apparently, the number has gone down from 1 in 8 (12.5%) to 5-10%. So, basically, the population insisting we allow people with penises into women’s restrooms and changing areas, and people who’ve gone through partial to complete male puberty into women’s sports and athletics, is basically a population of crossdressers, not actual transsexuals. It’s almost as though paranoids can have real enemies.

The document amendment regime enables this. Here’s a breakdown: four states disallow amendment of sex markers on birth certificates. This actually includes a fifth, Montana, in which this has been an ongoing legal controversy. There are glowing reports that Montana has now “completely” recognized trans rights thanks to a Bostock-like state Supreme Court ruling. However, the ruling simply upheld a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the non-amendment policies for birth certificates and driver’s licenses, and sent the matter back to a lower court. I cut my deep dive into the decision (mercifully) short, but not before I located the passage that prompted media summaries that the purported discrimination stemmed from “cisgender” people being able to get birth certificates amended while transgender people could not. The example was of a scrivener’s error on a “cisgender” person’s birth certificate, and the statute provides for amendment of scrivener’s errors. Yeesh.

Facepalm. Declaring transgender people a “suspect class,” which means the law must be evaluated under strict scrutiny, may not have the ultimate effect being touted.

So, that’s basically five states that disallow amendment of sex markers. 11 states require proof of sex-reassignment surgery. Five more “require a notarized affidavit from a physician indicating that a person has undergone a sex change operation, or has a chromosomal count that establishes the sex of the person as different than what is listed on the original birth certificate.” And good luck parsing the second phrase. Seven states require a court order for an updated sex marker amendment, but good luck with accomplishing that in Texas.

11 states require a simple application to the relevant Department of Vital Statistics, which basically means self-identification. 15 provide for amendment on self-identification, including amendment to an “X” marker. And that’s kinda wack, because “non-binary” is not a sex.

I’m not against people living as the opposite sex being able to get driver’s licenses to help them navigate society—if they’ve been psychologically evaluated and are under a physician’s supervision. Perhaps they should need a reevaluation at license renewal; this self-ID thing is crap. Birth certificates are a different matter, because they should reflect some physiological truth. Moreover, there are trans-identified males who transgress female boundaries and tried to justify it by stating they are “legally female.” So, there’s a problem there.

Passports, as allowed by the Supreme Court, are reverting to sex at birth, as Caitlyn Jenner recently found out by applying for a renewal and having the new one come back marked M. It appears that passports issued on birth certificates already amended may fly under the radar, depending on any facial notations required by state laws. Jenner, though, with that media-celebrated midlife transition, has nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

I doubt a wave of at-birth sex documents will sweep all the states; this seems very much a red state-blue state thing. It does seem, though, that a wave has crested and will continue to subside. There will be some people undeservedly hurt by this. And this is where the unfortunate classical allusion comes in. And that allusion is to the very messy tale of Sodom and Gomorrah. (Lot pimping out his daughters? The daughters manipulating Lot in to incest?) It has all the earmarks of a myth made up for positioning above and against neighboring tribes, as well explored at https://www.thenotsoinnocentsabroad.com/blog/controversial-theories-of-sodom-and-gomorrah-lots-wife-and-his-daughters-incest. Given the common interpretation of divine repulsion at homosexuality, I’m really not allowed to allude to it here.

The feature that came to mind was of Lot’s bargaining with Yahweh over finding a sufficient number of righteous men in Sodom to justify leaving it undevastated. Lot got Yahweh down to ten, but was unable to come up with them. I see a parallel here. There likely are trans-identifying people who are unobtrusively and harmlessly “living their authentic lives.” It’s likely going to suck to be them. That said, it’s tempting to think that what’s needed now is for the entire trans rights edifice to get burned down, clearing a path for honest transsexuals to make a renewed case for document amendment in the original narrow circumstances.

Let’s see what happens this summer when the Supreme Court issues its ruling on trans participation in women’s and girls’ sports and athletics. I’m expecting, and hoping for, a hard no. This is the sound of one brick wall being hit.

There are songs it’s possible to imagine as being covered with the pronouns changed to great effect, such as The Crystals’ “He’s a Rebel.” “Just because she doesn’t do what everybody else does/That’s no reason why I can’t give her all my love.” I dated a tomboy in that range a while back, and oh, was I smitten. Sadly, she was also a flake, but a girl can dream.

The most recent example of my getting fished in came while listening to a digitally remastered 10@10 on Renee & Irish Greg’s Pop UP! on Patreon. Ten at ten was a feature on the late, lamented KFOG: “Ten great songs from one great year,” interspersed with news and movie clips, broadcast at ten in the morning on weekdays. Occasionally there would be another theme, like Soul Patrol, Hits from Hell, or a vertical tasting of songs on the charts on a particular day over a sequence of years. It’s great fun. I remember driving down to the South Bay for club meetings on a Saturday morning and listening to the 10@10 Marathon of the past week’s shows. I miss that, and I miss KFOG.

Renee and Irish Greg had remastered a 1978 10@10, and my ears perked up when I heard “Teenage Kicks,” which sounded like a young woman singing about a girl in the neighborhood she really wanted to meet and date. Only when I looked it up, it was a teenage boy, young enough to have pimples in the video, singing it with The Undertones from Northern Ireland. My heart sank. It’s still a really cool song about teenage infatuation, though.

Not long afterwards, I got to attend an actual lesbian event at a women’s bar in the Castro. It’s not officially a lesbian bar, but Rikki’s Women’s Sports Bar shows women’s sports and is named after the late bar owner Rikki Streicher. Rikki owned the first lesbian bar into which I snuck in with a fake ID. This was the famous Maud’s in the Haight-Ashbury, renamed at what point I don’t know from The Study. A Maud’s sign went up on the outside wall, and original neon The Study sign never came down. This was a nostalgic comfort for me, actually. At one point, Maud’s closed with a final celebration. There’s a documentary on DVD, “Last Night at Maud’s,” that tells the bar’s story.

The story includes the Maud’s softball team, which served as a fun community building phenomenon. After Maud’s closed, Rikki had another bar, Pier 50, across China Basin where the Giants’ new ballpark would be built. I never played on the Maud’s team, but I did play on the Pier 50 softball team, and I loved being able to say I played for Rikki.

The event at Rikki’s Women’s Sports Bar was a fundraiser for the Women’s Motorcycle Contingent, better known as the Dykes on Bikes®, and a celebration of their upcoming 50th anniversary ride leading off San Francisco’s Pride parade. I’m applying the Registered Trademark symbol because that, too, is historical. Under the leadership of Vic Germany, the Dykes on Bikes applied in 2003 for a trademark like any other outfit trying to control use of its own name. In 2004, the Patent and Trademark office denied the application pursuant to under Section 2(a) of the Lanham Act, which denies consideration of a proposed trademark which contains a term that is disparaging to a group of people.

Vic and her counsel made the points that the Dykes on Bikes, as many other lesbians had done in the past, were reclaiming the term as a point of pride for strong women. Like the ones who ride motorcycles. They pointed out other trademarks granted for other borderline language things like the television show “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” and other motorcycle clubs. They pointed out that PTO regs state that “whether a mark is disparaging and/or offensive is the perceptions of the individuals referred to and/or identified by that mark.” And so, since 2005, all 22 Dykes on Bikes chapters have been able to slap that symbol on their branding … such as on the commemorative metal beer glass I got to bring home by buying into the beer bust.

Most beer busts serve pretty generic beer, and the point of buying in is to save money and support the beneficiary. This beer bust, though, was serving a Kölsch from local microbrewery Standard Deviant. That was an unexpected treat! Moreover, the commemorative cup is really cool, and has gone into rotation in my home with some cool New Orleans Mardi Gras cups.

Aside from the thump-thump music that, sadly, has become standard in gay bars, it was a wonderful lesbian bar experience. I got to see lesbian friends like Vic Germany, Queen Cougar the extremely stylish black leather woman, and Terry Baum the playwright. I also got to see the classy and actually talented drag queen Donna Sachet. Donna Sachet has made a career out of emceeing fundraising events like that, including ones I’ve helped produce. She also, until recently, put on an annual lavish Christmas fundraiser, Songs of the Season. All cabaret and show tunes, so not a must-attend event for me. Instead of lip-synching, Donna will sing, and in her own male register. I respect that. I respect that a lot.

The emcee was this year’s SF Pride Director (I forget the exact title … because I don’t care), a transwoman who was affable enough and had a nice affect that being suspiciously tall in a frat boy way didn’t ruin. Honey Mahogany, who was in a drag Star Trek theater piece put together by drag king Leigh “Elvis Herselvis” Crowe, for whom I once recorded some backing tracks. Honey was also appointed to, then elected to, the Democratic County Central Committee, and brought official political greetings. It was good to be all getting along.

It’s a schlep for me to get to Rikki’s, because driving across the Bay Bridge and trying to find parking in the Castro is not fun. I may do it on occasion, like when the Valkyries have a road game. My first impression is that it’s a joint with which Rikki Streicher would be happy to be associated, and that’s high praise.

Then, in the pew, my contemplation flat-out kicked my behind, with a “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” moment. It was personal renewal and purification, but it came in the form of my unconscious coughing up a totally depressing worldview moment from the days when I was struggling to survive physically and emotionally. It was something so bleak it likely would have utterly devastated me back in the day; now, however, I apparently was ready to upchuck it so these suppressed feelings could leave my psyche for good.

That was a good thing, but it left me rattled for days. I relived feelings of awkwardness, even physical awkwardness, from when I had been emerging into a balanced adulthood from having been the weird, nerdy kid—a process compounded by having gotten “trashed” (read: canceled) by angry lesbian feminists who’d had it in not just for me but for my little non-conforming lesbian communities. I have been thrilled with—and grateful for—having come to be a calm, happy, content, and secure adult woman. My subconscious actually helped with this process of its own accord.

They say, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.” I reckon it’s never too late to have to do the processing to get there. I’m so happy the reverberations have subsided.

I had a good moment of “It wasn’t me!” when I came across an article, “Further basic evidence for the dark-ego-vehicle principle: Higher pathological narcissism is associated with greater involvement in feminist activism.” (See https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-023-05451-x) From the abstract:

“According to the dark-ego-vehicle principle (DEVP), individuals with so-called dark personalities (e.g., individuals with high narcissistic traits) are attracted to political and social activism not for the achievement of prosocial goals but to repurpose the activism to satisfy their specific ego-focused needs. In this pre-registered study, we … examin[ed] the associations of pathological narcissism with involvement in feminist activism. … Paralleling previous research, higher pathological narcissistic grandiosity was found to be statistically significantly related to greater involvement in feminist activism. … In exploratory secondary analyses, we found that higher pathological narcissism was associated with specific feminist conversational interaction behaviors (e.g., correcting other’s non-feminist language).”

So it’s not just that feminism—and I’d add lesbian feminism—attracted “mean girls.” I’ve attributed their meanness and obsessions with telling other people what to do with the New England puritanism that has underlain progressivism. Not so oddly, lesbians in Northampton, Massachusetts brag on their town as being “the lesbian capital of the world.”

My lesbian feminist communities back in the day were, actually, kind and loving. We were, though, beset from time to time by harridans insistent on our adopting their sometimes-paranoid views and their extreme ideologies. In time, thanks to non-lesbian women who wanted to make “lesbian” a primarily political identity, the harridans stomped on our happy little groups. We experienced women trying to take over our efforts to gain “attention, status, fame etc.” It didn’t help my growing up and establishing myself as a competent, centered adult.

Fortunately, happier retrospectives were on the way. One of my DAR sisters hipped me to an upcoming reading by Dennis McNally from his latest book, The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties, in Sausalito. McNally, who’d stumbled into being the publicist for the Grateful Dead, had been asked by the California Historical Society a decade ago to curate a photo exhibit celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Every museum in the Bay Area was planning something. McNally pointed out, correctly, that the real Summer of Love wasn’t the Summer of 1967 but the Fall of 1966, before the media got ahold of the hippie phenomenon and aided and abetted the Haight-Ashbury scene’s getting overrun and trampled like daisies in a meadow. And the lightbulb turned on over his head.

This timeline was the timeline of my childhood and adolescence, and it took place where I lived. The Beats were poets turned onto Zen by Alan Watts and his radio talks. They were cool, downbeat, and into jazz. And then, younger bohemians discovered rock and roll, in no small part, says McNally to the phenomenon of the Beatles. They also discovered psychedelic drugs. The original ethos had been one of using them to explore consciousness; indeed, their potential for psychological healing is being rediscovered. But, these explorers came to be outnumbered by those out to party, and here we are.

Both generations of bohemianism played out in local journalism and in popular culture. I hadn’t remembered the Kukla, Fran and Ollie episode in which Ollie riffed on Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts. It was news from me to McNally that cartoonist Bob Clampett had had a recurring beatnik artist spider, Vincent Van Goghman, in his Beanie and Cecil show. The effects on young, impressionable me were, perhaps, inevitable. All this was part of my environment.

And what should come back to the theaters, briefly, in IMAX format, than Werner Herzog’s 3D Cave of Forgotten Dreams? Discovered on December 18, 1994, the Chauvet-Pont-dArc Cave in southeastern France is considered one of the most significant Aurignacian art sites. Herzog learned of it in 2008, and worked out an arrangement with the French government for six four-hour days of filming. He and his crew had to pack in custom-built equipment by hand, forbidden from touching anything but the two-foot-wide pathway on which they carried cameras whose lights gave off no heat.

They more than pulled it off, both technically and artistically. Even the 2D DVD is well worth watching.

Not all of the footage is of the incredible cave paintings that used the contours of the rocks. There is local scenery, and there are interviews with the associated paleontologists. One scene that stunned me was of the “Venus figurines” in the local collection. They are Goddess figurines, basically, originally interpreted as the fertility fetishes some may be. They were an academic specialty when they made lasting impressions on some young second-wave feminists like myself. They spoke of a long history of veneration—and even fear—of “the power and diversity of female spiritual beings across global cultures.” That’s a tag line from the “Feared and Revered” British Museum exhibit I got to see at the National Museum of Australia my last time down under.

Their significance is that they counter the notion that women have always and everywhere been seen as inferior, that perhaps we have been completely worthy of being kept in a subordinate state and deprived of autonomy and personal power. The mean girl feminists jumped on the phenomenon for a hot minute, until they decided the Goddess/ancient woman-affirming cultures thing was a distraction from the real politics. Nonetheless, their existence of not only Goddess art but epic poetry, over such a long, long period of time, is something that has transformed many a female life.

I knew, of course, of the famous Venus of Willendorf, and even of the Black Venus of Dolni Vestonice and others. Nothing, though, prepared me for the sight of a French archaeologist opening drawer upon drawer filled with these figurines. These were the artistic, and probably spiritual, expressions of an entire widespread culture from 30-32,000 years ago. My heart leapt in my breast. Specifically, beneath the left one. It felt like an affirmation of my young feminist self.

That young bohemian and feminist self is now older and wiser, as irrelevant ephemera and over-idealistic hopes have given way to a deeper and more profound understanding of myself nonetheless informed by these environments I’ve been getting to revisit and celebrate. Did my having gotten rattled on Good Friday shake off some complaisance? Perhaps. Maybe it’s a case of being renewed and purified by a “Good Friday Spell.”

It’s been a ride.

Discouragement is a part of grief, so I don’t need brain-dead opining nudging me further in that direction. And yet, it’s there.

Fortunately, life goes on. I may feel like I’m wandering aimlessly sometimes, but the wandering has been on a path of good music, including a stretch of four days in a row of aimless enjoyment.

The first evening of enjoyment was at the Fillmore Auditorium, where Grahame Lesh had gathered quite an ensemble of Grateful Dead-adjacent musicians for a three-night musical memorial for his dad, Phil Lesh. It was wonderful, especially with the massed guitars and vocals. The cult figure Don Was, who played standup bass with another recently dead Dead, Bobby Weir, was part of the Friday night lineup, as was Tom Petty’s sidekick Benmont Tench.

It was just a tad bittersweet to have Taylor and Griffin Goldsmith of Dawes taking part. I’d gotten on line early in hopes of getting one of the table seats upstairs, and I did not see my old “show buddy,” a big fan who’d introduced me to that band. He had pushed me away last year, very angrily when I dropped in on him at his shop hoping to assure myself he was all right. I thought of the intense therapy he’d undertaken, and had to conclude, sadly, that maybe he’d gone off the rails.

I still had an excellent time, including happy interactions with other female Deadheads. Some favorite Dawes tracks of mine: A Little Bit of Everything, When My Time Comes, May All Your Favorite Bands Stay Together.

I went in a different direction the following evening, to Berkeley for some Bach: the cantata “Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis” (I had much sorrow) followed by the Ascension Oratorio. I chose a $40 ticket over the $100 one, which meant balcony. When I asked if the church had an elevator, I was told no. Though I said I could handle the stairs, the ticket lady got me a seat on the aisle in the last row. Then another organizer came and told me that row was reserved for a group. When I showed her my new voucher, she went and consulted with her associate, then came back and placed me in the fifth row.

The performers were the Cantata Collective, conducted by the esteemed Nicholas McGegan. I bought their 3-CD set of the St. Matthew’s Passion on my way out, planning to make listening to it part of my Good Friday devotions.

On Sunday afternoon, the Down Home Music Store was throwing a listening party for their new Clifton Chenier centennial box set. It’s on Arhoolie Records, which Smithsonian Folkways took under its wings with the passing of founder and ace ethnomusicologist Chris Strachwitz. Strachwitz had been maneuvered into discovering Clifton Chenier by the latter’s cousin Lightning Hopkins. Louisiana music had featured the button accordion, and Cajun music still does, but Clifton’s daddy bought him a piano accordion, and the rest was Zydeco history. The store is hoping to throw an outdoor screening this summer of quirky documentary filmmaker Les Blank’s story of Zydeco, “J’ai Été Au Bal / I Went to the Dance,” which got a digital remastering a few years ago and is great fun.

On Monday, I nudged my friend into meeting for our weekly lunch an hour earlier so I could get down the hill to the Veterans Memorial in Civic Center for the San Francisco Opera annual meeting. The company’s outlook is bright, and we were treated to some excerpts from confidence-inspiring Merola Program Fellows who could both sing and act. And, there was talk about the upcoming summer 2027 Ring Cycle (yee haw!).

These fun outings made me feel I was returning to the land of the living, and cushioned the average IQ is 100 effect of reading the usually excellent sportswriter Ann Killion freak out over the news that the International Olympics Committee will require a one-time chromosome test for competing in women’s events. Yeah, it was the usual, sad to say. An “overly simplistic” move with “significant negative consequences,” one she claimed “capitulates to political pressure while ignoring complex scientific realities.”

Politically, there’s a claim this test was reinstated to kiss up to President Trump with the 2028 Olympics being held in the States. I think that’s as opposed to the fact that we got this because a woman is in charge for once. Moreover, the policy is anything but simplistic: it will exempt those who flunk but have not gained advantages from testosterone. Coverage I read specifically mentioned Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. And, when I went to the Erin in the Morning blog for the hysterics, I was not disappointed. “The screening … will target not only transgender women [duh!] but also intersex people—including cisgender women who carry a genetic condition that some argue makes them ‘male’ despite having been born with a vagina and uterus, raised as girls, and having lived their entire lives as women,” a few of whom had 46,XY karyotypes yet had given birth with medical assistance.

And so, with a quick web search, I learned about Swyer syndrome: 46,XY people typically with normal vulvas, but underdeveloped gonads and fibrous tissue termed “streak gonads” (boogity boogity?). They typically will not experience puberty without hormone replacement therapy. “The cause is often, but not always, inactivation of the SRY gene, which is responsible for sexual differentiation.”

When such a gene is defective, the indifferent gonads fail to differentiate into testes in an XY fetus. Without testes, no testosterone or anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) is produced. So, this would be another “complex scientific reality” that would actually not be ignored, given that the goal is to keep testosterone-enhanced athletes out of women’s competitions.

“Now, Bethie, don’t get so upset. You know the average IQ is 100.” Were my bestie here, I would reply that the East German embassy was not available for comment.

One of them is a wave of wacky social media posts that appear on the surface to be parodies. They call for “empathy,” “respect for identities,” and conversations about “dignity and equality.” They lead, though, with stupid behavior and claims of lawsuits that somehow are neither identified nor capable of being searched.

The other looks like one of those leftside narrative whose suddenly popping up in numerous places suggests it was planned, then planted. Having come across three examples in two days, I thought of Ian Fleming’s dictum that “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.” This new narrative says citing biology in discussions over woman-transgender boundaries is “unscientific.”

One of these was a social media graphic that said, “Trans women are women – biology says so. Terfs [sic] use outdated science to try to persuade you, they are right, but they’re wrong. Biologists will tell you so. Scientists will tell you so. Every major health organization in the world will tell you so. Your opinion is not science.” Making the reasonable presumption this is in advocacy for people with penises living as women, and having established (more or less) social identities as women … WTF? I would imagine that were this to refer to transsexual women (post-genital surgery), it would be that they are “woman enough” and quietly left at that. Otherwise, we need a cameo from Mike Meyers’s Wayne Campbell character to deliver a definitive “NOT!!!”

Another comes from a guest post on the “Erin in the Morning,” blog, worth checking from time to time for the latest in trans-related legislation. There’s a ballot proposition in Colorado, Proposition 109, which is a basic women’s private spaces and athletics protection bill. According to this post, “it actually goes much further in its encroachment onto Coloradans’ rights and privacy. Initiative 109 would also introduce unscientific, arbitrary sex definitions into law—based on what kind of gamete, if any, someone’s reproductive system is judged to be ‘organized around’” (emphasis added). Yep, that’s what an RTFM says it says. And reasonable people would agree that it’s scientific: females produce ova, males produce sperm. Duh.

The cherry on top: In Britain, late life transitioner Steph Richards has reportedly been appointed as parliamentary engagement officer for Endometriosis South Coast. Richards formerly served as the CEO of the charity before stepping down following significant backlash because maybe someone who’s experienced endometriosis would be better suited for the position. Endometriosis South Coast claims it’s “scientifically inaccurate” to claim only women experience endometriosis, because it also affects trans, non-binary, and intersex individuals. Presumably those who happen to have a uterus and are, therefore, women. (So you’re saying people born with a DSD but have a uterus aren’t women? Isn’t that insulting?)

To my mind, a woman would say, thanks, but I don’t have a uterus so I’m not qualified to represent those experiencing endometriosis. The people you’re trying to serve need a representative with skin in the game. But that’s just me.

Now to the wacky posts. They’ve gone away, but will probably come back because I went on to pages to get better notions about the posters. One post I transcribed looks to have been a one-off, but other posters appear to be doing gentle activism (from which I’d now like to keep my eyes averted).

The random post claimed “A trans woman is taking legal action after an airport scanner repeatedly misgendered her, flagging her as male despite presenting as a woman. She called it ‘transphobic technology,’ shedding light on the struggles transgender travelers face with security systems that aren’t designed inclusively. Her story has sparked outrage and highlighted the biases built into automated screening tools. Experts say many scanners rely on outdated algorithms and gender norms, ignoring the diversity of human bodies. … Advocates stress that technology should adapt to human variation, not force people into rigid categories.”

I presume the scanner found a pubic area bulge, which the machinery will do. I’d read a similar story once, in which the emphasis was the embarrassment of having to self-out as transgender to explain. I wouldn’t know how to analyze this further.

A different post complained that “Facial recognition systems consistently misclassify transgender and non-binary individuals due to their reliance on a rigid male-female binary. These systems are trained on datasets that categorize gender based on superficial, biometric traits like jawline shape, bone structure, or facial hair, leading to frequent misgendering.”

No, actually, they categorize sex. Poking around, I found that facial feminization surgery can affect results in a presumably desired manner. Apparently, the technology is being used in planning such surgeries, which is brilliant. Still, the biometric traits facial recognition technology uses are hardly “superficial.” The technology can’t possibly determine “gender”—an internal experience some people have—as opposed to sex. I’m not interested in having a “conversation” about this.

Meanwhile, Erin in the Morning may have given the game away in a new post about three bills pending in Portugal, one of which “would return name changes and gender marker changes to a 2011-era framework requiring adults to obtain a formal diagnosis of ‘gender incongruence’ from a multidisciplinary clinical team.” Erin Reed complains that the “2011-era framework … treated being transgender as a disorder requiring intensive clinical diagnosis steps rather than an identity people could freely embrace.”

Well, if you’re going to expect medical treatment to alter physical characteristics and hormonal profiles, aren’t you going to have to be clinically diagnosed with the disorder of gender dysphoria? And isn’t it the people who’ve taken on being “transgender as … an identity people could freely embrace” who have been causing so many problems for women and girls?

So which side in the debates over what is appropriate as regards this whole “gender” thing are the ones being “unscientific”?

Trans propaganda is in the environment, so observing whether this new “anti-scientific” meme flies should be easy to observe.

P.S. Yep: “The recent World’s Strongest Woman competition made headlines after a female athlete was awarded the title following the removal of a trans competitor. The decision has ignited fierce discussions online about fairness, inclusion, and competition rules.

“Supporters say the ruling protects the integrity of women’s divisions, while critics argue it raises tough questions about balancing inclusivity with competitive standards. The story is now trending across social media, fueling debates on eligibility, gender identity, and fairness in sports.

“One thing is clear: the conversation isn’t ending.”

“Olympus Spa is a Christian-owned, women-only Korean mandatory nudity communal spa in Washington state. The state’s regulators heavily fined it for denying entry to a transgender ‘woman’ with intact male genitalia, the full package, “twig plus berries,” holding that the state’s anti-discrimination law only incidentally burdened the spa’s religious expression, and did not transform its customer policy into protected speech or raise any freedom-of-association issue. The sharp dissent accused the agency of pushing a political agenda, forcing women and girls to be naked alongside patrons with exposed male genitalia, and effectively targeting a small Korean-American business with little political clout.”

True dat. Under Washington State law, public accommodation anti-discrimination law includes “gender expression” under sexual orientation, a protected characteristic. And the Spa’s counsel may have made a tactical error in appealing the Human Rights Commission’s ruling on First Amendment grounds. The Ninth Circus opinion stated that “The Spa simply did not challenge the statute itself, and it is not our role to rewrite the statute.” Oops.

Nonetheless, the original decision was a tad wacky. Quoted by the Appellate Court, “Although the Spa contended that its entrance policy was based only on genitalia, the HRC explained that the policy “denie[d] services to transgender women who have not had surgery specifically because their physical appearance is not ‘consistent’ with the traditional understanding of biological women.” Funny how that happens when you’re male.

Now, the Court noted that the “WLAD’s [Washington Law Against Discrimination] governing regulations permit the maintenance of certain ‘gender-segregated facilities,’ such as ‘restrooms, locker rooms, dressing rooms,’ and similar spaces, so long as the facility does not remove or otherwise take action against a person for reasons ‘[]related to their gender expression or gender identity.’” Wash. Admin. Code § 162-32-060(1)–(2). So why not a slam dunk decision for the Spa?

Well, it’s because of that subterfuge of genital appearance, which seems to say the trans complainant wasn’t really male, per his genitals, but was actually a funny-looking female: “The Spa’s entrance policy denies entry to preoperative transgender women whose ‘gender identity’ or ‘appearance,’ as defined in WLAD, differ from the physical traits associated with postoperative or cisgender women. The statutory language is undoubtedly expansive, and its definition of sexual orientation is bespoke. But it is also unambiguous, and it applies to the Spa’s entrance policy.”

You can’t make this stuff up. And yet the Courts that have heard this case have gone ahead and made this stuff up anyway.

That did not sit well with Justice Lawrence VanDyke, who used “intentionally shocking language” in his lead dissent. I try to shy away from crude language here, to be polite. That said, I applaud Justice Van Dyke for leading off with this:

“This is a case about swinging dicks. The Christian owners of Olympus Spa— a traditional Korean, women-only, nude spa—understandably don’t want them in their spa. Their female employees and female clients don’t want them in their spa either. But Washington State insists on them. And now so does the Ninth Circuit.

“You may think that swinging dicks shouldn’t appear in a judicial opinion. You’re not wrong. But as much as you might understandably be shocked and displeased to merely encounter that phrase in this opinion, I hope we all can agree that it is far more jarring for the unsuspecting and exposed women at Olympus Spa—some as young as thirteen—to be visually assaulted by the real thing.

“Sometimes, it feels like the supposed adults in the room have collectively lost their minds. Woke regulators and complicit judges seem entirely willing, even eager, to ignore the consequences that their Frankenstein social experiments impose on real women and young girls. Yet if harmful and unfortunate consequences were all this case was about, we’d have to shrug and say: ‘That’s what comes with living in a democracy.’ Unless the Constitution is implicated, we get what we voted for ‘good and hard.’” [H.L. Mencken citation in the omitted footnote.]

And half the Panel misplaced its fecal material. But some of us law nerds got a thrill out of Justice Van Dyke slapping the majority across the face with the stinky halibut of truth. What a moment!

Justice Van Dyke may have pulled the Spa’s hash out of the First Amendment fire when he opined, “WLAD’s exemption of private clubs grants preferable treatment to secular activities that pose a comparable threat to the government interest underlying the statute. As a result, WLAD is not generally applicable, and we should have subjected WLAD’s application in this case to strict scrutiny, a standard it cannot survive. And as the intervening publication of Catholic Charities Bureau, Inc. v. Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review Commission, 605 U.S. 238 (2025), has made clear, WLAD is also not neutral because it facially distinguishes between religious activities based on religious practitioners’ theological choices.”

He then wrapped up his introduction with “The Supreme Court’s recent Free Exercise jurisprudence controls this case. An optimist might expect that to have had some effect on the outcome of this dispute and our court’s en banc vote. But even where the Supreme Court has defined a clear rule protecting disfavored constitutional rights, never underestimate woke judges’ willingness to sacrifice those rights on the altar of ‘social progress.’”

“For centuries, traditional Korean spas have provided treatment to women in female-only spaces. Full nudity is central to the tradition, and every woman is required to be completely nude when using Olympus Spa.” Gee, sounds like the late, lamented Osento Japanese-style bath, for which I wrote a Human Rights Commission amicus brief in a similar controversy before cooler heads prevailed. (And I’m still waiting for Justice Breyer to acknowledge my having invented the Bona Fide Occupational Qualification (“BFOQ”) defense of women’s privacy.)

The next step in the appeals process would be to bring it before the Supreme Court, if there are no procedural barriers. No need to with to be a fly on the wall; oral arguments are archived for public perusal. “At Olympus Spa’s request, a clause was added to the settlement reserving the spa’s right to bring a legal challenge as to the constitutionality of the agreement or the underlying statutes,” so here we go.

There’s good reading out there, should you wish to join me in RTFM. Women’s Declaration International USA filed an amicus brief in which it stated: “enforcing WLAD’s public accommodation provisions while also upholding criminal laws against voyeurism and indecent exposure creates a legal contradiction—a man with a penis cannot legally be in a nude women’s spa without committing a crime.” Ouch!

The amicus brief is at https://womensdeclarationusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/WDI-USA-Olympus-Spa-amicus-4-3-2024-STAMPED-1.pdf. It quotes Complainant (“twice … married to women, and remains sexually attracted to women”) as bragging, “I did it! I got the main naked lady spa in the area to change their policies and allow all self-identified women access regardless of surgery and genitals.” Creep.

Justice Van Dyke’s dissent begins at page 60 at https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2026/03/12/23-4031.pdf. It’s a corker.

“Olympus Spa is a Christian-owned, women-only Korean mandatory nudity communal spa in Washington state. The state’s regulators heavily fined it for denying entry to a transgender ‘woman’ with intact male genitalia, the full package, “twig plus berries,” holding that the state’s anti-discrimination law only incidentally burdened the spa’s religious expression, and did not transform its customer policy into protected speech or raise any freedom-of-association issue. The sharp dissent accused the agency of pushing a political agenda, forcing women and girls to be naked alongside patrons with exposed male genitalia, and effectively targeting a small Korean-American business with little political clout.”

True dat. Under Washington State law, public accommodation anti-discrimination law includes “gender expression” under sexual orientation, a protected characteristic. And the Spa’s counsel may have made a tactical error in appealing the Human Rights Commission’s ruling on First Amendment grounds. The Ninth Circus opinion stated that “The Spa simply did not challenge the statute itself, and it is not our role to rewrite the statute.” Oops.

Nonetheless, the original decision was a tad wacky. Quoted by the Appellate Court, “Although the Spa contended that its entrance policy was based only on genitalia, the HRC explained that the policy “denie[d] services to transgender women who have not had surgery specifically because their physical appearance is not ‘consistent’ with the traditional understanding of biological women.” Funny how that happens when you’re male.

Now, the Court noted that the “WLAD’s [Washington Law Against Discrimination] governing regulations permit the maintenance of certain ‘gender-segregated facilities,’ such as ‘restrooms, locker rooms, dressing rooms,’ and similar spaces, so long as the facility does not remove or otherwise take action against a person for reasons ‘[]related to their gender expression or gender identity.’” Wash. Admin. Code § 162-32-060(1)–(2). So why not a slam dunk decision for the Spa?

Well, it’s because of that subterfuge of genital appearance, which seems to say the trans complainant wasn’t really male, per his genitals, but was actually a funny-looking female: “The Spa’s entrance policy denies entry to preoperative transgender women whose ‘gender identity’ or ‘appearance,’ as defined in WLAD, differ from the physical traits associated with postoperative or cisgender women. The statutory language is undoubtedly expansive, and its definition of sexual orientation is bespoke. But it is also unambiguous, and it applies to the Spa’s entrance policy.”

You can’t make this stuff up. And yet the Courts that have heard this case have gone ahead and made this stuff up anyway.

That did not sit well with Justice Lawrence VanDyke, who used “intentionally shocking language” in his lead dissent. I try to shy away from crude language here, to be polite. That said, I applaud Justice Van Dyke for leading off with this:

“This is a case about swinging dicks. The Christian owners of Olympus Spa— a traditional Korean, women-only, nude spa—understandably don’t want them in their spa. Their female employees and female clients don’t want them in their spa either. But Washington State insists on them. And now so does the Ninth Circuit.

“You may think that swinging dicks shouldn’t appear in a judicial opinion. You’re not wrong. But as much as you might understandably be shocked and displeased to merely encounter that phrase in this opinion, I hope we all can agree that it is far more jarring for the unsuspecting and exposed women at Olympus Spa—some as young as thirteen—to be visually assaulted by the real thing.

“Sometimes, it feels like the supposed adults in the room have collectively lost their minds. Woke regulators and complicit judges seem entirely willing, even eager, to ignore the consequences that their Frankenstein social experiments impose on real women and young girls. Yet if harmful and unfortunate consequences were all this case was about, we’d have to shrug and say: ‘That’s what comes with living in a democracy.’ Unless the Constitution is implicated, we get what we voted for ‘good and hard.’” [H.L. Mencken citation in the omitted footnote.]

And half the Panel misplaced its fecal material. But some of us law nerds got a thrill out of Justice Van Dyke slapping the majority across the face with the stinky halibut of truth. What a moment!

Justice Van Dyke may have pulled the Spa’s hash out of the First Amendment fire when he opined, “WLAD’s exemption of private clubs grants preferable treatment to secular activities that pose a comparable threat to the government interest underlying the statute. As a result, WLAD is not generally applicable, and we should have subjected WLAD’s application in this case to strict scrutiny, a standard it cannot survive. And as the intervening publication of Catholic Charities Bureau, Inc. v. Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review Commission, 605 U.S. 238 (2025), has made clear, WLAD is also not neutral because it facially distinguishes between religious activities based on religious practitioners’ theological choices.”

He then wrapped up his introduction with “The Supreme Court’s recent Free Exercise jurisprudence controls this case. An optimist might expect that to have had some effect on the outcome of this dispute and our court’s en banc vote. But even where the Supreme Court has defined a clear rule protecting disfavored constitutional rights, never underestimate woke judges’ willingness to sacrifice those rights on the altar of ‘social progress.’”

“For centuries, traditional Korean spas have provided treatment to women in female-only spaces. Full nudity is central to the tradition, and every woman is required to be completely nude when using Olympus Spa.” Gee, sounds like the late, lamented Osento Japanese-style bath, for which I wrote a Human Rights Commission amicus brief in a similar controversy before cooler heads prevailed. (And I’m still waiting for Justice Breyer to acknowledge my having invented the Bona Fide Occupational Qualification (“BFOQ”) defense of women’s privacy.)

The next step in the appeals process would be to bring it before the Supreme Court, if there are no procedural barriers. No need to with to be a fly on the wall; oral arguments are archived for public perusal. “At Olympus Spa’s request, a clause was added to the settlement reserving the spa’s right to bring a legal challenge as to the constitutionality of the agreement or the underlying statutes,” so here we go.

There’s good reading out there, should you wish to join me in RTFM. Women’s Declaration International USA filed an amicus brief in which it stated: “enforcing WLAD’s public accommodation provisions while also upholding criminal laws against voyeurism and indecent exposure creates a legal contradiction—a man with a penis cannot legally be in a nude women’s spa without committing a crime.” Ouch!

The amicus brief is at https://womensdeclarationusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/WDI-USA-Olympus-Spa-amicus-4-3-2024-STAMPED-1.pdf. It quotes Complainant (“twice … married to women, and remains sexually attracted to women”) as bragging, “I did it! I got the main naked lady spa in the area to change their policies and allow all self-identified women access regardless of surgery and genitals.” Creep.

Justice Van Dyke’s dissent begins at page 60 at https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2026/03/12/23-4031.pdf. It’s a corker.

A couple of evenings after my movie trek to Marin County, the all-female but one Dead music band American Beauties played an International Women’s Day tribute show at the Ashkenaz, North Berkeley’s venerable folk dancing and other music venue. I was (and still am) feeling my mother’s spirit near and within in me, providing an uplift as the depression of mourning my bestie continues in a somewhat milder form. I can totally believe she’s looking over me and helping to carry me through the grief.

This wasn’t their best outing in my experience, and that may have been partly me. At the set break, a couple of folks sharing thoughts agreed that they hadn’t really gotten into a groove until the last song of the first set. That said, this show felt more to me like a Grateful Dead cover band show than part of what Bobby Weir called a 300-year project of which he was just a part. Late in the second set, though, I did have a little bit of that feeling of sinking and wanting to be off by myself. I reckon I’m returning to the land of the living just doing so little by little.

Some of the bright spots in the evening came from the paradox of straight hippie chicks expressing affection in a way that’s ordinary but feels lesbian-adjacent way to those of us with the capacity for deep affection for other women. Women love each other, and express that love, even though it’s more often than not strictly platonic. As I’ve always pointed out, the difference between girlfriend affection and lesbian attraction is one of degree, not of kind. I have straight women friends who say good bye with “Love you!” and a little kiss, even the ones who know I’m a lesbian. So, even though I have nothing going on right now in terms of a dating life, I still have an environment of female affection that sustains me—as it sustains those straight friends as well.

At my previous Scarlet Begonias dance show at Ashkenaz, I was bopping about when another woman started dancing with me, with a great big smile on her face. She even took my hands in hers and we swung in sync. Finally, she gave me a hug and went back to dancing in her own little world. It was partly the communal experience. It was partly female bonding being part of the fun. It was definitely a hippie thing.

This evening, I was doing a little bit of dancing and little bit of sitting and swaying in my seat on the edge of the floor as I got lost in the music. At one point, I saw a woman in front of me having a great time dancing. She was wearing a tube top in a rainbow pattern that I thought was cute. At one point, she turned and smiled at me. I smiled back, and we danced in sync until she turned and made her way closer to the stage.

Later in the evening, she returned to her original spot, and I saw her dancing with a girlfriend. They were side by side, with an arm around each other. No gaydar twinge; these were straight women friends enjoying the music together. And then I saw Rainbow Top Girl’s boyfriend. He came up and put an arm around her from her other, unoccupied side. After a while, he stood behind her and put his arms around her. After a while, he nudged the girlfriend out of the way and full-on hugged Rainbow Top Girl tight, and they danced together. The girlfriend peeled off, leaving it obvious this was a couple who had come to the show together and would be leaving together.

I doubt any of it was conscious on the part of any of the three of them. Was I wrong to suspect that, nonetheless, there was a minor jealousy and reasserting who was whose date thing going on, even if unconsciously? Darned if I know. I did take it as clear evidence of the emotional power of female bonding, and of its deep importance to most women regardless of actual sexual orientation. All I have to say about this as a lesbian is, duh!

A few days later, I was hanging out with one of my lesbian friends. She and her wife live in the Sierra foothills, and we met about two thirds/one third in the middle to do some wine tasting together. We met up at a winery on the outskirts of Lodi, where the Delta begins to give way to the Central Valley. Thanks to a mix-up in her partner’s family plans, only the two of us could get together. The two of us lingered over a five-pour tasting, talking about our lives, travel, and the state of the world for lesbians, particularly for lesbians who don’t conform to political correctness. I was engaged in the conversation, but soft-spoken, which happens from time to time. It was a much-needed fun day, well worth the driving I had to do.

Often, on an outing like this, the driving feels like and adventure, even if the route is familiar. Not today. I did enjoy seeing the white blossoms on the cherry trees around Lodi and Lockeford (where we had supper), as well as the occasional purple wisteria. I was happy, but my heart wasn’t singing.

By the time you read this, I will have returned from a thing in Bakersfield by way of the Carrizo Plain and the intersection of California 58 with Shell Creek Road, on my way to U.S. 101. These are prime spring wildflower spots, and yet, two years ago, my bestie and I got skunked on the final leg of our Texas Solar Eclipse road trip. I won’t be scattering her ashes till later in the spring, so I’m thinking of putting them in my car in hopes I can give her spirit some kind of vicarious wildflower happy time. At the very least, it will mean something to me as I continue walking the road out of grief.

I reprised that public transit/movie experience recently thanks to an AC Transit rerouting spree that made the Elmwood Theater in Berkeley accessible by a bus that runs down the hill from me. It’s an hour’s trip, but parking in the Elmwood is fiendishly challenging. It also allows for tweaking my state of consciousness for the show, this one having been the John Prine memorial concert film “You’ve Got Gold.” I do have lesbian friends whose alley this is right up, though it’s more the hippie in me that brought me here. Still, the female trio I’m With Her (with Aoife O’Donovan) singing “Unwed Fathers” brought tears to my eyes from many parts of me.

I followed that up with driving to see an art film, “The Testament of Ann Lee,” about the “Shaking Quaker” religious leader who brought a small group of followers from Manchester, England to upstate New York. There are actually three Shakers left (one a recent convert), despite celibacy being a key element of their religion. Ann Lee bore and lost four children. I don’t know if her husband was an S.O.B. in the way portrayed in the movie, but, apparently, she indeed had been put off by what she saw or heard of her parents’ lovemaking in their close quarters, so she was done. She got the idea that Jesus’s second coming would be as a female, and that she was it. Her Shaker religion held that she was a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon and stars beneath her feet. I’m sorry, but even as a lapsed Catholic I consider that position already taken.

“The Testament of Ann Lee” is being touted as a feminist movie, and I suppose it is. Ann Lee was, at the very least, a woman who exercised leadership and led a movement when that wasn’t a woman’s place. For myself, I see her as an early adopter of that mostly utopianism that, in the hands of New England Puritans, could have a dark side of trying to reform other people against their will. Good biopic, though.

I had driven across the Bay to the beautiful jewel box the Lark Theater, because I’d had to chase down a showing that didn’t conflict with my schedule. It was a minor extravagance, but I’d had a run of moonlighting hours and could afford the little splurge. The Lark, like the Elmwood, offers memberships with benefits because it was restored and kept open by volunteers who couldn’t bear to see it closed, and well may they be blest. Not only did I actually get to see the film before it disappeared into streaming, I got the uplift of my spirits that I get whenever I set foot in my ancestral Marin County. Maybe it’s being in the vicinity of Tamalpa, the Sleeping Lady (Mount Tamalpais). And I felt my mother’s spirit smiling on me as I exercised that drive to follow up on the curiosity and sense of adventure I obviously got from her.

And then there was reading the news at home. San José State University, and the Cal State system, have filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education over its finding that SJSU violated Title IX by allowing transgender volleyball player Blaire Fleming to compete on the women’s team from 2022 to 2024. The Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) concluded the university violated Title IX by denying female athletes equal opportunities, including scholarship access and playing time, and demanded corrective actions, including apologies to affected athletes. SJSU and the CSU system claim the findings are bogus and that they followed federal court precedents. So, they aim to block the federal government from withholding federal funding, which OCR has threatened if the university does not comply. Follow the money!

Chancellor Mildred Garcia stated, “We are an inclusive institution. Inclusive excellence is perhaps our most fundamental and treasured core value. It is in our DNA.” Yeah, about that DNA thing … <snerk>

Meanwhile, a panel of the Ninth Circus Court of Appeal has denied Olympus Spa in the State of Washington a rehearing of its appeal of the decision that said a trans-identified male was discriminated against by exclusion from its female-only clothing-optional facilities. As I recall, one argument against the spa was that the complainant was merely a woman with different-looking genitals. This is probably headed to the Supreme Court, looking for all the world like a big ol’ piñata. Justice Lawrence Van Dyke got in a swing of his own (so to speak), with a lead dissent that started out with:

“This is a case about swinging dicks. The Christian owners of Olympus Spa—a traditional Korean, women-only, nude spa—understandably don’t want them in their spa. Their female employees and female clients don’t want them in their spa either. But Washington State insists on them. And now so does the Ninth Circuit. You may think that swinging dicks shouldn’t appear in a judicial opinion. You’re not wrong. But as much as you might understandably be shocked and displeased to merely encounter that phrase in this opinion, I hope we all can agree that it is far more jarring for the unsuspecting and exposed women at Olympus Spa— some as young as thirteen—to be visually assaulted by the real thing. Sometimes, it feels like the supposed adults in the room have collectively lost their minds.”

Damn. Just damn.

Stay tuned—“The war between Atlantis and Mu has reached a critical point.” (And kudos to reader Rita Rippetoe for having responded to that quote in a previous post with a Morgan’s Tarot quote of her own: “It’s a dog-eat-dog food world.”)

This is the friend who’s said to me, “The trannies are f***ing things up for us normal people.” She didn’t mean she was normal normal, she meant she was one of those people who got surgery and assimilated into the larger society so she could just go about her life like anybody else. Meanwhile, the people who think it’s cool to be trans and/or some kind of “queer” are giving honest transsexual women like her a bad name.

We had a conversation that went something like this. I brought what’s she’d said up to her in the context of Kansas, and she said, “That’s exactly what’s going on here. People who’ve gone through the whole process and come out the other end are going to lose their documents thanks to the gender theory idiots. And they don’t deserve that.”

After she assured me that, being neither a Kansas native nor resident, this doesn’t affect her. Moreover, she got her birth certificate amended back in the day and had, out of an abundance of caution, gone about it in a way she says makes it pretty much airtight. She wouldn’t specify; she wants to leave no clues behind just in case.

But how did she feel about it? “Well, you’re the English major,” she said, “what’s that quote about being able to hold two contradictory things in your mind at the same time?”

“F. Scott Fitzgerald. ‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.’ I have to remind myself from time to time that I can do that.”

“That’s it. Even though ‘I’m all right, Jack,‘ I think I want to remind myself that stuff like this is happening so I don’t get complacent. I think I need to remember to keep maintaining a distance between myself and the weirdos, so I’m not in the blast zone when the blowback hits. And this is big time blowback. I’ve been thinking about the ability to petition for a birth certificate amendment, and how the original idea was that it was correcting something that seemed like a good idea at the time. Kinda sorta like an intersex situation. You’re the paralegal, too, so you’ve probably already looked up what the previous Kansas law was.”

“Guilty as charged,” I replied with mock chagrin. “I haven’t gotten into the nuts and bolts of it, but apparently there was some kind of consent decree in 2019 that allowed people to get their sex marker changed if a doctor said they should. And I think, like in California, that means having gotten some amount of treatment but not necessarily the whole shebang.”

“F***. That’s what I mean. I don’t think anyone need care about driver’s licenses. Well, maybe if someone’s committed a crime and gotten arrested, and the media misreports them as being a woman, that would be a different matter.”

“Yeah, it burns my a** when I read of a rape suspect getting referred to as ‘she.’”

“Way back in the day, you could get a new driver’s license with a doctor’s note saying you were under their care for gender dysphoria, implying you were going to continue on to surgery. It’s a kind of polite fiction some people should be able to take advantage of. Checking accounts, stuff like that. Birth certificates are different. They’re vital statistics in a way driver’s licenses aren’t. And nobody with a penis has any right to a government document stating they were born female. Because obviously they weren’t, and a lot of them don’t want to get female enough anymore.”

“Right, like seven out of eight. Which means maybe about 200 or so Kansans are getting hosed.”

“Yeah, it sucks to be them. Part of me is angry about it, but part of me sees this as probably inevitable, given all the trannie misbehavior that gives all of us a bad name. People used to understand transsexuals pretty much. Now they’re losing patience with making fine distinctions, but for some conservatives, oddly enough.

“I’m capable of being annoyed at this trend, but at the same time seeing the hand of karma and going oh well.”

“I don’t believe in tempting the Lords of Karma. I do believe pride goeth before a fall. So you know people who are freaked out?”

“Oh, there are a lot of them who are in a total panic. The problem is, they see this as an excuse to tell women like me who keep a distance that it’s time to circle the wagons. It’s that old ‘Transgender Umbrella’ bulls***, which means people like me are supposed to front for even the hobby crossdressers. And if you don’t, they freak out even more and ask what you’re doing empowering the right wing.”

“And with that,” I said, “I’ve got another quote for you. Lord Palmerston. ‘Nations have permanent interests, not permanent allies.’”

“Precisely. Where the f*** has the left wing been? They’ve been pushing stuff like letting men convicted of violent sexual crimes suddenly claim to identify as women, so they can do their time in a women’s prison.”

“And go forth and rape some more. The left has been selling women out for a long time.”

“But I’m the bad guy because I maintain my values and my standards. I will not let myself be shoehorned into a ‘community’ whose behavior is crap. Meanwhile, my normal friends appreciate that, and I think it will help in the long run for people to know there are ‘normal’ transsexual people. Meanwhile, we’re seeing innocent people ending up collateral damage, as I’ve been fearing.”

I feel bad for the collateral damage people. This, though, is precisely why it’s important to get the L out: the trans fight is not our fight, and some of it is objectively wrong and bad.

This ain’t no party. This ain’t no disco. This ain’t no foolin’ around.

It comes to mind, though, because it’s obviously time to write something about Operation Epic Fury/Roaring Lion. Maybe something like, “War—hunh!—good God, y’all. What is it good for? Getting rid of mullahs.” The ability of Iran’s Islamic dictatorship to control the people, much less exist, is being worn away day by day. It’s a positive moment for all freedom-loving people. As a bonus, if you’re the second wave feminist type, this is a cool “Death to the Patriarchy” moment.

There’s also the matter of how this is being carried out. I have a philosophy for travel: Strategize, organize, execute. And I’m seeing this play out in how the United States, with Donald Trump as Commander in Chief and his team, and Israel have gone about setting up the destruction of the mullahs’ military capabilities at minimal loss of life. President Trump has stated a clear goal of making it possible for the Iranian people to form a new government of their own choosing, one that will not repress them.

Strategize, organize, execute. We saw that in the taking out of Venezuela’s narco-terrorist dictator Maduro, and we’re seeing that now in Iran. Venezuela’s transformation and recovery is already in progress, and we will likely see a similar opportunity coming about in Cuba. Meanwhile, China’s losing cheap, subsidized oil may likely fatally degrade its capability to seize Taiwan. Our military’s motivation has been changed from social activism that includes flying rainbow flags to winning. That’s the purpose of a military: kill people and blow things up, as needed, to protect the homeland and the people.

War sucks. We are humans, so it’s never going to go away, no matter how we’d all like to Imagine something better. I pray we can continue to deploy our military with such decently clean results for liberty and freedom. The way we are changing the world right now should be a cause for hope, and maybe even celebration.

Certainly, the people of Iran are celebrating, even as they also hunker down and hold their breath. There is footage to see on social media of Iranians dancing in the streets, the women throwing away their hijabs. Iranians have provided footage of their doing the Donald Trump dance to “YMCA,” and two founding members of the Village People have expressed a humble joy at having been chosen to be a soundtrack for this moment in history.

And it’s giving the proggies fits. Though I know I shouldn’t, I feel very cynical about the possibility for the moment to get lefties to stop and consider whether they really are on the right side of history, as they like to believe. How bad is it? One feminist scholar I deeply admire for her work but not for her knee-jerk leftism posted some shill’s comment that “No American bomb ever set a single woman free.” Facepalm. Iranian women have been very vocal about their disgust with the proggies not backing their liberation. Gaza Arabs (who supported an attempt at a new Holocaust—sponsored by the Iranian mullahs)? Out in the streets. Ukranians? Out in the streets. Iranians, particularly the women? Crickets chirping.

The Establishment line reflects a knee-jerk assumption that the U.S. must be up to no good, or at least isn’t capable of doing good. This goes back to the Vietnam War era, when the self-styled “the best and the brightest” tried to finesse a war without doing the things it would take to actually win (like ignoring boundaries and wiping out the Ho Chi Minh Trail). It runs through Middle East adventures grounded in a misguided neocon belief that it’s an American duty to bring democracy (as they conceive of it) to the entire world. Taking out Saddam Hussein … likely a good thing; our attempt to build a new government without having a clue about balancing Sunnis and Shias … well, that didn’t work out, did it?

It sure looks like a new era of focus and not being constrained by what the supposed international community might think. But it’s something America is doing, and especially something Donald Trump is doing, so hitting the streets and protesting is a must! Even though, as one wag noticed, the women who like to demonstrate in Handmaid’s Tale costumes are protesting in support of a regime that puts women in Handmaid’s Tale wear and polices their sexuality down to preventing them from appearing attractive in public.

The Associated Press has come up with its critical boilerplate: “a conflict that has rapidly spread with no clear U.S. exit strategy.” I call bullcrap on both points. The spreading of the conflict was Iran’s firing missiles at Islamic countries in the region, turning them against the mullahs’ regime. Well, the regime has been using up its stock of missiles and drones, and its navy has been obliterated. Some rapid spread; it’s just as rapidly receded.

And, there is a clear exit strategy: destroy the nuclear arms capability, and turn the country over to its people so they can form a new government. Some have said this is changing stated goals to fit the moment. I don’t see how anybody can doubt both have been goals from the beginning. Neither has changed, that I can see. Nor is one being emphasized at the expense of the other. They’re both necessary.

Perhaps the new Cold War, in this country, is people who want our country to be what the Constitution was ratified to enable it to be, and the communist Lilliputians who want it tied down by “the international order” so we can’t act in our best interests. Nor the interests of our friends. The Iranians and the Israelis have a good chance of ending up friends. We have a good chance of the Iranians getting to be our friends once the “Death to America” regime is gone.

Too bad nothing I write will change any minds; people’s identities are at stake!

I would not be one to say McBride’s male birth and transition is a disqualification for having a go at feminist analysis. I would, of course, expect the better results to come from those born with skin in the game, and possibly from a few of those who acquired skin in the game as adults. As a matter of fact, one can find at the Internet Archive the short early 1990s run of TransSisters: A Journal of Transsexual Feminism. Its core target audience was whose who’d had sex reassignment surgery and had a clue that living in the world as a woman required some feminist consciousness, in the genre of feminist subgroups that began with the assertion that black women had issues different and in addition to those faced by white women’s liberationists.

In its issues one can see the beginnings of the divide between gender dysphoric transsexuals happy to have “gotten over” and assimilated, and the (likely autogynephilic—honk if you know the difference) gender theory-driven transgenders expecting to have parity with vaginiferous women on the basis of their identities. At issue at that point in time was the “womyn-born womyn only” policies of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, a feature of which was safe space for women to run around naked in the sunshine (like we hippies). Two articles from writers in the former camp were “The A.B.C.s of T.G. P.C.,” which asserted that “lesbians . . . have every right to be grossed out by penises” and “Meet the New Boss,” which followed on with “If what the trans rights movement is going to become about is telling women who don’t want to have to see a penis at a women’s festival that they need to just get over it, then ... it’s not my revolution.”

Sarah McBride is firmly in the latter camp. McBride asserted that “anti-trans laws,” meaning, presumably, laws protecting women’s private spaces and athletics, are “anti-feminist” because, as she reiterated in this speech, “at the end of the day, transphobia, homophobia, misogyny and sexism are all rooted in the same prejudice: the belief that one perception at birth should dictate who you are, how you act, what you do, who you love and how you dress.” Ironically, this speech took place roughly within a week of a female high school wrestler in Washington State getting forcibly digitally penetrated during a match by a competitor she found out later was a trans-identified male. She and her mother had to escalate her complaint past the school officials, who were mandatory sexual harassment reporters, to the school board. In this case, “anti-feminist” pro-Title IX policies would have prevented a rape.

Injuries to female athletes from trans athletes, some of whom have not only the strength to inflict them but the will, just seem to keep occurring. In Australia, Riley Dennis, infamous for insisting people not into the penis have sex with transwomen, and her teammates have slammed female soccer opponents (American terminology) into fences during competition. But laws that would have prevented that are “anti-woman,” according to McBride.

Meanwhile, feminists are pushing supposedly “anti-feminist” policies about women’s private spaces that would put a stop to the sexual harassment and rapes taking place in women’s prisons by criminals who suddenly claim to identify as women after conviction. Almost half of these are sex offenders: several times higher than the general male prison population. One commentator asked, “Are trans-identified males more likely to be sex offenders, or are sex offenders more likely to pull this scam?”

McBride’s attempt at feminist analysis wasn’t done well—it was hardly done at all. McBride’s premise was a flat, two-dimensional premise grounded in labels and identities. Feminism and lesbian feminism are grounded in bodies, and the reality of members of a mammalian species living in sexed bodies in societies that have been, and may continue to be, to different extents, male-dominated.

In male-dominated societies, males feel entitled to have either physical or visual access to women’s bodies to satisfy their sexual drives. And, they want women and girls to know they have power over us. Think about it: We have to teach girls how to protect their bodily privacy from male voyeurs, even pre-pubescent boys, before they can understand the sexual and domination content. That’s what the sex-segregated private space laws derided as mere “bathroom bills” are about. Women have an instinct to regard someone with a penis in such spaces as dangerous; transactivists insist we unlearn that vital instinct for their benefit.

It’s all about our bodies. Not labels. Not identities.

(And speaking of bodily privacy, over breakfast before sitting down to final edits, I read a newspaper story about a man arrested for taking an upskirt photo of an 11-year-old girl—his second arrest for this in two weeks. Yeah, tell me that was about how she was labeled at birth and her identity.)

Women had to reclaim knowledge of our bodies, the right to have them taken seriously in medical situations, and pride in them, especially as regards our genitals. While the word “pudendum” applies to male as well as to female external genitalia, it’s mostly been used to refer to female genitals. The meaning is “something of which to be ashamed.” In 1970, women wrote the first edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves as a pamphlet, expanding it into a book in 1973. It emerged from a workshop at a feminist conference, in which the female participants shared stories about the health issues they faced and their frustrating interactions with doctors. In the months that followed, they met regularly and soon realized how little knowledge they had about their own anatomies. They resolved to obtain the knowledge themselves.

And so they did. This included the much-ridiculed practice of taking a speculum and a mirror and looking at one’s own cervix (or fold, if one has had a hysterectomy. I got you, sisters!). It was the antithesis of avoiding “down there,” and leaving the care of their female organs to a doctor who might write off women’s health complaints as “hysteria,” and prescribe them drugs to shut them up.

This led to The Vagina Monologues, a theater piece composed of readings of various women’s and girls’ thoughts and feelings about their vaginas and what they’d been trained to think of them. If you’ve never called your genitals “down there” because they’re supposedly gross, you have no idea how revolutionary—and how necessary—this groundbreaking theater piece was.

Labels and identities may have had something to do with how women and girls were told to act in response to violence against us, particularly sexual violence. Changing those expectations didn’t involve redefining the expectations that came with labels. It meant fighting entrenched anti-female attitudes and power dynamics. Whether a rape or domestic beating, the immediate question in the aftermath used to be (and too often still is), what did she do to provoke it? In the case of rape, was she where she shouldn’t have been? Was she dressed in a provocative way? What did she do to lead him on? In the case of domestic violence, what did she do to make him lose patience with her?

Feminist activism has been changing the framing of acts of violence against women. Moreover, it was women who organized the first shelters for raped and abused women. Today, these shelters can come under attack from transactivists, if they keep out trans people on the grounds that hearing a male voice or seeing male features can be traumatic to someone who’s just been raped. Transactivists attacked such a woman-run shelter in Vancouver, B.C., spraying hostile anti-“TERF” graffiti on the outer walls and nailing a dead rat to the door.

It was women writing about attacks on women’s bodies—including how these attacks are meant to control women’s minds—who began the process of change. Against Our Will, by Susan Brownmiller, which exposed the existence of “rape culture.” The groundbreaking Battered Wives, by my friend and mentor Del Martin.

If it’s only labels and identities that matter, there would not be so much trans-identified male venom directed at lesbians who will neither date nor have sex with people with penises. This is prioritizing flesh and blood bodies over those precious labels and identities, causing shock that lesbian means lesbian.

To me, Sarah McBride is merely attempting to co-opt the feminist movement and put its resources behind trans activism, much as she and others got the big Gay, Inc. organizations to do after marriage equality was won and it was logically time for them to downsize.

I don’t hold myself out as any kind of expert on these subjects. I grew up the weird nerdy kid, mired in depression well into my 20s. As the song goes, though, I know a little about it, and baby I can guess the rest. That said, when I embraced my lesbian life in diaspora, I didn’t leave my second wave feminism behind. It’s needed in this world more than ever.

Besides, as I’ve been known to say, riffing on Winnie the Pooh’s friend Tigger … Being really opinionated and mouthing off is what Bethies do best!

As an example, I’m certain that young checker at Trader Joe’s wasn’t cruising me. I can’t be certain we were having a mutual gaydar moment, but I had my suspicions. It was obvious, though, that we were both having a fine time yakking through the transaction, through the warm farewells. Things like this make me happy, and they make me happy to know that my appreciation for women will get engaged in the world, even in mundane situations.

And then there are the opportunities, from afar, to leave snail trails, as it were. Yes, that means watching the Winter Olympics … and having my heart broken by the news that U.S. Women’s Hockey Team Captain Hillary Knight proposed to a woman other than myself. At least she didn’t crush any lesbian dreams.

Hillary Knight came across my radar during the last Winter Olympics. She’s definitely a girly tomboy (pant, pant) who cleans up right nice. Shortly afterwards, in one of its body issues, Sports Illustrated ran a color photo of her unclothed but unexposed. There was a tattoo running up her side. And I was gone.

Not an athlete, but a little hottie nonetheless, is sex and culture commentator Arielle Scarcella. She’s someone of whom it could be said the liberals’ slide to the far left left her so far behind she ended up on the right. She’s highly intelligent in her gender critical outlook, one that’s nuanced and generous enough that she says the transactivist crazies are making things difficult for “normal transsexuals.” She’s friends to trans people critical of the madness like Blaire White and Buck Angel.

My paesana Arielle left Brooklyn for Florida, where she can wear things like a stars and stripes bikini. And post a picture of herself in it. Causing me to set down my mouse so I could fan myself.

Back to Olympics, there’s an American athlete who’s not conventionally gorgeous, but her basic good looks and intelligence concatenate. She’s the Captain of the U.S. Women’s Curling Team, and wow, can she slide the rock. Unfortunately, I can’t find anything suggestive in that. I just find her a woman who may be nothing special on the surface but strikes me as a woman I wouldn’t mind meeting.

All endorphins aside, we all had the shock of two mass murders by mentally ill trans people in short order. One, in British Columbia, was by the now all-too-typical teen with mental issues that should have precluded their being on cross-sex hormones and the like. The other, in Rhode Island was a family self-immolation by a big hulk of a midlife transitioner, similarly not quite right. This situation looked like a bomb ready to explode. The perp, who took himself out along with a wife and child, arguably should have been talked out of surgery on grounds he’d never, ever make a credible woman. And yet, he was someone with a chip on his shoulder about being mocked or misgendered; he rage-posted thing like, ““Keep bashing us. But do not wonder why we Go BESERK [sic].”

Meanwhile, state legislatures are tightening down on any sexual wiggle room. They are calling a halt to allowing amending birth certificates with a different sex marker, and in at least one case revoking previously amended birth certificates and driver’s licenses and issuing ones with the original designation. There’s a new thing of doing the math to ascertain the prevalence of mass shooters by percentage in various populations … and things aren’t looking good for trans people.

Meanwhile, a new meme is starting to make the rounds about transwomen killing more people than do ICE. (That’s cold.)

There are statistics floating around, whose accuracy I can’t ascertain, about people commencing medical transitions and ending up a psychological mess. There are, no doubt, a good number of people who never should have been taken on as patients in the first place who crash and burn. Nonetheless, I can’t wrap my head around the increasing number of claims that anyone any kind of trans is mentally ill. It doesn’t jibe with my experience. Heck, one transsexual woman I know, the wife of a one-time newspaper colleague of mine, sits on the Superior Court bench here in the East Bay. Sober as a judge, you might call her.

While pondering this, I recalled hanging out with a resident of Trinidad, Colorado who got a kick out of his town being called the Sex Change Capital of the World. Obviously, so many clinics have been started to cash in on the trend that the claim is now moot. I think this was on a 2016 Indonesia/Bali total solar eclipse tour. Dr. Biber and his clinic might or might not have been Jeopardy! clue material. His clientele seemed to be uniformly low profile, and his altering them then letting them loose on the world seemed to have little, if any, impact on the world.

Dr. Biber had one patient who became his assistant, and then with an M.D. of her own, took over the practice by the time he passed in 2006. From what little I heard through the gay and gayish grapevine, things proceeded at a steady state. However, this is the same Marci Bowers who, as head of the self-styled experts on gender medicine WPATH, promoted treatment of children. WPATH even came to endorse “nullification” surgery, which left (presumably male) patients with nothing but a urethral opening.

WTF happened here? And when, and how?

Maybe we’ll get a clue when binders and testosterone and puberty blockers are replaced by the next adolescent girl social contagion fad. Certainly “gender medicine” for children and adolescents is on its way out, despite attempts to create “sanctuary states” for same. Court verdicts and damages award to detransitioners will assure that. We can only hope more mass shootings by people who never should have been allowed onto the trans path are not in our future, though I fear they are.

As someone who’s been a lesbian activist, and one with some decent achievements of which to be proud, I’ve never really lost those mama bear-like protective instincts for my lesbian sisters. That can be frustrating, or at least wearing, since these are not great times for lesbian community and independent lesbian culture and community infrastructure. And, yes, a major component of that is men presenting as women harassing us for being socially and sexually “exclusionary.”

As even organizations like the National Center for Lesbian Rights caved, and began advocating for trans issues over lesbian issues, I experienced more and more moments of powerlessness to do what had been my thing of standing up for lesbians. “Our” organizations don’t want to hear from the likes of me. Things were verging on crisis of meaning stuff.

But then, as is its wont, my subconscious stepped in with a sudden flash of insight. It was something familiar to which I saw a new facet: my parents having tracked me to be a high achiever when my comfort zone was in being a bohemian. I realized it was something of which I could—and should—let go. I’m living a “normal” life, as a woman comfortable in my life in the Bay Area and having fun. I’ve been living that life for some time. And hadn’t the ability to do that been a goal of mine ever since I was emerging into adulthood from having been the weird, nerdy kid? Why, yes …

I’m still a quirky gal, but I don’t have to experience every moment in my life through that lens. And so, on the day I rode a bus, BART, and the N Judah streetcar over to the Arboretum in Golden Gate Park, it struck me that I was doing normal (middle class) woman things. I looked at pretty flowers—it’s Magnificent Magnolias time. I waltzed into Tartine Bakery just before closing and picked up an almond frangipane croissant for the next day’s breakfast. And then I had a tasty restaurant meal.

Normal stuff.

Meanwhile, my more “normal” women friends have been getting more sophisticated about some of the issues that work my nerves. On of my women’s lineage societies has been hit with the bug to add female-birth restrictions, and the minority on about that has been doing so in a somewhat hysterical and nasty way. A small number of us working on a project did a bit of casual debriefing, including my having gotten put through my parliamentarian paces. As is more common than social postings may make it appear, they’re not unnerved by anyone who’s gone through a complete transition, meaning genital surgery and assimilation. They knew, however, that the states allow for birth certificate amendment with medical treatment short of surgery is problematic. As one of them put it, somebody could stop short, get an amended birth certificate, have an application approved with that certificate, and, if not continuing treatment, be a man in a women’s organization. Not cool. But different policies for different state documents would be a headache. More than that, the nastiness we’ve seen has put us off, so we’re letting things be and hoping for decorum.

That detransitioner’s lawsuit victory is just beginning to have an impact. The Supreme Court’s decision that’s expected to uphold Title IX and exclude trans athletes from women’s and girls’ athletics is not expected to come down until late summer. We will likely not experience a full turning of the tide for some time. Meanwhile, women and girls are still under attack—literally, in some cases. A high school wrestler in Washington state was digitally raped during a match by a competitor she did not know was trans until afterwards. She and her mother complained, but the teachers and coaches who are mandatory reporters of sexual assault and abuse did nothing, until Mom went to the school board.

At that big Munich Security Conference, Hillary Clinton put together a panel on “Fundamental Rights for Women.” And who was her featured speaker? Rep. Sarah McBride, whose approach to women’s rights is to make sure they are subservient to trans rights. According to McBride, transphobia and misogyny are rooted in the same prejudice, and enforced gender roles. She called the attacks on what she considers rights to be right-wing, anti-woman stuff, claiming “threats towards trans people are threats towards all women”: anything not trans-placating is an “assault on women’s rights.”

Yeah, like prohibitions on boys cosplaying as girls competing against actual girls, so they could shove their fingers up a wrestling opponent’s vagina, are an assault on women’s rights. RYFKM?

Legislative backlash continues, though, and some of it is fierce to the point of shocking. In my 2011 paper for the UN Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (from which some of Supreme Court Justice Breyer’s researchers may have lifted my Bona Fide Occupational Qualification theory), I cited the State of Utah as one that enacted gender identity housing and employment anti-discrimination statutes that specifically respected single-sex facilities. Well, a bill introduced this year would remove those protections. It would swap out the word “gender” and insert “sex” in all official publications. It would ban amendment of sex markers on birth certificates, and protect single-sex facilities. It would also prohibit, in healthcare and educational settings, anyone who presents as the opposite sex from having more than five minutes interfacing with children.

Kansas is going even further. A bill expected to reach the Governor, whose expected veto is expected to be overridden, would mandate the relevant agencies to invalidate not only birth certificates but driver’s licenses with amended sex markers and reissue them with markers for the birth sex.

Wow, that is brutal. I do believe people who’ve had genital surgery and had their gonads removed should be able to have their birth certificates amended to help them continue their new lives. I know driver’s licenses amendments used to require a doctor’s note, but those are given out like candy these days. This is like I don’t care who started it, both of you kids are going to your rooms.

Perhaps this reflects the extent to which transhenanigans have gotten out of hand—and the extent to which people have become fed up with them. There are some good people who’ve done transition right who are going to become collateral damage. The war has reached a critical stage between Atlantis and Mu, for sure.

One of the things he wrote to try to get me back on the Maggie’s Farm of the Democrat plantation (I presume you’re familiar with the Bob Dylan song) was that I should be backing the anti-ICE thing because I would be one of the next targets. By that, he meant that I, as a lesbian, would be a target for Trump Administration repression. By that, he meant that I, as a lesbian, was an LGBTQ person or a member of the (mythical) LGBTQ community. Funny, when the center was so positioned that I could be identified as left of it, we were all on about individual rights. Now, the supposed heirs to our activism want to wipe out our individuality by reducing us to identity community units.

I did a proper lesbian, not queer/lesbian, not LGBT response which, naturally, did not move him.

I have to point out that he and his wife, whose company when they’re not being political I do miss, had a photo of the two of them with Barack Obama on their refrigerator in San Francisco before they cashed out and moved to the Oregon Coast. I’ve not been surprised when I’ve had to push back on comments to posts of mine that were obvious attempts to police my opinions.

I gave just an overview of ways in which the T agenda is anti-woman and therefore anti-L. I don’t see the Trump Administration as threatening my rights as a lesbian because I agree with keeping people with penises who identify as women out of women’s private spaces, with keeping people with the advantage of having undergone male puberty out of women’s and girls’ athletics, and with enabling the mutilation of tomboys under the assumption they’re struggling with female puberty because they’re trans.

My kinda sorta friend has obviously swallowed the “LGBTQ rights” line that anything detrimental in any way to the desires of trans people threatens everyone LGB as well, making it the responsibility of the latter to go to bat for the trans rights agenda.

This agenda took a hard slap across the face with the stinky halibut of truth recently when a female detransitioner won a medical malpractice case against doctors who strongarmed her parents into letting her be subjected to a double mastectomy. She was awarded $2 million, plus $1.6 million for pain and suffering and close to half a mil for her attorneys. Remember “Big Tobacco” having to pay out $208 billion, altering their advertising, and slapping warnings on everything? With this verdict, a dam may have broken, and Big Gender Medicine may be about to face similar consequences.

Meanwhile, I get exposed to some amount of trans stuff on social media because I have liberal and progressive friends with trans and pro-trans people in their networks, and the algorithms do their thing. Moreover, from time to time I’ve clicked on a reel from Erin Reid of the “Erin in the Morning” blog on trans legal matters, because the topic in the description looked interesting. (Otherwise, I’m not really pleased with seeing her very plain mug in my feed.)

Recently I did click to see what Erin had to say on video about some terribly awful anti-trans law in Florida. The LGBT point of view would be that I, as a lesbian, should be up in arms about this. I did an RTFM dive rather than callously blow this off. What I found on SB 254 was this:

It prohibits sex-reassignment prescriptions or procedures for patients under 18, with two exceptions:

Patients born with a “medically verifiable genetic disorder of sexual development,” or who were already receiving such treatment before May 17, 2023. Doctors who provide gender-affirming care to minors in violation of the law face third-degree felony charges, which may include fines and jail time.

Gender-affirming care for adults must be prescribed, administered, or performed only by a licensed physician (M.D. or D.O.), effectively banning advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs) and other providers. (The thought of nurses being able to prescribe hormones made me go hunh?)

Patients must sign lengthy, complex consent forms in person with the prescribing physician. (Duh.) Telehealth services are banned for initiating or continuing treatment. (Um, yeah, this is something that really does call for in-person diagnosis by a qualified physician with relevant experience, no?)

The law prohibits the use of state funds for gender-affirming care through public health programs, Medicaid, or managed care plans. (This could do with a more granular analysis, regardless of overall wisdom.)

The law also grants Florida courts temporary emergency jurisdiction over any child present in the state who has been subjected to or is threatened with sex-reassignment prescriptions or procedures. This provision has been criticized as enabling “legal kidnapping” by parents opposing their child’s care, says an AI summary.

So … is this stuff terrible? It depends on one’s point of view, of course. I think it’s certainly open to debate. It’s flat-out terrible if one takes the transactivist point of view that all people who adopt a trans identity know what they’re doing and deserve to have society affirm their cross-gender identities in toto, meaning to the point of being open to enter women’s private spaces and women’s and girls’ athletic competitions. But, is it objectively awful?

Let’s take a deeper dive next week into Florida SB 254 and to see what may be terrible and what may be rational.

And what a plum! The right to set up more bases (which some say we already had) for a Golden Dome missile security system. Exclusion of Russia and China. Denmark continues subsidies for the Greenlanders. Mineral mining rights for rare earths, with royalties to the locals—something that ensures China will not have a monopoly on them. It’s a stunning achievement in terms of national security. It’s a great alternative to the U.S. being a Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians of globalism.

He invented the Candygram, and he probably won’t even get credit for it (one of my favorite riffs on “Blazing Saddles”). In fact, I know he won’t get credit for it in many circles. I was out for a cuppa tea with a friend from one of my groups, and when she made the all-too-common gratuitous remark about the Orange One being crazy, I interjected that the Denmark agreement was, actually, a stroke of genius. She had no idea what the agreement was about.

That’s my environment. Outgrowing the notion that socialism will actually work, and benefit the average person, is technically a slide to the right. Or, one could say it’s a matter of growing up, having to work to support one’s self and maturing in the process. Along the way, as one does that, one can’t help but notice that some people look to socialism or Big Government (but I repeat myself) simply to get benefits for themselves. Otherwise, it’s a matter of that Scott Adams (rest in peace!) diagrams of generic liberals staying in one place on the spectrum while so many of their counterparts shifted left, left, left.

I continue to look askance at both of our major political parties. And yet, the decision point for not voting for Kamala of fear of getting sucked into a war with Russia (which would be nuclear), is playing out well. Negotiations for an end to the war between Russia and the Ukraine have not been prominent in the news, but I did read something about Zelenskyy saying an agreement may be close.

Another situation that’s gone fairly silent is Iran. The social media reporting has slacked off since reports about what look like war preparations. This would be another war I’d hope can be avoided. Better alternatives would be the Ayatollahs realizing they are cornered rats (literally as well as figuratively), and cutting a deal for a safe exit. Second choice would be yet another surgical strike, this one destroying not missiles but the Mullocracy itself. I continue to pray for peace, and the liberation of the Iranian people. That could happen, again with Donald Trump’s fingers all over it.

I halfway understand some people’s cultural aversion to Donald Trump. One friend keeps going on that his anti-presidential style is an embarrassment for our country. He’s an odd duck, that’s for sure, but he’s doing good things for our country, and for the women of our country. This includes shaking up the New World Order and globalism, something that is long overdue. It includes the recent Department of Education finding that San Jose State University violated Title IX by allowing a male athlete to compete on its women’s volleyball team and retaliating against female athletes who spoke out. The Department is demanding SJSU separate sports by biological sex, and send personalized apologies to female athletes from 2022–2024, including those on teams that forfeited. This is another reason to appreciate the evil anti-Kamala.

Another orange accomplishment, this just in as of drafting time: “Tom Homan: ‘[Minnesota] AG Keith Ellison clarified for me that county jails may notify ICE of the release dates of criminal public safety risks so ICE can take custody of them, upon their release from the jail.’” May, not shall. But it’s a start, along with Tampon Tim backing off a bit, per one summary: “He supports cooperation only for targeted efforts involving violent criminals, stating Minnesota honors ICE detainers for the ‘worst of the worst’ but opposes broad immigration enforcement.” Of course, the color revolution types in Minneapolis just got caught with their fingers in the organized “resistance” cookie jar. And in the defrauding government cookie jar. Consequences may be on their way.

Now, I whiffed on what would happen when the inevitable shooting of an ICE protestor or two happened. I didn’t think that the wagons would get circled, and the deceased presented as martyrs. I’ve seen a couple of pieces lately (and there seem to be many) on weaponized empathy, which is distinct from sympathy. As in, you’re a terrible person if you don’t feel bad for this viiiiiiiictim! People are not evaluating the recent lethal situations rationally because they don’t want to. I can understand their being in shock that somebody on their side could get killed while engaging in risky behavior. That suggests it could happen to them. (Stifling the urge to say, if only.)

That said, there looks to be movement in positive directions, and possible deescalation of the war on the enforcement of law. Regardless of whether America ever really was the America of my childhood Civics classes, peace and the absence of official collectivism are something for which I ardently long. I’m feeling fairly hopeful.

Please stay tuned. No adjustment of your set is necessary.

One morning, after greeting her spirit, I saw her turn toward eternity and give an astonished gasp. And then she was gone.

Okay, so now I’m going to veer off into Cosmic Muffin territory (if I haven’t already). I don’t expect anybody to follow along. If you get an impulse to laugh at me behind my back, I’m fine with that. My mystical “Volcano Girl Narrative,” whose origins I’ll explain below, is something that has enabled me to make sense of my life and my place in the Universe. Nothing more, nothing less, but it’s been key.

My mother had faith. She believed the afterlife was Heaven, where injustices endured in life would be righted. I have conflicting information on life after death. On the one hand, on a hiking meditation, I had an experience of Jesus telling me, “Keep doing what you’re doing, Volcano Girl. Live out your life, and I will have a reward for you.” That was followed up with an unmistakable invitation back to the Eucharist and its mojo. On the other hand, I once had a vivid dream of a past life, particulars of which I had no possible way of knowing beforehand but which actually checked out on the ground. I do accept the promise of redemption, with gratitude, but still keep a wary eye out on the possibility of getting sent back out on assignment.

The other week we had some warm, sunny weather in the Bay Area. The friend who hosted the tea at which I got to talk about my take on Martin Buber’s I-Thou relationship, from a lesbian point of view, asked me to join her on an outing for dim sum. I was happy to do so, as I’ve been among the friends nudging her back into the world after the loss of her soul mate. The day being lovely, after picking me up at the Daly City BART station, she drove us down the Peninsula, taking a scenic route along Crystal Springs Reservoir.

On the way back, she parked at her and her late husband’s favorite overlook. There, she asked about my late Bestie, whether there had been an autopsy, and how I was coping with grieving. She spoke again of a medium showing her her husband happy on the other side, from where he told her to stay on Earth because she had things to do. This is a message I’ve been reinforcing in light of her desire for a more immediate reunion.

My Bestie had had neither faith, nor anything resembling my metaphysical outlook, and I’d gotten a sense of things not being copacetic for her after her passing just before Christmas. One night, in that liminal space between waking and actual dreaming, I felt her floating in the Bardo, confused. Naturally, I tried to direct her to go toward the light, not the immediate light, but the one beyond that one, per the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It was time to check in on her intentional family anyway, so after the dim sum outing I called. No autopsy, but in addition to the malignant colon blocker there had been a small brain tumor, and evidence of ministrokes.

I told them about my Bestie appearing to me, and said, yeah, she’s appeared to a number of people. They have an elemental spirit friend, the one I can’t dismiss after he may have been responsible for clearing the skies on two solar eclipse road trips my Bestie and I had taken. Supposedly, my Bestie wanted to be in some kind of stasis, until the rest of the family could cross over and could be together again, and he put her there.

That was not what I was experiencing. I had the sense, whether for real or just in my imagination, that my Bestie didn’t want to be in stasis. I felt her spirit clinging to me, piggyback-like, which was not conducive to my settling into happy memories of her. I decided her spirit could benefit from my taking her up to the Volcano.

The Volcano, or actually its caldera, is next to Roundtop Mountain in the Oakland Hills at Sibley Volcanic Preserve. It blew out nine and a half million years ago, got tipped perpendicular as tectonic plate action uplifted the hills, and then was quarried, leaving beautiful exposed volcanic and other rocks. One old quarry has an impressive basalt wall. In the other, someone laid out a marvelous labyrinth decades ago. I read about this in an East Bay Express nature article when I first moved to the East Bay. It was by Gina Covina, whom I knew as a guiding light of Amazon Quarterly back in the day. It took me years to locate it on a map, just in time to have my spirits lifted on hikes there when my father was dying. I found that while “logging some Volcano time,” my consciousness would get lifted up and allow insight to flow in.

Why should my Bestie’s spirit be in an uncomfortable stasis when she could hang out at the Volcano? Her spirit could enjoy the natural beauty and, hopefully, she could enjoy in death the elevated perspective, and the inspirations and insight, into which I’ve always been swept there in life.

And so, I imagined sitting her down on a bench with me, with a view across the Bay to Mount Tamalpais, as I talked about her spending her Bardo time in the bosom of the Volcano. Were she waiting for the rest of her intentional family to cross over, she could do it in a happy state, not rigidly locked into stasis. More importantly, she could have guidance as to what the afterlife is, and what her afterlife options are.

My instincts proved true. I still feel my Bestie around me, just not constantly. And, instead of clinging to me, her spirit seems to be hanging out curious about what I’m up to. It’s like our relationship before she passed, except I can no longer exchange wisecracks or plan road trip adventures with her. I’m sure she’ll eventually move on. It could be when the rest of her family crosses over, or in a moment of turning toward eternity and being amazed.

When that day comes, I will be left with happy memories, and gratitude for all she meant to me in life and how that made mine happy. And, I will have emerged from my grieving process, all the happier for not having been completely resistant to the Cosmic Muffin stuff.