The last time I saw this sign...

 

...was in Berlin. In 1966.

A Modest Proposal

 I'm disturbed to find that in the current debate over transgender athletes, even right-leaning news organizations seem to be adopting what I find to be a completely false framing of the issue. Case in point: I just saw the headline "North Dakota House Passes Bill Banning Transgender Athletes from High School Sports Teams."

But when I clicked over, the first sentence in the Daily Wire article read:

The North Dakota state House of Representatives passed a bill Thursday that requires school athletes to participate on sports teams that correspond with their biological sex.

 Does this ban transgender athletes from anything? I don't see it. It appears to me to be saying that if Jim wants to wear a skirt and call himself Jean, fine, but he's still eligible for the boys' team. Does not say that Jim can't participate. 

It's known that post-pubescent males have significant athletic advantages over females - lung capacity, upper body strength, overall muscle mass, etc., etc. They might conceivably have a problem with gymnastics, but there is no case for allowing people with male bodies to "compete" with females in weightlifting.

It's known that in most athletic fields, female athletes' best records are well below those of male athletes. That's the reason for women's sports to begin with! We want our young women to compete with each other in an arena where dedication and hard work make a difference, not to form a permanent underclass who will never "win" while there's a "transgender" man who wants to scoop up the trophies. Don't we? 

If certain scolds in our population are offended by the very concept of "boys" and "girls" I can think of two solutions.

1) Do what North Dakota has just very sensibly done, but tweak the nomenclature. We will no longer have boys' and girls' or mens' and womens' teams, just Teams of People Who Happen to Have XY Chromosomes and other Teams of People Who Happen to Have XX Chromosomes. Sure, it's awkward to say, but it's not nearly as silly as being required to call certain people ze/zir or other manufactured pronouns.

2) Scrap the division of teams by sex entirely and let each sport be represented by just one team whose members are the best-performing athletes in the school. Sure, this destroys women's sports in one blow, but that may be better than the death by a thousand cuts in which each young woman's athletic record is held hostage for the first boy in her school sport who decides he'd like to compete as a girl. At least it makes clear up front that women are now to be sacrificed to the pretense that men can become women simply be saying so. 

Oh, but the people who do this don't want to make that clear, do they?

And that's why I find headlines such as the one on the Daily Wire article so irritating.

 

Simplifying history

 My online book club is reading The Prince. I rather wish we'd picked Discourses on Livy instead, because I find Machiavelli's thoughts on republics more interesting and more relevant to the present day than his (possibly ironic; there's a lot of debate on that) comments on principalities. Oh well, c'est la vie. Anyway, his references in The Prince have made me realize how ignorant I am of Renaissance Italian history, so I've been doing some background reading and have come to the following "conclusions":

1. Given any two Italian states X and Y that border one another, X attacked Y (or vice versa) at some time.

2. Any prominent figure apart from Girolamo Savonarola betrayed somebody else to the Borgias at some time, and I'm not sure about Savonarola. (Good only to the date of Cesare Borgia's death.)

3. Somebody invited France in to support their claim to somewhere. Somebody else invited Spain in.

and finally, the only one relevant to the present day:

4. Our current situation could be worse. If our Republic fails, it will be.

I realize all this is something of an oversimplification, but honestly, the shifting alliances and wars make my head hurt. Anyway, I've already simplified my "understanding" of history by deciding:

5. All kings of France were named Louis.

6. All prominent medieval figures were named William, unless they were named Matilda/Maud. (You haven't lived until you've written a scene featuring three historical characters all of whom were named William or some variant thereof.)

It's not much of a stretch to extend this system to early Renaissance Italy. 

Sarah Hoyt nails it: this occupation is set to fail

 I've been slowed down by the lovely muscle relaxants the doc prescribed for my pulled back muscles, which he warned "might make you slightly drowsy." Ha. Make me fall asleep sitting up, is more like it. But while I've been dozing, others are paying attention. Today Sarah Hoyt described a fascinating parallel to current events... in the 17th century Spanish occupation of Portugal. (Me: What? The Spanish occupied Portugal? Nobody told me about this!) 

She writes:

The funny thing — stop me when this sounds familiar — that Spain would probably have won the battle, long term, almost certainly, if they’d come in and governed with Portuguese best interests at heart, and let the cultures and families merge.

Portugal didn’t even have a very strong sense of national identity at the time, and noble families had property in both families.

But they came in set on “reducing” the Portuguese. It involves a program of destroying the statues of the conquered people, and the stories of their heroes. It involves giving away prized possessions that brought in wealth (in Portugal’s case various colonies given away in the dowry of Spanish princesses) for the glory of the invaders. It involves forbidding the mother-tongue and replacing it with the invaders’s speech (A-men and A-women!) and it involves in general making the invaded country feel its humiliation, in the hopes of making it want to die.

 Remind you of anything? Yeah, me too. And she predicts Americans will react to the current regime as badly as the Portuguese did to this ham-handed attempt to flatten them.

My prediction is a crash of internationalism, a revival of a love of nationality and each nation’s character and heroes, and a glorious upraised middle finger to those who’d be global masters, Winnie the Xi and the UN included, and possibly with petards.

 Click through and read the whole thing: Reducing An Occupied Country