How is Charlie Gard an excuse to criticize transgender issues?

An opinion piece by Christine Flowers in a recent edition of the local paper takes a perplexing detour. While the piece mainly deals with the Charlie Gard controversy, which I don't feel that I understand well enough to comment on, it suddenly swerves midway through into arguments about abortion, a matter not truly related to the initial one and a far more nuanced issue than she gives it credit for. That's not what we're here for, though. I'm focusing on when she ultimately shifts, quite abruptly, into bashing care for young transgender people, devoting around a quarter of the piece to this, despite how obviously little she understands the subject and despite it having no discernible connection to the original topic.

Pokémon GO types rant

I want to start by saying that I do enjoy the game overall. The data usage is basically negligible as long as you get game updates through wifi. It helps motivate me to do some of the exercising and exploring I ought to be doing anyway, and honestly enjoy doing anyway once I actually start moving instead of making excuses. There's just something about seeing these creatures from my childhood coming to life... more or less, anyway. And it's free to play!

That said, it definitely has its problems. There's no interaction between players except indirectly through king-of-the-hill-style fighting over gym locations. Status ailments don't exist. Monster spawns are often poorly distributed outside of urban areas. Eevees show up constantly instead of being rare enough that you can only get a single one in many of the games. A number of special monsters remain completely unavailable so far (though maybe that's better than if everyone were overusing them). The app chews through battery charge like no one's business. The interface's responsiveness always seems to stutter at the worst possible times. I've recently been having an annoying problem where all the nearby monsters sometimes vanish for a few seconds before coming back, sometimes several times in a row. Stability remains an issue months after the initial release, especially in the busier areas that would otherwise be the best places to play. The positioning sometimes gets so flaky that it thinks I'm driving too fast even when I'm on foot, or not moving at all. And let's not forget the cheaters.

None of those are my main gripe, though.

Confusion, Embarrassment, Humiliation, and Loss of Decency

Let's do semi-local semi-current events.

The Boyertown Area School District, located maybe an hour away from where I live, is being sued over transgender rights, but not by or on behalf of a transgender person, as has happened in numerous places where such rights have been denied. No, in this case, the suit is attempting to squash such rights, as a boy known only as "Joel Doe" claims to have felt "confusion, embarrassment, humiliation, and loss of dignity" at what he calls "sexual harassment" and an "invasion of privacy" after allegedly seeing a transgender boy—whom we'll refer to as "T" for convenience since neither an actual name nor an alias have been reported—in the locker room "wearing nothing but shorts and a bra".

So, in short, it sounds an awful lot like Joel was watching other people changing, saw something he wasn't expecting to, and had a freakout over it. I'd say I don't mean to trivialize it, but I don't think I can honestly make that claim. It's sounding pretty trivial from here. On the other hand, I've also seen the suggestion that he doesn't actually care all that much, and his parents just pressured him into this, but since I have no way of knowing either way, I'll make no further mention of that and just comment on the facts of the case as they have been reported.

Wrestling with Restrooms

It's been over a week since the Supreme Court declined to take the Gavin Grimm case, which involves a transgender boy fighting to be allowed to resume using the boys' restrooms at his high school in Virginia. Though disappointing to those who had hoped to see the question of transgender bathroom rights settled, the result should come as no surprise considering how the lower court ruled. Rather than directly address the question of whether the school district's newly-enacted prohibition violates the non-discrimination rules of Title IX, or the principle of equal protection under the law in general, the lower court's ruling was basically a cop-out, amounting to, "the DoJ and DoE say it violates Title IX, and we can't prove they're wrong, so we'll defer to their judgment." However, the DoJ and DoE under the new administration have since backed down from that position, so the original ruling doesn't hold up, and the Supreme Court basically sent it back for a do-over. Neither court, it would seem, wants to address the issue directly as long as they can come up with any justification for avoiding it.

Setting this thing up...

Due to certain concerns regarding the home country of the current host of my main site (at http://kwhazit.ucoz.net) and how certain policies of said country (aside from being objectionable on principle) may relate adversely to some of my posts, I've decided to start mirroring the existing posts here. Additionally, any posts moving forward that don't strictly relate to the primary content of the main site will only appear here, where free speech is still valued.

And, hey, no obnoxious ads, either!

Speaking of which, if anyone knows of another free, or inexpensive, webhost that allows you to provide your own existing HTML files instead of forcing you to go through a design interface, I'm open to suggestions. I do miss FortuneCity's free hosting. For all its faults and lack of support, they at least had FTP and made sure the ads behaved themselves.

And it turns out I can backdate the posts, so everything is even properly dated and in chronological order!

Goats and Doors (originally posted on uCoz)

Today's issue of Parade has a 30th anniversary Marilyn vos Savant article that among other things revisits the Monty Hall problem (also known as two goats, three doors) that caused an alarming amount of controversy, including furor from a lot of from people who really ought to have known better. "Of the letters from the general public, 92% are against my answer, and and of the letters from universities, 65% are against my answer", she wrote in a follow-up, and many of these letters were condescending if not outright rude and insulting. (archived link)

For anyone unfamiliar with it, here's the basic premise of the problem:

Bathroom Hypotheticals (originally posted on uCoz)

I don't generally like to comment on politics, but this is more a social issue than a political one, so I consider it fair game. Anyone who's only here for the translations might still want to skip this one, though.

"I don't have anything against the transgenders, it's about the perverts and predators who could abuse this," or so I often hear. If that's true, it seems odd that all these proposed "bathroom bills" go by biological sex or birth certificates or male and female deoxyribonucleic acid, and don't so much as bring up predatory behavior. Similarly, the policies many of these people are objecting to apply specifically to transgender people and not to anyone else, much less to people trying to commit crimes.