Gender Follies
September 2, 2025 — Scott Johnson
The first of Thomas Berger’s tetralogy of novels featuring Carlo Reinhart is titled Crazy in Berlin (highly recommended). Today I learn that the Washington Post has a Berlin bureau and that Kate Brady reports from Berlin for the Post. JWR has posted Brady’s latest story, datelined Berlin, “Germany debates gender law as convicted neo-Nazi heads to women’s prison” (the Post version is here behind the paper’s paywall). Brady’s story brings
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September 2, 2025 — Scott Johnson
This past June the Supreme Court addressed Tennessee’s law prohibiting certain treatments for transgender minors in United States v. Skrmetti. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion in a case that divided the Court 6-3. It isn’t a difficult issue. The Court has tied itself in knots over the campaign for “trans rights.” The multitude of opinions in the case derives from the knots. Hey, the losers can look on
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August 30, 2025 — Scott Johnson
Minnesota passed a ban on so-called “conversion therapy” in the first months of 2023. Governor Tim Walz held a signing ceremony that hailed its passage along with an odious “trans refuge” bill on April 27. In the aftermath of the murders and attempted massacre committed by Robin Westman at Annunciation Church in Minneapolis earlier this week, I revisited the “conversion therapy” law and thought about it in the context of
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August 29, 2025 — Scott Johnson
In a tour de force of quotation as reporting, the Washington Free Beacon has documented the treatment of Robin Westman’s transgender status under the heading “Don’t Say Trans: How Mainstream Media Outlets Referred to Minneapolis’s Transgender School Shooter” The documentation begins with the subhead: “‘FBI Director Kash Patel identified the shooter as male. Legal documents requesting a name change for Westman say she identified as female,’ NBC reports.'” The compilation
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August 27, 2025 — John Hinderaker
This morning there was a mass shooting at a church school in south Minneapolis. It took place in a neighborhood where I once lived. The school that was attacked, Annunciation, is where we would have sent our youngest child if we had stayed in the city. Reports on the shooting here. Two children were killed and 17 were wounded. The murderer shot through a stained glass window into the church,
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July 1, 2025 — John Hinderaker
The University of Pennsylvania has reached an agreement with the Trump administration on Title IX: The University of Pennsylvania will retroactively strip transgender swimmer Lia Thomas of her [sic] records and titles as part of a deal with the Education Department to abide by bans on transgender athletes in women’s sports. Thomas, for what it is worth, is a sinister figure. Thomas was the first transgender athlete to win an
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June 19, 2025 — Scott Johnson
Yesterday the Supreme Court let stand Tennessee’s law prohibiting certain treatments for transgender minors in United States v. Skrmetti. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion in a case that divided the Court 6-3. It isn’t a difficult issue. The Court has tied itself in knots over the campaign for “trans rights.” The multitude of opinions in the case derives from the knots. Hey, the losers can look on the
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June 7, 2025 — John Hinderaker
We have followed (here and here) the story of the Champlin Park, Minnesota girls’ softball team, which was powering its way to the state title game behind the heroics of a six-foot tall pitcher who, until age nine, was named Charles. Charles became a girl, Marissa, and Champlin Park became state champion last night, behind yet another shutout performance by its star fastballer, Marissa Rothenberger. The linked Star Tribune story
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June 6, 2025 — Scott Johnson
I commented yesterday on the Minnesota state girls’ softball tournament with reference to Bill Shipley’s column “How One Young Man Altered The Landscape of Girls’ High School Softball In Minnesota.” John added: “It has been reported that when Charles Rothenberger was nine years old, his mother had his birth certificate altered to change his name to Marissa and his sex from male to female. As far as I have seen,
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June 3, 2025 — Scott Johnson
The author of Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed-the-Plow, and American Buffalo, David Mamet must be our greatest living playwright. Indeed, he may be our only great living playwright. His new book is The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment (don’t spellcheck me, bro). Andrew Ferguson told the story of Mamet’s turn to conservatism in the 2004 Weekly Standard article “Converting Mamet.” Making the rounds to support his new book, Mamet offered this
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May 6, 2025 — John Hinderaker
President Trump has issued an executive order banning transgender individuals from service in the armed forces. He issued a similar order during his first term. This time, a group of allegedly transgender soldiers or would-be soldiers sued in Seattle to block implementation of the order. District Court Judge Benjamin Settle granted a preliminary injunction banning the order from taking effect. Judge Settle called it “unsupported, dramatic and facially unfair.” I
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April 24, 2025 — John Hinderaker
Rahm Emanuel has been making the rounds, trying to nudge his fellow Democrats in a more moderate direction. In the clip below, he says Democrats should listen to the American people and stop talking like adjunct professors at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. I am not sure what the deal is with Yeti cups, which he he takes to be symbolic of something, but I understand the
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April 16, 2025 — John Hinderaker
Certain U.S. Supreme Court justices may be unable to answer that question, but the Supreme Court of the U.K. has concluded that a woman is–well, you know–a woman. The London Times reports: Every organisation in Britain has been told to revisit their equality policies after the country’s highest court ruled that trans women were not legally women. Women’s rights campaigners celebrated as the Supreme Court declared on Wednesday that the
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April 11, 2025 — Scott Johnson
The pronoun police signal our life in the coming dystopia. Orwell! thou shouldst be living in this hour… In the video below Anderson Cooper commits a dystopian faux pas at CNN’s townhall with Bernie Sanders this past Wednesday evening. An attendee at CNN's Bernie Sanders town hall corrects Anderson Cooper on pronouns: pic.twitter.com/GRhkVXst6o — Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) April 10, 2025 Fortunately, we missed the show. Robby Soave extracts the,
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March 9, 2025 — Steven Hayward
We noted here the other day that Gavin Newsom had his own “Sister Souljah moment” over transgender women in women’s sports (and several other issues), which has ignited a predictable new front in the civil war inside the Democratic Party. Democrat grandee Debbie Wasserman Schultz has dissented already, saying “We have to stand on principle and make sure that everyone is treated equally. I’m not shrinking away from this issue.”
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March 7, 2025 — John Hinderaker
We, and pretty much everyone else, have expressed puzzlement over the Democrats’ choice of men playing in women’s sports as their signature issue–the hill they were willing to die on, in the face of 80% opposition from voters. But now it appears that they are beating an orderly retreat. First it was Gavin Newsom, who said while inaugurating his own podcast with Charlie Kirk, that allowing men to play in
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February 26, 2025 — John Hinderaker
This story from London illustrates the far-reaching effects of the Trump administration’s cutbacks at USAID: Stonewall could be forced to cut up to half of its staff after President Trump’s decision to freeze foreign aid, The Times understands. Workers at the LGBTQ+ charity were told on Thursday that restructuring would take place, and that only roles with dedicated funding would be safe. I guess “dedicated funding” means funding by someone
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