This weekend — today, Sunday — is the Derringer Co-Prosperity Sphere’s 29th wedding anniversary. While we’re beyond the “Gone Girl” tributes, it’s always nice to mark a milestone appropriately, so we had a 24-hour getaway.

To St. Clair, Michigan, previously known as the place where Nancy and her friend Bill go ottering in high-to-late summer. Just north of Palmer Park there, where we otter, is the St. Clair Inn. It was once a highfalutin vacation spot for swells (Bill spent his first honeymoon night there, once upon a time), then fell on hard times, then went through a lengthy, oft-delayed renovation, and reopened only recently as a swank hotel. We booked a room there for Saturday. River view, of course — what’s the point of going to St. Clair if you can’t watch the freighters go by?

That’s the…I forget which one that was. Wait, lemme zoom in… OK, it’s the Federal Columbia, a bulk carrier, upbound. A salty, which is what they call the ships that leave the Great Lakes for open ocean. We saw at least a dozen, a few of them thousand-footers like the Edmund Fitzgerald. The Federal Columbia is headed for Burns Harbor, in Indiana. Got a ways to go, but I bet it’s closer than I think.

The St. Clair River drains Lake Huron, into Lake St. Clair, then Erie, Ontario and out to sea. It’s blue, and it runs at a clip.

The bar in the Inn is called the Dive, and this sculpture outside pays tribute to the end-of-season tradition from the old days, where the wait staff would go for a swim themselves. My man on the right has about a second to correct his position before he does a bellyflop.

Today, it was a slow drive down the riverfront, through Algonac to the northern coast of Lake St. Clair, then the long way home. A whole trip that felt like a mini-vacation, and we used less than a quarter of a tank.

Of course you can’t get entirely away, and the news intruded. Another goddamn mass shooting, because we gotta have one of those every so often. Otherwise we might not have Freedom.

Bloggage: If you haven’t read this, from the Atlantic, about “how politics poisoned the evangelical church,” it’s worth your time.

Oh, and look — another mass shooting. This one…at a church. Kinda fitting.

Best story from Kate’s Euro tour: The government-owned venues they played had the best food, and some even had chefs who would come in and make the artists a four-course meal before they went on. Also, they did a quickly arranged two-song pop-up at a sunglass boutique in Paris and all came away with a new pair of shades as payment. Also, Jean-Baptiste, their tour manager, knew all the best places to eat and even a secret swimming hole outside of Marseille.

They had a great time. Transformational, even.

So. The U.S. is having a baby-formula shortage. As usual, it’s complicated — a plant closed blah blah and supply-chain issues blah blah, you know the drill. Normally this is the sort of problem I’d pay polite but disinterested attention to. I want babies to be fed, but there are no babies in my current immediate orbit, so I don’t feel the urgency. I certainly don’t want any to be malnourished or die.

But it’s been kind of horrifying, given the other big event surrounding women’s bodies in recent days, to hear how many men are utterly. Clueless. About breastfeeding.

Not all of them. Those whose wives breast-fed generally get it. But a disturbing number of men have taken to social media to say, “Hey, just breast-feed!”

I have sympathy for parents who are unable to obtain baby formula due to the evil and incompetence of politicians.

I would also say that hopefully this is a wakeup call to become more self-sufficient—God literally designed mothers to feed their babies.

— Eric Sammons (@EricRSammons) May 11, 2022

And this was one of the better ones. There were others that were far, far worse.

I breast-fed. It was a rough start, but we worked it out. And I kept it up. Kate weaned herself the week of her first birthday, and that was that. I didn’t realize at the time how rare that was, what a luxury it was, but let me tell you, I had a LOT of support. A long maternity leave, a breast pump, a lactation room at work, flexible hours. That’s almost unheard-of. Just having a job makes it insanely difficult for a working mother, unless you can take your kid to work, and hardly anyone can do that. Plus it requires good nutrition and, mostly, time. Newborns eat more or less constantly, which means you spend half your life sitting in a chair, nursing. Then they get a little older, and you spend a third of your time there. Then they get older still, and new complications ensue. All of which can derail something like breastfeeding.

What every parent should learn from parenthood is that no one has the perfect answer. Whatever works for you may not work for the family next door. And I remember one member of my nursing mothers’ group, who cried because she simply couldn’t make enough milk and her child was medically diagnosed as malnourished. An affluent, educated woman. She was crushed. So if you think “just breast-feed” is the answer, and you don’t support things like long paid parental leave to accommodate, take a long walk in a different direction.

God, this stupid country.

OK, then! On that cheery note, have a great weekend, all.

The Shadow Show tour is over, and Alan is on his way home from Toronto with the girls. (Air Canada has far lower fares to Europe than any domestic airline.) I remember being young, cobbling together multi-connection routes to the places I wanted to go. Living in Fort Wayne, you could save hundreds of dollars flying out of Indianapolis, only 110 miles south, or Chicago, 150 miles west. The drive down at the beginning of vacation was a blip; the drive home might as well have been 500 miles of two-track road.

Crossing international borders keeps getting easier, but even Canada is still complicated. However, they’ll be home later tonight and that will be good.

I’m trying not to mainline Doom, but I read this piece earlier this week and it unhinged me a bit. It’s about Marjorie Dannenfelser, “the woman who killed Roe,” i.e. an anti-abortion pitfall who sees no color but black or white. She is…infuriating:

She soon converted to Catholicism and came to believe that full human rights are conferred upon a zygote at the moment of fertilization, rendering even a rape exception “abominable.” She tried to convince her parents of this and failed, repeatedly. “They really taught me to relentlessly pursue the truth,” she told me, “which is why it was so frustrating.”

Of Trump, the strangest bedfellow:

…Dannenfelser says she “felt ill at the prospect of defending a man who could speak that way.” Her daughters told her they could not support her if she supported him. “Ultimately,” she wrote, “I had to accept my own public argument: Trump’s commitment to the pro-life cause outweighed his offensive remarks. My daughters saw a snapshot in time and were right to be appalled. But I saw the evil that had been wrought in the decades since Roe v. Wade, which had ended the lives of more than 50 million preborn babies.”

Inside the logic of this particular nightmare, the 50 million dead, there could be no question of falling back. Dannenfelser watched the final presidential debate. Trump had, of course, been coached, but he still sounded, usefully, like a child. “If you go with what Hillary is saying,” he said, “you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby … you can rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month on the final day.”

Finally! thought Dannenfelser, watching at home. Here was an answer neither avoidant nor squeamish; here was a man describing the improbable violence she wanted to be on every voter’s mind, the Gerber baby, the Nilsson baby, the visual stand-in for every routine eight-week abortion across the nation. “Trump got it right and was never even a part of it,” she tells me. “He wasn’t a part of it. But he has an instinct for how to build something.” Others had focused on “issues surrounding the act itself, paying for it, informed consent about it, parental notification about it. He’s one of the first politicians that was able to talk about what it is. Everyone else was afraid to offend. He wasn’t afraid to offend. He’s not a cautious man.”

Go ahead, nice Christian lady, get in bed with this guy. Enjoy the herpes. Although this story, infuriating as it is, is still very good, and has a great kicker. I recommend it.

Is that it for me tonight? It would seem so. Long day. Tired.

In December 2020, a small group of Stop the Steal lunatics demonstrated outside the Michigan Secretary of State’s home. It was dark, and it was said that some were packing the usual long guns those dipshits favor, but I only saw a couple of videos and didn’t spot any. They were told to stay on public sidewalks, don’t block traffic, and do their thing. Which they did.

I wrote a column about it at the time, which no one liked. I said it was obnoxious, but entirely defensible, as long as it stays non-violent and the shits stay off private property. I think one of the demonstrators here dared to ring her doorbell, but that was it. (He should have been arrested, IMO.)

So don’t cry to me, Clarence Thomas. Tough shit, Brett Kavanaugh. If it’s the downfall of decency and decorum, hmm, too bad. As these guys like to say, over and over and over, the American Revolution wasn’t polite, either.

At least I’m consistent in my outrage. I don’t remember any Republicans hand-wringing today over the Death of Decorum defending Jocelyn Benson in 2020.

So. Not a terrible weekend, for a change. Friday night we shlepped to Pontiac to see the Hu, the Mongolian metal band. I’d put them in the Deadline Detroit newsletter in the events section, just for the novelty. Then I got a note from LAMary telling me her roadie son was going to be in Detroit “with some Mongolian musicians” and figured there couldn’t possibly be more than one. We’d actually talked about going, just to get out of the house for something different, and that settled it. So first Mexican food, then the Hu. We were supposed to be on the list, but we weren’t. “We’ll just take two tickets, then,” I said.

“Sorry, it’s sold out,” the lady at the window said. It was a nightclub, not the hockey arena, but still. Clearly the Hu has more of a fan base than we thought. And we got lucky, because just then the club owner came in, saw us standing around fretting, and waved us in. First stop: The merch table, to say hi to Pete and buy a T-shirt. We found our way upstairs and had an OK view. They put on a good show — very Metal, very loud, very tribal-sounding. They play traditional instruments (although I noticed a guitarist standing in the back, out of the light, and one of the drum kits is the conventional kind), and do a fair amount of Mongolian throat-singing. For once, it didn’t matter that the lyrics weren’t clear, because they were in Mongolian. It reminded me of George Miller, talking about the flame-throwing guitarist in “Mad Max: Fury Road.” He said every army needed a drummer boy, and that guitarist was the bad guys’ drummer boy.

The Hu could be the drummer boys for Genghis Khan. Somewhere in a central Asian grave, he is surely smiling. Of course, the band has a song about him.

I’ve always been interested in Mongolia. When I was riding, I used to get a catalog for a horse-based travel service called Equitour. Most the trips were stuff like fox hunting in Ireland, dressage in the Netherlands, etc. But there were two that I really should have done when I still could — crossing the interior of Iceland on native ponies (there was a note that you should be able to ride 20-plus miles a day and expect mutton at literally every meal), and a trip across the Mongolian steppes, also on native horses, probably with a similar physical and dietary warning. When I had amnio before Kate was born, the geneticist and I chatted about her research work in Mongolia, looking for links between central Asians and native Americans.

I’d have chatted about all this with the Hu, but they don’t speak much English, Pete said. Probably fluent in Russian, though.

OK, then, time to get the show on the road. On my “day off” I’ve already edited several stories and had no fewer than four phone calls with my editor. I’ll leave you with a picture:

Hu’s on first, but in Columbus today, I believe.

Warning: I am only somewhat less incandescent with rage over the SCOTUS thing. However, I also had my second booster this week, which took out most of my stuffing for about 12-24 hours. I’m Team Pfizer, but my local CVS had only Moderna. I’ve read a few things suggesting that cocktailing the two vaccines may give the recipient wider immunity, and I’m all for that. However, while I had zero side effects from Pfizer other than the usual sore arm, this Moderna made me feel like a very old person with aches, pains, ague and zero energy.

As I recall, Kate got Moderna and suffered a bit, too. Maybe it’s in our genes.

Anyway, I now feel pretty immune to everything. But I’m still bothered by the Supreme Court.

I was in high school, a sophomore as I recall, when Roe was decided. I lived in an affluent area, and the standard operating procedure for girls who got pregnant was the one-day trip to New York City. An ACLU lawyer described it to me years later: The gate at the airport for the 7 a.m. flight, full of youngish women, teens and their mothers. They’d arrive in NYC mid-morning, take a cab to the clinic of their choice and all be back at the LaGuardia gate for the 5 p.m. flight back to Columbus. Everyone knew what was going on.

You had to go to New York because the earliest states to liberalize abortion laws were Republican-led, and that was the Rockefeller era. Democratic governors were beholden to the Catholic vote then, and as others have pointed out, Catholics were pretty much the only religious group opposed to abortion then.

But not everyone could get to New York, and so one night the wife of a friend of mine told me about the abortion she’d had, pre-Roe. She, too, was from a reasonably well-off family, but she went to St. Louis, and had her abortion in a hotel room. She didn’t share a lot of details, but I gathered it was a very unpleasant experience. Just thinking about it made me mad all over again.

And now we learn the prime mover behind the J.D. Vance endorsement: Tucker Carlson. Behold the former president of the United States:

After promising Trump that Vance was with him on the issues despite the candidate’s past anti-Trump comments, Carlson — according to three sources familiar with the matter — turned to a lurid closing argument. “You can’t trust” David McIntosh, the president of the conservative Club for Growth and a top backer of Vance’s rival Josh Mandel, Carlson claimed. McIntosh had just concluded his own phone call with Trump during that same midday meeting. The reason, Carlson asserted, is that McIntosh has an embarrassing and “chronic” personal sexual habit.

Rolling Stone cannot confirm the claim and will not repeat it. But during that phone call, the twice-impeached former president spent a notable amount of time gossiping and laughing about the prominent Republican’s penis and how “fucking disgusting” and “fucking gross” he allegedly was.

Trump had already displayed a long, abiding interest in Mandel’s own sex life, having spent months privately regurgitating and spreading salacious, unverified rumors that he’s heard about “fucking weird” Mandel’s supposed debauched ongoings. Carlson’s comments about the proclivities of Mandel’s patron threw both Trump and his son into fits of laughter.

I’M MOVING TO MEXICO, CANADA OR WESTERN EUROPE ONE OF THESE DAYS AND GODDAMNIT YOU CAN’T STOP ME.

OK, time to take off the caps lock and prepare for the evening ahead. I believe we’re headed to Pontiac this evening for some Mongolian heavy metal and a potential face-to-face with LAMary’s roadie son. This should be epic. I’m getting a T-shirt.

Good weekend, all. Stay cool.

I don’t know what. I’m so tired, and yet furious. I slept badly last night because I was so angry. I’ve never had an abortion — although that’s none of your, or anyone else’s, goddamn business. My friends had them, oh yes they did. And because I’m old as hell, most of them had them before you had to walk a gantlet of screaming idiots to do so. But almost every one of them is a happy, well-adjusted mother of multiple children today. Successful. Confident. And (I’ve verified this) beyond regret over decisions they made when they themselves determined they weren’t ready to have a child.

And that’s what people like Justice Handmaid and Justice Rapist and Justice Steal-a-seat and Justice Strip Search can’t stand. The autonomy. (And when I say almost all of them are, etc., I don’t mean the ones who aren’t are messed up somehow. Some of them aren’t mothers, because they never wanted to be mothers. And still aren’t. Another thing that’s none of your business.)

God, I’m just furious. I’ve been furious all day.

As the Trump administration headed out the door, I thought back on its early days and came to the conclusion that Dems should have held their fire longer. The early “scandals” — OMG Kellyanne Conway put her bare feet on the Oval Office couch, OMG Ivanka has a West Wing office, etc. — burned people out to the point that by the time the really bad stuff arrived, voters were numb. I feel the same way about this. Yes, Roe will be overturned. Yes, probably same-sex marriage will be next. But no court is going to overturn interracial marriage or ban birth control, even though they believe those decisions rest on rotten foundations. In fact, they’ll use their tolerance of this fruit of the poison tree to show how reasonable they are, how hysterical it is to call them extremists.

And I just want to do something. Besides scream and be angry and pour another drink or write a check. If we’re two-thirds of the voting public, we need to do something.

Sorry, but I’ve been reading takes all day and I’m about taken out. And — as I might have mentioned — fucking furious.

Discuss? Discuss.

I guess Tuesday is the Ohio primary, correct? I suppose it’ll tell us a few things, unless it tells us nothing. Joe Blystone, “constitutional conservative” and cowboy-hatted dipshit with a Santa Claus beard, won’t make a dent in the governor’s race, but I’ve been amused by his candidacy ever since the Cincinnati Fucking Enquirer identified him as “Farmer Joe Blystone” in some earlier story. I just checked his campaign website. Of course one of his issues is?

Election integrity is a major issue on the minds of Ohioans. While the design of Ohio’s system has many strengths, we still have issues that draw attention to a need to do better.

There were two links in that statement. One took me to the Ohio section of the Heritage Foundation’s vast database on election fraud. It used to be hosted by WhiteHouse.gov, but isn’t anymore, teehee. For the hell of it, I clicked on the first case, from 2021:

Edward Snodgrass, a registered Republican and a Porter Township Trustee, was charged with one felony count of illegal voting after submitting an absentee ballot on behalf of his deceased father in the 2020 General Election. As part of his plea deal, Snodgrass pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of falsification, was sentenced to three days in jail, and fined $500.

Hmm. There’s one vote. (Never mind it’s a Republican.) Here’s the next one on the list, from 2019:

Yaakov M. Schulman, of Columbus, was found guilty of illegal voting for voting as an alien. Schulman was charged with one count of false election registration and one count of illegal voting, and was found gulty of illegal voting, a fourth degree felony, by a jury. He was sentenced to community control (probation) for two years, ordered to complete cognitive behavioral programming, and was ordered to pay a $2,500 fine and $1,812 in court fees.

And so on. The list is full of stuff like this, but we’re so distracted we don’t even check. People see the Heritage Foundation has a database of 1,353 cases of voter fraud and assume HUGE PROBLEM. When the list is almost all penny-ante shit like this. But keep trying, Heritage Foundation. Here’s their splash-screen copy:

The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database presents a sampling of recent proven instances of election fraud from across the country. Each and every one of the cases in this database represents an instance in which a public official, usually a prosecutor, thought it serious enough to act upon it. And each and every one ended in a finding that the individual had engaged in wrongdoing in connection with an election hoping to affect its outcome — or that the results of an election were sufficiently in question and had to be overturned. This database is not an exhaustive or comprehensive list. This database is intended to demonstrate the vulnerabilities in the election system and the many ways in which fraud is committed.

“…hoping to affect its outcome” made me laugh. Isn’t that why people vote at all?

I don’t know who will win the gubernatorial primary in Ohio. It’s the Senate that everyone’s paying attention to. Don’t know that one, either, but whichever Republican it is, it’ll be a terrible, terrible one.

So. I guess the big talker over the weekend was the Tucker Carlson thing in the NYT — you can look it up if you haven’t clicked out yet this month. (Does the NYT free-articles meter reset on the first of the month, or does the 30 days roll over?) I’m still working my way through it. I don’t know if there’s any one thing to say about it, other than: Hmm, what an asshole, but anyone who didn’t know that already has been failing to keep up. Just did a Twitter scroll and discovered there is no shortage of wannabes out there stoking fear and anger, particularly about public schools and teachers. I know it’s trendy to say someone’s going to get killed over this, but from the tone and hysteria of the clamor, I think it’s only a matter of time.

And now I think I’m-a walk Wendy. I leave you with this excellent joke:

That cut to Peter Doocy…

“Everyone had to prove they were fully vaccinated and boosted. So if you are at home watching this and you wonder how to do that, just contact your favorite Fox News reporter. They’re all here, vaccinated and boosted, all of them.” pic.twitter.com/kA56YzjiVU

— Matt Wilstein (@mattwilstein) May 1, 2022

And wish you all a good week.

Years ago, when I was younger, callow and a lazy newspaper columnist, I opened my mail one morning and a story fell into my lap.

The letter was from a former resident of the Pixley Home, a long-closed child welfare agency in Fort Wayne. Back in the day, if you lacked the resources to support your own children, you didn’t get cash or food stamps or other help from the government. Rather, the government would take over the care and raising of your children in a place like the Pixley Home, sort of an orphanage for children who weren’t orphans. This woman’s time at Pixley was sometime in the ’30s or ’40s, when the Depression, and then the war, disrupted many families. Kids at Pixley might have only one parent, often a widower father but sometimes a woman who had no family of her own to help with her burden. Child care outside of a grandmother or aunt was virtually nonexistent, so if you had to work to support yourself and had no one to watch your children? You surrendered them to a place like the Pixley Home.

If it sounds cruel to you, you’re not the only one.

Parents could visit their children, of course, on Sundays. And parents could get their children back, once they were back on their feet. I don’t recall what the process was to reclaim them, but I do know children generally stayed for months or years.

Anyway, the woman who wrote was trying to put together a reunion of Pixley kids, and hoped I could publicize it. I dug up a picture of the old building, called a few of the other residents that she had already tracked down, and wrote a column describing this merry, loving place, because that’s how my correspondent remembered it. She described it as something out of Little Orphan Annie, with stern-but-kind caretakers, big group dinners and so forth. It was like having a couple dozen brothers and sisters, all sleeping in dorms and bunk beds. About the worst thing she remembered was the weekly dose of castor oil everyone had to take.

The column ran, a few more Pixley kids were found as a result, the reunion went as planned and then, a few weeks after that, another letter arrived.

Like the first, it was written by an older woman. Only her memories of the Pixley Home were very different. She described a particular delivery man who would hang around after he’d offloaded his groceries and find a way to corner her in a quiet place. You can imagine what happened next. She certainly hadn’t forgotten it. She said she told the matrons about him, but nothing was done. It’s safe to say that decades later, she was still pretty upset about it. She certainly didn’t want to go to a happy reunion, and didn’t. But she wanted me to know.

Jeff has written about this elsewhere, and he’s right: Sexual abuse of children and women is absolutely nothing new, and was far, far more widespread than any of us know. My Fort Wayne neighbor’s mother-in-law was profoundly deaf from birth, and it happened to her. If you wanted a perfect victim, why not choose a girl who couldn’t talk? Or a girl in an institution? Or a servant or other low-status worker with no power and few resources to fight back?

The good ol’ days weren’t, in other words.

I thought of this other Pixley girl a couple years ago, when a father in one of the Larry Nassar sentencing hearings lunged at the defendant, calling him a son-of-a-bitch and asking for “one minute alone,” etc. He was subdued by deputies before he laid a hand on Nassar. So now his daughter, molested by Nassar at 13, has to further deal with the sight of her father being taken from the courtroom in handcuffs.

I want to tentatively raise my hand and ask a question: Is it possible to acknowledge every one of Nassar’s victims, to let them speak and describe how they were hurt by him, and still give them what they need to live the rest of their lives, not as victims, but as survivors? Because as creepy as having some doctor stick his ungloved fingers in you might be, having that define the rest of your life is far, far worse.

All of these stories are terrible, and some are unendurable. A father whose guilt over not protecting his daughter drove him to suicide. A victim who committed suicide herself.

When I read that ESPN piece about Todd Hodne, the rapist who played briefly at Penn State, I was struck by…well, by so many things. But what elevated it, in my eyes, was the careful attention paid to what happened to the women after they were raped by this behemoth. The girl who, at 16, successfully fended him off found strength in what she’d done, strength that has buttressed her throughout her life. Betsy Sailor, the woman who tried so hard through her terror to remember every detail, so she could testify later in court, similarly carried that good-deed-that-came-of-a-terrible-one into how she lived. Others were broken, or nearly so, by what happened. One woman remembered her mother, a Hodne victim, and the anxiety she was never able to shake afterward.

Of course you can’t blame those who didn’t turn straw into gold; no one knows how they’ll come through a trauma until it happens.

I was also struck, reading the Hodne story, that we’re finally getting better at how we treat women (and men) who endure these crimes. Victim impact statements are only part of it. We obviously have far, far to go. But there’s a glimmer of a bright side to look on, at least sometimes.

I don’t want to bring y’all down today, but the Pixley Home has been knocking around my head for a while now, and it needed to come out.

Bloggage?

In Michigan, the state GOP continues to delaminate. The guy in that story is deep in the DeVos organization, as I recall, and if he’s out, well, Katy bar the door.

If you were wondering if there’s a worse businessman in the world than Donald Trump, I do believe we’ve found him:

Boeing should have rejected then-President Donald Trump’s proposed terms to build two new Air Force One aircraft, the company’s CEO said Wednesday.

Dave Calhoun spoke Wednesday on the company’s quarterly earnings call, just hours after Boeing disclosed that it has lost $660 million transforming two 747 airliners into flying White Houses.

Then-President Trump, an aviation enthusiast, took a keen interest in the new presidential jets, involving himself in everything from contract negotiations to the plane’s color scheme. As part of the deal, Boeing signed a fixed-price contract that required the company, not taxpayers, to pay for any cost overruns during the complicated conversion of the two airliners.

Then-Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg, who was dismissed in December 2019, personally negotiated the Air Force One terms with Trump at the White House and the former president’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.

P.S. Dennis Muilenberg left his “dismissal” with a $62 million exit package.

This weekend was pretty much perfect, weather-wise. Temperatures in the high 70s, sunny, really nice. So of course I woke up Sunday feeling lousy, didn’t get much better, thought I’d read a little until I felt peppier, then had a bad attack of vertigo. It lasted a couple hours, wouldn’t respond to any of the home remedies I tried. (It’s called the Epley maneuver, tried it three times, zilch.) Just had to wait it out, and it lasted two or three hours.

However, it was pleasant to lie on the bed with the birdies tweeting outside, writing my own obituary in my head, based on my assessments of exactly what sort of brain tumor I no doubt have.

At least I didn’t throw up this time. Progress!

The state Republican convention was this weekend. I checked the tweets from time to time. It started quiet, ended loud, and the two Trump-endorsed candidates for attorney general and secretary of state won the party’s endorsement. (They did an “endorsement” convention for some offices this year, to clear the decks for a full summer of campaigning, although the gubernatorial slate of 10 count ’em 10 candidates will have to fight it out in August.

The now-officially-endorsed AG nominee is a nightmare, fired from one firm for padding billings and equally unsuccessful advancing his election-fraud suits after 2020. The SOS candidate is a religious nut…

,,,with no election experience. She, too, has advanced claims of misconduct in 2020 not supported by any evidence. She also calls herself a college professor, because she teaches two classes at Wayne County Community College — public speaking and the how-to-be-a-college-student class you often find in community and junior colleges, where students are frequently first-generation students.

For the record, I doubt either one will win. But as 2016 demonstrated, one must never say never. Which brings us to this piece from a few days back:

In statehouses and courtrooms across the country, as well as on right-wing news outlets, allies of Mr. Trump — including the lawyer John Eastman — are pressing for states to pass resolutions rescinding Electoral College votes for President Biden and to bring lawsuits that seek to prove baseless claims of large-scale voter fraud. Some of those allies are casting their work as a precursor to reinstating the former president.

The efforts have failed to change any statewide outcomes or uncover mass election fraud. Legal experts dismiss them as preposterous, noting that there is no plausible scenario under the Constitution for returning Mr. Trump to office.

But just as Mr. Eastman’s original plan to use Congress’s final count of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021, to overturn the election was seen as far-fetched in the run-up to the deadly Capitol riot, the continued efforts are fueling a false narrative that has resonated with Mr. Trump’s supporters and stoked their grievances. They are keeping alive the same combustible stew of conspiracy theory and misinformation that threatens to undermine faith in democracy by nurturing the lie that the election was corrupt.

And people like these will no doubt be very useful in the future. Which is why turnout in November will be very, very important and if the Democrats don’t start acting that way, I’m gonna scream.

Couple of updates:

Kevin has moved on. On Wednesday we had some work done on the house, a sagging staircase buttressed for the next 70 years or so. It would be POUNDING and DRILLING and STRANGE MEN GOING UP AND DOWN THE STAIRS, all of which would make Kevin basically MELT DOWN.

So I took him to daycare. I told the lady at the front desk his story, went home, and two hours later the phone rang. It was another staffer, saying he’d fallen in love and if I really wanted to place him somewhere else, would I consider him?

Would I consider him? A guy who could take him to all-day play every single day? Oh yes I would. And I think this is now a happy ending:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Camp Bow Wow SCS Lil' Campers (@camp_bow_wow_scs_lil)

Sometimes a match just doesn’t work out. On a day like today, when I had to spend hours in bed, I’m reminded what a good idea this was.

OK, into the week feeling faintly nauseated. Sounds about right. Hopes yours is better.

I’ve been wanting to write something about transgender issues. I’m waiting for the static in my head around the issue to stop being so staticky, but the more I read and think about it, the louder it gets, so here goes. I usually work through these things by writing about them, anyway.

Let me begin with a revelation that shakes me to my core:

I find myself largely in agreement with this Ross Douthat column.

People? That never happens. Until now.

It’s paywalled, and I’ll clip/paste/summarize as best I can:

After laying out some rather eye-popping statistics — that 21 percent of Gen Z identifies as LGBT, he notes:

Here are three possible readings of these statistics. The first interpretation: This is great news. Sexual fluidity, transgender and nonbinary experience are clearly intrinsic to the human experience, our society used to suppress them with punitive heteronormativity and only now are we getting a true picture of the real diversity of sexual attractions and gender identities. (Just as, for example, we discovered that left-handedness is much more common once we stopped trying to train kids out of it.)

So the response from society should be sustained encouragement, especially if you care about teenage mental health: This newly awakened diversity should be supported from the time it first makes itself manifest, at however young an age, and to the extent that parents feel uncomfortable with their children’s true selves, it’s the task of educators and schools to support the kid, not to defer to parental anxiety or bigotry.

The second interpretation: We shouldn’t read too much into it. This trend is probably mostly just young people being young people, exploring and experimenting and differentiating themselves from their elders. Most of the Generation Zers identifying as L.G.B.T. are calling themselves bisexual and will probably end up in straight relationships, if they aren’t in them already. Some of the young adults describing themselves as transgender or nonbinary may drift back to cisgender identities as they grow older.

So we shouldn’t freak out over their self-identification — but neither should we treat it as a definitive revelation about human nature or try to build new curriculums or impose certain rules atop a fluid and uncertain situation. Tolerance is essential; ideological enthusiasm is unnecessary.

A third interpretation: This trend is bad news. What we’re seeing today isn’t just a continuation of the gay rights revolution; it’s a form of social contagion which our educational and medical institutions are encouraging and accelerating. These kids aren’t setting themselves free from the patriarchy; they’re under the influence of online communities of imitation and academic fashions laundered into psychiatry and education — one part Tumblr and TikTok mimesis, one part Judith Butler.

There is no clear evidence that any of this is making kids happier or better adjusted; instead all we see is a worsening of teen mental health, blurring into a young-adult landscape where sex and relationships and marriage are on the wane. So what we need now is probably more emphasis on biology, normativity and reconciliation with your own maleness or femaleness, not further deconstruction.

I find myself solidly in Camp #2. Like most people I know, the second interpretation fits with my direct experience and observation. I have known trans people, know them now, see elements of it in younger people, and even in the young children of people I know. I am happy, proud even, to support trans people in every way I can. I’ll use whatever names or pronouns they might want, treat them with respect. Share a bathroom. Hell, share a locker room if that’s the ask. It seems pretty simple to me, very live-and-let-live. People exist across a broad, vast spectrum of individuality, and that’s what makes them so wonderful.

That said, I am uncomfortable with some of the radical treatments being made available to children, adolescents and even young adults. I’m talking surgery, hormones, puberty blockers, etc. I understand that an older trans man, weary of binding his chest, may opt for breast removal, and OK, your body, your choice. But I’m really leery of saying that to a 19-year-old, let alone a 14-year-old.

Here are some of the ideas and experiences that contribute to the static in my head these days. I offer them in no particular order, just as a slide show of my brain:

** Many conservatives like to say trans people are mentally ill. Having recently shared an evening with a trans woman (hi there, you know who you are), as well as many other encounters in recent years, I reject that out of hand. (Although I’m convinced this trans man has more than one screw loose, sorry. It’s impossible to look at the near-full-length photo of him, showing off the new, surgically constructed bulge in his tighty whities, and not see the enormous divot on his thigh, where the flesh to construct it was harvested, and not be appalled. That’s not to mention the still-obvious female waistline, and I shudder to think how that’s going to be rectified in some future operating room.) But mental illness? For living as a person of another gender? Sorry, no.

** I think back on, of all things, Edward Bodkin, whom you can google, although Hoosiers will remember him as the Huntington Castrator. In the less-edified fog of the late ’90s, there was lots of discussion as to who, exactly, would seek out the castration services of a man who practiced his craft on a filthy kitchen table. As I recall, the easiest answer was transgender women who couldn’t afford the services of a reputable surgeon. I also recall one of my colleagues hanging up the phone after an extended interview with the editor of some fetish magazine — was it Ball Club? Something like that — and coming over to my desk, rather shaken, for a debrief. The gist of the interview was basically that body dysmorphia is real, that it doesn’t always break down along clear gender lines, and that for whatever reason, some men might want to kiss their testicles goodbye.

** Not long after that, the Atlantic published a long story about people who seek out amputation of healthy limbs, sometimes by mangling the ones they have in self-inflicted injuries, out of nothing more than a sense that they are meant to be amputees.

** I’ve been told most people do not regret assuming genders other than those assigned at birth. I accept that. But I reject that this number is so overwhelmingly large that those who do have second thoughts are outliers we can disregard. This essay, recently published in the WashPost, seems noteworthy:

When I was 19, I had surgery for sex reassignment, or what is now called gender affirmation surgery. The callow young man who was obsessed with transitioning to womanhood could not have imagined reaching middle age. But now I’m closer to 50, keeping a watchful eye on my 401(k), and dieting and exercising in the hope that I’ll have a healthy retirement.

In terms of my priorities and interests today, that younger incarnation of myself might as well have been a different person — yet that was the person who committed me to a lifetime set apart from my peers.
There is much debate today about transgender treatment, especially for young people. Others might feel differently about their choices, but I know now that I wasn’t old enough to make that decision. Given the strong cultural forces today casting a benign light on these matters, I thought it might be helpful for young people, and their parents, to hear what I wish I had known.

There follows a list of regrets, and they boil down to: I wish I’d been able to come to terms with my homosexuality. She concludes:

What advice would I pass on to young people seeking transition? Learning to fit in your body is a common struggle. Fad diets, body-shaping clothing and cosmetic surgery are all signs that countless millions of people at some point have a hard time accepting their own reflection. The prospect of sex can be intimidating. But sex is essential in healthy relationships. Give it a chance before permanently altering your body.

Most of all, slow down. You may yet decide to make the change. But if you explore the world by inhabiting your body as it is, perhaps you’ll find that you love it more than you thought possible.

One reason I am sympathetic to this view is my direct experience with a member of our commenting community here. Alex commented on this essay:

If I’d been given the opportunity to change genders at adolescence, I would have gone for it. After a dozen or so years of psychoanalytic work as an adult, I’m glad I didn’t. The counseling I underwent taught me many things, but perhaps most important of all, to accept myself as I am. My identity is no longer tied up in the arbitrarily rigid gender norms that I grew up with, and I find this so much more liberating than if I had gone under the knife and endured a lifetime medical regimen in order to conform to a physical ideal that I would have fallen short of anyway.

Gender fluidity is a state of mind, and a perfectly healthy one that needs no surgical augmentation.

Honestly, I think no one can make an informed choice who hasn’t had a sex life or gained significant social maturity beyond young adulthood. Not an easy message to impress upon young people who fervently believe that a sex change is the one thing they need in order to find fulfilment when they’ve gotten it from nothing else. But I’m willing to go out on a limb and risk being called a stodgy old fart and a buzzkill if I can persuade even one young person to reconsider. Next to getting myself some good counseling, it was the best decision I ever made.

Alex and I exchanged a few emails over “In the Darkroom,” Susan Faludi’s outstanding memoir of her reconciliation and short-lived relationship with her estranged father, following his gender change. I won’t share them; if Alex wants to, he knows where to do it. I highly recommend the book, by the way.

** Conversations with gay men on this topic all seem to end, maybe after a drink or three, with a lowered voice, a glance around to see who might overhear, and a confession that while they are supportive, etc., they sure seem to know a lot of hot-mess trans people. Maybe that’s because they’re treated so badly by others, so misunderstood. It can’t be easy.

** I know I’ll clash with some of you over this, but I’m a feminist who wonders why, once again, women are carrying most of the burden for all this societal enlightenment. Yes, I’m talking about That Swimmer, but also the issues J.K. Rowling is raising: What about women’s prisons? Domestic-violence shelters? What about…identity? Graham Linehan is affirmatively anti-trans, but it can be useful to check in with these folks from time to time. Do scroll through his recounting of the story of Jaclyn Moore, and make your own conclusions.

I’ve known radical feminists who are deeply offended by drag culture, who find it, at base, a mockery of womanhood. I’m not among them, but I feel that way about Jaclyn Moore, sorry.

** Speaking of identity, you know another bad actor in all this? The fucking Kardashians, who have steamrolled through the culture with this insane version of femininity that, had I confronted it at age 14 or so, might have made me call myself non-binary, too. The plastic surgery, the dieting, the fucking waist trainers, the laxative teas, the injections of fillers and plumpers and slimmers and all the rest of it — just fuck them all the way out of town. They are not helping. Has femininity always been this rigid? I thought we’d learned something during the ’70s, and here we are 50 years later, making the same mistakes.

** Language. Oy, the language. Here’s my declaration: I will never, ever be able to say “pregnant people” or “menstruating people” with a straight face. Never mind the they/them stuff. You should hear me talking to Kate about some of her friends, it’s like the who’s-on-first routine: “They’re going with you? X and who else?” etc. Language should make messages clear. This language does not.

Finally, I guess my conclusions are that I have no conclusions. I just have static. Some people are indeed walking around in a body that feels all wrong, and if they accommodate it in some way that doesn’t hurt others, that’s perfectly fine. Young people should be in counseling, maybe for years, before they undergo surgery or drugs that will leave them forever changed. And that’s it for me, for today. How’s everyone else doing today?