Welcome to Sunday, November 2, 2025, and remember that the time changed last night, moving an hour back at 2 a.m. Therefore, you were entitled to an extra hour of sleep. If you forgot, take an hour’s nap today. It’s also Plan Your Epitapth Day. Here are two great ones. First, from reddit, the grave of Mel Blanc, who voiced many cartoon characters, including Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety, Sylvester the Cat, and many others.
It is, of course, the ending of many Warner Brothers cartoons, and voiced by Porky Pig:
And the grave of poet William Butler Yeats, with the epitaph taken from his great poem “Under Ben Bulben”. The relevant verse:
Under bare Ben Bulben’s headIn Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid,An ancestor was rector thereLong years ago; a church stands near,By the road an ancient Cross.No marble, no conventional phrase,On limestone quarried near the spotBy his command these words are cut:Cast a cold eyeOn life, on death.Horseman, pass by!
It’s also National Deviled Egg Day, and Zero Tasking Day.
Since November is Native American Heritage Month, Google has a special Doodle for it, showing a variety of what seem to be flutes. Click on the Doodle below to see where it goes:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 1 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*I am a happy man this morning. When I went to bed last night, the Dodgers were behind Toronto in the final game of the World Series. But mirabile dictu, I woke up this morning and saw that the Dogers took the game after 11 innings—and the series! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! From the NYT:
Building a sports dynasty is supposed to be difficult. It should demand more than a singular talent, a massive payroll, and a clear path to a championship. A dynasty has to be earned, and the Los Angeles Dodgers earned it Saturday night in a Game 7 for the ages.
They didn’t have a lead until past midnight in the 11th inning, but they held on to beat the Toronto Blue Jays 5-4 to clinch their second consecutive championship and bring an epic World Series to a fitting and monumental conclusion.
On the mound at the end was Yoshinobu Yamamoto, pitching on zero days’ rest after starting Game 6. The winning blow came from catcher Will Smith, a homegrown Dodgers superstar, who hit a go-ahead home run in the 11th. No. 9 hitter Miguel Rojas, who wasn’t even in the lineup the first five games of this series, hit a game-tying home run with one out in the ninth. The game ended with a double play, Mookie Betts to Freddie Freeman, two of the cornerstones of a team that has now won three of the past six World Series.
“We know how to win tough games, we know how to win blowouts,” Betts said in a TV interview. “We just know how to win.”
The Dodgers were the favorites and had been, basically, since Opening Day. They won the World Series last year and spent nearly $500 million in the offseason to try to win it again. Because of their excess — their payroll, their star power, their 13 straight trips to the playoffs — the Dodgers have an annual expectation of something close to perfection, yet their flaws were exposed, especially in this series.
The Dodgers’ depleted bullpen held the line in Game 3 but couldn’t control the damage in Games 1, 4 and 6. The Blue Jays outhit them. Even the Dodgers’ greatest strength, their rotation, was outmatched. The Blue Jays’ rotation had more strikeouts, a lower WHIP, and a better ERA in the series.
But the Dodgers still won because of both their superstars and their role players. The Blue Jays pushed them to the brink, forcing them to win Games 6 and 7 on the road in Toronto. Betts, who’d been stone cold, delivered a big hit in Game 6. Max Muncy, who’d also not hit much this series, went 3-for-4 with an eighth-inning home run in Game 7. Rojas’s game-tying homer was his first hit in a month and only his second home run since the middle of July. Andy Pages — who’d been benched due to lack of production in the postseason — made a game-saving catch in center field that prevented a Blue Jays walk-off in the bottom of the ninth.
Blue Jays DH George Springer, playing through an injury that had sidelined him in Games 4 and 5, had three hits in the game including a leadoff single off Dodgers starter Shohei Ohtani in the third inning. Three batters later, Bo Bichette, a free agent in a few days, hit a three-run homer that, for most of the night, seemed destined to be a game-winner. Bichette later singled in what might have been his final Blue Jays at-bat.
The Dodgers chipped away at the lead, but they still trailed 4-3 in the ninth when Rojas hit his go-ahead home run. A half inning later, the Blue Jays loaded the bases with one out in the bottom of the ninth, giving themselves two chances to walk off with a championship. But with Yamamoto inducing a groundball and Rojas throwing home for the second out of the inning before center fielder Pages made a dramatic, inning-ending catch while crashing into left fielder Kiké Hernández.
The Dodgers blew their own bases-loaded opportunity in the 10th, but Yamamoto just kept pitching until Smith hit his go-ahead homer and Freeman caught the final out.
It was not the easy victory many predicted seven months ago, or even a week ago. The Dodgers had to fight for it. They had to earn it. They were pushed to the brink and came out with a ring.
. . . . This World Series was already being hailed as one of the greatest in history, and that was before this showstopper of a finale.
Indeed! This was baseball at its finest. Dodger Pitcher Yoshinobua Yamomoto won the Most Valuable Player of the Series award. Here are the highlights:
*Hamas handed over to Israel what was purported to be remains of three hostages, but DNA evidence showed that none of the remains came from hostages.
The partial remains of three bodies that Hamas handed over to Israel on Friday night via the Red Cross were assessed by Israeli authorities as not belonging to any hostages, The Times of Israel has learned.
The assessment on Saturday was made following the completion of identification efforts at the Abu Kabir forensic institute in Tel Aviv.
The terror group’s military wing confirmed it handed over the remains of three bodies to Israel.
According to the Al-Qassam Brigades, it had offered samples of the unidentified bodies it found, but “the enemy refused to receive the samples and requested to receive the bodies for examination.”
Hamas said it handed over the remains “to counter the enemy’s claims.”
There was no comment from Israel on the transfer, but it has previously charged that the terror group knows the location of the vast majority of the remaining bodies of hostages, and is purposely stalling.
The bodies of 11 hostages are still held by terror groups in the Strip.
The Red Cross on Friday night said it transferred the partial remains of three bodies from the terror group to Israel.
“The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), in its role as a neutral intermediary, assisted this evening at the request and with the approval of the parties in returning the remains of three bodies to the Israeli authorities,” the ICRC said in a statement.
The remains were taken out of the Gaza Strip and to the forensic institute for identification.
Earlier this week, Hamas returned the partial remains of Ofir Tzarfati, whose body was recovered by the IDF nearly two years prior.
Military drone footage showed the terror group staging the discovery of the remains before handing them over to the Red Cross, which Tzarfati’s family decried as Hamas “manipulation.”
I’ve seen the video of Hamas burying remains and then pretending to find them. How low can this organization go? I feel for the families and loved ones who want at least the remains of “their” hostages. I’m pretty sure Hamas has those remains, but is holding onto them as a pathetic last attempt to have some leverage over Israel. But it won’t work any more.
*The WSJ reports of something we knew about already: the rift in the LGBTQ+ community between the gay people and the queer + trans people.
In his book “Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic,” which comes out next week, [Ben] Appel argues that gender ideology is “illiberal, regressive and anti-gay”—as much a cult as Lambs of God, the fundamentalist sect in which Appel was raised—and one that he and an increasingly vocal group of gay men, lesbians and bisexual people reject. [Appel is a gay man.]
More than three dozen in-depth interviews with gay men, lesbian women, bisexuals and transgender people, along with surveys and several new books, including “The End of the Gay Rights Revolution” by Ronan McCrea, also coming out next month, reveal a complicated—and contentious—relationship between the LGB and TQ+ components of what advocacy organizations and the Democratic party refer to as “LGBTQ+ people.”
While gay and lesbian people emphasized that they oppose discrimination and harassment of transgender adults, they resent being “force teamed,” “taken over” or “erased” by trans and queer ideologues, especially when gay people constitute 90% of those Gallup categorizes as LGBTQ+. In private chat groups and burgeoning LGB organizations and on podcasts, many question whether same-sex attracted people should have allied themselves with trans and queer identities in the first place. To most LGBTQ+ groups this attitude is nothing short of trans exclusion and antithetical to their principles.
These disagreements stem from radically different ways of viewing identity. Gay people typically see their homosexuality as fundamentally grounded in biology and based on attraction to people of the same sex. Transgender people instead prioritize gender identity, defined by the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group, as “one’s innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both or neither.” Meanwhile, queer theory argues that both sex and gender exist on a spectrum and are often fluid, allowing for labels like nonbinary and genderqueer.
There have always been fault lines within the rainbow coalition. But in the past 10 years, ever since the right to gay marriage was secured in 2015, further divisions have emerged and expanded, along with growing rancor and vitriol. All of which belies the overriding image of inclusion touted by advocacy groups.
. . . Blowups regularly erupt over these conflicts. In August, for example, John Boyne, author of the bestselling “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” was boycotted by more than 800 writers when his new novel, which addresses homophobia and sexual assault, was shortlisted for the Polari Prize, a literary award for gay British authors. Boyne had publicly stated that he supports transgender rights except when they come into conflict with women’s rights, for example in prisons and domestic violence shelters. His fellow nominees removed themselves from contention in protest. The prize was canceled, and Polari vowe
I remember that fracas, and I have to agree with Boyne on the few transgender “rights” that must be curtailed, but apparently some in the community have no notion of the idea of conflicting “rights” that have to be resolved, sometimes through compromise. The data aren’t in on the biology or genetics of transgenderism, but even if it’s also “fundamentally grounded in biology”, the differences in advocacy tne priorities are, as the article says, the source of the conflict.
*Once again there are claims that Amelia Earhart’s lost plane might have been found (see previous theories here). This is reported by CNN:
An odd shape in the South Pacific that has sparked the latest push to solve one of the greatest mysteries of all time came to light in a backyard in California. USNavy veteran Mike Ashmore was at home in 2020, scrolling through satellite images of a tiny island called Nikumaroro, when he spotted the unexpected object in a lagoon.
Halfway between Australia and Hawaii, Nikumaroro plays a key role in one of two rival hypotheses that seek to explain what happened to the famed aviator Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, who went missing in 1937 while attempting to fly around the world. Their disappearance has captivated researchers for decades and long fascinatedAshmore, a hobbyist who got hooked by a theory that the legendary pilot ended up on the island’s shores.
Ashmore thought what he saw resembled an aircraft wing and shared the picture with a popular Amelia Earhart online forum hosted by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, or TIGHAR, a collective devoted to aviation history and archaeology. The elongated shape in the satellite imagery stirred excited discussion among members, although some said it was likely a log from a palm tree.
The blurry object also caught the attention of archaeologist Rick Pettigrew, a longtime Earhart aficionado and executive director of the Archaeological Legacy Institute in Eugene, Oregon, who decided to investigate further. He said he found that the anomaly, which has since been named the Taraia Object, is visible in other aerial photos taken of the lagoon, including some captured as far back as 1938.
“With the evidence that we have now, it would be a crime for nobody to go there and look,” Pettigrew said.Now an expedition is launching to do just that. Led by Pettigrew and Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, where Earhart once worked in the department of aeronautics, the new effort will make a dash straight for the Taraia Object, in the hopes it could uncover part of Earhart’s plane. Ashmore said he intended to join the journey but has been forced to drop out because of family illness.
The team was set to depart from Majuro in the Marshall Islands on November 4 and sail about 1,200 nautical miles to Nikumaroro. From there, researchers planned to spend around five days on the small island investigating the intriguing object in the lagoon.However, Pettigrew said late Tuesday the expedition had been delayed until 2026, without giving a reason.
I can’t reproduce the photographs, but some of the objects found on Nikumaroro are shown and have this caption:
Artifacts found on Nikumaroro that TIGHAR believes may have been connected to Earhart. (From top left) A jar similar in style to that of Dr. C.H. Berry’s Freckle Ointment. Earhart was known to have been concerned about her freckles; fragments of red material chemically consistent with an early 20th century cosmetic; a broken-apart knife, similar to a knife listed in the Electra’s inventory; a shattered glass bottle. The bottle design was patented on May 30, 1933, according to TIGHAR research. (TIGHAR.org)
That jar of what may be freckle cream is very interesting! At any rate, there are still competing explanations, and another team is going to search the sea floor near Hawaii. The expedition to Nikumaroro has been postponed to 2026 because of weather and permit problems.
*You Read it Here First Department: Andrew Sullivan reprises the study showing a lack of balance in colleges teaching live controversies (race, abortion, Palestine), from a paper I reported on recently:
One of my queerest character traits is that I love differing opinions. It was the assumption that none of this was opinion at all, but merely established empirical fact — of which I was blissfully unaware, probably because I was a bad-faith bigot, or had never picked up a book. This absolute certainty was also generally correlated with higher levels of education — just as “liberals” and “very liberals” were far more likely to have a college degree than those to their right. Over time, my friends began to wither among the educated classes, especially the newly minted and humorless “queers”, as I gravitated to normies, who had some strong views, were open to some others, and enjoyed a good chat and smoke sesh.
A new study tells me little I didn’t suspect already about my educational peers and how this strange correlation emerged between higher education and epistemological certainty. But it does prove something empirically important. The study scraped millions of college curricula available online, mainly in the last decade from Anglophone countries — and found that very, very few students in the humanities are exposed to anything apart from critical theory in all its deranged permutations.
On race in American history, for example, only one viewpoint is actually taught: that the US is a white supremacist state that murders and imprisons black people as its core goal, that its real founding was 1619, its Constitution a form of white tyranny, and racial “progress” is a lie designed to obscure this permanent reality. It was deemed the authoritative view of American history by the New York Times, no less. And look: this is a perfectly legitimate point of view and should indeed be taught — alongside empirical, historical, liberal and conservative perspectives.
But almost nothing else is taught.
. . . .The new study also looked at Israel-Palestine and abortion — and of course the same pattern holds, as it does everywhere in the “humanities”. When I glance at what any young person will be taught about homosexuality in college, for example, there is nothing but critical queer and gender theory. I would wager that most gay men under 30 believe the gay rights movement was entirely begun by black trans women, that the penis is just an unusual sex organ for a woman, and that Matthew Shepard was the victim of a hate crime by a total stranger. It’s not so much indoctrination as a completely closed system in which the only communication is about the degree of heresy. You want an idea of how this works? Go to Bluesky. And slowly die.
This is why, despite my horror at government meddling in higher education, I’ve softened on it. The bubble that exists on campus in the humanities is so far left and, at this point, so impregnable that it has to be burst; it is incapable of bursting itself. This system of illiberal education is creating one of the most ignorant and incurious elites just as populism is filling the larger void that liberalism once did. And no, this is not a distraction from opposing Trump. It is central to opposing Trump, because in a world of only ideological and postmodern fantasies, the phantasms of the far right have far more traction than the far left’s, and always have.
Accurately discerning reality matters for what was once our way of life. If liberal democracy has any hope at all, it has to be built on liberal education, and that education must have an open mind at its core. Left elites closed it, and nailed the door shut. Time, alas, to break it down.
I do think that study is important, but since it’s based on syllabi it needs to be analyzed further (see the paper here). Most of us in liberal-arts schools already know that there is a lack of balance in how things are taught.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is sad. and looks it:
Hili: I’m trying to look on the bright side.
Andrzej: And?
Hili: Failing miserably.
In Polish:
Hili: Próbuję być optymistką.
Ja: I co?
Hili: Kiepsko mi idzie.
*******************
From The Absurd Sign Project Uncensored 2:
From Cats Are Assholes:
From Now That’s Wild:
Masih is still celebrating the conviction of her would-be assassins, but J. K. Rowling retweeted something that could have been on Masih’s site:
A new Taliban ban has forbidden women from working in the carpet weaving industry, leaving many widows and sole breadwinners unemployed. Despite earlier restrictions on office work, some women had relied on these labor-intensive jobs—until now.💔😡
Please stand with Afghan women pic.twitter.com/IE7aa6VYr2— WDI.Afghanistan (@WDIAfghanistan1) October 29, 2025
From Luana. I am guessing this is a joke, but if it isn’t it supports Rebecca Tuvel’s hypohesis that transgenderism is okay but transracialism is not.
CisAmerican liberal gets educated by transindigenous man of color 💪🏾🪶 pic.twitter.com/wQXCvTgj1m
— Josh Seiter (@josh_seiter) October 28, 2025
From Simon; Ricky Gervais’s cat Pickle. Pickle looks pretty content:
She’s done fuck all again today except be adorable.
— Ricky Gervais (@mrrickygervais.bsky.social) 2025-10-30T15:53:37.059Z
From Malcolm; the world’s yo-yo champion. I used to play with them as a kid, but this is yo-yo-ing of the highest caliber:
Hajime Miura clinched his 8th 3A World Yo-Yo Championship title at the World Yo-Yo Contest 2025 in Prague—cementing his legacy as one of the most dominant players ever.pic.twitter.com/aEBY5KiLzB
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) October 16, 2025
One from my feed. I’ve posted this before, I think, but the cat’s expression when the sugar glider lifts off is priceless!
“What? You can fly?” 😂 pic.twitter.com/iUqj24t08Q
— We don’t deserve cats 😺 (@catsareblessing) October 31, 2025
One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:
This Dutch Jewish boy was killed as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was five years old, and would be 89 today had he not been gassed.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-11-02T13:40:13.581Z
And two from Dr. Cobb, author. Matthew asks of this first one, “Is it the dog or the filmer that they have imprinted on?”
Bonne journée à tous ! 👋Un peu de mignonnerie pour débuter ce samedi pluvieux…. Take Care 🙏#Radiohead 🎶
— John-y-Cash (@john-y-cash.bsky.social) 2025-11-01T07:39:25.626Z
This is a LOT of rays:
I just finished doing a grid count on this group of rays (aka fever) I filmed recently in the St Pete/Clearwater, Florida area. This still isn't the largest group I filmed though, I'll share that one soon. #nature #amazing #animals #awesome #wildlife #ocean #fiddythousandflappersflapping
— See Through Canoe (@seethroughcanoe.bsky.social) 2025-10-23T19:37:22.089Z
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
His mother had often said, When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it. -Lois McMaster Bujold, writer (b. 2 Nov 1949)
I liked her stuff. Read everything up to 2002.
I stayed up past midnight here on the East coast at my grandson’s texted urging and watched till the finish. What a finish it was. Bottom of the 11th, up by a run, one out, tying run on third, another runner on first; broken bat (slow) groundball to short to turn a close double play, end the game, and the series. Wow!
On another subject: I know nothing about poetry, but “Under Ben Bulben” moves me.
(1) Surely the square root photo is fake? Either that or whatever delimiting structure that caused the roots to grow like that have since been removed.
(2) Best epitaph ever still that of Jonathan Swift.
I think the photo of the square root of tree is real. Not rational, as that severe root bind isn’t healthy, bit I have seen square and cube roots of many other plants.
Pamela Paul : “The Growing Divide in the Rainbow Coalition”
The pamphlet Queers Read This! was published anonymously and distributed in 1990 at a gay pride parade in New York.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queers_Read_This
PDF available online. Important background, IMHO.
I wish I knew how to attribute my favorite epitaph, but search as I can, nothing comes
. . . anyway, here it is: Always finish what you
Or some immortal words from John Lennon:
You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not
😂
Amazing World Series, best I’ve ever seen.
And Andrew Sullivan’s piece shows us how far social contagion can go. Right before our eyes, the west transformed from a place where truth was a virtue to one where truth doesn’t exist at all.
Finally, the yo-yo man is amazing! Could I do that with my blue plastic Duncan Imperial? Don’t know. I’ve never tried.
It took me a month to learn how to ‘walk the dog.’ Then I retired.
I not only stayed up until almost 1:00 to listen to the whole of yesterday’s game, but I also stayed up until 3:00 to listen to all of game 3! Lifelong Dodger fan; it finally doesn’t just feel like a life sentence.
It was actually a game-tying home run. C’mon NYT; even if you aren’t sure how to tell a man apart from a woman, you ought to be able to get a simple baseball fact right.
And, the bottom three lowest life forms on this planet: 3) rat; 2) cockroach; 1) Hamas. What a thoroughly disgusting waste of organic molecules.
“Curtailing” trans rights to exclude those demands that abridge women’s interests won’t work. Men who self-identify as women insist they are women, so there is nothing to discuss and certainly nothing to curtail. If a woman is upset at being naked in the presence of a woman with a penis, that is the bigoted woman’s problem, not the “trans woman’s” problem to accommodate her irrational prejudices. Try as you will, you will not be able to segregate women’s demands for privacy, safety, and fair athletic competition from “reasonable” protections from discrimination. The activists need those very women-abridging “rights” you are trying to curtail in order to validate themselves as women. Just as freedom of speech receives its strongest test when speakers want to say revolting things, trans rights against discrimination receive their strongest test when women complain about them most bitterly. Men who identify as women want to be seen as “women like any other woman”, not “women except where the bigoted oppressor says we aren’t.”
You can say “biological” men or people “assigned” male gender at birth shouldn’t enter women’s spaces, sure. But the trans activists will say you are missing the point. Transwomen aren’t being oppressed because they’re male. They’re being oppressed because they’re transgendered, because they are being forced to live as the gender they know they aren’t, because their gender discovery is being “erased.”
Unfortunately the only solution I can see is to recognize that the concept of trans rights is flawed from the start, being founded on the false premise once believed to be true that people are in some real way transgender. We should therefore indeed erase gender identity and expression entirely from the list of prohibited grounds for discrimination in human rights / civil rights codes. And we should certainly not equate prohibitions against discrimination by sex with discrimination by self-claimed gender.
I agree, Leslie.
I think what we need to do is make it clear that sex non-conformity is protected. People should be free to cross-dress. But where sex is relevant, law and social policy must be based on the individual’s sex, not their subjective sense of “identity.”
As with all desires to crush and stomp out discrimination, we need to distinguish between negative rights and positive rights. Certainly the state should not punish people for cross-dressing (unless they are using it as a disguise to aid in the commission of a crime) or who are sex non-conforming (whatever that even is.) Those are negative rights, like due process and freedom of speech. They limit the power of the state against the citizen without putting any burdensome obligations on other citizens. They also have the great virtue of not costing anything. “Congress shall make no law. . . ”
Laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of enumerated characteristics are positive rights: They do put obligations created by laws on other citizens. Civil libertarians frown on them because they increase the power of the state. It has to create, fund, and staff an enforcement apparatus of civil servants to help one citizen punish another citizen for the civil offence of discrimination. In Canada this apparatus is called the Human Rights Commission. The U.S. has things like civil rights legislation and its regulatory Titles.
If law and social policy recognize sex and not subjective identity, that will defang the Human Rights Commissions and the trans activists who want to bring discrimination complaints against employers, landlords, and retail businesses on the basis of their subjective identity that they are sex non-conforming. So far as it goes, so good. But cross-dressing and sex non-conformity will no longer be fully “protected” if an employer can now fire a trouble-making sex-non-conforming cross-dressing man who constantly accuses the other employees of misgendering him, without having to worry about his complaining to the HRC. Any complaint must be dismissed because sex-non-conforming “identity” is no longer on the list of prohibited categories of discrimination — only sex itself is — and the state can no longer punish the employer for so discriminating. (The employer would also become free to refuse to hire anyone who gives evidence of being sex non-conforming such as specifying pronouns on the resumé or cross-dressing for the job interview. Much easier to avoid these problems than to fix them.)
Additionally, a female employee who enrolled with the firm indicating Male on her signed intake forms could be fired for cause, for making a false statement on a company document. (The company might well have hired her just to make the sex breakdown of its headcount look better for various government and head-office equity mandates.) She wouldn’t be able to sue for wrongful dismissal on the grounds that the employer “erased” her sense of identity. She just lied.
Are we in agreement here?
Pretty much. I think Bostock established that discrimination on the basis of something like cross-dressing is discrimination on the basis of sex. Which is fine with me, free country, yada yada. But lying about your sex? Insisting others use “your” pronouns? Demanding access to the other sex’s rightful facilities? We agree, that’s not on.
Thanks for engaging, LM.
The Bostock ruling (6-3)
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/17-1618_hfci.pdf
is 172 pages but a lot of appendices and footnotes. The two dissenting opinions are more closely argued, imho, with more extensive citations (particularly Alito.)
The ruling doesn’t protect cross-dressing at work. It just says that discrimination against an employee who “is” transgender falls under the Title VII prohibition against discrimination by sex.
Mr. Bostock himself is homosexual, not transgender. Two other appellants (who died before their cases were heard) were included in the ruling and were all decided together. For our purposes here, a Mr. Stephens was fired on the spot from his job at a funeral home after he notified his employer that on return from his vacation he was going to live and work as a woman. There was no specific behaviour he had engaged in at work that got him fired, and therefore no specific behaviour, such as cross-dressing, was deemed to be protected by the ruling. Indeed Judge Gorsuch wrote for the majority that the ruling put no limitation on an employer’s power to make rules about bathrooms, locker rooms, dress codes (my emphasis) or “anything like that” because none of those rules were before the Court. Rather, firing on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity is necessarily discrimination by sex because behaviour that would be welcomed as normal in one sex — being sexually attracted to men or presenting as a woman — was treated as a firing offence when it occurred in the other.
The two Justices who wrote dissenting opinions heaped scorn on this notion, particularly since the ordinary meaning of sex discrimination even today doesn’t encompass discrimination against homosexuals or trans people, just as the employers claimed, and certainly didn’t in 1964. Indeed the majority accepted that the employees themselves would have agreed that they were fired because they were gay or transgender, not because they were men. Tough, said the Majority. You were really engaging in sex discrimination even if you didn’t know it. That’s not what the phrase “discrimination on the basis of sex” even means, you dolts, said the Dissenters in reply.
Leslie, thanks. I haven’t read the ruling and I am not a lawyer. I just recall reading gender critical attorneys I follow online arguing about the precise consequences of the ruling. But this from “Duly Noted: The D.C. Bar Blog”, is basically how I understand it:
“Additionally, while defining sex as a biological characteristic, Gorsuch said that ‘it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.’ The justice expounded:
“‘[T]ake an employer who fires a transgender person who was identified as a male at birth but who now identifies as a female. If the employer retains an otherwise identical employee who was identified as female at birth, the employer intentionally penalizes a person identified as male at birth for traits or actions that it tolerates in an employee identified as female at birth. Again, the individual employee’s sex plays an unmistakable and impermissible role in the discharge decision.'”
I take this to mean you can cross-dress, be a feminine male, or what-have-you, at work. In other words, gender non-conforming behavior is OK, because discriminating against that would be discrimination on the basis of sex.
But I hope that, as Gorsuch defined “sex” “as a biological characteristic” (THANK YOU, JUSTICE GORSUCH!) the ruling doesn’t mean the gender non-conforming employee has access to the same-sex facilities of the sex he isn’t. I don’t think the ruling implies that he has a “right” to be referred to by all and sundry as “she”. This is OK with me, as it’s not the non-conforming behavior itself that I object to but the erasure of the biological realities of sex and sexual dimorphism. “Trans women” are men.
Hope that’s clear. I suspect we’re on the same page.
I wish we had more room to discuss this, as I’d love to hear your further insights, but I know we risk running foul of Da Rules. Thank you for the discussion!
Ducklings following the puppy: adorable!
🦆🐶
The transindigenous guy also has also done some funny transMexican stuff. The best way to show how absurd the whole trans thing is is to switch it back at them. If you can change sex, then I can change species meow 😂
My favorite epitaph is the one that belonged to Sir Henry Lee of Ditchley, who was buried with an image, or statue, of his mistress, Anne Vavasour kneeling. John Aubrey recorded it in his Brief Lives, and I saw Roy Dotrice recite it when he played Aubrey in the play of that name:
“Here lies the good old knight Sir Harry,
Who loved well but would not marry;
While he lived and had his feeling,
She did lie and he was kneeling.
Now he’s dead and cannot feel,
He doth lie and she doth kneel.”