There have been a rash of chickenshit Dems stepping back from full support for trans rights – against the terrifying backdrop of Trump administration cruelty and legacy media pseudo-scientific, pearl-clutching anti-trans polemics. This is appalling. Right at the point where Trump is failing on so many fronts, and where they should be preparing for a 2028 campaign laser focused on Trump’s destruction and looting of our economy, his grotesque personal failings, and the band of bozos he has put in charge of our government, we see Sistah Souljah-level circular firing squad on basic values.
We will win by having spines, calling bullshit, bringing flamethrowers to knife fights,* attending and heckling at red state town halls, and clearly enunciating policies that will make people’s lives better.
So here is my personal list of the trans-rights-related principles that I will expect in our Democratic nominee:
Trans women are women; trans men are men; non-binary people are non-binary.
Call people by the names and pronouns they prefer. This issue has the highest noise to signal ratio in all of politics right now. If Michael says “call me Mike,” call him Mike. If Michael says “call me Ann,” call her Ann. See how easy that is?
Trans women should use women’s restrooms and trans men should use men’s restrooms. Do you really care who is peeing in the next stall over? Really? And if we we’re worried about assault, we need to start by protecting women from the conservative white dudes who keep assaulting them, not trans women needing the restroom.
People should compete on sports teams aligned with their actual gender, that is they ones they themselves identify, whether or not it lines up with the one on their birth certificate. First of all – and I know this will be the most controversial thing in this post – they’re just games! I know the science supports the concept that trans women who have taken the generally prescribed hormones will no longer have an advantage over AFAB women but fundamentally, these are kids playing kids’ games. Let them play. At the more elite levels, the concept that hormones are the only advantages is laughable. People win Olympic medals because they have physically extreme bodies and all the time, money, and sponsorship necessary to exploit those physical advantages. I will never be in the WNBA not because it’s full of trans women but because I’m 5’2″.
So Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom, Rahm Emmanuel listen up:
We are the party of human and civil rights. We will not win by diluting this. Apologize for your lapse, embrace full rights for our trans siblings, and fight like hell for our country.
*It’s a metaphor — to clarify before the FBI knocks.
Is it possible to turn off the social media reminders that if I wondered what I’d have done during [some other appalling moment in history], that I should not wonder anymore because I’m doing it now, also that my silence is complicity, and that I will be remembered if I sit on the sidelines, and – now that I’m trying to do all the things I would have done during [that other appalling moment in history], not being silent, and getting off the sidelines – that I should be sure to rest.
I know these things. I knew them before the reminders and – thanks! – I really remember them now. But my timeline remains full of these reminders and ALL THAT DOES IS MAKE ME ANXIOUS. It does not increase my effectiveness in resisting the current appalling moment in history.
So, let’s move on to more effective performative reminders. Thanks!
As my five or six regular readers know, my husband and I are a small plaintiffs’ civil rights firm. From our founding in 1996, we have leveraged technology to be able to take on much bigger firms representing enormous companies. In 1996, this meant spending most of our monthly budget on a Westlaw subscription and investing in the discovery management program used by the biglaw firm where we met. In my personal experience, it also helps to marry a database nerd, as Tim adopted — and then taught me to use — Microsoft Access early on, and databases have been a crucial tool in all of our large cases.
Airtable is a basic relational database platform that I use for a very wide variety of purposes, from tracking billable time (linking people to cases to rates) to listing the book series I’ve read and want to read (linking books to authors to series). Airtable is not as powerful as MS Access, but Access is not shareable and Airtable is both shareable — it exists entirely online — and much easier to learn and efficient to use. Although the platform promotes many other uses — for example, project and inventory management — I use it to organize data into related tables, and then quickly and easily sort, filter, and query the data. For example, in most of our prison cases, I’ll set up a “people” table with the incarcerated individuals we’re working with, and an “events” table that tracks key events in the case, linked to the relevant people. It’s easy to add ad hoc tables, for example, in a current case, we served over 600 requests for admission which later turned into undisputed facts in support of summary judgment. I have tables linking people to events to RFAs to undisputed facts, which was incredibly useful in drafting our summary judgment motion. Indeed, Airtable and our wonderful paralegal can be credited for this shout-out in the Court’s decision granting partial summary judgment to our clients, Disability Rights Tennessee and several Deaf individuals in custody of the Tennessee Department of Correction:
[P]laintiffs’ voluminous spreadsheet of incidents . . . confirm that what is at issue in this case, at least as far as interpreters are concerned, is not isolated incidents, but a pervasive and continuing approach to when ASL-reliant deaf inmates will or will not be granted access to interpreters.
Trivette v. Tennessee Dep’t of Correction, No. 3:20-CV-00276, 2024 WL 3366335, at *18 (M.D. Tenn. July 9, 2024).
It’s also easy to set up different “views” of the data, so once you’ve filtered or sorted in specific ways, you can save that view, go back to seeing the entire table, and not have to redo the filter each time you want to see it. This also prevents the shout from across the small office, “hey! who filtered the database?!”
Since I can’t share any firm-related views, here is a snip from my Book Series Airtable:
CaseFleet is an online discovery management platform that we use in all of our cases. During an enormous case several years ago, Tim researched a number of programs and found that CaseFleet was one of the only ones that permitted coding at the individual page level. Most discovery programs let you set up issue codes which you can then attach to each document. This is deeply unhelpful if, just to take a totally random example, you litigate against prison systems that continue to maintain paper-only files and, as a result, produce in discovery 500-page scanned pdfs consisting of the entire file for one prisoner. As you can imagine, if you coded at the document level, you’d likely attach most of your issues codes to each document and have no way of knowing where in the 500 pages the relevant text was. CaseFleet allows you to issue-code at the page level — or even sentence or word level — selecting a passage of text and coding for date, issue, importance, etc. It has a powerful Boolean search feature and efficient document viewing and coding windows.
The other wonderful thing about CaseFleet is that it’s a small operation and we’ve gotten to know their sales and training staff. If you decide to sign up, say hey to Jeff, Meg, and Charlotte from me!
aBreevy8 is a universal text expander. You can create short text abbreviations and it will expand them on any platform and in any program. It is similar to Word’s “AutoCorrect” only much simpler and more powerful. I use it for simple replacements like “fs” becoming “F. Supp.” to entire phrases and sentences, for example, I have set up “ratub” to expand to “readily accessible to and useable by,” the standard for new construction under the Americans with Disabilities Act. It capitalizes the common abbreviations I use day to day: ADA, ASL, HUD, DOJ — and using a different short text thread, will produce the expanded version: Americans with Disabilities Act; American Sign Language; etc. It also supports italics, bold, and underlined text, so in typing cites, “id.” now automatically converts to id.
Replacements I set up in aBreevy8 work in any environment on my laptop: Microsoft programs; browser windows; Zoom chat windows; WordPerfect (yeah, yeah, yeah).
Pause to note that Firefox does not recognize WordPerfect as a thing. Sigh. We few, we happy few.
Workflowy is an incredibly useful outlining program. It would be a must if for no other reason than the fact that Word’s outlining feature is so far beyond awful — not only failing to generate useable outlines, but actively obstructing your work by randomly generating new levels, letters, numbers, indents, outdents, emojis, and small woodland creatures every time you hit the return key.
Even without the stark contrast to Word’s outlining dumpster fire, Workflowy would be an essential. You can easily expand, collapse, focus in, and move nodes at any level. It’s the way I organize every legal research or writing project I do now. And, like Airtable, it advertises a wide variety of other uses, so explore!
Bulk Rename Utility permits you to rename groups of files quickly based on a number of parameters. Unhappy that your opposing counsel just produced 1,000 documents with no “-” between the Bates prefix and the number, when you’ve been using -‘s throughout the case? No problem! Bulk rename will let you insert a “-” into all 1,000 file names in one go. You can add prefixes, suffixes, and sequential numbers and delete the entire beginning or end of a file name. This has saved many frustrating hours of (let’s face it) my paralegal’s time renaming documents one by one.
* * *
So there you have my five favorite utility programs. Only sorry that “small firm semi-tech-competent software influencer” isn’t a thing.
I love this clip (description below) because it reminded me that often spikes like this are installed to prevent humans from lingering or resting in public places, and are generally directed at people who are or appear to be homeless. We should all be more ungovernable and more gracious.
Hitler and Stalin would have to come off buildings, but he says “less egregious” cases like Calhoun are different.
This is literally valuing the millions of white lives lost to the Holocaust and to Stalinism more highly than the millions of black lives lost to American slavery. And by “literally,” I literally mean “literally.”
Kronman accuses those who supported renaming a Yale college (that is, a dorm) — discarding the name of a prominent supporter of slavery for the name of a pioneering female scientist — of the sort of historical revisionism practiced by the Soviet Politburo.
Kronman says that colleges and universities have a responsibility to “cultivate the capacity for enduring the moral ambiguities of life.”
What in the absolute fuck is morally ambiguous about slavery? It is precisely this sort of academic arrogance that actively devalues and excludes students of color and prevents real intellectual discussion and evolution. It also requires a special sort of intellectual laziness to easily acknowledge other countries’ monsters while being unwilling to face up to our own.
I’m ashamed of my school’s former dean and proud of Prof. John Fabian Witt for his excellent point-by-point demolition of Prof. Kronman’s indefensible defense of the defense of slavery.
Pete Seeger arrives at court for sentencing with his banjo over his shoulder, April 4, 1961. Source: New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002709318/
Every schmuck who was called before HUAC and stood their ground or didn’t. Every government employee — like my Grandpa Clarence Blau — whose loyalty was questioned for the job they held, a newspaper they subscribed to, a meeting they attended, or a petition they signed. Every American whose FBI file Herbert Hoover created and padded. Everyone who was ever on the receiving end Joseph McCarthy’s or Richard Nixon’s bloviating.
We were terrified of people who read newspapers or sang songs or attended meetings full of other newspaper-readers or song-singers. We made people’s lives miserable and ruined careers based on false and flimsy allegations.
Hell, I’m sort of sorry for the Rosenbergs, even if they were guilty.
Why do I feel bad for the entire spectrum — from pale pink to bright red, from folk singer to spies? Because none — not one — of those individuals stood on stage before a worldwide audience and handed over our country to the Russians.
*****
*According to my Granddaddy Clen, Hiss was framed by Whittiker Chambers. Granddaddy probably had a rip-roaring case of OCD, undiagnosed. He spent much of his adult life gathering files and articles, creating maps and timelines, and filling stacks of 3×5 cards about this conspiracy. This will mean something to approximately 16 living humans.
Knight correctly notes that there are three categories of people who don’t give any fucks: babies; assholes; and the enlightened (that is people who have bought and read her book). I would add, of course, old people. But she’s right and of course I have a graph to prove it.
The author is right that babies don’t give a fuck at least about things that don’t deserve it. But think I didn’t give much of a fuck until junior high school when I and every other 13-year-old started to give a fuck about EVERY FUCKING THING. For me, starting college started the long process of giving less of a fuck. It involved plenty of academic fuck-giving, but fundamentally I was surrounded by Nerds Like Me and there was a lot less to stress about in the other-people department. I then spent three years traveling — mostly in Taiwan — and giving very few fucks because I was surrounded by people for whom my weirdness factor started around 95%, so I did not give a fuck if my marginal weirdness was marginally higher or lower on any given day. Also the food was amazing. Law school of course brought a major increase in fuck-giving, but I think it’s been on a gradual downward trend since then.
As with most self help books (or so I hear), Knight gives you self-improvement homework: to make lists of the things you give a fuck about, and then determine whether each one is deserving of the fucks you devote to it. I’m working on that list, but also — therapeutically — created the list of Things I Have Already Succeeded In Not Giving A Fuck About:
Knowing about, drinking, or liking wine.
Knowing about or listening to classical music or opera. The music genes were distributed very unevenly in our family, and appear to have skipped me completely.
Camping, hiking, swimming, exercising, or being outdoorsy.
Staying home on Friday or Saturday night — indeed, this is now at the top of my list of Things I Love To Do.
Most clothing choices — especially any pressure to achieve variety in my wardrobe.
Whether the forks, knives, and spoons are on the right or left because Emily Post says so possibly based on a configuration designed to discourage dinner guests from stabbing each other in the middle ages (and some modern family dinners). I can’t tell left from right, everyone gets the utensils they need, and I don’t give a fuck!
Eating dinner unfashionably early, say, at 5:00, and sometimes bracket-creeping that back to 4:00, 3:00, or even 2:00 at which point we just call it “second lunch” or just “lunch” since “second breakfast” happened around 10:00.
Having gray hair. The dyeing process requires you to sit still and make conversation with someone you barely know on topics you don’t care about for HOURS, and then a week later to start giving a fuck about — but not actually doing anything about — your roots.
Whether I have selected the fastest driving route from one place to another. Try it: you cannot imagine how liberating it is to choose a route and never think about whether the traffic might have been just a little faster on the alternate route.
What most of the world thinks of me, which of course does not stop me from giving over brainspace to the opinions of totally random and/or toxic people or perseverating about something I said several decades ago. Still working on that.
So to anyone stressing about a milestone birthday, I say: it gets better — you give less and less of a fuck with each passing year, and it’s glorious.
Renée Graham wrote a thoughtful and terrifying piece in yesterday’s Boston Globe entitled “Toxic masculinity is killing us.”
Literally and figuratively, toxic masculinity is killing us: Mass shootings. Domestic violence. Fatal fraternity hazing. Rape culture. Workplaces and schools turned into cesspools of sexual harassment and assault. This is not consigned to one race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic level. Feral masculinity affirms itself every day through violence and domination.
It is a detriment to social and political progress, our mental health, and physical safety. The deleterious result is a nation under siege by those compelled to affirm their power by any means necessary.
I had been thinking about this, especially in light of several recent stories about fraternity or football hazing resulting in severe injuries or death. All involve bizarre, sadistic rituals and near-fatal and fatal levels of alcohol. And we only know about them because someone died or was horribly injured. Two things struck me as I read these articles:
The non-fatal version of this must go on thousands of times a year, in precisely the institutions we’re counting on to turn adolescents into adults; and
When they’re not busy play-acting at sodomy or abusing and photographing the almost-corpse of their classmate — or engaging in other, violent but non-fatal rituals — these young men likely present as upstanding citizens-to-be.
They’re the ones we praise on the field on Sunday and offer summer internships to, not the ones we kill for wearing a hoodie or having a busted tail light or failing to leave a movie theater between showings.
There was the seemingly callous handling of Tim Piazza’s body, as when a brother lifted Tim’s arm and it thudded back onto his chest, or when another brother poured liquid on his face, or when a brother slapped his face three times, or when a brother tackled someone onto him, or when Tim kept rolling off the couch but his body showed no reflex reactions, or when another brother struck his discolored abdomen with an open hand. Then there was the response to his condition: Beta brothers strapped a heavy book bag on Tim’s unconscious body to keep him from rolling onto his back and aspirating on his own vomit, a phenomenon with which they were sufficiently familiar to have a name for it: “backpacking.” There were intermittent signs of animation: Tim twitching, Tim vomiting, Tim bare-chested and moving his legs, the backpack affixed to his body. There was the brothers’ disconcerting failure to seek help. When brother Kordel Davis arrived, 28 minutes after Tim’s fall, he looked at Tim’s head and began pointing at it agitatedly and arguing to his fellow Betas, according to interviews conducted by police, that they needed to call 911. A brother was then seen on the video shoving Davis across the room.
After Beta’s brothers and pledges had headed off, Tim Piazza was seen alone in the video, at times on all fours and clutching his abdomen, at times managing to stand and stagger, only to fall again, repeatedly, sometimes face-first onto the hard floor or into sharp objects (a table corner, a banister finial). At 6:49 A.M., a pledge named Qobi Quainoo sat on a sofa opposite Tim and watched him groan, fall off the sofa, and get to his knees and bend forward, rocking and clutching his head. Quainoo began to record a video of this on his cell phone, according to the presentment, and left the house at 7:12 A.M. (Quainoo did not respond to a request for comment.)
Around 10 A.M., two brothers found Tim’s shoes and started looking for him. They found him in the basement, breathing heavily, bare-chested, his hands clenched, his skin cold, blood on his face, his eyes half open. They took him upstairs. For the next 42 minutes, a shifting assortment of brothers stood around, shaking Tim, attempting to put a shirt on him, trying to prop him up on the couch.
What follow then details the attempts to clean up and cover up the crimes.
Deng was the last of his pledge class to go through the Glass Ceiling. He made it through the first two stages, but in the middle of the third he got up unsteadily after one tackle. Then, according to testimony later given by Li, the pledge assistant Kenny Kwan, starting 10 to 15 feet away, ran at full speed into Deng and slammed him to the ground. Deng did not get up.
Li, 21 at the time, would later tell prosecutors that Deng was making ‘‘groaning sounds.’’ According to Li, Sheldon Wong, who was 21 and the pledge educator, picked Deng up and, with others’ help, carried him inside the rental house. Charles Lai, who was 23 and Deng’s Big, told detectives that Deng’s body felt ‘‘straight like a board.’’ Fraternity members stripped off his clothes, cold and wet with frost, and laid him down by the fireplace and covered him with a blanket. At 5:05 a.m., the police timeline indicates, one brother called his girlfriend, a nurse, to ask what she thought could be causing Deng to be so unresponsive. Eight minutes later, another brother Googled ‘‘conscious’’ and ‘‘unconscious.’’ At 5:55, a fraternity brother named Revel Deng texted a friend four times to ask about his grandfather’s fatal fall down the stairs. During this period, none of the three dozen brothers in the Poconos called 911. Nobody summoned an ambulance because, according to a statement given to detectives, someone had looked up how much it would cost and determined that the price would be too high.
Around 6 a.m., Wong, Lai and a third brother drove Michael Deng to the emergency room
Gruver died at a hospital on Sept. 14 after Phi Delta Theta members found him lying on a couch at the fraternity house. A witness told police that Gruver was “highly intoxicated” when fraternity members laid him on the couch and left the house sometime early that morning.
Around 11 a.m., members found Gruver still on the couch with a weak pulse and couldn’t tell if he was breathing, police said. Two people drove him to a hospital, where he died that day.
Jordan Preavy had it all as a junior in high school after making the football team. But that dream quickly became a nightmare for the 16-year-old when he was sodomized during a hazing ritual.
Witnesses told police Preavy’s head “snapped back and he looked pained,” yelling “No!” and “Get off,” as he was assaulted through his clothes with a broomstick by at least two older teammates in 2011.
Nearly a year later, just weeks after his 17th birthday, Preavy killed himself.
was kidnapped last year from his dorm, had his arms and legs bound with duct tape, and was beaten, peppered with anti-Muslim slurs, stripped to his underwear, nearly penetrated by a foreign object, then left half-naked in a baseball field as temperatures dipped near freezing.
These are the perps:
Having recalled reading these various articles, I went to find them by googling “fraternity hazing deaths.” There’s a Wikipedia page that lists them — since the 1800s.
What does it mean for these boys’ treatment of women and gay men that sodomy is used as a symbol of dominance, ingrained into them to belong to a new family just after they’ve left their birth families.
I have no answers. Perhaps if high schools and colleges were led by grown-ups who set positive examples and banned all hazing — and enforced the ban full time, not just ad hoc after death or injury? But could colleges do this without endangering their endowment? And thus it perpetuates itself.
Thought Snax 