New post just up on "FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC"
See https://john-ray.blogspot.com/
Can an inert chemical be harmful?
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9th Circuit’s Characteristic Nuttiness on Gender Identity Again on Display
Women and girls seeking equal opportunity in scholastic athletics have notched a few significant wins this year against the Department of Education over its massive rewrite of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.
Title IX is the brief, 50-plus-year-old civil rights law that prevents sex discrimination in any publicly funded education program. The Biden-Harris administration, however, has expanded the meaning of “sex” in Title IX to include “gender identity or expression.” But based on a plain reading of the text of Title IX, and with an eye toward the congressional history of the law as geared toward ensuring women’s equality in education, the rewrite is more than a little illegal.
At least three federal appellate courts have agreed.
Not so, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, however. It brought that streak of victories to a halt recently when it determined that the state of Arizona’s Save Women’s Sports Act was both unconstitutional and a violation of Title IX.
This isn’t the first time that the 9th Circuit has botched its analysis on “gender identity.” And once again, its reasoning left court-watchers scratching their heads.
Last year, the 9th Circuit reached an identical conclusion in striking down Idaho’s women’s sports fairness law in Hecox v. Little. Legal scholars have called the court’s opinion in that case “full of deceptions and irrelevancies.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, that case is now pending on a petition for review at the U.S. Supreme Court.
In Doe v. Horne, the court followed its flawed reasoning in Hecox to affirm the trial court’s finding that two biological boys (referenced in the court’s opinion as “transgender girls”) were entitled to a preliminary injunction against the state of Arizona—something that prevented the state from enforcing its Save Women’s Sport Act.
While the underlying litigation proceeds, the court ruled that both boys must be allowed to play on girls’ sports teams at their respective Arizona schools.
So, how did the court reach such a hackneyed conclusion? Its twisted reasoning went something like this: It began with blind acceptance of the Left’s talking points on “gender identity” as something distinct from sex “assigned” at birth, including the fact that there is “a consensus among medical organizations that gender identity is innate and cannot be changed through psychological or medical treatments.”
That ignores the increasing body of clinical evidence that most prepubescent and pubescent children will—if left alone to experience normal pubertal development—grow out of any purported expression of a “transgender” identity.
The court continued that the state law, which separated scholastic sports teams by males, females, and coed or mixed teams, was discriminatory. That was so because the classifications based on biological sex discriminated against students who were biologically of one sex but expressed a different gender identity, by preventing them from playing on sports teams in accordance with that gender identity.
In the words of Judge Morgan Christen, an appointee of President Barack Obama, who wrote the opinion for the unanimous three-judge panel that included Judges Mary Margaret McKeown and David A. Ezra, appointees of Presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, respectively: “[T]he ban turns entirely on a student’s transgender or cisgender status.”
Not so. The ban turns entirely on a student’s sex—regardless of whether that student’s sex is male or female.
The court’s opinion ignored one very glaring weakness in its own arguments: the U.S. Supreme Court has never held that “sex” and “transgender status” are one in the same.
Classifications based on sex are just that. And in Arizona’s case, whether the students were transgender “girls” or “boys” resulted in the same outcome: All students, regardless of gender identity, were required to compete on teams that matched their underlying biological sex.
The court’s opinion also clung to the fact that, in its view (and the view of the trial court):
[t]ransgender girls who receive puberty-blocking medication do not have an athletic advantage over other girls because they do not undergo male puberty and do not experience the physiological changes caused by the increased production of testosterone associated with male puberty.
However, medical evidence now indicates that regardless of the use of puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, males begin to distinguish themselves athletically from their female counterparts around the age of 11.
Hormones have limited or no impact on wingspan, muscle mass, height, or bone density—all critical physiological advantages in competitive sports.
The court went on to rationalize that laws that discriminate based on “transgender status” are subject to heightened scrutiny under the equal protection clause of the Constitution.
That meant that the state of Arizona bore the burden of proving that its law served an important government objective, and that the law was substantially related to achieving the objective.
The appellate court wrote that the state had not met its burden. In the court’s view, the act had been adopted for the sole purpose of excluding “transgender girls” from playing on girls’ sports team. This was not, the court wrote, a law substantially related to achieving an “important government objective,” nor could the state bear the burden of demonstrating an “exceedingly persuasive justification” for what it viewed as a discriminatory classification.
Turning to the Title IX discrimination claims, the 9th Circuit panel was influenced mightily by the Department of Education’s expansive rewrite of Title IX to include “gender identity or expression” as commensurate with biological sex.
Christen wrote that the law “does not afford transgender women and girls equal athletic opportunities … [and] the record does not demonstrate that transgender females would displace cisgender females to a substantial extent if transgender females were allowed to play on female teams.”
In the end, the court determined that in addition to the foregoing, the “public interest” was served by preventing “the violation of a party’s [i.e., the transgender student’s] constitutional rights.”
Despite the court’s ongoing delirium about transgender discrimination, Arizona’s then-governor, Doug Ducey, when signing the women’s sports bill into law, noted perhaps the simplest and clearest aim of the legislation:
This legislation simply ensures that the girls and young women who have dedicated themselves to their sport do not miss out on hard-earned opportunities, including their titles, standings, and scholarships due to unfair competition.
This bill strikes the right balance of respecting all students while still acknowledging that there are inherent biological distinctions that merit separate categories to ensure fairness for all.
The simple, nondiscriminatory mission of the Save Women’s Sports Act, however, was utterly lost on the 9th Circuit.
Perhaps, in time, sanity will prevail at the U.S. Supreme Court.
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Class Action Scams Enrich Lawyers, the Left
John Stossel
Have you gotten a letter that says, “You may be entitled to compensation”?
I get a bunch. One claimed my union (New York state forced me to join) probably cheated me on medical insurance. I didn’t think they did, but I filled out the forms.
I got a check for $557. Great!
Except … my lawyers pocketed $7 million.
How is that fair?
Likewise, lawyers accused the Boston Globe of illegally sharing my clicking habits with Facebook.
I don’t really care. Facebook already knows my clicking habits. Anyway, I’d only briefly subscribed. I canceled as soon as I realized that much of the Globe is insipid leftist drivel rerun from The New York Times.
Still, I got a check for $158.
My new video looks at those class action lawsuits.
In theory, they protect consumers, but many of these lawsuits resemble anti-consumer scams.
First, lawsuits make most everything cost a little more.
Second, they deprive us of good products. Bendectin, a morning-sickness pill, was pulled from the market after hundreds of lawsuits claimed side effects. But the Food and Drug Administration says the drug was safe.
Lawsuits helped kill three-wheeled ATVs, too. Lawyers I confront say losing risky products is a good thing: “If they’re scared of someone like me,” one told me, “I’m happy about that.”
We pay for his happiness.
Of course, if companies do wrong, they should be punished.
When Google was caught sleazily collecting location data from users who turned off location history, it wouldn’t have been worth any single user’s time, or money, to sue. A lawsuit would cost more than anyone might win. Hence class actions.
But the lawyers create their own scam. When Google paid $62 million to settle that lawsuit, the class action lawyers gave themselves $18 million and then gave $43 million to their favorite nonprofits. That included left-wing advocacy groups like the ACLU (after it promised to use the money to help “people of color,” “activists” and “people seeking … transgender health care”). They gave victimized class members nothing.
Why would a judge approve such a deal? Because judges are just lawyers in robes, and most lean left politically. They love donating other people’s money to their favorite causes.
“It’s a huge conflict of interest,” says Anna St. John, whose law firm challenges such settlements.
“You have this slush fund of tens of millions of dollars, and the parties and judge are allowed to decide who should get this money. When they have a choice between distributing that money to millions of class members who are not going to say ‘thank you,’ versus directing millions of dollars to their alma maters, to organizations where they sit on the board, the choice is clear what they’re going to do. Six of the attorneys or Google employees involved in the case sit … or sat on the boards of the recipients getting millions of dollars.”
“The guys who did bad get to reward their friends?” I ask.
“Yes. Google’s giving money to organizations it already donates to,” she notes. “It’s unclear how it can be a benefit to the class when the defendant’s just doing what it already does.”
“This is a left-wing money raiser,” I observe.
“It is. This is a settlement class of millions of Americans with diverse viewpoints, and yet the money goes to very extreme, left-wing causes favored by the attorneys and by the defendant.”
I asked the attorneys and judge who approved the deal to explain why it isn’t a scam. They didn’t answer.
America needs lawyers to protect our rights and our freedom, just like we need missiles and bombs. But lawsuits, like missiles and bombs, are tremendously destructive.
We try not to use our missiles. We should do the same with lawyers.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/09/21/class-action-scams-john-stossel/
***************************************************New Docs Shed Light on Air Force’s ‘Goal’ to Reduce ‘White Male Population’ Joining Officer Ranks
The Air Force finally handed over a trove of documents pertaining to its sweeping “goal” of reducing the number of white male applicants in a popular officer program after spending months stonewalling requests for their release.
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman C.Q. Brown—at the time the highest-ranking member of the Air Force—issued a memorandum in 2022 that the branch was updating its racial and gender demographic goals for applicants seeking to become officers, in a bid to prioritize “diversity and inclusion.”
Internal documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation include a slideshow from 2022 where the Air Force outlines racial and gender quotas and details how it hopes to “achieve” a reduced number of white males in its Reserve Officers’ Training Corps officer’s applicant program.
The documents reflect the Biden-Harris Pentagon’s intense focus on implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in the armed forces, even as the military continues to combat dwindling morale among its rank-and-file, recruiting and retention shortfalls, and low pay.
“The American people are rightly concerned that, at a time when our country is facing dangerous and increasing threats throughout the world, the Air Force is focused on recruitment efforts based on arbitrary racial diversity goals—not merit or increasing the force’s lethality,” James Fitzpatrick, director of the Center to Advance Security in America, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Center to Advance Security in America requested records regarding the Air Force’s new officer applicant standards through a federal transparency request in 2023. At the time, the Air Force said it couldn’t find any records, according to a letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Center to Advance Security in America then sued the Air Force for the records in April 2024 and received hundreds of documents and slides in response, which the Daily Caller News Foundation subsequently obtained.
A spokesperson for the Air Force told the Daily Caller News Foundation, “The FOIA request was being processed at multiple levels within the Air Force.”
“One of the units responded to the FOIA request with a ‘no responsive records’ response after conducting their own local search, while the remainder of the units continued to process the responsive documents that were ultimately provided,” the spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
One of the slides in question, labeled “AFROTC White,” depicts a graph that shows the percentage of white male ROTC officer applicants declining from approximately 60% in fiscal year 2019 to a projected 50% in fiscal year 2023. The graph further details how the Air Force’s goal is to reduce that percentage down to approximately 43% by fiscal year 2029, denoted by a star with the label “achieve(d) goal.”
“White male population will decline as other demographics increase,” the slide reads.
The respective slides in question also explain that the Air Force is either on track or needs to do more to hit racial and gender quotas in the ROTC’s officer applicant pool.
For example, with the African American population, the slideshow suggests the Air Force “target [the] male population through ongoing programs and marketing” and notes it has already met its “female goal” for ROTC officer applicants. For the American Indian, Asian, and Hispanic applicants, the slideshow says the Air Force is “on track to grow diversity.”
“These documents show us that the Air Force has taken steps toward implementing their new directive of specific racial quotas for officer recruitment and enrollment throughout the branch,” Fitzpatrick told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Included in the slide deck are funding requests for diversity recruiting initiatives, including $500,000 for “diversity advertising campaigns” and $250,000 for “influencer engagements.”
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A Wittgensteinian Defence of Robert Jenrick
It’s difficult to decide which is worse: that a Conservative MP with leadership aspirations should be thought of as brave for talking fondly of “English identity”; or that the Left establishment via its media outriders should be so predictably sniffy about the possibility of there even being such a thing. “Englishness”, for the Left, is like Australian wine or the success of Clarkson’s Farm: tolerable only to the extent that it’s not discussed.
Robert Jenrick MP has an inexplicable aspiration to lead the post-election wrecking yard still bafflingly known as the “Conservative Party”. He has written this, for the Daily Mail:
The combination of unprecedented migration alongside the dismantling of our national culture, non-integrating multiculturalism and the denigration of our identity have presented huge problems.
Cue the inevitable “gotcha” ambush, this time from a house mediocrity on Sky News, who demanded from Jenrick a definition of this curious relic he calls English identity. Jenrick’s reply was sensible enough, as far as it went: that he was unable to condense in soundbite form a set of cultural, historical and legal phenomena which make for a collective of quantum complexity is hardly surprising (I’m helping him out a bit here, but that’s the gist).
The journalist’s question amounted to a crude, tedious and very voguish reiteration of the Socratic strategy. The Socrates of the Platonic dialogues, talented though he undoubtedly was, was also a nuisance who spent his days walking the streets of Athens in search of likely marks on whom he could lay down his own “gotcha” schtick. This would involve asking them to provide a definition of an abstract concept (such as “justice”) and then explaining to the victim why his response was deficient.
Most of us know how that ended: a speedy trial followed by an invitation to down the cup of hemlock – cancellation being of a less reversible (and arguably less deserving) form in those days.
A “gotcha” of this sort is philosophically in error. It assumes that for a thing to have an identity then it must have an essence, one which is definable in non-vague terms. But the world is not constructed like that. There are logical systems which are constructed in acknowledgement of the fact that vagueness is an intrinsic feature of the universe. It would be absurd to think, for example, that a person is not bald when he has n hairs but becomes so when that number declines to n-1. There is hirsute, there is comb over, and there is bald – and the details of that journey are not conducive to a strictly arithmetical formalisation. Certain parts of that map are of necessity impossible to read.
What is it we want from a definition? Wittgenstein, whose competence as a philosopher of language arguably exceeds that of even the most intellectually agile news anchor, has some persuasive things to say here. In his later writings he suggests that it is strange to think that the meaning of a concept is reducible to a list of necessary and sufficient conditions which determine its application:
The idea of a general concept being a common property of its particular instances connects up with other primitive, too simple, ideas of the structure of language.
The example Wittgenstein uses is that of a “game”. There are all manner of games. Some of these require a ball others do not; some are played as a team while others are not, etc. These things we call “games” admit of no single unifying definition but share in a common resemblance. As with games so with “English identity” – perhaps its resistance to an easy classification is evidence of the strength, rather than the weakness, of the concept.
We do not need a theory of Englishness to be able to know it when we see it, any more than a Catholic communicant is required to fully understand the concept of transubstantiation before she receives the Host. An account of English identity might refer to the Common Law, make mention of the complicated history of the Anglican church, or valorise the peculiar nature of English traditions (including the tradition of being sceptical about the nature of Englishness). Or it might prefer to point at the perverse pleasure we take in an England batting collapse, or the Pavlovian and very English default to apology when somebody bumps into us.
These are, of course, all things which exercised the wonderful mind of Sir Roger Scruton, whose explication and defence of English culture and identity is distributed throughout many articles and books. Sir Roger was famously ostracised by the Tory parliamentary party for “unacceptable” remarks he made during a New Statesman set-up job a year or two prior to his death. Remarks which, it almost goes without saying, his accusers had not bothered to contextualise. Perhaps the current crop of Tory leadership contenders would find it useful to look at what Scruton had to say about our shared culture and the increasingly acute threats to it? (An appreciation of irony is, of course, also a very English thing.)
Sky’s question to Jenrick was not worthy of serious consideration. And to his credit Jenrick displayed a very English embarrassment at being expected to answer it. I’d have been more robust. If asked the same question I’d have said that English identity includes an affection for eccentricity and a love of queueing. If further pressed I’d have pointed out that Englishness is a bit like crap journalism: we can’t define it, but we know when we are in its presence.
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/09/24/a-wittgensteinian-defence-of-robert-jenrick/
**************************************************My main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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