Author Archives: Dana Pico

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Mochi

We have to keep Mochi inside on Mondays, until the garbage man has come and gone, because he’s deathly afraid of dogs, and Mochi barks at strangers. She’s never bitten anyone, and once you make friends with her, something which can be done in a single encounter, she’s a very loving dog.

Our yard is fenced, $3,100 worth of fence . . . and Mochi soon figured out that she can jump high enough to scramble over the corner of the gate. She runs across the road, into the Daniel Boone National Forest, to chase only the Lord knows what, she runs down to the river and the pond, to get muddy and wet, and our 8 acres are not nearly enough; her ‘territory’ is about 20 acres.

She’s a horrible dog: she wants to chase cars, and steal food off your plate. She’s the ultimate guard dog, because nothing can approach the house without her letting us know about it. But she also wants to cuddle, and we love her.

Robert Stacy McCain wrote about his dog here.

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Chicago thinks it’s the nation’s murder capital. Philadelphia laughs and says, “Hold my beer!” The good people of those two fine cities are getting exactly that for which they voted.

A police officer places makers on evidence on the 3900 block of Poplar Street 18-year-old Nasir Marks was fatally shot on Tuesday, May 25, 2021. Steven M Falk, Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Photographer. Click to enlarge.

According to the Chicago Tribune, as of Sunday, December 19th, there had been 783 murders in the Windy City thus far in 2021, 34 more than on the same day last year. As of the same day, 540 homicides had occurred in Philadelphia. The 19th being the 353rd day of the year, that works out to 2.2181 homicides per day in Chicago, and ‘only’ 1.5297 per day in the City of Brotherly Love.

But, according to the 2020 census, there were 2,746,388 people living in Chicago, and 1,603,797 in Philly. Using the homicide rates, that works out to a projected 558 killings in Philly and 810 in Chicago. Murder rates are calculated based on 100,000 population, meaning that Chicago is headed for a homicide rate of 29.4933 per 100,000, while Philadelphia is looking at 34.7924. Philadelphia is far deadlier than Chicago!

We noted that Philadelphia tied its 1990 homicide record of 500 the day before Thanksgiving, and at that point, the city was actually seeing slightly fewer killings per day than it was on December 19th. And guess what: with 547 homicides as of the end of Thursday, December 23rd, the rate has crept up slightly again, to 1.5322 per day, making the projected number of killings 559!

I will admit to a sort of grim fascination with the numbers, but murder in Philadelphia has really changed things. One murder, it has been said, is a tragedy, but 547 is just a statistic, and to the leadership of the city, and the editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer, that’s all it is, a statistic, a number that they can attribute of “gun violence,” but never examine the real problem: bad people!

In Ironic Justice: Two Anti-Police Lawmakers Get Carjacked, Robert Stacy McCain noted that two Democratic politicians, one in Chicago and one in Philly, who supported the “reform” of policing — meaning: getting even softer on crime — were carjacked within 24 hours of each other.

Illinois state Sen. Kimberly Lightford (D-Maywood) was targeted in suburban Chicago on Tuesday night, while Congresswoman Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.) was carjacked Wednesday afternoon after an event in South Philadelphia.

Well, it seems that, given that Representative Scanlon is a sitting congresswoman, the feds are getting involved:

“The investigation into this incident is in its very initial stages, and we are continuing to investigate and evaluate charging decisions,” said U.S. Attorney Williams. “Armed carjacking is a serious federal crime. There have been a rash of violent crimes like this recently, and while there were national security implications to this particular incident, we are always working collaboratively with our local partners to evaluate if cases should be taken federally. Working together means more resources, more tools, more intelligence. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: If you pick up a gun and use it to commit a crime, together, we will come after you. And we are very good at what we do.”

In point of fact, however, if armed carjacking is a “serious federal crime,” when was the last time the feds got involved in such a case? Just two weeks ago, Philadelphia police said the city has seen an 80% increase in carjackings this year, and what had United States Attorney Jennifer Arbittier Williams done in response? Nothing, until a Democratic congresswoman got carjacked in — sweet irony! — FDR Park.

Seriously, go look through the press release archive at the U.S. Attorney’s web site and tell me if you find a case where they previously prosecuted a carjacking. I went back as far as April and didn’t find one, so if the Biden DOJ was making it a priority to “come after” carjackers before this week, they weren’t very successful at it. But then again, success really hasn’t been a hallmark of the Biden administration, has it?

Mr McCain was employing sarcasm, but there’s a not-so-veiled slam at Philadelphia’s District Attorney, Larry Krasner, a George Soros-financed stooge whose main goal is getting the bad guys released, not jailed. At some point, you’d think Philadelphians would get tired of all of the crime and violence in their city’s streets, but not tired enough: Mr Krasner was re-elected last month!

The good people of those two cities are getting exactly that for which they voted.

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Seen at Wawa

My thanks to William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove, who cross-posted here on the days I was away!

Driving back to Kentucky from the Keystone State on December 23rd, I stopped at the WaWa store on Pennsylvania Route 61, just north of Interstate 78, and saw something I’d never seen, in person, before: the WaWa had six — I think it was six; I didn’t actually count, and should have taken a quick picture, but didn’t — Tesla TSLA: (%) charging stations. This was at 3:45 PM EST.

Also see: William Teach: Climate Cult: Forget The Electric Vehicles You Can’t Afford. People Need To Drive Less

What I didn’t see were any Tesla’s actually being charged there. Oh, one of the charging stations was occupied, but by a mid-1990s, gasoline-engine beater car, using the charging area as a parking space.

Meanwhile, the store’s twelve or so gasoline pump queues, two pumps per queue, were fully occupied, with additional cars lined up to get fuel, and a fuel tanker was unloading gasoline or diesel into the underground storage tanks, because those vehicles are thirsty! I really should have taken pictures, on my phone, or as Sheriff Buford T Justice told his son, “Put the evidence in the car!”

I did pick up two boxes of WaWa coffee in Kuerig-cups for my wife and older daughter for Christmas.

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As evidence mounts that the vaccines do not stop the spread of the virus, some people want to double down on #VaccineMandates

It seems that employers have been struggling with the vaccine mandates, but there’s an underlying, unwritten message in this. From The New York Times, not exactly an evil reich-wing source:

    Whiplash on U.S. Vaccine Mandate Leaves Employers ‘Totally Confused’

    Companies are struggling to figure out what to do as legal battles and rising Covid cases complicate their plans. Even up in the air: What does “fully vaccinated” mean?

    By Lauren Hirsch, Emma Goldberg and Charlie Savage | Monday, December 20, 2021 | 6:50 AM EST

    The marching orders from the Biden administration in November had seemed clear — large employers were to get their workers fully vaccinated by early next year, or make sure the workers were tested weekly. But a little over a month later, the Labor Department’s vaccine rule has been swept into confusion and uncertainty by legal battles, shifting deadlines and rising Covid case counts that throw the very definition of fully vaccinated into question.

    The spread of the highly transmissible Omicron variant has seemingly bolstered the government’s argument, at the heart of its legal battle over the rule, that the virus remains a grave threat to workers. But the recent surge in cases has raised the issue of whether the government will take its requirements further — even as the original rule remains contentious — and ask employers to mandate booster shots, too. The country’s testing capacity has also been strained, adding to concerns that companies will be unable to meet the rule’s testing requirements.

    “My clients are totally confused as, quite frankly, am I,” Erin McLaughlin, a labor and employment lawyer at Buchanan, Ingersoll & Rooney, said on Saturday. “My sense is that there are a lot of employers scrambling to try and put their mandate programs in place.”

    No company has been spared the whirlwind of changes in the last week, set off by the spike in Covid cases that have, in some instances, cut into their work forces. Then on Friday, an appeals court lifted the legal block on the vaccine rule, though appeals to the ruling were immediately filed, leaving the rule’s legal status up in the air. On Saturday, hours after the appeals court ruling, the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration urged employers to start working to get in compliance. But OSHA also gave employers some leeway, pushing back full enforcement of the rule until February, recognizing that for all its best intentions the rollout of the rule has been muddled.

There’s a lot more at the original, but the unwritten part is simple, and obvious: most employers don’t want to impose a mandate on their workers, not because they don’t believe in the effectiveness of the vaccines — most probably do — but because they don’t want to discipline or terminate workers who refuse. Businesses are already having problems finding workers, and losing some of those they have can seriously hurt production, and the bottom line.

The truth is simple: the vaccines have been freely available to everyone for about ten months now, and virtually every medium has been telling us about the availability. Politicians and business leaders and community activists and your neighborhood Karens have all been imploring people to get vaccinated. The number of Americans who haven’t heard the messages has to be vanishingly small. Those who want to get vaccinated have already done so; those who haven’t gotten vaccinated are almost universally those who do not want to get vaccinated.

The resistance is only getting stronger: as the government pushes harder to try to force the reluctant to get vaccinated, those who do not want to take the vaccines are pushing back harder as well. As William Teach noted, Governor Kathy Hochul (D-NY) is now pushing legislation which would mandate a booster shot as well as the initial two-shot vaccine to be considered ‘fully vaccinated.’

    New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) announced during a press conference on Thursday that she is planning to introduce legislation that includes a booster shot within the definition of being “fully vaccinated.”

    While the Democratic governor noted that the legislation needed to be more fleshed out and required more data to be collected, she signaled the change would happen eventually, saying that “at some point, we have to determine that fully vaccinated means boosted as well,” CNY Central reported.

    Hochul’s remarks come as the country begins to see an uptick of COVID-19 cases again and as health officials grapple with the spread of the omicron variant, which President Biden’s chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci warned on Thursday would likely be the dominant strain in “a few weeks.”

Also from The New York Times:

    A growing body of preliminary research suggests the Covid vaccines used in most of the world offer almost no defense against becoming infected by the highly contagious Omicron variant.

    All vaccines still seem to provide a significant degree of protection against serious illness from Omicron, which is the most crucial goal. But only the Pfizer and Moderna shots, when reinforced by a booster, appear to have initial success at stopping infections, and these vaccines are unavailable in most of the world.

    The other shots — including those from AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and vaccines manufactured in China and Russia — do little to nothing to stop the spread of Omicron, early research shows. And because most countries have built their inoculation programs around these vaccines, the gap could have a profound impact on the course of the pandemic.

    A global surge of infections in a world where billions of people remain unvaccinated not only threatens the health of vulnerable individuals but also increases the opportunity for the emergence of yet more variants. The disparity in the ability of countries to weather the pandemic will almost certainly deepen. And the news about limited vaccine efficacy against Omicron infection could depress demand for vaccination throughout the developing world, where many people are already hesitant or preoccupied with other health problems.

But here’s the money line:

    Most evidence so far is based on laboratory experiments, which do not capture the full range of the body’s immune response, and not from tracking the effect on real-world populations. The results are striking, however.

So, there seems to be little or no effectiveness against transmission by any vaccines other than Pfizer and Moderna, and only if reinforced by the booster, and their effectiveness is based only on laboratory studies, not real-world data. Employers wanting to see more of their workforce vaccinated are having to deal with reality: reluctance on the part of some employees, a tight labor market, and data which show that getting vaccinated provides less protection from spreading the virus than we were originally told.

This is the conundrum: if the vaccines lessen the effects on those who contract the virus, but don’t seem to offer much protection from spreading the virus, the ‘logic’ for mandating vaccination vanishes. If getting vaccinated does not mean you can’t contract and spread the virus to others, choosing not to get vaccinated is a decision which only affects the person choosing not to get vaccinated!

I’ve said it before: I am vaccinated, and I took the booster shot as well. I think that’s the wiser choice, and I am perfectly willing to say that to anyone who asks. But it is none of my business, nor should it be the government’s business, nor the employer’s business, as to what other people choose to do.

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36

A man’s life, reduced to four paragraphs. From the Lexington Herald-Leader:

    Coroner releases name of man, 21, who died after shooting in Lexington

    by Karla Ward | Saturday, December 18, 2021 | 12:44 PM EST | Updated: 1:48 PM EST

    A 21-year-old man died after being shot in a neighborhood near downtown Lexington late Friday.

    Lexington police said they were called to the shooting on the 800 block of Oak Hill Drive, off Loudon Avenue, at 10:56 p.m. When they arrived, police found the man inside a residence, Lexington police said in a news release Saturday.

    The Fayette County coroner’s office said the man, Devon Sandusky, was pronounced dead at the scene at 11:25 p.m.

    They said the investigation is ongoing. No suspect information was released.

There was a fifth paragraph, but one which simply told readers where to report information to the police. A sixth paragraph noted that this was the city’s 36th homicide of the year, a new record. The previous record was 34, set in 2020. At the current pace, Lexington is projected to see one or two more killings before 2021 is over.

To me, this was sadly reminiscent of the stories I see in The Philadelphia Inquirer, where a murder victim’s life is reduced to a few short paragraphs, often without even the victim’s name being published. But, unlike the Inquirer, the Herald-Leader will print more about the murder as more information is released. With ‘only’ 36 homicides on which to report, the newspaper’s staff can put a little bit more time into reporting on it; the Inquirer’s staff are overwhelmed, with 535 homicides through Thursday, December 16th, and the City of Brotherly Love on pace to record another 23 killings, for a total of 558.

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Another Capitol kerfuffler sentenced

We have previously noted the hypocrisy of the Lexington Herald-Leader in refusing to publish the mugshot of Brent Dyer Kelty, a man previously convicted of “several prior felonies in Fayette County since 2010,” in their story about him being indicted for the murder of an infant, but publishing the photo of Gracyn Dawn Courtright, one of the Capitol kerfufflers. In that, the newspaper followed the McClatchy Mugshot Policy, despite the fact that Mr Kelty, even if acquitted of murder, is still a multiply convicted felon, while Miss Courtright was convicted of a single misdemeanor count.

Now, the former University of Kentucky student has been sentenced:

    UK student gets 30-day sentence for involvement in Jan. 6 Capitol riot

    by Christopher Leach and Bill Estep | Friday, December 17, 2021 | 2:48 PM EST | Updated: 3:50 PM EST

    A former University of Kentucky student who unlawfully entered the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot has been sentenced to 30 days in jail followed by a year on probation, according to her attorney.

    The sentence for Gracyn Courtright also includes 60 hours of community service and a $500 restitution payment, according to her attorney, Thomas Abbenante.

    The government sought a sentence of six months in prison for Courtright, arguing she was one of the few people who went onto the Senate floor during the “violent attack” that threatened the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election, injured more than 100 law enforcement officers and did more than $1 million in property damage at the Capitol.

    Courtright did not engage in violence, but witnessed others damaging property and continued inside the building, Assistant U.S. Attorney Rachel A. Fletcher said in a sentencing memorandum.

There’s more at the original.

So, Miss Courtright did nothing violent herself, as the government conceded, but “witnessed others damaging property,” yet the government wanted to lock her up for half a year. The kerfuffle included damages to property and some police officers were injured, but Miss Courtright personally did neither of those things.

If that’s the standard, then every single #BlackLivesMatter demonstrator who participated in any Mostly Peaceful Protest™ in which any bystander or law enforcement officer was hurt, or any building burned, or any store looted, should be jailed, in the government’s view, for six months, regardless of whether the government can prove that a specific individual perpetrated any of those acts.

The real truth is that the Capitol kerfuffle wasn’t that serious, and no one should have been charged with any crimes. The next Republican president won’t be able to give any of the kerfufflers their time back, but he should pardon every last one of them.

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97% of NBA players are vaccinated, yet the league is losing players to positive tests.

The players in the National Basketball Association are among the strongest and in best physical condition people on the planet. As we have previously noted, the Philadelphia 76ers all-star center, Joel Embiid, who was fully vaccinated, went out of action in early November due to a positive test for COVID-19, and he later said that he was so ill that he wondered if he was going to survive. Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, who was fully vaccinated, missed a week due to a positive test.

Nowe there’s this:

    After last month’s outbreak, Sixers now watch as NBA deals with latest COVID-19 wave

    As of Thursday night, nearly 70 players league-wide had been put in health and safety protocols this season, including 52 in December.

    by Gina Mizell | Friday, December 17, 2021

    NEW YORK — The number of Twitter notifications peppering Joel Embiid’s cellphone recently have been comparable to those of draft night, the star big man said.

    Except the reason for the constant news-breaking is grim, not celebratory.

    The Sixers were the first NBA team to experience a major COVID-19 outbreak this season, when four players including Embiid were in health and safety protocols from Nov. 1 until Thanksgiving. Now, those players are watching as the virus’ wave takes hold across the league.

    “At this point, it’s kind of turned into a bit of a joke,” third-year wing Matisse Thybulle added. “You just see Woj [ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski] and almost every other tweet, it’s another player in [protocols]. Yeah, it’s kind of frightening.”

    As of Thursday night, nearly 70 players league-wide had been put in health and safety protocols this season, including 52 in December. That growing number has overshadowed this week’s games, including Philly’s 114-105 loss in Brooklyn to a Nets team without seven players, including superstar James Harden.

Further down came the money line:

    For a league that is 97% vaccinated, the vast majority of the positive tests are breakthrough cases.

In the National Football League, 96% of the players are vaccinated, but the Philadelphia Eagles are having their Sunday game postponed until Tuesday, because their scheduled opponent, the Washington Redskins Football Team, has had an outbreak of positive tests.

It’s become very clear: the vaccines simply do not prevent a person from contracting the virus. Denmark and Norway have just reported positive cases for the Xi Omicron variant among the fully vaccinated are almost the same as the percentage of the population who are fully vaccinated.

Getting vaccinated is wise, in that it seems to lessen the symptoms in those who do contract the virus, but as far as keeping people from contracting it in the first place? The evidence for that doesn’t seem very strong.

And that blows the rationale for vaccine mandates out of the water. If the vaccines don’t prevent you from contracting the virus, or prevent you from spreading it to others, and the only seemingly real effect is to lessen symptoms for the individual, then it’s the individual’s choice as to whether he wants to risk it. It’s on him, and nobody else.

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He feels like a woman

I do not know how many websites have, and publish, their own “stylebook,” but at The First Street Journal, I do. From that Stylebook:

    Those who claim to be transgender will be referred to with the honorific and pronouns appropriate to the sex of their birth; the site owner does not agree with the cockamamie notion that anyone can simply ‘identify’ with a sex which is not his own, nor that any medical ‘treatment’ or surgery can change a person’s natural sex; all that it can do is physically mutilate a person.

That is, of course, wholly at odds with the Associated Press Stylebook, which is used by many, though certainly not all, credentialed media sources, which specifies language which reinforces the notion that a person can define his ‘gender’ as something different from his biological sex, and that such choices can, should, and must be accepted by society as real.

And so we come to NBC News:

    Ivy League swimming champion becomes target of transphobic rhetoric

    Lia Thomas, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, has become the most recent target in the heated debate about trans women athletes.

    By Jo Yurcaba | Thursday, December 16, 2021 | 5:23 PM EST

    A swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania is the latest target in the culture-war debate over whether transgender girls and women should be allowed to participate on female sports teams.

    Lia Thomas, who came out as trans in 2019, set three school records and two national records at a meet this month.

    Since then, Thomas has faced criticism and verbal attacks from anti-trans groups, conservative media and, reportedly, even two teammates.

    Some of the headlines about Thomas’ wins said she “smashed” the records and continued her “dominant” season alongside pre-transition photos of her and using her previous name and male pronouns — practices known as deadnaming and misgendering.

As we have previously noted, Twitter bans “deadnaming” and “misgendering”, not allowing any discussion of whether the ‘transgendered’ really are the sex they claim to be rather than their biological sex — something The New York Times gave Chad Malloy[1]Chad Malloy is a ‘transgender’ activist who believes he is female, and goes by the name ‘Parker’ Malloy. space to claim actually promotes freedom of speech. I will confess to having difficulty with the notion that restricting speech somehow promotes freedom of speech. Were I to submit this article for publication to the Times — something of which I have no intention of doing — I would have to change all references to those deemed acceptable by their stylebook, and, in doing so, concede the argument that sex can be changed!

    Transgender advocates have condemned that coverage and some of the conversation about Thomas as transphobic. They said it mischaracterizes her victories to make it appear that transgender women are cheating just by being trans and implies that one trans woman winning means trans women generally are dominating women’s sports. They note that Thomas is competing within guidance issued by the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

What I have pointed out is that Will Thomas and his swimming records, competing against biological women, prove that “trans women” are very different from real women. On Sunday, December 5th, Mr Thomas, won the 1,650 yard freestyle with a time of 15:59:71; the second-place finisher was his teammate Anna Sofia Kalandaze, who touched at 16:37:44 in the Zippy Invitational Event in Akron, Ohio. The difference between Mr Thomas’ and Miss Kalandaze’s times is 37.73 seconds.

Competitive swimming at the collegiate level involves races which are often won by fractions of a second. A victory of 37.73 seconds is extraordinary.

In the 500-yard freestyle final, Mr Thomas again defeated his teammate, Miss Kalandaze, who finished second, 4:34.06 to 4:48.99, a 14.93 second margin; Miss Kalandaze defeated the seventh-place finisher by 7.42 seconds, just half of the time she was behind Mr Thomas.

Mr Thomas time would have finished 15th in the men’s final, ahead of ten other male swimmers. The last place male swimmer in the 500 yard freestyle, Luke Scoboria of Bloomsburg University, finished at 4:42.78, 7.21 seconds ahead of Miss Kalandaze’s second-place time. His year of taking testosterone suppressants — whether he has undergone ‘sexual reassignment surgery’ is not something I have found in the published record — have obviously not done what the NCAA believe it would.

    Thomas’ critics have varying views. Some have used explicitly anti-transgender language and argue that trans women should be completely banned from women’s sports, while others argue that the NCAA’s policy regarding trans athletes’ participation isn’t strict enough.

    Thomas declined an interview with NBC News and has done only one recent interview, with the podcast SwimSwam. In that interview, she said she and her coaches expected that there would be “some measure of pushback” in response to her competing, but not “quite to the extent that it has blown up.”

    “I just don’t engage with it,” she said, regarding the criticism. “It’s not healthy for me to read it and engage with it at all, and so I don’t, and that’s all I’ll say on that.”

Of course Mr Thomas does not wish to engage with it, because, regardless of how he feels about things, his swimming records point out the differences, shout out the differences, between males and females. I get it: he really wants to feel like a woman, but he just isn’t one. Even he has to wonder about all of this, because with every meet he swims, every record he breaks, he is demonstrating the differences between himself as a ‘trans woman,’ and real women.

The Daily Mail reported:

    ‘Usually everyone claps, everyone is yelling and cheering when someone wins a race. Lia touched the wall and it was just silent in there. When fellow Penn swimmer Anna Kalandadze finished second, the crowd erupted in applause.’

Simply put, regardless of what Jo Yurcaba says, regardless of what Bruce Jenner or Bradley Manning or Will Thomas believe, the crowd of ordinary people knew what had happened, knew what was going on, and knew that the winner was not a real female swimmer.

This is the part I simply do not understand: if Mr Thomas believes that he really is a woman, why is he doing things which make the differences between him and real women so apparent?

It is wholly politically incorrect to say that men and women are different, but I’m not exactly politically correct; men and women are different, and somehow, some way, every human society about which we have any knowledge knew about and understood those difference. Every bird, every reptile, and every mammal, can tell the difference between males and females of their own species; it’s necessary for survival. Some mammals, cats and dogs for instance, appear to be able to distinguish between human males and females. It is only now, among our 21st century liberals that that innate ability has been educated right out of them.

References

References
↑1 Chad Malloy is a ‘transgender’ activist who believes he is female, and goes by the name ‘Parker’ Malloy.
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And what could have happened had the school district done otherwise?

The idiocy of ‘transgenderism’ strikes again:

Missouri school district on the hook for $4 million for not letting transgender student use desired restroom

by Adam Sabes | Wednesday, December 15, 2021 | 9:52 PM

A Missouri school district has been ordered to pay a former student $4 million after a jury ruled that the district discriminated against a transgender student by not allowing him to use the boys’ restroom.

A jury in Jackson County, Missouri ruled on Monday that Blue Springs School District discriminated against a transgender student by not letting him use the boys’ restroom or locker rooms at several schools, including the middle school and the Freshman Center.

In 2014, the family of RJ Appleberry, the student, filed a lawsuit against the Blue Springs School District after the district allegedly blocked him from using the boys’ bathroom and locker room, according to Fox 4 Kansas City.

The article states that the student transitioned from female to male at the age of nine years old.

According to the lawsuit, after amending his birth certificate in 2014, he was still denied access to the boys’ restrooms and locker rooms at several schools, including Delta Woods Middle School and the Freshman Center.

In total, the jury awarded $175,000 to the former student in compensatory damages in addition to $4 million in punitive damages, and the plaintiff has also requested that the school district cover the attorney fees as well.

A spokesperson for the Blue Springs School District said that they disagree with the verdict and will be “seeking appropriate relief from the trial court and court of appeals if necessary.”

There’s more at the original.

Miss Appleberry was a minor, when her parents and she filed the lawsuit, and the obvious question is: had Miss Appleberry had sexual mutilation procedures sex reassignment surgery performed at the time? Missouri has seen legislation which would make such illegal on minors, but it is not clear that such would have been prohibited when she began her ‘transition’ nine years ago. The question that no one seems willing to ask is: what are the dangers of allowing someone with female genitals into the bathrooms and locker rooms full of hormone-riddled real teenaged boys? We already know what happened when the Loudoun County public schools allowed a boy who sometimes wore a skirt to freely use the girls’ bathrooms. There is a risk of sexual assault!

The Blue Springs School District would have been equally liable if Miss Appleberry had been allowed to use the boys’ bathrooms and locker rooms if some real boy decided that the chance to see, and perhaps use, some female genitals in such settings. That such would have constituted rape on the part of the assailant would not relieve the school district of the liability of allowing such a set up to occur.