ayşe.

The transformation of the heart is a wondrous thing, no matter how you land there.

I wasn’t in the room when the independent panel decided to halt the recent male birth control trial. I don’t know what their decision-making process was like. Certainly, depression and mood changes aren’t things to be taken lightly, and of course it’s in everyone’s best interest to have new drugs be as safe as possible. However. In the male birth control trial, 4.7 percent of men experienced mood swings, and 2.8 percent experienced depression. These were two of the side effects cited as reasons for ending the trial. On the other hand, let’s take Liletta, an IUD approved by the FDA in 2015—5.2 percent of its users experienced mood swings, and 5.4 percent experienced depression. A woman using Liletta has a higher chance of experiencing the same side effects than a man using the injectable birth control that was deemed too risky. The standards are different. In 2007, the pharmaceutical company Bayer gave up on a male contraceptive “that involved an annual implant and a quarterly injection,” as my colleague Olga Khazan reported in 2015. The company, she wrote, “concluded that men would consider the regimen—in the words of a spokesperson—‘not as convenient as a woman taking a pill once a day.’” Well, yes. That is far more convenient—for the men. Women will put up with it, of course, as they have for years, because the stakes are that high. And as research into male birth control accelerates, we are starting to see this hypocrisy more clearly—that the burdens women bear in exchange for their reproductive freedom are considered too much to expect men to deal with.

Social and moral norms regarding honesty mostly have to do with the semantic form of communication. One’s words are supposed to correspond with, or at least not mislead about, the facts as one understands them. But Trump simply doesn’t view what he’s engaged in as an exercise in articulating and defending beliefs about factual states of affairs. He is as blind to that function of communication as human eyes are to infrared light. What he’s doing is trying to establish dominance — to win, in his words. That’s what he uses words for. That’s how he sees every interaction in which he is involved. He is attuned only to what the words are doing, whether they are winning or losing, not to what they mean.

We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

We need to move away from inequitable local property tax-based school funding that rewards the wealthy and penalizes everyone else. Some may say we cannot afford to do this. I say we cannot afford not to. The human and economic costs of inequity are too high a price to pay. We can afford this investment if we reorient our national priorities and tax structures. We need to invest in ensuring the quality of the community public schools we already have rather than in escape schemes for individuals such as expanding the number of charter schools or funding vouchers for private schools. We need systemic strategies for all, not escape hatches for the few. We are all diminished when some of our children don’t get the highest quality education.