By: Colin Wright

Published: Jul 2, 2026

Within minutes of the Supreme Court’s decision allowing states to protect girls’ and women’s sports, the headlines arrived in formation.

“Supreme Court Allows States to Bar Transgender Athletes From Girls’ Sports,” said the New York Times. According to NPR, the Court had upheld “bans on transgender athletes participating in women and girls’ sports.” Reuters claimed the Court had cleared the way for “transgender sports bans.” The BBC, NBC, ABC, ESPN, USA Today and others all settled on some version of the same phrase: transgender athletes banned from sports.

They know they’re lying. We know they’re lying. And they know that we know they’re lying.

Let’s be clear: the Supreme Court did not “ban transgender athletes from sports” this week. It didn’t even ban transgender athletes from women’s sports. The Court simply allowed states to pass laws that restrict girls’ and women’s sports to female athletes, which is the entire point of having a female category in the first place. The decision has nothing to do with identity or pronouns. The disputed trait is sex.

You can test this easily.

Suppose a female athlete identifies as a man but is not taking testosterone (a performance-enhancing drug). Is she barred from women’s sports under these state laws? No. In fact, we already saw this with Iszac Henig, whom NBC News described as “a trans male swimmer at Yale University who swims on the women’s team.” There was no national panic over Henig’s presence on the women’s team. Why? Because Henig is a female playing in the female category.

What about female athletes who identify as “nonbinary.” Are they barred from women’s teams for not identifying as men or women? Again, no. In 2018, the Oberlin Review profiled two “nonbinary” female athletes competing on the college’s women’s cross-country and basketball teams. Why don’t you know their names? Because women competing against women is not controversial.

If females with transgender or nonbinary identities are still eligible for female teams, then “transgender athletes” are not what is being banned.

What do the athletes at the center of every dispute have in common? They are male. That is the fact every left-wing headline attempts to obscure.

Consider the Globe and Mail headline: “Supreme Court allows states to ban transgender girls and women from school athletic teams.” That sentence is technically defensible, but in the most slippery way possible. Yes, states may bar certain athletes who identify as transgender woman and girls from certain teams. But which teams, and why? Female teams, because they are male.

But these laws would also bar any “cisgender” male who attempted to play on female teams, and for the same reason—they’re male.

Leaving the issue of sex out of the headlines is obscuring the central point.

Imagine that I—a 40-year-old man—tried to join a tee-ball league for children ages 4 to 7. Let’s say I identified as a trans-age 6-year-old. The state then passed a law saying adults like me could not compete in leagues reserved for small children, and the Supreme Court upholds it. Would any honest newspaper run the headline: “Supreme Court allows states to ban men from sports teams”?

That would be technically true, since the law does indeed ban men from certain sports teams. But it would leave readers with a completely false impression that men were banned from all sports, when in reality we were banned from children’s sports. The age component is the whole story.

This is what left-wing media is doing with the recent SCOTUS decision. Males are not banned from sports. Transgender-identifying students are not banned from sports. Males are barred from female sports. The sex component is the whole story.

This distinction is not complicated. In fact, it’s one of the most easy and straightforward distinctions imaginable. It’s a distinction that has kept our species going for millions of years. The reporters understand it, the editors understand it, and everyone involved in writing these headlines understands it. That is what makes left-wing media coverage so revealing.

If a headline said, “Supreme Court Allows States to Keep Males Out of Girls’ Sports,” readers would immediately understand the case. They might agree or disagree with the ruling, but they would at least understand the central issue. A headline calling it a “transgender sports ban” does the opposite, and causes readers to imagine it as a broad, cruel exclusion of an entire vulnerable class from athletics itself. It tries to turn a simple sex-based eligibility rule into a civil-rights cause.

The language is designed in a way that the ordinary sounds extreme, and the extreme sounds ordinary. The existence of a female sports category is framed as “discrimination.” A male athlete is referred to as a “woman” or “girl.” A law preserving female-only competition becomes a “ban on transgender athletes.” Every word is specially selected to keep readers from making contact with reality.

It’s a mistake is to think that this kind of narrative manipulation is unique to the transgender issue. If major news organizations are attempting to mislead you about something as obvious as the distinction between men and women, imagine what they do on stories where the facts are less familiar and the science and law are more technical and difficult to understand.

They do the same thing on other issues, they just get away with it more often.

Defenders of these Orwellian headlines will say that “transgender athletes” is a common phrase and that everyone understands what it means. But if that’s true, then why not just say it? Why choose the word “transgender” over “male,” especially when headline character space is so limited?

Because accurate wording would weaken the preferred narrative.

The Supreme Court did not ban transgender athletes from sports. It allowed states to preserve the female category.

That is the headline. Everything else is spin.

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Abstract

Black Queer Feminist Alchemy: A Codex of Sociogenic Conditions of Knowing and Being articulates a counterhumanist paradigm and methodological praxis that begins from the premise that Black life does not require validation within dominant epistemological systems to be recognized as fully human. Rather than positioning Black experience as an object of study, this work proceeds from Black queer ways of knowing as already generative, sufficient, and in excess of the categories that have historically sought to contain them. In doing so, it refuses the terms through which humanness has been narrowly defined and reorients inquiry toward the conditions through which knowing and being become possible.

Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s sociogenic principle, this codex develops Sociogenic Condition and Fractal Threading as conceptual and methodological articulations for engaging these conditions. Together, they attend to how humanness is produced, lived, and felt across history, relation, and everyday life, while offering a mode of inquiry that moves through recursion, relation, and return rather than linear progression or resolution. Within this orientation, knowledge is not extracted or stabilized, but emerges through sustained engagement with lived experience, memory, and the ongoing movement of meaning.

Organized as a codex, the work resists a singular, fixed path of reading and instead invites multiple points of entry. Its methodological movements operate relationally, allowing inquiry to remain responsive to the conditions from which it emerges rather than bound to predetermined sequence or outcome. In this way, the codex repositions research as a relational and ongoing practice rather than a closed system of explanation.

By centering relational, affective, and lived modes of knowing, this work contributes a paradigm and methodological praxis to qualitative research that reimagines how knowledge is produced, shared, and lived, expanding the conditions under which inquiry itself becomes possible.

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By: Colin Wright

Published: Jun 25, 2026

For years, we were told not to worry about pediatric gender medicine because it was vanishingly rare. Puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, we were assured, were reserved for a tiny number of carefully assessed children with severe and persistent distress.

But when new data show that these treatments aren’t so rare, the same defenders suddenly change their tune: the numbers are no longer reassuring because they are small; now they are reassuring because they are large. More children receiving medical transition means that a previously hidden population finally feels safe enough to pursue the care it has always needed. Higher cross-sex identity persistence after social transition or administering puberty blockers means the interventions were obviously appropriate.

Any outcome, it seems, can be interpreted as proof that “gender-affirming care” is successful. But this is not how evidence-based medicine is supposed to work. This is how an ideology protects itself from falsification.

The latest example comes from Oregon. As Benjamin Ryan first reported, a new study in Research Connections analyzed insurance claims for 868,740 insured Oregon adolescents ages 8 to 17 from 2016 to 2023. The data cover roughly 80 percent of insured Oregonians. The figures were shocking.

By age 17, roughly one in 240 insured Oregon girls was taking testosterone, and about one in 630 boys was taking estrogen. Across all ages in the study, about 1 percent of insured Oregon youth had a gender-related diagnosis. For girls, the figure was 1.5 percent.

These aren’t nationwide numbers. Oregon is an unusually progressive state with an unusually supportive legal and insurance environment for pediatric gender medicine. But they give us a glimpse of what happens when supporters of child transition receive little to no pushback.

The study’s authors don’t view the numbers as alarming. They still describe medical transition as “rare” and emphasize that access remains “limited” even in Oregon. They suggest that the state’s supportive policy environment likely contributed to greater access, while “structural and systemic barriers” may still be holding treatment rates down.

Whatever the data, they support the affirmative model. If the rates are low, that proves the panic is overblown. If the rates are high, that’s evidence that access is improving. If the rates rise, that means stigma is declining. If they don’t rise enough, that means barriers remain. Heads they win, tails you’re a bigot.

This pattern shows up again and again. Years ago, when critics warned that puberty blockers appeared to function less as a “pause button” and more as the first step on a nearly automatic pathway to cross-sex hormones, defenders insisted that persistence meant the children had been properly selected. But if administering puberty blockers changes the likelihood that a child will persist in rejecting their sex from about 15–20 percent to more than 97 percent, then persistence isn’t proof that the child’s transgender identity was fixed all along—it’s evidence that the intervention made permanent what would have been ephemeral.

Kenneth Zucker, one of the world’s leading experts on childhood gender dysphoria, has warned that even social transition is not a neutral act. Changing a child’s name, pronouns, clothing, and social identity is a psychosocial intervention. It may reduce distress in the short term, but it also seems to increase the likelihood that a child’s cross-sex identity persists into adolescence, when puberty blockers and hormones are put on the table.

That possibility should haunt the field. Instead, it is dismissed.

Consider a new Canadian study, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health and shared by pediatric psychiatrist and gender medicine proponent Jack Turban on social media. Researchers examined 445 adolescents referred to gender clinics. After a median follow-up of 2.4 years, 97.1 percent still identified as transgender or nonbinary, and only 1.1 percent of those who started cross-sex hormones stopped taking them. The study presents this as reassuring evidence that adolescent transgender identity is extremely stable, and that concerns about regret and potential detransition are overblown.

The same logic appeared in response to the Oregon data. Trans activist Ari Drennen said on X that it “should not be shocking” that 0.4 percent of 17-year-old girls in Oregon are chemically transitioning. But it is shocking. If one in 240 girls aged 17 in a state were receiving any other powerful intervention for a new psychiatric diagnosis that permanently deepened their voice, caused them to grow beards, altered their sexual function, and affected their fertility, no serious person would shrug and say, “Sounds about right.”

At some point, defenders of pediatric gender medicine must answer several simple questions: What result would make you reconsider? Would it be one in 100 girls on testosterone? What about one in 50? What rate of regret or detransition is too high? Would you accept that as evidence that suicidality and mental health don’t improve after treatment? How many systematic evidence reviews must conclude that the evidence of benefit is extremely weak while the risk of serious harm is significant?

We should have insisted on answers long ago, before we ever started performing this medical experiment on children—not after the results come in, when activists have had ample time to devise explanations about why the latest horrific finding is actually wonderful news.

Falsifiability is a basic principle of science. No claim that can be supported by every possible outcome has any business being called scientific or “evidence-based.”

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The thing that never happens.

By: Colin Wright

Published: Jun 19, 2026

The moral panic that swept through higher education after 2020 caused tremendous damage. In the name of diversity, equity, inclusion, antiracism, decolonization, and “social justice,” universities scrambled to avoid accusations of racism by building new offices, making DEI a central factor in hiring and promotion, and going on a hiring spree for “diverse” candidates to artificially augment the non-white racial makeup of faculty.

All of this took place at a time when public confidence in higher education was already in the gutter. At the exact moment universities needed to show the public that they were still committed to truth-seeking and academic rigor, many just doubled down on the ideological rhetoric and actions that caused so many Americans write them off in the first place.

The University of North Carolina (UNC), however, has been one of the few major public universities where trustees have shown some willingness to resist this ideological takeover. In 2021, they refused to approve a tenured appointment for Nikole Hannah-Jones, the journalist behind the New York Times’ overtly political “1619 Project,” correctly perceiving that Hannah-Jones wasn’t being recruited for having strong credentials, but rather as the face of a controversial political project that rewrote America’s founding through a highly contested racial narrative.

The trustees’ instincts were sound. Unfortunately, their resolve was not. After protests and national backlash, the board ultimately approved Hannah-Jones for the tenured position. But this backfired in humiliating fashion when she subsequently declined the offer and took a position at Howard University.

Now the board faces a similar test. This time the candidate is Kiran Asher, a professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who last month was proposed for a distinguished professorship at UNC with tenure. According to reports, Asher’s hire had already been approved by the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, the College of Arts and Sciences, the university-wide appointment, promotion, and tenure committee, and UNC’s new provost, Magnus Egerstedt. By the time her case reached the Board of Trustees, many faculty viewed final approval as a mere formality.

But the trustees exercised their veto power, and voted to reject Asher’s appointment. The backlash has begun.

UNC is a public university created to serve North Carolina and advance its stated mission: “to serve as a center for research, scholarship, and creativity” and to educate the next generation of leaders. Trustees exist to protect that mission over the long term. While they’re not supposed or expected to micromanage every faculty search, when a proposed lifetime appointment raises serious questions about whether scholarship has been subordinated to ideology, they have not only the right but the duty to intervene.

Asher’s work sits squarely inside the activist academic world exposed by the 2018 “Grievance Studies” affair, where skeptics managed to get a half-dozen nonsense papers published in popular, peer reviewed feminist journals. One absurd paper was even chosen as one of twelve “lead pieces” in celebration of the journal’s 25th year in production. Decolonial feminism, postcolonial theory, anticapitalist critique, Queer Theory, and notions of “embodied” and “situated knowledges” run through Asher’s scholarship, as well as allusions to her “postcolonial feminist rage and research” and her insistence that research must be joined to activism.

In one co-authored paper, Asher and Priti Ramamurthy explain that anticolonial scholarship foregrounds how colonial practices create “Eurocentric” forms of knowledge-production that marginalize “other forms of knowing and being in the world.” They write that postcolonial and decolonial approaches agree that “the political task of working toward liberation, decolonization, and social justice must accompany scholarly and academic tasks of analysis.”

These are not one-off papers. Such ideas form the foundation of her scholarship. To win back the public’s trust, we need fewer scholars motivated by politics and “rage,” and more who are committed to cool-headed analyses to uncover truth.

Decolonial scholarship treats the university system and modern science as instruments of oppression that must be destabilized, dismantled, or replaced by alternative “ways of knowing.” In plain English, this means that the standards that made universities useful in the first place—evidence, logic, falsifiability, replicability, disciplined argument, and openness to criticism—are portrayed as forms of oppression rather than tools for discovering what’s objectively true.

A university is an institution built around the production and transmission of reliable knowledge. That requires methods capable of separating what is true from what is merely felt, asserted, or politically useful. The scientific method may have been primarily formalized by white Westerners, but it is not owned by the West. It can be used, checked, and replicated by anyone, anywhere. Its universality is precisely what makes it such a powerful tool. Any ideology that rejects it as a form of Western oppression has no place in institutions committed to rigorous scholarship and the pursuit of truth.

How could Asher’s hiring advance the mission of the university when her personal and professional mission as an activist is to undermine its very legitimacy? If a field or candidate is devoted to replacing disciplined inquiry with identity-based epistemology or activist “praxis,” trustees are allowed to—and should—say no.

They are also allowed to question the judgment of administrators who send such appointments forward. Provost Magnus Egerstedt supported Asher’s appointment and advanced it to the board for final approval. That’s unsurprising, given that Egerstedt was part of UC Irvine’s Samueli School of Engineering Anti-Racism Task Force, an initiative created in the wake of the post-Floyd moral panic.

While that alone should not disqualify his recommendation, it does show that he comes from the same activist culture UNC’s trustees have been trying to resist, and that they were right to not simply defer to his judgment.

Asher’s own comments after her rejection reveal the bullet that was dodged. She suggested that the board’s decision was part of a broader pattern affecting “women and people of color,” especially those doing “gender work, race work, social justice work, non-Christian work, Islamic studies,” and said, “I don’t see this as an individual thing—it’s all systematic.” She also said someone told her “the BOT has gone rogue,” adding that “rogue doesn’t just happen” and that certain things “facilitate a certain kind of rogueness.”

But the board did not “go rogue.” They are not obligated to grant tenured appointments to scholars whose work treats the university’s foundations and mere existence as oppressive structures to be dismantled.

The UNC Board of Trustees made the right call in blocking Asher’s appointment, and other university trustees should use them as a model for what real oversight looks like. Faculty and administrators will complain. Activists will accuse them of political interference. National media may frame the decision as an attack on academic freedom. But academic freedom does not require public universities to grant lifetime appointments to every scholar approved by a process that’s been ideologically captured.

Trustees should expect backlash, and they should ignore it. The pressure to fold is strongest precisely when their resolve matters most.

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By: Chris Sharp

Published: Jun 18, 2026

Last August, Decarlos Brown Jr.—a mentally ill repeat offender out on bail—allegedly stabbed 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska to death on a Charlotte light rail train. Video of the shocking murder prompted widespread outrage, pushing the North Carolina legislature to pass a law named for Zarutska and meant to overhaul the state’s criminal justice and mental-health system.

But will Zarutska’s killer be brought to justice? Brown is currently mentally incompetent to stand trial, according to a federal judge. As a result, he may never face a jury. In fact, under current law, he could walk free if the court concludes he will never regain the capacity to proceed.

This perverse outcome is the result of flawed involuntary commitment and mental competency laws. At the state level, these laws allow the release of violent criminals like Brown into communities without court-ordered treatment and supervision. Federal policy is only marginally less bad. Both are in desperate need of reform.

Brown faces both state and federal murder charges. His lawyers have used the same strategy at both levels: seeking a declaration of incompetency to stand trial. Under both federal law and North Carolina law, no person can be tried, convicted, or sentenced while incapable of understanding the court proceedings.

So far, Brown’s lawyers have found success with this strategy. The state case against him was delayed until October after authorities found him “incapable to proceed” in court. Earlier this month, a judge delayed the federal case for the same reason.

Currently, Brown is in federal custody. He will soon be sent to a secure federal medical facility, where he will undergo psychiatric treatment for four months in hopes of restoring his competence to stand trial. Authorities could extend this period if his condition improves.

If the feds can’t restore Brown to competence, they have two options: hand him off to North Carolina or continue to hold him while they determine whether to keep him in indefinite civil commitment under federal supervision. The first scenario is more likely, as the crime happened on city-owned and operated public transportation, and the federal government does not have direct jurisdiction. Even if Brown is found to be unrestorable and referred for civil commitment, the federal government reverts to state laws and practices, which could allow Brown’s case to be dismissed, setting him free.

If he is remanded to state custody, the outcome could be outrageous. Under North Carolina law, Brown could be released back into the community with all charges dropped if further treatment does not restore him to competence. Specifically, if he is found not restorable within the maximum term of imprisonment (ten years for felonies) Brown’s charges will be dismissed and he will be released, with the same untreated mental illness and history of violence.

For a dangerous individual accused of murder, this outcome is unlikely but not impossible. The critical final decision over Brown’s competence to stand trial would fall to the clerk of the court in the North Carolina county where the trial takes place.

By any reasonable standard, Brown is dangerous. But North Carolina’s judgment of what counts as “dangerous” is already questionable. Before he killed Zarutska, Brown had 14 arrests, some for violent crimes, in Mecklenburg County, as well as a schizophrenia diagnosis. Despite Brown’s increasingly erratic behavior and 911 calls motivated by delusions, the state repeatedly charged him without completing a competency evaluation—until Zarutska’s murder.

Nor does the process governing the clerk of the court’s decision inspire confidence. The law doesn’t require the clerk to order a psychiatric evaluation or to consider such an evaluation when determining whether the accused should stand trial. The law simply states that the clerk may order an evaluation and may use that evaluation to determine if someone is capable of standing trial.

North Carolina’s laws make this outcome possible. The state needs to revise them to prevent it from occurring.

A better system would make competency evaluations mandatory, expand them to lower-level crimes when the perpetrator’s mental state is in question, and make the results of the evaluation part of the perpetrator’s permanent court record. These steps would help prevent mental-health issues that cause repeated criminal behavior from spiraling out of control without the court system knowing about it.

When a court finds a defendant incompetent to stand trial and clinicians determine that treatment is not likely to restore competency, residential treatment should be mandatory. Under no circumstances should the state allow an administrator to release a dangerous defendant simply because a court has declared him incompetent.

North Carolina is not the only state where involuntary commitment and mental competency laws need reform. South Carolina, Oklahoma, New York, Kentucky, and Illinois all have deficient laws in one way or another—to name just a few. But Brown’s case may soon place North Carolina’s system at the center of a national firestorm.

During his most recent hearing, Brown reportedly shouted at the judge, raved about having “material in his body,” and threatened to press charges against the FBI. Officials subsequently removed him from the courtroom.

It should never have come to this point. Each one of Brown’s violent crimes and misdemeanors was a missed opportunity to intervene. If just one of Brown’s prior arrests had led to an evaluation and mandatory treatment, Zarutska might be alive today. But with reform, we can save other lives.

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Violent offenders who are unrestorable should be humanely put down.

There's... literally no reason not to, other than misplaced "empathy" for what is definitionally an incompetent monster.

"Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent." – Adam Smith, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments"

Fat Queer Ecology

As climate change-related disasters continue to affect both human and more-than-human ecologies, it is increasingly evident that fatphobia influences which beings are worthy of protection. Although queer and disability studies scholars have critiqued ecology research that does not adequately attend to socio-political landscapes, fatphobia's links to environmental exploitation have gone largely untheorized. In this thesis, I imagine what a fat queer ecology might look like by theorizing different fat, queer strategies for approaching environmental justice in the United States. By constellating these practices, I account for ways that fat, queer justice becomes environmental justice, and vice versa. I argue that considering eco-criticism and environmental justice through a fat, queer lens opens alternate ways of forming kinship with more-than-human ecologies.

In Chapter One, I demonstrate how fat, Black leatherdyke "fuck sessions" in pornographer Shine Louise Houston's Crash Pad Series suggest possibilities for not-quite-human and more-than-human porosities. In Chapter Two, I focus on Claudia Hermano's photographic series, TIL WE ARE FULL, and my personal encounters with the landscapes of the American Southwest. I theorize enfolding, a process where fat folds encircle other bodies and catalyze a disruption of a bounded sense of self. Finally, in Chapter Three, I assert that the digestive system in Neb Berry's A Monster Made of Many Mouths provides insights into fat, queer more-than-human kinship. Throughout this thesis, I reassert the inextricability of fatphobia and ecological violence, which are both ongoing systems of exploitation that cast aside human and more-than-human bodies alike for capitalist gain.

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And how does she show us that she's "non-binary"?

*Taps the sign* 👇