"Litter boxes in schools" is a Wikipedia article — with an active discussion of whether it should be retitled "Litter boxes in schools hoax."

It begins:

 

I used a screenshot because I wanted you to experience the absurdity of the picture of an actual cat litter box. Surely, if there were a litter box for a human being it would need to be proportional, and I think a third grader is about 6 times as large as a cat. I don't know the urine output of a child versus a cat, but, seriously, you're going to need a bigger box. But if it is a hoax — and Wikipedia assures me it is a hoax — then there is no box and that's the whole point.

I was going to make a joke using the phrase "Schrödinger's cat box," but the Wikipedia entry "Schrödinger's cat" was a real rat hole.

"If transgenderism is appropriate, then transracialism is appropriate./Transgenderism is appropriate./Therefore, transracialism is appropriate."

That's the argument Rebecca Tuvel believed she was making, but the reason feminist philosophers freaked out, Jim S. argues, is that Tuvel's modus ponens argument flips all too easily into this modus tollens argument:

If transgenderism is appropriate, then transracialism is appropriate.
Transracialism is not appropriate.
Therefore, transgenderism is not appropriate.

"The question is, why did so many scholars, especially feminists, express one sentiment behind closed doors and another out in the open? "

"In private messages, some people commiserated, expressed support, and apologized for what was happening and for not going public with their support," writes Vanderbilt philosophy professor Kelly Oliver, about the article “In Defense of Transracialism” written by Rebecca Tuvel and published in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy.

As one academic wrote to me in a private message, “sorry I’m not saying this publicly (I have no interest in battling the mean girls on Facebook) but fwiw it’s totally obvious to me that you haven’t been committing acts of violence against marginalized scholars.” Later, this same scholar wrote, again in private, saying Tuvel’s article is “a tight piece of philosophy” that makes clear that the position that “transgender is totally legit, [and] transracial is not—can only be justified using convoluted essentialist metaphysics. I will write to her privately and tell her so.” Others went further and supported Tuvel in private while actually attacking her in public. In private messages, these people apologized for what she must be going through, while in public they fanned the flames of hatred and bile on social media. The question is, why did so many scholars, especially feminists, express one sentiment behind closed doors and another out in the open? Why were so many others afraid to say anything in public?

MEANWHILE: In Alexandria, the real Hypatia did not face mean girls on Facebook, but mean men...



... who "tore off her clothing" and either ripped "her body in pieces" with "tiles" or "dragged her... through the streets of the city till she died."

Why name your journal after her if you don't have courage?

"This Is What a Modern-Day Witch Hunt Looks Like."

By Jesse Singal (in New York Magazine). This is a remarkably detailed analysis of an attack on Rebecca Tuvel, a philosopher who published "In Defense of Transracialism" in the feminist-philosophy journal Hypatia. Excerpt from Singal's article:

There has simply been an explosive amount of misinformation circulating online about what is and isn’t in Tuvel’s article, which few of her most vociferous critics appear to have even skimmed, based on their inability to accurately describe its contents. Because the right has seized on Rachel Dolezal as a target of gleeful ridicule, and as a means of making opportunistic arguments against the reality of the trans identity, a bunch of academics who really should know better are attributing to Tuvel arguments she never made, simply because she connected those two subjects in an academic article.

Read the whole thing. It makes me want to read all these other things Jesse Singal has written. Like, "Here’s (More) Evidence Testosterone Makes Men Dumber."

As you can see [from the new study in Psychological Science], testosterone made the respondents significantly more likely to pick the answer that “felt” right but that wasn’t in fact correct. It didn’t seem to have an effect on their ability to solve arithmetic problems, which don’t have an answer that “feels” right and therefore don’t lend themselves to gut-impulse guessing.

Here's a Breitbart article about Jesse Singal: "Meet Precious Flower Jesse Singal: He Thinks You Are a ‘Hateful Idiot.’" It's really insanely intra-Breitbart:

[I]n response to Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos Tweeting out the article about Singal’s piece, Singal began to lose it. “Holy shit Breitbart responded to my beard blog post!!!!!!!!!!! These are some sensitive snowflakes,” Singal wrote....

That goes on and on about Singal going on and on.  Here's Singal's beard blog post (from 2015): "7 Breitbart Commenters Who Think Paul Ryan Might Be a Radical Muslim Because He Grew a Beard."

Vanity Fair on Rachel Dolezal: "Her cover’s blown, but that turned out not to matter. It was never a cover to her, anyway."

I know: Weren't Rachel Dolezal's 15 minutes of fame over? She's so last month!

But — you may remember — the discussion of Rachel Dolezal was abruptly cut short when another race-related news event suddenly, dramatically overwhelmed it and made it seem too stupidly trivial to talk about. That feeling  — that the Charleston massacre makes it wrong to talk about Rachel Dolezal — has worn off.

And, more importantly, Vanity Fair has put up a big article that plays right into the zone that we'd left unexplored, the concept that race, like gender, can be a matter of personal, inward identification:

Dolezal feels her outing was a big misunderstanding... Had she been able to explain her complicated childhood and sincere, long-time love for black culture to everyone before the blow up, all would have been forgiven.

“Again, I wish I could have had conversations with all kinds of people,” she says. “If I would have known this was going to happen, I could have said, ‘O.K., so this is the case. This is who I am, and I’m black and this is why.’”

Men in shorts — the not-quite-ready-to-shave edition.

From a NYT article titled "At London Men’s Fashion Week, Bigger is Not Necessarily Better." The photo is by Tom Jamieson for the NYT and the fashion is by Christopher Shannon for spring 2016.

I love this image because of how strongly it proves the point I've been pushing for 11 years, which is that shorts make a man look like a boy. Now, maybe that's what some men are looking for. They've got an inner child to let out of the awkward man-shell within which they find themselves trapped. They're trans-boys.

This model looks perfectly cute in his boyishness, and the stylists knew what the look was: boy. See that shaving cream on his chin and ears? He's just playing at shaving. Got into his dad's things. The shaving cream. The old Zippo lighter. Look out. Going to get in trouble. Here comes trouble.

ADDED: The NYT portrays what I'm calling shaving cream as "mousse":

[Christopher Shannon] models’ faces were bearded with snowy drifts of mousse, as though they had come direct from a frat-holiday foam party. But give the lads a shower and the collection came forward as crisp, sporty and salable....

Mousse, eh? That calls to mind the it's-not-mousse scene in "Something About Mary."

The trans-real world of Rachel Dolezal and her memoir-writing, child-abuse-trial-awaiting brother Joshua.

"It was revealed Monday that Dolezal’s older brother Joshua Dolezal is awaiting trial on charges he sexually abused a black child — charges that the Dolezal family, in their own television appearance, implied Rachel Dolezal may have helped orchestrate," reports Justin Wm. Moyer in the Washington Post.

Joshua Dolezal’s troubles could perhaps explain at least one piece of the complicated puzzle behind this saga, the question of why a couple claiming to be Rachel Dolezal’s parents would expose their daughter to such public humiliation and perhaps legal  jeopardy....

The affadavit in support of the arrest warrant has a racial theme: "The family had a subscription to National Geographic magazine... Joshua Dolezal showed [redacted] his collection of photos of topless and naked African women.... Joshua Dolezal was turned on by the black body and was curious about black women sexually."

Joshua Dolezal, an English professor, seems to be a respected writer. He has a memoir published by the University of Iowa Press, "Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging." The WaPo reporter extracts material about Rachel from the memoir: