Again, you’re misreading it. The requirement that the child be raised Jewish applies ONLY when the mother didn’t convert, and wasn’t Jewish, by the time the child was born. Put the other way: if the mother’s conversion took place before the child’s birth, the child was Jewish at birth by definition, and it doesn’t…

Really? All I ever see is people saying how awful Caitlyn looks. Assuming they even have the decency to call her Caitlyn and “she.” The idea that nobody dares to criticize trans women or their appearance is preposterous.

My grandmother took me to the Automat once when I was little, and it was amazing to me. I didn’t really understand that there were people involved, and thought the entire process was “automated” — including making the food.

That isn’t what that says. If the child’s mother converts before the child is born, the child is Jewish by birth no matter how he or she is raised. In exactly the same way that I am Jewish by birth (because both my parents were Jewish), and am considered Jewish regardless of the fact that I had no formal Jewish…

Most of you are probably too young to remember these two, but back in the 1980s, I was having lunch with a friend at the covered sidewalk tables of a restaurant on Lexington Avenue in the 60s. The space was so narrow that our table was no more than two feet away from the one next to it, where the completely gorgeous…

Balsa wood? That’s what I remember. So light you could chew on it!

If the founding fathers had intended the rights of citizens to be applied to fetuses, the 14th Amendment would have been written to apply to “all persons conceived or naturalized” in the U.S., not “all persons born or naturalized” here. And the age minimum for Presidents would have been set at 34 years and 3 months,…

The same planet Xenu came from, undoubtedly. There’s no real difference between Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard except about 100 years or so.

Yes, I was wondering whether Mormons who engage in mass (obviously non-consensual) baptisms of Jewish Holocaust victims — and I know they keep promising not to allow that anymore, but it still sometimes happens; I once found my mother’s murdered grandparents on such a list — are now going to have to make sure first…

Plus Fox put that cheater A-Rod on television to comment on the World Series! Doesn’t integrity mean anything anymore? What about the children? (I saw several columns from cranky old men saying pretty much exactly that.)

That has no binding legal effect whatsoever if the recipient doesn’t have a legal obligation to the sender to keep things secret. Nobody can unilaterally impose confidentiality that way; both sides have to agree. It’s just meaningless words that aren’t worth the paper they aren’t even written on.

Plus, this is all based on fantasy and fear-mongering on your part. Not one of you has ever been able to furnish an actual example of a trans woman (or a man who wasn’t trans pretending to be a woman) who entered a women’s bathroom using the excuse of one of the existing anti-discrimination laws, and proceeded to…

No, I don’t think he should lose his job. But he properly was removed from his position as chair of the psych department for breaking the rules for research, including, among other things, having sex with the subjects of that research.

You just gave the “game” away yourself — and the fact that you call it a game is quite telling — by admitting that you think of trans women as men who merely claim to be women. The fact is that the defeat of this law simply gives people like you license to harass women who (whether by genetic accident or because they…

Source for the first sentence?

And how many of those men have achieved access by posing as trans women?

Your premise that this law would allow “men” in women’s bathrooms is entirely false. Please show me where this law says that, or where the couple of hundred similar laws have been so interpreted.

And J. Michael Bailey, the notorious promoter of flagrantly transphobic and discredited theories.

Nope, that’s not my only takeaway. And I didn’t say I believed her. I said it’s possible. And whatever she did, she’s not an “it.”

I’m so sorry. I was sexually abused for several years, beginning when I was 11, by a prominent physician. I didn’t tell my parents or anyone else — I was too embarrassed, because I thought that somehow it was my fault, or maybe I was imagining it. In retrospect, part of me is relieved that I didn’t say anything,…