Good News from “Chop Wood, Carry Water”

Extra! Extra! 2/2 by Jessica Craven

We made it through another week! Read on Substack

From Jay Kuo’s ever excellent “Just For Skeets and Giggles”

Hi, all, and happy Sunday!

Good God, what a week. I’m guessing you’re ready for a little good news, and guess what? I’ve got some! Actually quite a bit. Remember: two things can be true at once. Things are very bad, AND good things also happened this week. Some of them are even outgrowths of the bad things.

So with no further ado, let’s take a look at what went right in a week that was otherwise exceedingly challenging. Please take this list in, savor it, and dwell on it for as long as you can. It isn’t doomscrolling, for a change — it’s goodscrolling! Enjoy! And then share this list with someone who needs the lift.

As usual, I’ve popped an 🪓 next to every item that everyday activists like you helped make happen, and a 🪣 next to every one that got done by lawmakers or administrations that we helped elect.

Read This 📖

This hopeful cartoon is from editorial cartoonist Kevin Necessary. [H/T Nancy Davis Kho]

Celebrate This! 🎉

The Virginia Senate approved a proposed constitutional amendment that would restore voting rights to individuals with past felony convictions upon their release. If passed by both chambers next session, the amendment will go before voters for final approval. 🪣

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison announced a settlement with Novo Nordisk, securing insulin products for $35 per month in the state for the next five years. 🪣

A coalition of non-profits, public health leaders, and small businesses sued to block OMB’s late night attempt to pause all agency grants and loans. 🪓

Workers at a Whole Foods in Philadelphia have voted to become the first unionized store in the grocery chain, which is owned by Amazon. 🪓

Jim Acosta resigned from CNN, issuing a statement that said, in part: “It is never a good time to bow down to a tyrant…Do not give in to the lies. Don’t give into the fear. Hold on to the truth and to hope.” He then launched a Substack, which already has over 150K subscribers. 🪓

A Nevada judge dismissed a right-wing lawsuit filed by the Public Interest Legal Foundation that challenged voter rolls in Washoe County.

Trump’s firing of 18 inspectors general has prompted bipartisan pushback. Your calls helped with this! 🪓 🪣

The White House rescinded its illegal “freeze” after a day of ferocious backlash. Nice job, y’all. 🪓

Democrat Mike Zimmer flipped a state Senate seat in Iowa in a special election on Tuesday. Zimmer prevailed 53% to 47% in a district that Trump carried 60% to 39% in November. AMAZING! 🪓

The normally quiet Reddit thread of federal workers at rfednews has exploded with defiance — “We will NOT Resign, we took an oath and we will keep defending it against foreign and DOMESTIC enemies!!” 🪓

USDA inspector Phyllis Fong refused to comply with her firing and finally had to be semi-dragged out of her office. 🪓

Clean energy investment manager Greenbacker Renewable Energy has secured $950 million to build what will be New York State’s largest solar farm.

The U.K. and Scottish governments have launched a “skills passport” program to help fossil fuel workers transition to clean energy jobs.

The American Association of University Professors are saying they will completely ignore Trump’s attempts to control school curriculum. 🪓

Democrats easily held a state Senate seat in Minnesota. Democrat Doron Clark won this Hennepin County seat 91% to 9%. In November, Harris had prevailed 83% to 14%. 🪓

The Burbank, CA city council voted unanimously in favor of a resolution to make Burbank a sanctuary city. 🪓 🪣

Solar and wind are now being installed at a rate that is five times faster than all other new electricity sources combined. 🪣 (Thanks, Joe Biden!)

In response to Trump’s announcement of 25% tariffs on Canadian goods, British Columbia Premier David Eby has directed the B.C. Liquor Distribution Branch to immediately stop purchasing American liquor from Republican-led “red states” and remove the top-selling brands from public liquor store shelves.

A bipartisan coalition of 24 U.S. governors pledged to continue the country’s work toward achieving Paris Agreement goals. Representing nearly 60% of the U.S. economy and 55% of the nation’s population, Alliance members pledged to reduce collective greenhouse gas emissions by 26% below 2005 levels by 2025, a target it is on track to achieve. 🪣

The Nature Conservancy also independently pledged to continue honoring the Paris Agreement goals and help the rest of the U.S. “do its part,” too.

SCOTUS allowed the federal government to enforce a money-laundering law that protects consumers by increasing transparency in corporate ownership.

Three days before Trump was sworn into the presidency, a private equity firm with a growing monopoly on anesthesia practices agreed to a federal settlement requiring it to back off its anticompetitive roll-up scheme that has cost patients millions more for vital services. 🪣

After years of litigation that delayed payments designed to combat the national opioid crisis, Purdue Pharma and the billionaire Sackler family who own it agreed to pay $7.4 billion to settle lawsuits over the opioid manufacturer’s role in the crisis and give up their company ownership. 1

Sexual assault victims in New Jersey should be able to track their rape kits through the criminal justice system by late summer under a new law Gov. Phil Murphy signed last week. 🪣

Sacramento City Unified School District officials unanimously affirmed safety for undocumented students at their schools, saying they will refuse to cooperate with ICE or allow them on their campuses. 🪓 🪣

Senate Budget Committee Democrats boycotted the committee hearing on Russell Vought to protest his nomination. MORE LIKE THIS PLEASE!! 🪓 🪣

Costco is increasing pay for most of its hourly U.S. store workers to more than $30, per Reuters.

A New York appeals court restored the state’s Voting Rights Act, which expands voter protections, overturning a lower court’s decision striking it down.

China broke its own records for the installation of new solar and wind power last year, with installed capacity increasing by 18 and 45 percent, respectively.

Former New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez was sentenced to 11 years in prison following his conviction on bribery and corruption charges.

The leaders of more than half of Africa’s nations gathered this week in Dar es Salaam to commit to the biggest burst of spending on electric-power generation in Africa’s history.

New research indicates students are paying significantly less to attend public universities than they were a decade ago. And tuition increases at private colleges have finally slowed after years of hefty rises. Meanwhile, college enrollment in the U.S. rose for the first time last fall to surpass pre-pandemic levels.

Two unions–National Treasury Employees Union and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility–are suing the president for his “Schedule F” executive order that would allow him to fire civil servants without due process. 🪓

Former North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson is dropping his defamation lawsuit against CNN and “dropping out of politics.”

A federal judge in Rhode Island granted a temporary restraining order to block Trump’s freeze on all agency grants and loans. The judge also barred the Trump administration from issuing any further directive that emphasizes a funding freeze. Oh and he’s a judge Biden appointed. 🪣

A group of Quaker meetings, represented by Democracy Forward, filed a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s plan to enable ICE agents to enter houses of worship for their immigration enforcement actions. 🪓

The first step towards creating a Celtic rainforest – a now extremely rare habitat that once covered large swathes of the west coast of Britain – has been completed in Devon, England.

IKEA has slashed its carbon footprint by 30 percent in the last ten years while growing its profits 24 percent over the same period.

The decision to greenlight a giant new oilfield off Shetland in the UK has been ruled unlawful by the courts, in a major win for climate action.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has blocked anyone who took part in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol from working in state government. 🪣

TikTok influencers have been spreading information about ICE raids across the country, sometimes making it harder for agents to enforce Trump’s massive crackdown. 🪓

A new report from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication finds that most registered voters support climate-friendly policies, think the US should use more renewables and less fossil fuels in the future, and support US participation in the Paris Climate Agreement.

A Franklin County, MO woman pardoned for her participation in the U.S. Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021 was sentenced Wednesday to 10 years in prison for her role in a fatal drunk driving crash.

Left-leaning media outlets are seeing a “Trump bump” in ratings after initially seeing a massive drop in viewership. MSNBC has seen a 61 percent bump since Donald Trump’s inauguration. The Guardian, The Bulwark and The Atlantic have also seen increases.

Economists at Georgia Tech reported in a paper published this month that by mid-2023, the 13 states with total abortion bans had suffered a combined net loss of an estimated 36,000 residents per quarter, or more than 144,000 per year.

Rachel Maddow is bringing viewers back to MSNBC — and giving them hope.

Ron DeSantis and the Florida legislature seem to be at war.

A tip line (DEIAtruth@opm.gov) meant to encourage federal employees to rat out their colleagues for working on diversity issues is instead apparently being spammed with movie quotes and colored pencil drawings. (And some of us helped!)

Active-duty trans soldiers—and one prisoner—have sued to stop the Trump Administration’s anti-trans orders.

A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by several voters who sought to remove hundreds of allegedly ineligible voters from voter rolls in Marin County, California without evidence. The judge ruled the voters lacked standing.

Trump’s approval ratings are already starting to drop.

Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll refused a Justice Department order that he assist in the firing of agents involved in Jan. 6 riot cases, pushing back so forcefully that some FBI officials feared he would be dismissed (he wasn’t.) Courage—love to see it!

Officials have declared that the world’s largest hornet, dubbed the “murder hornet” for its killer stings, has been eradicated in the US five years after it was first spotted.

2000 new people have signed up with Run For Something just in the last week – that makes more than 15k since Election Day. WOW!

After Minnesota’s largest Pride festival dropped Target’s sponsorship (and the 50K donation that came with it) they put out a call for financial help and raised twice the money Target was supposed to kick in in less than 24 hours.

New York lawmakers are discussing a bill that would give Gov. Kathy Hochul more time to set dates for special elections, which could leave Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik’s red North Country seat empty until the summer.

Amazing PA rep Malcolm Kenyatta was just elected the Vice-Chair of the DNC! So was David Hogg! (The DNC has three vice-chairs.) Ken Martin will be the Chair, and although he wasn’t my choice he seems like he’ll be a competent leader. So the DNC has strong new leadership. No more “rudderless ship.” Yay!

Arizona Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs appointed Maria Elena Cruz to the Arizona Supreme Court. The state appellate judge from rural Yuma County will become the first Latina and the first Black person chosen for the state’s high court

After a white supremacy aligned university club encouraged students to report their classmates to ICE, hundreds of Arizona State University students responded by marching in support of their undocumented classmates.

Gov. Tim Walz announced he is proposing the first sales tax rate cut in Minnesota’s history to help Minnesotans weather Trump’s tariffs.

ITS OFFICIAL — the Eaton, Palisades & Hughes fires are all 100% contained. (As an Angeleno this one may be my favorite.)

(snip)

Julia Hare in “Wee Pals” Today

Wee Pals Comic Strip for February 02, 2025

https://www.gocomics.com/weepals/2025/02/02

Feb. 2d Traditions-What Is Yours?

Please tell us about yours, or what you wish it was, or anything else, in the comments!

Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for February 02, 2025

Arlo and Janis Comic Strip for February 02, 2025

https://www.gocomics.com/arloandjanis/2025/02/02

Scottie-Tell Ron! A Lighthouse Story

Ida Lewis, Newport’s Legendary Lighthouse Keeper

In the mid-1800s, Ida Lewis’s daring sea rescues became a media sensation, leading to hundreds of telegrams, gifts, and marriage proposals. All Ida wanted to do was tend to her lighthouse.

Nancy Rubin Stuart

Ida Lewis in a rowboat, ca. 1900 (Newport Historical Society)

The events that led to Ida Lewis being called “The Bravest Woman in America” began on the blustery night of March 29, 1869, on Lime Rock Island, after her mother Zoradia spotted two men clinging to an overturned boat in the churning waves and screaming for help. “Ida, O my god! Ida, run quick! A boat has capsized, and men are drowning. Run quick, Ida!” she yelled to her daughter.

Ida and her younger brother Hosea immediately ran out of the house and jumped into a small skiff. Taking the icy oars, she rowed against a high wind to rescue the drowning men. Despite the freezing, wintery weather, she and Hosea lifted the choking men into the skiff, rowed them back to shore, and brought them into their home. The men were soldiers from nearby Fort Adams. As told in Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter, Sergeant James Adams was barely able to “totter up to the house” and Private John McLoughlin was unconscious, but once revived and fed both recovered. Later, Sergent Adams told Ida’s other brother, Rudolph, “When I saw the boat approaching and a woman rowing, I thought She’s only a woman and she will never reach us. But I soon changed my mind.”

Illustration of Ida Lewis rescuing Sergeant James Adams and Private John McLoughlin, from the April 17, 1869, issue of *Harper’s Weekly* (Mariner’s Museum)

That was not the first time Ida had saved lives. By then she had already rescued three schoolboys and two other groups of men from drowning; during one rescue, Ida had saved four men whose boat had capsized in Newport Harbor. She was only twelve.

The *New York Tribune*’s story on Ida Lewis from their April 12, 1869 issue (Library of Congress)

Illustration of Ida Lewis from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, November 1881 (Newport Historical Society)

But her rescue of 1869 was so improbable that reporters flocked to Newport to interview her. On April 12, the New York Tribune carried Ida’s story, followed by articles in Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, which printed an etching of Ida’s pleasant face, strong features and wide-set hazel eyes. Adding to the story’s sensationalism was her weight of 103 pounds. Readers were riveted and soon besieged Ida with hundreds of telegrams, phone calls, gifts, and marriage proposals.

Shy and modest, Ida recoiled from the attention. When asked what motivated the rescue, she explained it as a moral obligation. “If there were some people out there who needed help, I would get into my boat and go to them even if I knew I couldn’t get back. Wouldn’t you?”

The boat presented to Ida in Boston on Independence Day (Stinson: *Newport Firsts: A Hundred Claims to Fame*, 2018, Arcadia Publishing via *WindCheck* magazine)

Readers were so overwhelmed by her courage that they collected funds to honor her. On July 4, 1869, in a public ceremony in Boston, they paraded a magnificent rescue boat through the streets, which was then presented to Ida. Among the audience were politicians and military leaders like Ulysses S. Grant, General Tecumseh Sherman, and Admiral George Dewey along with many wealthy Gilded Age summer residents of Newport who were then building estates along the shore. To the audience’s disappointment, she refused to address the crowd, leading prominent abolitionist Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson to explain, “Miss Lewis desires me to say that she has never made a speech in her life and…doesn’t expect to begin now.”

Later that summer, women’s rights leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton visited Newport and met Ida, whom they cited as a “young heroine” and an example of women’s unsung abilities.

Born on February 25, 1842, Idawalley Zoradia Lewis was the oldest of the four children of Zoradia and Captain Hosea Lewis of the Revenue Cutter Service, the forerunner of the U.S. Coast Guard. In 1854 after the Lighthouse Service appointed Ida’s father as keeper, young Ida routinely sailed with him from Newport to Lime Rock Island to help maintain the light. Three years later when a house was built on the island and the light relocated there in a special second floor “lanthern” room, the Lewises moved to Lime Rock. Tragedy struck four months later when Ida’s father suffered a paralytic stroke, forcing her mother Zoradia to assume his keeper duties.

Illustration of Lime Rock Island from *Harper’s Weekly*, July 31, 1869 (Wikimedia Commons)

By then everyone in the family knew Ida was dependable, had unusual strength, and was a skilled sailor. Her brother Rudolf bragged, “Ida… can hold one to wind’ard in a gale better than any man I ever saw, wet an oar, and yes do it too when the sea is breaking over her.” Consequently, after her father’s stroke, she rowed her siblings to school and returned to the island with supplies from Newport.

Over the next 14 years, Ida helped her mother tend the light until her father died in 1877. A year later, Zoradia, who was ill with cancer, also died, leaving Ida to serve as keeper, maintain the family home, and care for a frail sister.

Ida Lewis posing with an oar (U.S. Coast Guard / Arlington National Cemetery)

Being a lighthouse keeper was demanding. It was a job traditionally done by men. The beacon came from an oil-burning lantern housed in a wooden or iron frame surrounded by thick panes of glass. A solid wick suspended from the top of the frame enabled the oil (which needed to be refilled two or three times a night) to burn through the darkness. A Fresnel lens 17 inches tall and 11 ¾ inches in diameter reflected the burning oil, its light beaming far out beyond Newport Harbor. Every evening before dusk Ida trimmed the wick and adjusted the glass vents of the lens to create a proper draft. During the day, she cleaned the delicate panes of the lens, inspected and cleaned parts of the lantern, and removed carbon and other impurities. Those duties had to be performed carefully. If not, and the beacon failed, the lives of sailors at sea could be endangered.

Since Ida never kept records, no one knows how many rescues she achieved. Besides the famous 1869 rescue, several others were well known. The first occurred on a February 1866 night when she pulled three drunken soldiers from the waters after they “borrowed” her brother’s skiff and capsized it. The second happened the next January when three farmhands herded one of tycoon August Belmont’s prize sheep down Newport’s Main Street. Unexpectedly, the animal bolted and plunged into the harbor. Panicked, the trio jumped into Ida’s brother’s skiff to capture it but then overturned the boat. Again, Ida leapt into her own skiff and saved the drowning men whose hands were so numb from the frigid water that they barely grasped the sides of the capsized hull.

In 1870 Ida was officially appointed the Lighthouse Keeper of Lime Rock and awarded a salary of $750 per year (about $17,000 today). That same year she married Captain William Heard Wilson but became so unhappy that she soon left him and returned to her duties at Lime Rock Lighthouse.

Later, she rescued two more soldiers from Fort Adams who had fallen through the ice, prompting the United States government to award her the Gold Lifesaving Medal in 1881. Decades later, in 1907, Congress bestowed the first American Cross of Honor upon the aging Ida.

But awards, even national ones, meant little to her. “The light is my child and I know when it needs me, even if I sleep,” she once said. It was only when Ida died at age 69 on October 24, 1911, that her light finally went out.

Nancy Rubin Stuart often writes about women and social history. She is the author of The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation. Visit nancyrubinstuart.com.

Interesting, And I’m Glad There Are People Thinking of Such Things!

TikTok’s “cute winter boots” meaning explained

[Taylor Lorenz at UserMag]

This is like something from a cyberpunk novel:

“The phrase “cute winter boots” is not about footwear. It’s a code phrase being used to discuss resistance to Trump and how to fight back against the draconian immigration policies his administration is enacting. Users talking about “cute winter boots” keeping people safe from “ice,” are referencing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Cute winter boots” is just the latest example of algospeak, coded phrases and words aimed at subverting algorithmic filters.”

The reason is a perceived idea – which may well have basis in fact – that actual discussion of how to combat ICE raids and so on will be demoted by the platform’s content algorithm. It’s also clearly a way of trying to avoid scrutiny from authorities. But it also reveals a strong knowledge of what the TikTok algorithm likes to promote:

“The videos discussing “cute winter boots” leverage the TikTok algorithm’s preference for product-focused content to amplify their reach. “What the algorithm likes is products,” said Diana, the admin of @/citiesbydiana, a TikTok account about urban planning. “It’s a way to talk about resisting the federal government in a way that will actually reach people.””

This is absolutely dystopian police state stuff, but at the same time, it shows a ton of initiative, and illustrates that people aren’t going to take any of this lying down. Power to them.

#Technology

[Link]

https://werd.io/2025/tiktoks-cute-winter-boots-meaning-explained

Literally Watching Again In Real Time, Peace & Justice History For 2/2

History, and Why Some Women Ought To Know Better Than How They Behave…

In the Ladies’ Loo

Gender-segregated bathrooms tell a story about who is and who is not welcome in public life.

Passengers freshening up in the ladies’ restroom at the Greyhound bus terminal, Chicago, 1943 via LOC

By: Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza

Women’s entry into public life around the turn of the twentieth century was a major catalyst for the creation of sex-segregated public restrooms. As scholar Daphne Spain writes, female civic reformers lobbied municipal governments to make cities more inclusive places for women, pushing for amenities such as health clinics and kindergartens. And in both small towns and big cities, notes historian Peter C. Baldwin, women worked to ensure the availability of public toilets. The first gender-segregated public bathrooms afforded women privacy, safety, and autonomy—if, that is, the women were white and of means; otherwise, access to bathrooms served as a tool of segregation. The history of the women’s bathrooms in the United States is a story of who does—and who doesn’t—get to belong in public life.

The first public bathrooms in the United States appeared in the late 1800s. Pub owners offered them to paying customers to drum up business and keep drinkers drinking. But, as Baldwin notes, pubs and saloons were improper, unwelcoming, and sometimes dangerous environments for women, and were effectively male-only establishments whose facilities only catered to men.

Just a few decades later, according to Spain, women had begun to challenge their “proper place” in society. While middle- and upper-class women increasingly ventured out of the home into the burgeoning urban environment to shop and to socialize, their lower-class counterparts increasingly found work in factories and other non-domestic environments where they could earn their own money. And some, many of whom belonged to the upper classes, forced their way into political and civic life, lobbying for, and winning, suffrage. Changing social stations pushed women and men together in public. They shared sidewalks, transportation, parks, stores, and restaurants. Women entered public life, and standards of decorum shifted to accommodate them, though certainly not to include them—gender segregation became a paramount concern, according to Baldwin, for preserving the modesty and propriety of women. Still, a dramatic shift had occurred: Men no longer wielded a monopoly on public life.

While men were afforded the opportunity to take care of their most basic needs—the need to relieve themselves—women were not given the same.

In the absence of an available pub bathroom, men were accustomed to relieving themselves in the street. Not only did that suddenly seem crass in mixed company, but the new science of germ theory made it clear that using the city as a toilet posed a health hazard, Baldwin says. Urban designers, physicians, and civic groups lobbied municipal governments in Chicago, Boston, New York, and elsewhere to provide a sanitary solution to the problem of human waste.

The first public toilets, euphemistically called “comfort stations,” appeared in American cities in the 1890s, according to Baldwin. By 1919, roughly one hundred cities, including Denver, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Seattle made toilet facilities available to the public for free or a small fee. Some were funded by health-minded philanthropists and reformers concerned not only with physical cleanliness, but “moral cleanliness,” writes sociologist Alexander K. Davis. They believed the two were intrinsically linked.

Comfort stations were gender segregated but not gender equal. While men were afforded the opportunity to take care of their most basic needs—the need to relieve themselves—women were not given the same. Women’s facilities were often smaller and had fewer toilets than the men’s, writes Baldwin, and were consistently inferior to the semi-private “customers only” bathrooms available in the “Adamless Eden” of a department store, as one such store owner Spain quotes called them; these were available only to patrons.

For those women denied the privilege of department store entry owing to race or lack of means, the comfort station was the only option for getting some privacy in public. Businesses, manufacturing plants, offices, and government buildings almost entirely lacked gender-segregated bathrooms, and because it was scandalous for a woman to enter a bathroom that men used, the lack of women’s toilets sent a clear signal about who was and wasn’t welcome in a particular space. Without equitable access, women were not able to fully participate in life outside the home. If you can’t empty your bladder or your bowels with dignity, it’s hard to be away from home for long.

Public stations were expensive to maintain and quickly became dirty and malodorous. Many were underground or in secluded areas and were dangerous for female users. Baldwin points out that by the early 1920s, cities cut budgets and patrons abandoned the cause, so stations fell into disrepair almost as soon as they appeared, and some of the same women’s groups that had petitioned for their creation eventually pressed for their closure. The provision of bathrooms became largely the remit of private business owners who could provide or restrict access as they pleased.

Women's restroom at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, AZ, 1930s — Women’s restroom at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, AZ, 1930s via Wikimedia Commons

Though the truly public bathroom—where access is free to all—is increasingly rare today, the semi-public toilet is taken for granted. The ladies’ room in restaurants, bars, airports, train and bus stations, hotel lobbies, schools, and event venues remains one of the few spaces where men are strictly prohibited. Though many are accessible only to those who can patronize a business or afford a ticket for travel.

It’s such an important part of female culture that the women’s bathroom is a convenient prop in movies, TV, and books. Writers set a scene in the ladies’ room, where women gather to complain, cry, confide, confess, gossip, preen, or bully. And though such scenes sometimes lean on tired tropes of female behavior, the gender-segregated bathroom is a place to exist beyond the gaze and reach of men. Here, women speak candidly about feelings, bodies, periods, sex, romantic partners, friends, jobs, and family.

“They offer a space for bonding, the exchange of information, and personal recovery,” writes scholar Christine Overall. “Sex-segregated toilets provide ‘the element of sociability important to many women, who also use the women’s room as a refuge, ‘a place to feel safe, both physically safe but also psychologically safe.’” On the wall and in stalls, it’s not uncommon to see phone numbers for domestic violence helplines or, in bar bathrooms, instructions for ordering an “angel shot”: a coded way to ask a bartender for help in the face of harassment.

Of course, the ladies’ room by design isn’t a safe space for all women.

“At various points in US history, the absence of toilet facilities has signaled to [B]lacks, to women, to workers, to people with disabilities, to transgender people, and to homeless people that they are outsiders to the body politic and that there is no room for them in public space,” writes the feminist scholar Judith Plaskow. If these bathrooms are supposedly for the public, then by virtue of excluding certain people, the message is that their needs are not for consideration.

Access to public space in the US has even been explicitly exclusionary. When the Boston-based advocacy organization Women’s Educational and Industrial Union pressed for the creation of health clinics and lunch rooms in the early twentieth century, it made it clear that their goal was to segregate classes and create spaces, Spain explains, where only “middle-class and elite women could appear without being declassed and working women could appear in public without having their virtue questioned by being ‘on the streets.’”

In the Jim Crow south, writes Baldwin, Black women had to use separate bathrooms, typically older and poorly maintained, and were not afforded the privacy of gender-segregated facilities. In some cases, Black people in the segregated South had no access to public bathrooms at all.

Now, the current campaigns of exclusion seek to bar transgender women from accessing the ladies’ room. In 2016, the North Carolina state legislature passed “the bathroom bill,” which forced people to use the bathroom that corresponds to the gender they were assigned at birth. The next year, eight more states moved to impose similar restrictions. North Carolina’s bill was met with such anger on behalf of the LGBTQ community that some elements were quickly scrapped, and the remainder was left to lapse in 2020. While campaigns for equity have made such laws and restrictions exceedingly unpopular, they have not yet made them extinct.

In November 2024, Sarah McBride became the first openly transgender person elected to Congress, representing the state of Delaware. Within weeks, representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina introduced a resolution banning transgender women from the ladies’ bathrooms on Capitol Hill. Within days, House Speaker Mike Johnson announced the official ban.

Yes, I believe it is worthwhile to challenge hate speech.

And this is a blog well worth following, though I don’t read there often enough.

https://happinessbetweentails.com/2025/01/23/metoo-a-plea-bad-pharma-by-pam-lazos-and-abraham-johns-md/?page_id=449703

Wee Pals’s Soul Circle:

Wee Pals by Morrie Turner for February 01, 2025

Wee Pals Comic Strip for February 01, 2025

https://www.gocomics.com/weepals/2025/02/01

I Found This Beautiful To Read, So I Want To Share

The writing style is frank. The title directly beneath is the link. -A

“Sex, Love, And Longing In 1970’s New York: Edmund White on His Past Lovers“

“He was a Peter Pan, the puer aeternus. I was abject in my longing for him.”

By Edmund White

Throughout the 1970s I was in love with Keith McDermott, ten years younger than me. When I first met him, I was living in a third-floor walk-up studio on Horatio Street in the West Village. He was living across the street with Larry Kert (he’s dead), the original young male lead in West Side Story. I was one of Larry’s rainy-day fucks—he’d call me midday or early evening when he was horny and the weather forbade open-air cruising (snow, rain, or tropical heat).

Maybe I met Keith at Larry’s or through someone else; I don’t remember. Keith was living rent-free with Larry. They’d started out as lovers but now, after a year, Keith was expected to help in maintaining their big, luxurious apartment by cleaning and doing chores—and disappearing when Larry had a trick he was bringing home.The sound of the whirring wheels as he came racing around the corner and glided to a halt became the very whisper of desire for me.

Keith wanted to move and I had a lead on an eight-room prewar apartment on the Upper West Side, a block away from Central Park and just four hundred dollars a month. The landlady lived downstairs from us and had decided to rent only to gays—but, what narrowed the field, gay men without dogs. In those days gay couples had dogs, not yet children. We were too poor and unsettled to think of wanting a dog. It never crossed our minds.

Keith was a famous beauty (famous in the West Village and Fire Island among gay men). He was blond, blue-eyed, just twenty-one, and perfectly formed (an expert gymnast). In good weather he rode his bike everywhere. The sound of the whirring wheels as he came racing around the corner and glided to a halt became the very whisper of desire for me. He was fleet, funny, and so handsome that Bruce Weber, the most famous photographer of handsome men back then (Abercrombie & Fitch, GQ, Calvin Klein), took his picture. Weber’s men, often nude or in wet white underpants, were twenty-something, athletic, Ivy League, and passably heterosexual—perfect eye candy for gay men of the period, who liked their men to be iconic and unobtainable, i.e. straight.

Of course I wanted to sleep with this beauty, but he found a way to forestall my lust. He said he was sick of “meaningless” sex and invited me to join his chastity club. We could sleep side by side as long as we never touched. I was content to have that constant access to his beauty and company—and he was happy, I guess, to reap the devotion of a fit, charming, bewitched man in his early thirties who was just publishing his first novel. Before long we were living in our vast eight-room apartment. Whenever I would buy an ugly but big dining room table and six high-backed chairs at Goodwill, Keith would be so outraged that he would drag the furniture out the front door into the hallway. He was a resolute artist and had a horror of looking or being middle-class.

Keith was careful with his “instrument,” i.e., his body. He drank tiny cups of liquid buffalo grass, ate sparingly, mainly vegetables, and visited the gym daily for two hours, where he’d twist and turn on the exercise rings, climb ropes, and strengthen his arms and core, his shoulders and legs, but he never wanted to become a heavily built muscleman. He was a Peter Pan, the puer aeternus. I was abject in my longing for him. I can’t bear to recall the scenes of my crawling toward him, arms outstretched, or the moment when I saw him as an emanation of God. Once I organized an orgy of several guys I dragged back from the Candle Bar in the neighborhood, hoping to be able to touch Keith in the melee. It worked.I can’t bear to recall the scenes of my crawling toward him, arms outstretched, or the moment when I saw him as an emanation of God.

Larry Kert had had a cruel streak—maybe that had rubbed off on Keith. Or maybe my idolatry was just that absurd and I needed vinegar poured in my wounds. I suppose some of the mystical strains in Nocturnes for the King of Naples, the book I was writing then, were a spillover from my almost religious love for Keith.

And then Keith was cast in the Broadway hit Equus, in which he was naked onstage eight performances a week for years. Dirty old men would sit with binoculars in the front row night after night. A pimple on his ass would send Keith into an anxiety attack. He was brilliant in the role; I saw him in the play dozens of times opposite Richard Burton or Anthony Perkins. It was such a titanic strain (no colds, no hemorrhoids, no weight gain or perceptible loss), thousands of lines, gymnastic feats blinding the “horses” (dancers dressed as stylized horses), rowdy adolescents seated in the cheap seats onstage making wisecracks, kids who were so used to TV that they thought these performers, too, couldn’t hear their remarks. His life became one of iron discipline. I like to think he even came to appreciate our domestic life.

He moved to Los Angeles but was a little too openly, rebelliously gay for Hollywood in those days (no one wanted to see the fag kiss the girl and there were almost no gay roles in the seventies). Then I moved to Paris for sixteen years. When I came back to New York in the late nineties, Keith was living with a sweet, talented Israeli painter; he’d mellowed, was just as funny as ever, became a close associate of the avant-garde director Robert Wilson.

Keith himself directed plays at La MaMa and had published a book. We’re great friends. He insists that I helped form some of his tastes in music and literature. His own curiosity and experience in so many domains of the arts, however, didn’t need my influence, I’m sure. When I told him I’d be writing about him in my sex memoir, he said, “Just say I have a big dick.” That’s easy—his dick is huge.

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