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Lia Thomas, a 22-year-old senior on the Penn womens swim team, holds the fastest swim times in the country among NCAA women in two freestyle events. She also happens to be a trans woman. Last weekend at the Ivy League Championships, Thomas won three titles. Her success has put her in the center of a national debate on trans womens right to play sports.

As a nonbinary trans person myself, and a former swimmer, I cant help but notice that only a few voices are weighing in on this topic. Few have anything original to say.

Olympic champion Michael Phelps said on CNN that the issue is very complicated. Caitlyn Jenner, a trans woman and Olympic gold decathlon champion, said on Fox News that we need to protect womens sports and that Thomas participation is not good for the trans community. Jordan Peterson, a former professor of psychology, likened trans lives to satanic ritual abuse and a sign of the end of civilization in a conversation with former MMA fighter Joe Rogan on his podcast.

Michael Phelps, Caitlyn Jenner, and Jordan Peterson are being asked to weigh in on an issue that they havent worked on in any substantial way. Phelps hasnt committed his life to trans activism and civil rights. When I listen to Jenner, I cant help but feel that even though she is trans, she is isolated. She doesnt have much other than the spotlight, and under that glare, she repeats what other people say. Peterson has never published peer-reviewed work on gender, bodies, or anything of relevance to the topic of trans women in sports.

The exclusion of substantive voices and a lack of understanding about the topic of trans life has consequences. This month, state legislatures in Kentucky, Indiana, and Iowa passed bills that limit trans women and girls from participating in sports. Alabama lawmakers also passed a bill banning transgender students from using school bathrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity.

Many people dont realize that the real impact of these anti-trans bills will be a spike in depression and a risk of suicide for trans kids fueled by rejection, marginalization, and hate. We owe it to trans kids to do better.

My recommendation is that those having conversations about trans people whether at home, in the news, on the deck of a swimming pool, or in a state legislature consult experts with a known track record in what they are talking about. There are many fantastic voices to choose from.

Veronica Ivy has done a stellar job addressing inexpert arguments about unfair advantages in sports. Historian Julian Gill-Petersons 2018 book Histories of the Transgender Child addresses the medicalization and racialization of childrens bodies. Anne Fausto-Sterling has a long record of publishing peer-reviewed papers on the topics of sex, gender, development, and biology. Reubs Walsh has committed her academic career to investigating the links between neurodiversity, transness, and mental health. Sari van Anders researches sex and gender as it relates to the study of hormones and culture. Their work is all too often ignored or overlooked.

We need to invite real experts into any conversation or policymaking discussion that impacts trans people.

The true conversation has nothing to do with testosterone or science, and everything to do with fear specifically, peoples fear about their own gender identity and fear of people who dont have a gender identity thats easy to read.

Maybe, someday, well all be able to swim together.

Mal Pool is a trans nonbinary founder of a collective that mediates nonviolent conflict and discrimination at music events in Berlin and a former swimmer from Indiana.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255, The Trevor Project at 866-488-7386, Trans Lifeline at 877-565-8860, or text TALK to the Crisis Text Line at 741741.

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When we talk about Penn swimmer Lia Thomas, were listening to the wrong voices | Opinion - The Philadelphia Inquirer

The Canadian Freedom Convoy that was protesting government mandated vaccination is but the latest instance of U.S. right-wing influenced attempts to discredit and eventually destroy democracy. According to a story in the Feb. 16 Washington Post, almost all Canadian truckers are vaccinated and reportedly prominent leaders of the convoys are not truckers themselves, but right-wing instigators, instead.

Interestingly, while the large majority of Canadians oppose the Freedom Convoy, and are vaccinated, the truckers are supported by white supremacist groups, and U.S. Republicans such as Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and anti-democratic social media figures such as Tucker Carlson, Jordan Peterson and Elon Musk, who have encouraged similar actions in American cities. More than 55 percent of the donations for the truckers coming from the Christian fundraising website GiveSendGo originate in the United States.

Unfortunately, while the yearning to be free is a legitimate desire of the human species, its expression is often at the expense of anothers freedom, and used to disguise its repressive purpose. As the good people of Ottawa could tell us, there is freedom, and then there is freedom. In the name of the latter, they have had to endure the freedom of the truckers clogging their streets and disrupting their lives, making their sleep impossible by running their engines late at night, befouling their air with their noxious diesel fumes, ripping the protective masks off the faces of citizens and refusing to wear masks when entering businesses that require them, and committing other uncivil acts against people who have nothing to do with their complaints against the governments mandated vaccines.

What is occurring in Ottawa in the name of freedom, however, is all too common on a much larger scale in our civilization where it is often invoked to justify and conceal displays of domination, abuse, and control. Just ask people of color, indigenous folks, almost any woman, certainly children, people deemed unacceptable because of their sexual, political, religious, etc. orientations, not to mention Mother Nature, herself. White skin privilege, male domination, adult ageism, heterosexual tyranny, and species dominion are all examples of the exercise of power-over committed by one human being against another in the name of the perpetrators freedom.

This freedom is the domain of ego. It is I-centered, Me First in its nature and expression. It is the freedom of an illusory Self, which allows us to entertain the fantasy we are independent of and separate from the rest of life, without responsibility or accountability to any other living being. It is the freedom to do what this fictional I wants, regardless of the consequences for others, the freedom that Donald Trump has glorified and legitimized in his wanton exhibition of extreme narcissism.

It is also in its name that there has emerged in our country an organized effort to overthrow democracy, currently through the obstructionist use of the filibuster by Republicans in the Senate, the storming of the Capitol by Trump insurrectionists, and the disenfranchising of voters through state laws. These acts diminish, not enhance citizens freedom, aiding a minoritarian regime to come to power over the majority.

Ultimately, the litmus test as to whether the call for freedom is camouflage for oppression, or is, in fact, the real deal, is if it recognizes that freedom does not exist in any meaningful way unless it is rooted in our inherent interconnection and interdependence with the rest of life. This is freedom that is informed by a consciousness that none of us would be alive beyond the moment of our births if it wasnt for our mothers and fathers, friends and teachers, farmers and truckers, mail deliverers and garbage haulers, factory workers and office workers, water and soil, air and sun, bees and worms, plants and animals oh, the list is endless that we are so absolutely dependent upon for our brief stay on this planet, but about which too many of us are both mindlessly unaware and ungrateful.

To be conscious of this intimate relationship we have with each other and the rest of life is to live a freedom of interbeing, to use Thich Nhat Hanhs felicitous expression. Without ego to circumscribe either our vision or hearts, it is a freedom of such boundless space that it is inclusive of everyone and everything, hence responsible to all.

In so being, such consciousness allows us to be an untethered expression of our inherent capacity for compassion, kindness, generosity, and love, true to the person of heart we are meant to be. This is adult freedom, the freedom of a spiritually mature person who developmentally is no longer subject to the selfish demands of I.

Interestingly, it is also the freedom that opposes mandates to accomplish this purpose, recognizing that they, and its agency, the State, are counter-productive to instilling the sense of freedoms responsibility that is only learned when we grow up, and accept that were all in this business of life together.

Tim Stevenson is a community organizer from Athens with Post Oil Solutions, and author of Resilience and Resistance: Building Sustainable Communities for a Post Oil Age (2015, Green Writers Press). The opinions expressed by columnists do not necessarily reflect the views of Vermont News & Media.

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Living with the Long Emergency: Truckers, freedom, and interbeing - Brattleboro Reformer

Evangeline Lilly appeared in a five-minute video this weekend with a direct appeal to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau concerning the ongoing protests against vaccine mandates in that country. The protests began in late January in the Canadian capital, Ottawa, led by cross-border truck drivers, and has since spread to other cities. The Ant-Man and Lost star, who was born and raised in Western Canada, published her cri de coeur on the Instagram page of Bridge City News, a daily program out of Alberta that airs on The Miracle Channel, Canadas first over-the-air religious television station.

In a calm tone with noticeable "oot"s for "out"s, Lilly opens by telling Trudeau she has concerns about his current approach to, and current treatment of, our fellow Canadians who are protesting your federal vaccine mandates. They have asked to meet with you, Prime Minister; medical experts, top scientists, doctors, nurses, parents, grandparents, intelligent, loving, concerned citizens. Why won't you sit with them?

She goes on to request he listen to what they have to say with a mind open to hearing things that might go against the ideas you are entrenched in. She also suggested he listen to Needle Points by Norman Doidge, the name of a four-part essay published in Tablet Magazine last November, and also the name of a January podcast hosted by Jordan Peterson, the ubiquitous controversial Canadian professor. Lilly says that Doidge, the best-selling author of The Brain That Changes Itself, has painstakingly and comprehensively laid out why these protestors are not unreasonable."

This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

In late January, Lilly attended an anti-vaccine-mandate hullabaloo in Washington, D.C., the same one where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. compared current American public health initiatives to the policies of Nazi Germany. Even in Hitler Germany [sic], you [could] cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic, like Anne Frank did, he said, then later apologized after the Auschwitz Memorial's social media arm called his comments a sad symptom of moral & intellectual decay.

From that event, Lilly posted some black and white shots to her Instagram to support bodily sovereignty while Canadian truckers were rallying for their cross-country, peaceful convoy in support of the same thing.

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Following these remarks, Lillys Ant-Man co-star David Dastmalchian, as well as fellow Marvel hero (and Canadian) Simu Liu, made social media comments about of their own about the value of Covid vaccines and the appropriate use of a wide platform.

The third Ant-Man picture, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, is scheduled for release in July 2023.

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Evangeline Lilly Appeals to Justin Trudeau To Hear From the People Sitting Out in the Cold at Your Door - Vanity Fair

Kansas coach Lance Leipold reacts during the first half of the team's NCAA college football game against TCU on Saturday, Nov. 20, 2021, in Fort Worth, Texas. TCU won 31-28. (AP Photo/Ron Jenkins)

The Kansas football team has hired Oscar Rodriguez Jr., a Kansas native who finished last season as Akron's interim head coach, as a defensive analyst.

Rodriguez will work with the defensive backs, though as an analyst, he is not allowed to coach players on the field. Jordan Peterson has been the Jayhawks' defensive backs coach the last two seasons.

His roots in Kansas are deep. Born and raised in Liberal, Rodriguez played safety at Emporia State in 2001, transferred to Coffeyville Community College in 2002 and then played two seasons at Fort Hays State. He then began coaching, first at a high school in Texas, and earned a master's in educational administration in 2008 from Washburn, where he was the defensive backs coach. He then coached at Baker, Hutchinson Community College, Emporia State and Garden City Community College and served as the defensive coordinator at each school.

Rodriguez then left Kansas before the 2015 season and spent three seasons at La Verne, a Division III university in California, where in 2017 he was named the Division III National Assistant Coach of the Year by the American Football Coaches' Association. He then became the assistant head coach and inside linebackers coach at Chattanooga in 2018 and moved to Akron the following season, when he was the safeties coach before coaching the inside linebackers beginning in 2020.

Akron coach Tom Arth was fired in November after nine games and Rodriguez was named the interim coach for the final three. The Zips lost all three, and new coach Joe Moorhead did not retain Rodriguez after he was hired on Dec. 4.

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Kansas hires former Akron interim head coach Oscar Rodriguez Jr. as analyst | Boyer on the Beat - KUsports

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, Apple has been requiring all customers to wear a mask in its retail stores, a policy the company unsuccessfully tried to discontinue last year. However, it seems that the company once again wants to drop the mask mandate for Apple Stores in the United States.

As reported by Bloomberg on Tuesday, the company told its employees in a memo that customers will no longer be required to wear a mask in eligible stores. However, Apple Store employees will still be required to wear masks. At the same time, Apple says it will continue to recommend that everyone should wear masks in its stores.

The new policy applies to Apple Stores located in Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, and other states that no longer require people to wear a mask. The report notes that the mask mandate will remain valid in a few states like Hawaii, which have stricter guidelines on wearing a mask.

After dropping the mask requirement in November 2021, Apple reinstated the mandate in its retail stores in December as the numbers of COVID-19 cases rose again in the United States due to new variants. The company has also shut down multiple stores across the United States and Canada during the past three months to prevent the spread of COVID.

As the situation improves, Apple also plans to resume in-store classes and other activities that have been suspended in Apple Stores. The company didnt provide a public statement about the new policies.

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Apple once again drops the mask mandate in its US retail stores - 9to5Mac