I suppose it's refreshing in the respect that Johnson is direct and doesn't beat around the bush. He said what he means rather than the typical political double speak. That said, he is the one who comes across as the a** h***. And it doesn't appear to matter. He appears to be in place for some time as the votes seem to favor that.
Why didn't Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa just save his breath and say the real reason AH was fired...the Mayor promised the CTU he would do it. As Tupac never said, "Mess with the CTU means bye, bye you"...
“I get that, but it’s important to remember that, though it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot at stake in the lower levels of competition, these venues are where stars and winners are recognized, selected and, ultimately, advanced…..One of the lawsuits in this area involved born-female high school runners who were edged off the podium by trans girls”.
I think you misread ( accidentally?) my post Eric. I referenced “GRADE SCHOOL” sports….NOT High School. I did so for exactly the reason you say. By high school, too much is at stake as there is direct advancement from there. But the stakes are much lower in grade school. So you created a straw man argument. So, what say you to my actual argument about low level competition?
There is good evidence that natal males have only a slight advantage in sports prior to puberty — the best player on my son’s kiddie hoops team was a girl back in the day. But I would still stand by the idea that, say, 6th grade basketball should be separated by sex because it might well impede the chances for advancement of promising 12 year old girls and would give more girls (and boys) the chance to play.
Who is going to be the one to tell the 11-year-old sixth grade trans girl who has been living as a girl since kindergarten that she can’t play basketball with her girlfriends because she is not a “real” girl? What about the damage we do to her by telling her that?
The folks who want to ban trans women from competing in women’s sports will say things like trans women who are going or who went through puberty as a male have advantages in things like height and lung capacity over cis women. But statements like that suggest that all trans women are taller and have larger lung capacity than all cis women, and that’s just not true. There are huge genetic variations within the population of cis girls and women that cover the range of any genetic advantages possessed by trans women. Brittney Griner is a cis woman who is 6’9” tall and wears a men’s size 17 shoe. And, I bet she could beat most men in a game of one-on-one basketball.
I really like this quotation from Schuyler Bailar, a trans man swimmer: “I think biodiversity exists everywhere, and the reality is people win and lose all the time, and nobody consider that unfair, until it is a marginalized person, specifically a Black or Brown women and/or a trans woman.” The quotation was taken from an article, the link to which is at the bottom of this comment.
I really think that the people who want to ban trans women and girls from sports do so because they can’t wrap their heads around the idea that trans women and girls are women and girls. They consider them to be men and boys, or what they call “biological men and boys.” (Calling trans women and girls “biological men and boys” is scientifically inaccurate, but I’ll save that for another post.) If you see trans women and girls as women and girls, you see the inequity in not allowing them to play when the clear and obvious genetic advantages that certain cis women have with respect to certain sports are deemed “fair.”
I have seen no evidence or even anecdotes that sixth grade sports will impede chances of advancement to high school sports for girls if those with a Y chromosome can play on the girls team. With high school I agree completely that even though it’s very sad for trans girls they shoukd not be permitted to play on a team that is segregated by sex. That’s the problem with Joanie Wilmer’s “ bio diversity” argument. We aren’t segregating by this bio diverse factors and that’s why it’s not “unfair” for Brittney Griner to play on the team. If we segregated by height and had a team for those under 6 ft 5 in, then no Ms Griner should not be permitted to play on that team. Once you are at a highly competitive level so that there’s a lot at stake, and you’ve chosen to sex segregate then no individuals with any Y chromosome on the womens team, even if there might be some individuals this feels unfair for. That would be my rule.
As I said above, I really think that the people who want to ban trans women and girls from sports do so because they can’t wrap their heads around the idea that trans women and girls are women and girls. They consider them to be men and boys, or what they call “biological men and boys.” Your response indicates to me that you are in that group because if you considered trans women and girls as women and girls, you would put them in that group when you segregate by sex. Chromosomes, of course, do not determine sex, and there are many women born with a vagina who have a Y chromosome.
You are correct that I don’t believe that trans women/girls are the same as girls/women who do not have a Y chromosome. I do believe that all who identify as female should be entitled to use the bathroom/locker room that aligns with their self identified gender. I believe that all should be entitled to gender affirming medical care which is found appropriate by their health care provider within medical standards. I believe that a persons chosen pronouns should be respected in classrooms, employment and in life in general. I believe schools should be free to discuss issues regarding gender. If you lose someone like me on the ability of those with a Y chromosome to play sports at a highly competitive level on a girls/womens team when that activity is segregated by sex, I believe you are fighting a losing battle in insisting otherwise and that this is a detriment to the most important rights of trans individuals.
With all due respect, Jo A., you are cis-splaining to me what I, as a transgender person, should be satisfied with and feel fortunate to have in our society and culture. But I’ll not be satisfied until transgender people are allowed to participate on an equal basis with everyone else in all facets of our society and culture, including athletics. Under your view, there could be a basketball team of 8th grade girls consisting of, among others, a transgender girl of mediocre genetic advantages, if any, and a cis-gender girl who is a future Brittney Griner with significant genetic advantages in the sport of basketball. Under your view, when they go to high school, the transgender girl should be banned from the team even though you would allow a player whose genetic advantages in basketball are much greater. Because she’s cis. To me that sounds a lot like unfair discrimination against the transgender person.
You are Correct that I believe that if competitive teams are segregated based only on sex that we don’t ban the cis-girl with a genetic advantage that we haven’t segregated for. I also believe that the trans girl should still be permitted to play on less competitive intramural teams. I am not explaining what I think you should be satisfied with. I am discussing what i believe is the danger from a political/legal perspective by pushing for the ability to have trans women participate in sex based highly competitive sports. If you can’t get people like me on board, you run the risk of alienating too many voters/lawmakers to accomplish other goals. For me that’s not worth it to jeopardize rights that I believe are important. For example, I believe that there should be no laws governing abortion. That the determination needs to be made solely by a woman or trans man in consultation with their doctor. But pushing for that would I believe jeopardize the goal of obtaining Roe v wade type protections under the law. That doesn’t mean I’m satisfied by those protections. But I’m coming at this from a realistic perspective.
The reader who suggests that an owner of a three-flat would convert if to three condos to save about $2500 in transfer taxes has no idea of the thousands (if not tens of thousands) of dollars it would cost to do the condo conversion. And if there happened to be a $1,500,000 three-flat that could be converted to three $750K condos, that would happen in a heartbeat with or without the new transfer tax.
Many of your readers seem to think biology/genetics is destiny. I would suggest any of the books of Robert Sapolsky , professor of biology and neurology at Stanford and MacArthur "genius." I am particularly fond of Monkeyluv and A Primates Memoir.
Did a reader REALLY defend separating men's and women's chess because of... wait, let me get the quote.... "Based strictly on over five decades of personal driving experience"? Let me finish here: "When I drive around in my Fiat convertible, I see these damsels driving in literal circles — their simple minds just cannot grasp the complexities of driving an automotive transportation machine. Now excuse me whilst I refill my pipe..."
"She's not aligned with our values", according to Ramirez-Sosa. Good to know. Moderates like me and almost everyone I know are also unaligned. When your tax base bails let's see how far your self-professed moral superiority gets you.
I interpret Alderman Ramirez-Rosa's comments accusing Arwardy of being a "neoliberal"( a new term to me) meant that a true progressive believes that every human service needs to be delivered by a government employee, without any discussion of quality of care or effective outcomes. My understanding was that part of the reason for closing some mental health clinics was to be able to provide more flexible, mobile, and quality mental health care to residents without paying for bricks and mortar. Maybe we do need more clinics, but other than increasing the city workforce, complete with union benefits and pension obligations for taxpayers, the alderman and mayor should provide evidence that cutting out the private not-for-profit agencies that have been contracted, and replacing them with city employees, will improve outcomes for people. I don't see much evidence that the city provides high quality service in most areas of government responsibility, let alone mental health.
I was also particularly annoyed by the repeated use of "neoliberal" as the ultimate smear in the defense of firing Arwardy. It's not as though she was turning health care over to the for-profit sector, the way Illinois has shamefully done with the Medicaid program. She was instead directing tax dollars to local non-profits with proven track records of effective community-based health services. A legitimate argument can be made either way on whether mental health services should be stand-alone programs or incorporated into primary care, but that's not the argument Ramirez-Rosa was making.
I would like to read a good pro/con on the mental health clinics. Seems as though my friends on the left have uncritically embraced the idea that closing them was a terrible idea and Lighttoot/Arwardy didn't give a shit and didn't try to reopen them because they are the thrall of their capitalist overlords. I don't know this issue very well, I admit, but that strikes me as simplistic nonsense.
Thanks! Heather Cherone is top drawer.. Here is from that article:
Quoting Lightfoot: "What I heard from the experts and what I heard from patients is that they didn’t want clinician care that our clinics offer. What they wanted was to be able to go to culturally relevant services in their neighborhood.”
As part of what city officials call the city’s network of Trauma-Informed Centers of Care, 44 organizations got tens of millions of dollars to treat 28,875 Chicagoans in the first nine months of 2022, according to Chicago Department of Public Health data provided to WTTW News. Each organization gets at least $250,000 to become part of the network, officials said.
Although figures for all of 2022 are not yet available, those organizations — funded by a combination of city, county, state and federal tax dollars — and other programs treated 48,860 patients in the first nine months of 2022 and are on track to treat more than 61,000 Chicagoans for a variety of mental health conditions by the end of the year, fulfilling Lightfoot’s promise, according to the data.
Lightfoot has also vowed that that residents of all 77 Chicago community areas can “access high-quality care” either in their neighborhood or in the location of their choice across the city. ...
That represents a massive expansion of Chicago’s mental health care system under Emanuel and former Mayor Richard M. Daley, when the publicly run clinics served no more than 6,000 Chicagoans per year, according to city data. In 2010, the city spent $13 million annually on mental health treatment.
In 2023, the budget calls for $89 million to be spent providing mental health care. That includes efforts to treat people outside clinics and other medical facilities, sending clinicians to homeless shelters, on the CTA and in encampments of unhoused people. ....
The debate over whether to add to the city’s five publicly run mental health clinics is the wrong question to ask, Arwady said.
“This is a conversation from a decade ago,” Arwady said, adding that public clinics could never meet the demand for mental health care in Chicago. Under Daley, the clinics were only open from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and did not treat children or adolescents, Arwady said. “The debate has gotten stuck.”
The city’s network of clinics treated 15,000 children in 2022, Awardy said.
City-run clinics should fill in the gaps left by nonprofit groups that are best equipped to serve Chicagoans where, how and by whom they want to be served, Arwady said, likening it to serving as a safety net to the safety net.
...it does not matter if clinics and other medical facilities are funded with city tax dollars or public funds from Cook County or the state of Illinois or federal grants, Arwady said.
“The distinction does not make sense,” Arwady said. “I don’t see it at all as outsourcing.”
I read with interest the discussion of trans women playing in women’s chess tournaments. I have no experience or knowledge about this topic. Reading all the comments, I gleaned the basic issue.
Is letting trans women play in women’s chess tournaments “fair” from a competition point of view?
Do these trans women with their male originated brains have an unfair advantage and if so, they should be banned from women’s tournaments. After all, we must have a fair and level playing field.
This was blowing my mind (I am an old baby boomer who uses baby boomer expressions).
So I needed a break from this and turned on Navy versus Notre Dame.
1. Live front Dublin Ireland…the fighting IRISH of Notre Dame versus navy. 30,000 ND fans have made the trip while about 8,000 navy fans are here. Hmmm, this looks like a home game on steroids for ND.
2. ND has a 24 year old transfer QB from Wake Forest starting for the first time. He comes highly rated and hopes to play in the NFL. Wait…a 24 year old super star QB could never play for navy. The navy QB is some student athlete carrying a difficult academic workload. QB is a very important position…kind of unfair.
3. In fact all of the ND players were bigger-especially in the skill positions. It looked like “semi- pro” ND players versus the student athletes of navy. This is really reeking of unfair competition.
4. My opinion ..the announcers also had an ND bias. How far can ND go this year? Can they make the playoffs? And let’s hope navy can stay on the field with ND.
5. Well, ND 42, navy 3.
Wow, that was a showcase for basic unfair competition- did not see any blowback in the media. This kind of unfair competition seemed blatant and accepted.
So back to the chess tournament issue. The arguments on banning trans women were subtle, certainly not in the realm of the ND/ navy game. So I say, let them play and if the trans women end up dominating maybe revisit the issue.
But tell me regarding future ND/navy games - do you ever expect this game to start on a level playing field? Do not think so- the unfair ND advantage will continue.
And finally, I must confess, I think Notre Dame is a fine school, but I intensely dislike their football team. Here comes my real prejudice - and when they play real semi pro teams like say..Alabama…they get get their lunch handed to them. Been a LONG time since they have won the national championship.
My understanding, and I am not a chess player, is that Chess tournaments typically have open events which allow any person to play. Also, some tournaments have events which are restricted to women. The two questions chess is dealing with are:
1. Who is allowed to play in the women's events?
2. For purposes of determining chess rank, which events in a player's history count?
I assume there are no events which exclude women. The IFC's proposal only applies to persons who have transitioned from female to male. The common complaint in sports about males who transition to females is not applicable in this case.
Based on my understanding no person is excluded from participating in competitive Chess due to their gender or gender identity. My problem with the IFC proposal was "abolishing" the record of playing in women's events. While I see the putative logic, I believe there is enough individual variation that they can allow to keep the records of events played when they were permitted to play them. That may be because I think Chess is overly obsessed with rankings, which I admit is my bias.
If I have my facts wrong, someone please set me straight.
Eric - Thank you for your defense against the argument that a video produced by a conservative think tank can simply be refuted on its face just because. (And of course, that also applies when conservatives would dismiss information coming from a left leaning organization solely because of its origin.) Finding inaccuracy with facts presented or arguing the reasoning is totally valid, but simply dismissing something without any reference to specific criticisms is intellectually lazy. Debate facts with facts and reasoning with reasoning as opposed to labeling and name calling.
Also, I appreciated your statement "The separation of the sexes in nearly all sports makes biological sense." Biology is real - follow the science!
The Nature article you cite definitely does not even claim to refute the difference between sexes in spatial reasoning. It only qualifies that difference, saying for example it shrinks and may disappear if there is no time limit to performing the task. That what chess clocks enforce, with great anxiety if you’ve ever played competitively.
The locus of authority for deciding which activities benefit from separate spaces for females only resides in one place alone: the females participating. Not the scientists, activists, politicians, lawyers, or philosophers.
In my view, no. But they would be a small minority in terms of creating a consensus that any particular female-only space should or shouldn’t include them anyway.
Regarding Michael M.’s suggestion: the Roku Ultra has a feature that locates its romote. The remote beeps when a button on top of the receiver is pressed. I stopped using the feature because my cats would constantly walk across the Roku.
I suppose it's refreshing in the respect that Johnson is direct and doesn't beat around the bush. He said what he means rather than the typical political double speak. That said, he is the one who comes across as the a** h***. And it doesn't appear to matter. He appears to be in place for some time as the votes seem to favor that.
Why didn't Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa just save his breath and say the real reason AH was fired...the Mayor promised the CTU he would do it. As Tupac never said, "Mess with the CTU means bye, bye you"...
“I get that, but it’s important to remember that, though it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot at stake in the lower levels of competition, these venues are where stars and winners are recognized, selected and, ultimately, advanced…..One of the lawsuits in this area involved born-female high school runners who were edged off the podium by trans girls”.
I think you misread ( accidentally?) my post Eric. I referenced “GRADE SCHOOL” sports….NOT High School. I did so for exactly the reason you say. By high school, too much is at stake as there is direct advancement from there. But the stakes are much lower in grade school. So you created a straw man argument. So, what say you to my actual argument about low level competition?
There is good evidence that natal males have only a slight advantage in sports prior to puberty — the best player on my son’s kiddie hoops team was a girl back in the day. But I would still stand by the idea that, say, 6th grade basketball should be separated by sex because it might well impede the chances for advancement of promising 12 year old girls and would give more girls (and boys) the chance to play.
Who is going to be the one to tell the 11-year-old sixth grade trans girl who has been living as a girl since kindergarten that she can’t play basketball with her girlfriends because she is not a “real” girl? What about the damage we do to her by telling her that?
The folks who want to ban trans women from competing in women’s sports will say things like trans women who are going or who went through puberty as a male have advantages in things like height and lung capacity over cis women. But statements like that suggest that all trans women are taller and have larger lung capacity than all cis women, and that’s just not true. There are huge genetic variations within the population of cis girls and women that cover the range of any genetic advantages possessed by trans women. Brittney Griner is a cis woman who is 6’9” tall and wears a men’s size 17 shoe. And, I bet she could beat most men in a game of one-on-one basketball.
I really like this quotation from Schuyler Bailar, a trans man swimmer: “I think biodiversity exists everywhere, and the reality is people win and lose all the time, and nobody consider that unfair, until it is a marginalized person, specifically a Black or Brown women and/or a trans woman.” The quotation was taken from an article, the link to which is at the bottom of this comment.
I really think that the people who want to ban trans women and girls from sports do so because they can’t wrap their heads around the idea that trans women and girls are women and girls. They consider them to be men and boys, or what they call “biological men and boys.” (Calling trans women and girls “biological men and boys” is scientifically inaccurate, but I’ll save that for another post.) If you see trans women and girls as women and girls, you see the inequity in not allowing them to play when the clear and obvious genetic advantages that certain cis women have with respect to certain sports are deemed “fair.”
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/diving-into-the-debate-over-trans-athletes/
I have seen no evidence or even anecdotes that sixth grade sports will impede chances of advancement to high school sports for girls if those with a Y chromosome can play on the girls team. With high school I agree completely that even though it’s very sad for trans girls they shoukd not be permitted to play on a team that is segregated by sex. That’s the problem with Joanie Wilmer’s “ bio diversity” argument. We aren’t segregating by this bio diverse factors and that’s why it’s not “unfair” for Brittney Griner to play on the team. If we segregated by height and had a team for those under 6 ft 5 in, then no Ms Griner should not be permitted to play on that team. Once you are at a highly competitive level so that there’s a lot at stake, and you’ve chosen to sex segregate then no individuals with any Y chromosome on the womens team, even if there might be some individuals this feels unfair for. That would be my rule.
As I said above, I really think that the people who want to ban trans women and girls from sports do so because they can’t wrap their heads around the idea that trans women and girls are women and girls. They consider them to be men and boys, or what they call “biological men and boys.” Your response indicates to me that you are in that group because if you considered trans women and girls as women and girls, you would put them in that group when you segregate by sex. Chromosomes, of course, do not determine sex, and there are many women born with a vagina who have a Y chromosome.
You are correct that I don’t believe that trans women/girls are the same as girls/women who do not have a Y chromosome. I do believe that all who identify as female should be entitled to use the bathroom/locker room that aligns with their self identified gender. I believe that all should be entitled to gender affirming medical care which is found appropriate by their health care provider within medical standards. I believe that a persons chosen pronouns should be respected in classrooms, employment and in life in general. I believe schools should be free to discuss issues regarding gender. If you lose someone like me on the ability of those with a Y chromosome to play sports at a highly competitive level on a girls/womens team when that activity is segregated by sex, I believe you are fighting a losing battle in insisting otherwise and that this is a detriment to the most important rights of trans individuals.
With all due respect, Jo A., you are cis-splaining to me what I, as a transgender person, should be satisfied with and feel fortunate to have in our society and culture. But I’ll not be satisfied until transgender people are allowed to participate on an equal basis with everyone else in all facets of our society and culture, including athletics. Under your view, there could be a basketball team of 8th grade girls consisting of, among others, a transgender girl of mediocre genetic advantages, if any, and a cis-gender girl who is a future Brittney Griner with significant genetic advantages in the sport of basketball. Under your view, when they go to high school, the transgender girl should be banned from the team even though you would allow a player whose genetic advantages in basketball are much greater. Because she’s cis. To me that sounds a lot like unfair discrimination against the transgender person.
You are Correct that I believe that if competitive teams are segregated based only on sex that we don’t ban the cis-girl with a genetic advantage that we haven’t segregated for. I also believe that the trans girl should still be permitted to play on less competitive intramural teams. I am not explaining what I think you should be satisfied with. I am discussing what i believe is the danger from a political/legal perspective by pushing for the ability to have trans women participate in sex based highly competitive sports. If you can’t get people like me on board, you run the risk of alienating too many voters/lawmakers to accomplish other goals. For me that’s not worth it to jeopardize rights that I believe are important. For example, I believe that there should be no laws governing abortion. That the determination needs to be made solely by a woman or trans man in consultation with their doctor. But pushing for that would I believe jeopardize the goal of obtaining Roe v wade type protections under the law. That doesn’t mean I’m satisfied by those protections. But I’m coming at this from a realistic perspective.
The reader who suggests that an owner of a three-flat would convert if to three condos to save about $2500 in transfer taxes has no idea of the thousands (if not tens of thousands) of dollars it would cost to do the condo conversion. And if there happened to be a $1,500,000 three-flat that could be converted to three $750K condos, that would happen in a heartbeat with or without the new transfer tax.
Many of your readers seem to think biology/genetics is destiny. I would suggest any of the books of Robert Sapolsky , professor of biology and neurology at Stanford and MacArthur "genius." I am particularly fond of Monkeyluv and A Primates Memoir.
For the ongoing gender sports debate: I pretty much only care about what cisgender female athletes/competitors feel about it. It's their game.
If they're cool with more inclusivity, no problem, let's go! But if they want tighter regulations, then that should be considered.
Did a reader REALLY defend separating men's and women's chess because of... wait, let me get the quote.... "Based strictly on over five decades of personal driving experience"? Let me finish here: "When I drive around in my Fiat convertible, I see these damsels driving in literal circles — their simple minds just cannot grasp the complexities of driving an automotive transportation machine. Now excuse me whilst I refill my pipe..."
"She's not aligned with our values", according to Ramirez-Sosa. Good to know. Moderates like me and almost everyone I know are also unaligned. When your tax base bails let's see how far your self-professed moral superiority gets you.
I interpret Alderman Ramirez-Rosa's comments accusing Arwardy of being a "neoliberal"( a new term to me) meant that a true progressive believes that every human service needs to be delivered by a government employee, without any discussion of quality of care or effective outcomes. My understanding was that part of the reason for closing some mental health clinics was to be able to provide more flexible, mobile, and quality mental health care to residents without paying for bricks and mortar. Maybe we do need more clinics, but other than increasing the city workforce, complete with union benefits and pension obligations for taxpayers, the alderman and mayor should provide evidence that cutting out the private not-for-profit agencies that have been contracted, and replacing them with city employees, will improve outcomes for people. I don't see much evidence that the city provides high quality service in most areas of government responsibility, let alone mental health.
I was also particularly annoyed by the repeated use of "neoliberal" as the ultimate smear in the defense of firing Arwardy. It's not as though she was turning health care over to the for-profit sector, the way Illinois has shamefully done with the Medicaid program. She was instead directing tax dollars to local non-profits with proven track records of effective community-based health services. A legitimate argument can be made either way on whether mental health services should be stand-alone programs or incorporated into primary care, but that's not the argument Ramirez-Rosa was making.
I would like to read a good pro/con on the mental health clinics. Seems as though my friends on the left have uncritically embraced the idea that closing them was a terrible idea and Lighttoot/Arwardy didn't give a shit and didn't try to reopen them because they are the thrall of their capitalist overlords. I don't know this issue very well, I admit, but that strikes me as simplistic nonsense.
This covers it in part. https://news.wttw.com/2023/01/25/push-reopen-public-mental-health-clinics-closed-11-years-ago-defines-another-chicago .
Thanks! Heather Cherone is top drawer.. Here is from that article:
Quoting Lightfoot: "What I heard from the experts and what I heard from patients is that they didn’t want clinician care that our clinics offer. What they wanted was to be able to go to culturally relevant services in their neighborhood.”
As part of what city officials call the city’s network of Trauma-Informed Centers of Care, 44 organizations got tens of millions of dollars to treat 28,875 Chicagoans in the first nine months of 2022, according to Chicago Department of Public Health data provided to WTTW News. Each organization gets at least $250,000 to become part of the network, officials said.
Although figures for all of 2022 are not yet available, those organizations — funded by a combination of city, county, state and federal tax dollars — and other programs treated 48,860 patients in the first nine months of 2022 and are on track to treat more than 61,000 Chicagoans for a variety of mental health conditions by the end of the year, fulfilling Lightfoot’s promise, according to the data.
Lightfoot has also vowed that that residents of all 77 Chicago community areas can “access high-quality care” either in their neighborhood or in the location of their choice across the city. ...
That represents a massive expansion of Chicago’s mental health care system under Emanuel and former Mayor Richard M. Daley, when the publicly run clinics served no more than 6,000 Chicagoans per year, according to city data. In 2010, the city spent $13 million annually on mental health treatment.
In 2023, the budget calls for $89 million to be spent providing mental health care. That includes efforts to treat people outside clinics and other medical facilities, sending clinicians to homeless shelters, on the CTA and in encampments of unhoused people. ....
The debate over whether to add to the city’s five publicly run mental health clinics is the wrong question to ask, Arwady said.
“This is a conversation from a decade ago,” Arwady said, adding that public clinics could never meet the demand for mental health care in Chicago. Under Daley, the clinics were only open from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and did not treat children or adolescents, Arwady said. “The debate has gotten stuck.”
The city’s network of clinics treated 15,000 children in 2022, Awardy said.
City-run clinics should fill in the gaps left by nonprofit groups that are best equipped to serve Chicagoans where, how and by whom they want to be served, Arwady said, likening it to serving as a safety net to the safety net.
...it does not matter if clinics and other medical facilities are funded with city tax dollars or public funds from Cook County or the state of Illinois or federal grants, Arwady said.
“The distinction does not make sense,” Arwady said. “I don’t see it at all as outsourcing.”
I read with interest the discussion of trans women playing in women’s chess tournaments. I have no experience or knowledge about this topic. Reading all the comments, I gleaned the basic issue.
Is letting trans women play in women’s chess tournaments “fair” from a competition point of view?
Do these trans women with their male originated brains have an unfair advantage and if so, they should be banned from women’s tournaments. After all, we must have a fair and level playing field.
This was blowing my mind (I am an old baby boomer who uses baby boomer expressions).
So I needed a break from this and turned on Navy versus Notre Dame.
1. Live front Dublin Ireland…the fighting IRISH of Notre Dame versus navy. 30,000 ND fans have made the trip while about 8,000 navy fans are here. Hmmm, this looks like a home game on steroids for ND.
2. ND has a 24 year old transfer QB from Wake Forest starting for the first time. He comes highly rated and hopes to play in the NFL. Wait…a 24 year old super star QB could never play for navy. The navy QB is some student athlete carrying a difficult academic workload. QB is a very important position…kind of unfair.
3. In fact all of the ND players were bigger-especially in the skill positions. It looked like “semi- pro” ND players versus the student athletes of navy. This is really reeking of unfair competition.
4. My opinion ..the announcers also had an ND bias. How far can ND go this year? Can they make the playoffs? And let’s hope navy can stay on the field with ND.
5. Well, ND 42, navy 3.
Wow, that was a showcase for basic unfair competition- did not see any blowback in the media. This kind of unfair competition seemed blatant and accepted.
So back to the chess tournament issue. The arguments on banning trans women were subtle, certainly not in the realm of the ND/ navy game. So I say, let them play and if the trans women end up dominating maybe revisit the issue.
But tell me regarding future ND/navy games - do you ever expect this game to start on a level playing field? Do not think so- the unfair ND advantage will continue.
And finally, I must confess, I think Notre Dame is a fine school, but I intensely dislike their football team. Here comes my real prejudice - and when they play real semi pro teams like say..Alabama…they get get their lunch handed to them. Been a LONG time since they have won the national championship.
This is my favorite comment in the issue, by far.
My understanding, and I am not a chess player, is that Chess tournaments typically have open events which allow any person to play. Also, some tournaments have events which are restricted to women. The two questions chess is dealing with are:
1. Who is allowed to play in the women's events?
2. For purposes of determining chess rank, which events in a player's history count?
I assume there are no events which exclude women. The IFC's proposal only applies to persons who have transitioned from female to male. The common complaint in sports about males who transition to females is not applicable in this case.
Based on my understanding no person is excluded from participating in competitive Chess due to their gender or gender identity. My problem with the IFC proposal was "abolishing" the record of playing in women's events. While I see the putative logic, I believe there is enough individual variation that they can allow to keep the records of events played when they were permitted to play them. That may be because I think Chess is overly obsessed with rankings, which I admit is my bias.
If I have my facts wrong, someone please set me straight.
The announcers ALWAYS have a ND bias! :)
Eric - Thank you for your defense against the argument that a video produced by a conservative think tank can simply be refuted on its face just because. (And of course, that also applies when conservatives would dismiss information coming from a left leaning organization solely because of its origin.) Finding inaccuracy with facts presented or arguing the reasoning is totally valid, but simply dismissing something without any reference to specific criticisms is intellectually lazy. Debate facts with facts and reasoning with reasoning as opposed to labeling and name calling.
Also, I appreciated your statement "The separation of the sexes in nearly all sports makes biological sense." Biology is real - follow the science!
Dr. Arwady should be able to walk into any bar or restaurant in Chicago and not have to pay. Like politicians, pro athletes, and Mobsters.
The Nature article you cite definitely does not even claim to refute the difference between sexes in spatial reasoning. It only qualifies that difference, saying for example it shrinks and may disappear if there is no time limit to performing the task. That what chess clocks enforce, with great anxiety if you’ve ever played competitively.
The locus of authority for deciding which activities benefit from separate spaces for females only resides in one place alone: the females participating. Not the scientists, activists, politicians, lawyers, or philosophers.
Nor, apparently, in your view transgender females.
In my view, no. But they would be a small minority in terms of creating a consensus that any particular female-only space should or shouldn’t include them anyway.
Regarding Michael M.’s suggestion: the Roku Ultra has a feature that locates its romote. The remote beeps when a button on top of the receiver is pressed. I stopped using the feature because my cats would constantly walk across the Roku.
I recall seeing a TV at Abt about ten years ago that had a feature that located the remote.