On Jonas Hole's Salutatory Address

Jonas Hole in his Junior ROTC uniform

Three of Curmie’s last four blog posts touched on issues related to the trans community—what can be taught in university classrooms, the fact that a trans actor was cast in a major motion picture, and that a piece of instrumental music honors a trans activist from decades ago.  The fourth essay was about graduation ceremonies.  And now… <drum roll>… both topics at once.  Curmie promises he’ll find a different kind of topic soon.

Actually, the graduation speech by Jonas Hole, the salutatorian at D’Iberville High School in Biloxi, isn’t the whole story, although it’s how Curmie found out about the case.  Jonas, who identifies as transmasculine, was introduced by the school’s principal, Cheryl Broadus.  Broadus used Jonas’s deadname and described him as an “outstanding young lady.”  Unsurprisingly, Broadus has not responded to multiple requests for comment. 

What is particularly disturbing here is that this is obviously an attempt, not merely to be a bigoted asshole, but to strut about it.  It would certainly be easy enough to avoid gendered descriptions: “Our next speaker is the class salutatorian, who has accomplished a great deal both in the classroom and elsewhere.  Our records show the name as Makayla Hole, but many of you will no doubt recognize this outstanding young scholar as Jonas Hole.” 

See how easy that was?  It notes the reality that students—and that who this event ought to be all about, after all—will know this person as Jonas, without either endorsing or condemning the name change.  Reality is a thing, after all.  Curmie would have been more affirmative, but no one asked him, and it’s only fair to admit that Broadus has to deal with what might reasonably be assumed to be a less than entirely liberal community, and alienating those folks might be contra-indicated.  

She (Curmie uses the feminine pronoun because that’s how she presents herself; he hasn’t checked her genitalia) didn’t have to join with the neanderthals, however, and in Curmie’s mind that makes her unfit for her position, which above all else ought to be to prioritize respect for her students.

The speech itself was recorded by a mom in the audience who posted it as a reel on Facebook.  It’s not exactly the highest fidelity in history, and there’s more than a little background noise, but it’s what we’ve got, and it isn’t horrible.  Jonas differs from the Kinks’ Lola, who walks like a woman and talks like a man.  Jonas talks like a woman; whether he walks like a man isn’t clear from the video, but he certainly looks like one (see the photo above).

The speech is a little rushed.  Whether this is a function of nerves (reasonable enough under the circumstances) or perhaps a time limit isn’t clear.  What is absolutely evident, however, is that there’s actual content here.  Enjoy it while you can, Gentle Reader, as election season is heating up, and we’re not likely to hear much of anything in our news feeds but slogans and misrepresentations for the next few months.

The video doesn’t show the very opening of the speech, but according to the article in Mississippi Today linked above he “first introduced himself with his former name, then added, ‘a lot of you know me as Jonas.’”  Nice little knife twist, that.  The speech starts with the recollection of “trying to blend in” and “wanting people to like me” as a freshman. Curmie doesn’t remember a lot about that time in his life, but he does remember that.  “Whether you know it or not, you probably did, too,” says Hole.  Yep.  And it didn’t work for Curmie, either.  (Different circumstances; same phenomenon.)

After a couple of shoutouts, we get to the real stuff:

Throughout high school, I eventually gathered the courage to advocate self-expression for myself and others.  Despite my own self-acceptance, others judged me without understanding me.  I became my labels, and it felt as if my achievements, hardships, personality, all became irrelevant for the sole fact that I present myself differently. 

However, I hold no grudge against those who were so quick to criticize me….  As I’ve matured to accept myself for who I am, I want to encourage all of you to do the same. Express yourself as individuals and resist the temptation to just be a follower. We as a community can be so much stronger by living our lives truthfully and without fear of what someone else may or may not think.  

(Note: the quote in The Advocate renders that last word as “be.”  It’s unclear in the recording; both words work in context.)

He even slipped in a Bible verse, Romans 15:7 (NIL) “Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God.”  Touché, kid!

OK, yeah, the whole thing was a little self-centered, and the homily wasn’t actually the most original advice Curmie has ever heard.  That said, the speech was polite and gracious, and Hole is in an ideal position to connect his own lived history with wider issues.  It’s not the “mic drop” that some LGBTQ+ advocates claim it is, but it’s honest and articulate: not bad for a three-and-a-half-minute speech by a teenager.

Unfortunately, misgendering Jonas at graduation appears to be the tip of the iceberg.  He was not only deadnamed in a post on the school’s Facebook page, but there is at least speculation that his image was digitally altered to make him appear more feminine.  The incipient mustache on Jonas’s upper lip is certainly more evident in the photo you see at the top of the page than in the school’s photo, but that wasn’t necessarily intentional.  And Curmie does admit to being a little confused by the suggestion that Jonas was “outed” by that post—surely virtually everyone knew the story. 

Erasure, of course, is a different thing.  Curmie doesn’t understand the phenomenon as viscerally as he would if he himself were trans, but he has seen the expression on the faces of trans friends and family who were deadnamed by people who knew better. 

Perhaps even more significantly, a half dozen students at the school found out their pictures had been excised from the yearbook only when the books were distributed.  Is that “dehumanizing,” as Jensen Luke Matar, the director of the statewide Transgender Resources, Advocacy, Networking and Services (TRANS) Program, would have it?  Perhaps not, but cruelty and stupidity are in a death struggle to be the defining characteristic of that little ploy.  In a just universe, whoever made that decision would be pilloried (literally).

The transition from adolescence to post-adolescence isn’t easy for anyone, let alone someone whose gender identity isn’t what some people think is “normal.”  Throw in the end of high school, where you got to see your friends every day, and things get tougher still.  Now you’re a lot more on your own than you’ve ever been.  That’s great in some ways, but it’s also damned scary.  And now some so-called educator wants to deny your reality.  Bloody fucking hell.

The Casting of "The Odyssey" and Believing Rumors

 

Curmie has written numerous times about variations on the theme of casting decisions for plays, movies, and television series.  In June of 2017, he discussed the controversy surrounding the Public Theater’s production of Julius Caesar, in which the title character bore more than passing resemblance to Donald Trump.  In 2021, it was the brouhaha at the University of Michigan when a Distinguished Professor of Music showed the Laurence Olivier version of Othello in class.  The following spring, Curmie argued that no, you don’t have to be disabled to play Richard III.  In February of ’23, he suggested that obeying the terms of the rights contract shouldn’t lead to the cancelation of a production of Waiting for Godot.

In April of 2023, Curmie wrote about the casting of black-presenting actress Adele James as Cleopatra in what Netflix would have had us believe was a documentary.  And in January of 2025, the topic was the entirely white-presenting chorus (some of the leads were BIPOC) for a production of the musical Elf in Sacramento.  Oh, and there was a lengthy comment on a post on Ethics Alarms in 2021 about the casting of black actress Jodie Turner-Smith as Anne Boleyn; that one was designated a Comment of the Day.

Anyway, here we go again.  Curmie thought that if he wrote about Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film version of The Odyssey, he’d concentrate on Nolan’s fondness for the controversial (?) feminist (?) translation of Emily Wilson, which Curmie definitely wants to read.  But he’s going to write instead about the three (Count ‘em!  Three!) casting decisions that have raised the ire of conservative commentators.  Well, there are three that Curmie knows about; there may be others.  The first and third, chronologically in terms of the brouhaha, are pretty similar and frankly rather boring: OMG, Nolan cast a black woman (Lupita Nyong’o) as Helen of Troy (and her sister Clytemnestra) and a black man (rapper Travis Scott) as a bardic narrator figure!  They should look like the originals, you see.  <Sigh.>

Ahem.  

First off, there almost certainly were no real-life originals.  Were there Bronze Age places called Troy and Greece?  Yes.  Was there a war between the Greeks and Trojans, fought at least partially at Troy?  Perhaps.  Were there important (royal) people named Helen, Odysseus, Agamemnon, etc.?  Unlikely, but possible.  Are the events of The Odyssey (Circe, Scylla and Charybdis, sirens…) even plausible?  Uh, no.  Homer, whoever he, she, or they may have been, either made that stuff up or perhaps inherited some of it from other writers not lucky enough to have had their works preserved.  Oh, and that line the right-wing critics like to quote about Helen being “the face that launched a thousand ships”?  That wasn’t Homer; that was Christopher Marlowe, over two millennia later.  Curmie’s a theatre historian; he knows this stuff.

Secondly, even assuming that there were real-life historical figures who served as the basis for Homer’s epic… uh… wouldn’t they be and look… uh… Greek?  As far as Curmie can tell, there is not a single Greek cast member, or indeed with any Greek forebears.  Interesting, that.  It may be a bit strong to use the term “racist” to describe those who see no problem with casting Matt Damon or Anne Hathaway but get righteously indignant over Lupita Nyong’o or Zendaya, but not by much.  People of Greek heritage who claim cultural appropriation have more of a point than those who want white actors only.

Is it a bit too cute for Nolan to justify casting Scott by suggesting that rappers are the closest thing we have today to the reception of ancient texts via bardic oral tradition?  Sure.  But it’s not a totally crazy idea, and Curmie, being of the wrong generation and race to fully appreciate Scott’s work, isn’t going to criticize that casting without as much as seeing the film.

But all of this leaves the source of peak indignation from the usual suspects, namely the casting of Elliot (formerly Ellen) Page.  There were rumors that Page, at a slender 5’1”, was to play Achilles, the greatest of the Greek warriors.  The response of Newsmax’s Rob Finnerty was predictably assholic: “You might even remember Brad Pitt played Achilles in a movie 20 years ago, meaning we go from Brad Pitt to a girl who dresses as a guy who’s five-foot-one, 118 pounds. That’s the person who’s going to be playing the greatest warrior in history, because to the left, that is normal. That’s okay.”  A little later, he proclaims that Helen was white.  Nothing to see here; move along.

Others, like the insufferable Elon Musk, also piled on.  The problem, though, is that whereas there’s no legitimate reason to object to Nyong’o’s casting, Page as Achilles is indeed a bit of a stretch, to say the least.  True, Achilles appears as a ghost (you will recall, Gentle Reader that he was killed by Paris in The Iliad), and it might be possible to film only close-ups, or in full armor, or with distortions, or whatever.  But Elliot Page would do well to lift a Bronze Age sword, let alone wield one well enough to defeat Hector one-on-one.

But here, Gentle Reader, is where Curmie urges you to read his introduction to this topic carefully: “there were rumors” that Page would play Achilles.  As of this writing, the imdb page for the film lists Page as a cast member, but doesn’t specify a role.  There has been no official announcement, but it is now reported that that Page is expected to play Elpenor, the youngest member of Odysseus’s crew, who gets drunk and falls off a roof to his death.  He’s the first ghost Odysseus encounters in the Underworld (Achilles appears later), and causes some angst because Odysseus had left him unburied.  Elpenor, like Achilles, is a relatively minor character in The Odyssey; either or both could end up as little more than a cameo… or could be expanded into something more.  We shall see.

When Curmie first read about this controversy, the site he was reading proclaimed that Page would play Achilles.  Even Finnerty introduced his screed by noting that Page reportedly would be in that role.  But human nature being what it is, a rumor became a report, and the report became a “fact.” 

Were he of a cynical or snarky disposition (perish the thought!), Curmie might suggest that Christopher Nolan is not an idiot.  Announce that Elliot Page is in the cast.  Don’t announce who’s playing Achilles (if indeed the character will actually appear).  Maybe even get a minion to accidentally-on-purpose mention that Page was under consideration (leaving out the “for maybe five seconds” part).  Result: well, the right-wing critics look like folks who believe articles in The Onion.  More importantly, there is a mountain of free publicity: we’re still two months away from the release date, and “The Odyssey” is getting a lot more headlines than anything that’s actually in theaters now.  Perhaps, just perhaps, Team Nolan dangled a particularly juicy fake story out there… and Finneran, Musk, et al., rose to the bait.

Curmie suppresses a smirk.  Oh, OK, no, he doesn’t.

Mark Twain Is Right. Again.

Mark Twain has already been lauded by Curmie for his observation that “In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.”  Of course, he’s not the only luminary who, despite having been dead for decades (or even millennia), has been cited for offering more incisive commentary on America in the 2020s than the vast majority of contemporary pundits have been able to generate.  Other folks in that category include Euripides, Luigi Pirandello, George Orwell, Martin Niemöller, and Gertrude Stein.  There are others, no doubt, who will be added to the list in the weeks and months ahead.

But ol’ Mark (or “Sam,” if you prefer, Gentle Reader) gets a second nod today for his observation that “there are three kinds of lies: regular lies, damned lies, and statistics.”  Curmie could have written about that line years ago in reference to, say, border security.  If administration X turns away more unauthorized migrants than administration Y does, does that mean there were more illegal crossings during the X administration or that the Y administration didn’t do as good a job of identifying wrong-doers?  Probably a little of both, one supposes.

Some statistics relating to crimes actually matter.  If there’s a dead body with bullet holes in it, there’s a really good chance a murder has been committed, whether someone is ultimately arrested, tried, and convicted or not.  But if the crime in question is, say, sneaking across the border, we generally don’t know of the existence of the offense until someone is caught. 

And this brings us to the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act.  Cutesy title notwithstanding, the bill is an abomination, but we’ll get nowhere arguing statistics.  There’s a meme out there that says the Cleveland Browns have started more quarterbacks since 1999 than non-citizens have voted in that time period.  Curmie actually fell for that one, but it’s a lie… not just an untruth, a lie.  More to the point, that claim wasn’t justified even by the statistics supposedly cited: its evidence was that there were fewer convictions than Browns quarterbacks.  That’s different than the number of illegal votes cast by a factor of…what? 2? 10? 100? 1000?  Who knows?

One side claims that prosecutions and convictions are extremely rare; the other side points to tens of thousands of names of non-citizens on voter lists.  They’re both right.  And they’re both exaggerating.  The following statements are all true, as far as Curmie can determine: 1). The majority of cases of illegal voting involve convicted felons, false impersonations, or registering in multiple constituencies, not non-citizens.  2). Some locales allow non-citizens to vote in local elections (school board, mayor, etc.).  3). Motor/voter programs may give non-citizens the impression that they can legally vote, especially if, say, they have a green card, have petitioned for asylum, etc.  4). A significant number of people who were about to have their registrations revoked were in fact citizens, and a disproportionate percentage of them were either black or Hispanic. 

Curmie made similar points 14 years ago when Texas was about to purge thousands of voters from the rolls.  It’s actually a pretty good essay.  You should read it in its entirety, Gentle Reader, but here are a couple of selections:

This all boils down to a simple illustration: if someone named Carlos Martinez, a registered Democrat, shows up to vote, too many Republicans want to say “no,” and too many Democrats want to say “yes.” The correct answer, of course, is “yes, if…”: if you’re a citizen, if you’re registered in this district and nowhere else, if you have some sort of reasonable proof that you are who you say you are….

We need to establish some system of presumption. You can’t register to vote unless you can prove citizenship; once registered, however, the government must prove you should be removed. None of this reliance on motor vehicle registrations or jury exemption lists: they’re notoriously unreliable. And the presumption rests always with the status quo. Once you’re registered, the burden of proof shifts to the government to demonstrate to a high standard of proof that you shouldn’t be….

As regards increased demand for appropriate identification, perhaps requiring a photo ID: yes, by all means, if and only if there is a full-scale, well-funded campaign to make sure that prospective voters know not only that the laws have changed, but how they’ve changed, and how to secure, without undue hassle, a legally sufficient, free, identification card.

The same argument about presumption re-appeared a few years later when Curmie was discussing a different xenophobic exercise in a different Trump administration: literally incarcerating and rescinding passports from honest-to-God born-in-the-USA citizens who happen to be… you know… of Hispanic heritage.  Curmie concluded that piece with this: “Yes, there are leftie commentators who are comparing this issue to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II or even the worst excesses of Nazi Germany. Is that really where we are? Of course not. But have we taken far too many steps down a road towards a very nasty, xenophobic, and unjust nation? Oh, yes.”

So there’s no guarantee, on the one hand, that even having a US passport will in fact mean anything to the Mad King of Trumpistan.  But even if that particular strategy doesn’t re-appear, there’s plenty to hate about the SAVE Act.  No, we shouldn’t yammer on about how few violations there actually are (we can’t prove those assertions beyond the general observation that there aren’t many), but we sure as hell need to keep pounding the fact that this bill is all about voter suppression. 

Curmie remembers citing a quotation generally attributed to Benjamin Franklin in a blog post from four years ago: “That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved.”  Unfortunately, however, Curmie also noted that a 2016 study by the Cato Institute found that a “terrifying 52% of Donald Trump’s ‘early core supporters’ responded to the question of which is worse, ‘having 20,000 people in prison who are actually innocent; or, having 20,000 people not in prison who are actually guilty’ by selecting the latter.”  There’s something fundamentally psychotic about that mindset, but… Trump supporters.  (Curmie antiphrastically refrains from suggesting to them that anyone whose name appears in the Epstein files should therefore be imprisoned immediately.)

The idea that it is somehow worth disenfranchising legitimate voters if by doing so we catch a few bad guys is, of course, the best case argument for supporting the SAVE Act.  The other rationales are even worse: that people who have changed their names for whatever reason—because they are trans or women who took their husband’s surname when they got married, for instance—ought to have to jump through more hoops than the rest of us just to be able to vote.  Oh, sure, a passport would work (assuming it hadn’t been arbitrarily revoked for spurious reasons) but those things cost a fair amount of money and take weeks or even months to get (especially since the Trump administration has initiated staff cuts in the agency charged with processing applications).  

Place the presumption with the status quo (if you’re currently registered to vote, you stay that way until and unless the government can prove that you should be disenfranchised) and make the process for new applicants fast, simple, and free, and we can talk.  Otherwise, it’s a poll tax intended to suppress the votes of women and poor people: those who would be more likely to vote against Republicans, in other words.

Of course, liberals are more likely to have passports than conservatives are, and liberal women are less likely to change their names when they get married, so it’s possible that this little stratagem would blow up in the smug faces of the Trumpistanian minions.  They’d certainly deserve it.  A better alternative, however, would be to have a couple of Republican Congresscritters care more about their country than about Dear Leader’s latest power grab.  As of this writing, there may just be a large enough handful of them to prevent this absurdity from becoming law.  We can but hope.  (Oh, and write, and call, and…)

“First, They Came for…”

Two facts about Curmie:

1. He lived in Kansas for seven years, working on his doctorate and staying on for another year when a full-time teaching gig didn’t materialize.  At the time, the state legislature was more conservative than Curmie would have preferred, but it wasn’t controlled by wackadoodles. 

2. He’s friends with (at least) six trans people, one of whom is also his nephew.  None of them, thankfully, live in Kansas.

Yes, it’s true that the lead story of the past few days is yet another reckless act by the Sociopath-in-Chief.  Were Curmie of a cynical disposition, he might suggest that killing little girls is a rather bizarre (and ineffective) means of trying to divert attention away from credible evidence that one has raped little girls.  But that was an act of desperation perpetrated by a single person (well, and his sycophantic minions) and whose victims committed the grievous ethical failing of being born in a different country.  What happened this week in Kansas was, in its own way, even worse.

No, there won’t be any Kansans buried under the rubble of their elementary school, but the level of bigotry disguised as piety and of quite intentional cruelty perpetrated for its own sake by the Kansas legislature is startling, even when compared to other examples of GOP malevolence towards their own constituents.  If you haven’t been following the story, Gentle Reader, Kansas Republicans overrode a gubernatorial veto and essentially disenfranchised trans voters, while causing the maximum amount of disruption in their lives in other ways, as well.  This was made easier for the bigots by circumventing the standard opportunity for the public to weigh in on an issue: a tactic called “gut and go,” by which the contents of a bill are “replaced” by, well, whatever the hell some jackass wants, thereby bypassing the public.  It’s now the “House Substitute for Senate Bill 244.”

A letter dated February 23 informed trans people that as of February 26, their state-issued driver’s licenses would no longer be valid because such identification, according to K.S.A. 77-207, must show the sex of the individual at birth.  Moreover, “the Legislature did not provide a grace period for updating credentials.  This means that once the law is officially enacted, your current credential will be invalid immediately, and you may be subject to additional penalties if you are operating a vehicle without a valid credential.”  Oh, bloody hell.

But wait!  That’s not all!  Recipients of that letter are “directed to surrender [their] current credential to the Kansas Division of Vehicles.”  A “new credential reflecting the gender identification consistent with statutory requirements” would then be issued.  OK, all this is annoying enough simply at face value.  But the real devil, and here Curmie really does mean the physical manifestation of evil, is in the details.

Where to begin?  First off, who cares whether that one letter on a license is an M or an F, since both are acceptable?  The best argument is that it helps identify the driver.  More than a photo does?  Anyway, the more important thing is that things change over time.  Curmie used to have a Kansas driver’s license.  It listed his hair color as brown and his weight at 155 pounds.  Both of those descriptions were accurate 30-something years ago when Curmie moved to Kansas.  Today, however, while there are still a few brown strands in there, the hair is grey (well, maybe “silver” if someone wanted to get on my good side) and the weight was about three inches of waist size ago.  More to the point, those things can change over just the duration of the license.  Other folks change their names: they get married or divorced, for example.  The world changes, except in what passes for a brain in a Republican pol, and we ought to try to keep up as best we can.

There are some areas in which reasonable people can disagree.  There are legitimate fairness arguments that trans women ought not to be playing women’s sports, for example.  Perhaps, although Curmie knows of not a single case in which a trans woman, or even someone pretending to be a trans woman, harassed cis women in a rest room, there’s a scintilla of honest, paranoia-free, argumentation in favor of bathroom bills.  (Needless to say, Curmie disagrees with that perspective, but at least there’s the potential for a rationale.)

But what the hell has “sex at birth” to do with ability to operate a car?  Men can drive; women can drive.  So can murderers, rapists, thieves… even (gasp!) “illegal aliens,” all legally.  Oh, and pedophiles, too; mustn’t forget them.  So even if being trans were to be regarded as unlawful (alas, there have been attempts, including in Curmie’s adopted state of Texas, to make it so), that shouldn’t prevent someone from having a driver’s license.  And there’s certainly nothing about being trans that translates (Curmie apologizes; he couldn’t resist) into being a danger on the road.  People who are, like those with multiple DUI convictions, can still have a driver’s license.  But trans folks who legally had their “M” changed to an “F” or vice versa: nope.

Oh, and if you’re trans, you need a new ID, even if your old one does show your sex at birth.  Andrea Ellis legally changed her name in December, then updated her driver’s license in January.  But, she “saw the writing on the wall after listening to [Attorney General] Kobach’s testimony for H.B. 2426” (the bill that would eventually morph into SB 244 and its demon spawn).  She therefore didn’t change the gender marker on her license, but got the same letter as other transgendered folks.  Yes, she had to change out her old license for one that was literally identical.  She’s trans, after all.

Then we add on the timing.  Apparently these letters were sent by mail no sooner than a Monday, and recipients had only until Wednesday to follow the dictates, as the law would go into effect on Thursday.  Of course, the morons on SCOTUS have decided that it’s OK for the postal service to intentionally not deliver mail, so that potentially complicates things even more.  Chances are very good that some people didn’t even know about what they were required to do until it was literally too late.  What if they were on vacation, for example?  

And then they were expected to turn in their old “credential.”  In person, of course, and you know damned well there will be no extended hours.  So that means taking time off work on short notice, finding a way to the office because you aren’t allowed to drive there, waiting in line, paying $46 (according to one source) for a new ID (poll tax, anyone?), and apparently waiting up to 45 days for a new license (N.B., Curmie isn’t completely convinced about the legitimacy of this claim), without which you’re not allowed to drive: not to work, not to the grocery store, not to visit a friend or relative in the hospital (or hospice), nowhere.

It is, of course, self-evident that new licenses could be created with considerably more alacrity than that—the technology exists to do so in no more than a few minutes—but the powers-that-be will slow-walk the process as much as they can, for no other reason than that, for them, cruelty is fun.  There is no rationality for this law, just bigotry and hatred.  Oh, and they’re handing out $1000 bounties for today’s variation on narcs, i.e., those who report folks they decide are peeing in the wrong restroom.  For a group that thinks “communists” (anyone to the left of Jesse Helms, in other words) are worse than, say, pedophiles, these asswipes sure do like to emulate the Stasi.

Well, actually, the disenfranchisement might be the rationale, as it obviously is for the SAVE Act: identify a group likely to oppose the Reich-wing zealots, and make it harder for them to vote.  That’s the argument raised by real-life Friend of Curmie Will Averill, in a Substack post that also suggests that GOP pols are particularly interested in “Bein’ Hicks and Checkin’ Dicks.”  Will doesn’t say this outright, but Curmie will: this obsession with examining specific body parts is perilously close to the prurient if not the perverse.  But that’s OK, you see, because they’re “protecting our women and children.”  <Sigh.>

There is no lack of posturing on this issue.  Lyft, for example hastened to the rescue, promising half-price rides… which are limited to $10 and expire early next week, long before there’s any reasonable solution.  That’s not help; that’s a scammy marketing campaign. 

The ACLU is filing suit on behalf of two transgendered Kansans, and it appears that there might be some other litigants, as well.  That’s a start, but the suit names only folks like the state Attorney General and Director of Vehicles, not the legislators who are directly responsible for this travesty.  Curmie’s no lawyer, so maybe that’s the appropriate tack, but it still seems insufficient.

Curmie is not, as a rule, given to “thin edge of the wedge” arguments, but with various federal agencies not merely admitting, but bragging about, compiling files on, say, people photographing ICE abuses with the goal of labeling such folks as domestic terrorists, the thought that one violation of Constitutional rights might lead to another becomes foregrounded.  And that famous passage by Martin Niemöller referenced in the title of this piece floats to the surface.

One thing is clear.  Even if we were to buy the spurious argument that trans women in particular are just pretending to be something they’re not, such a subterfuge would pale in qualitative significance in comparison to these… erm… individuals of Oedipal predilections masquerading as Christians.  Curmie has pondered whether every single pol who voted for this heinous bill should, in a just universe, be horse-whipped or sent to the stocks for a week to be pelted with rotten vegetables. 

¿Por Qué No Los Dos?

Iowa’s Heinous, Bigoted, Incompetent, and Hypocritical “Drag Show” Bill

Orlando and Rosalind in Curmie’s As You Like It

The Republican-dominated Senate would have us believe that folks like Robert Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth, and Kristi Noem are anywhere near qualified for the leadership positions to which they were confirmed.  At least the first three are outright threats to the nation and its citizens; Curmie was holding out hope that Hegseth would be merely incompetent, but it isn’t looking that way.  Noem is a vicious and self-righteous fool; that makes her look pretty good by comparison to the rest of that lot.

And 217 of the 218 House Republicans just voted for a budget resolution that would strip billions from necessary social programs that benefit the most vulnerable among us to clear the way for a tax cut for billionaires… and add trillions (yes, trillions) of dollars to the national debt.  So much for these assholes’ claims of fiscal responsibility. 

But with all due disrespect for the GOP quislings in Washington, the greatest example of legislative malfeasance just might be Iowa House Study Bill 158.  It’s currently been reported out of subcommittee with a recommendation to approve.

This totally wackadoodle legislation would criminalize “drag shows” (Curmie will explain the scare quotes in a moment) that allow minors to attend.  Venues would be fined $10,000 per minor in attendance; adults who bring a minor (anyone under 18) to such an event would be guilty of a class D felony (!), subject to “confinement for no more than five years and a fine of at least $1,025 but not more than $10,245.”  Oh, and parents or legal guardians can sue the venue for up to $50,000 plus legal fees for each offense.

Holy Dionysus, where to begin?  Curmie doesn’t attract a stupid or ignorant readership, so we’ll mention the obvious bigotry only in passing.  There is, of course, no rational reason to keep children out of drag shows simply because they are drag shows.  Some such performances may be unsuitable for other reasons, but it’s because of what can loosely be called “adult content”—language, actual sexuality, etc.—not the fact that a biological male (or someone who was once a biological male) is dressed as a woman, or vice versa.  “Drag queen story hours” never hurt anyone.  No, never.

So let’s move on.  The definition of “drag show” in this proposed legislation is a performance in which the following is true:

The main aspect of the performance is a performer who exhibits a gender identity that is different than the  performer’s gender assigned at birth through the use of clothing, makeup, accessories, or other gender signifiers.

The performer sings, lip-syncs, dances, reads, or otherwise performs before an audience for entertainment, whether or not performed for payment.

Needless to say, there are a lot, and Curmie does mean a lot, of theatrical and quasi-theatrical forms that fit that definition but aren’t drag.  The first one to come to mind is British pantomime—you know, Gentle Reader, that entertainment form that hundreds of thousands of British parents take their kids to every Christmas season?  The Dame, the comic older female character, is always played by a man.  And if there’s a juvenile male lead (as in, say, a version of Jack and the Beanstalk), that role will go to an attractive young woman. 

One of Curmie’s friends is one of the UK’s leading Dames.  He writes and performs in pantos not infrequently, but he also does solo work written specifically with children in mind.  He preaches that it’s okay to be different—sort of the kind of message that got actress Julianne Moore in trouble with the censorial asshats Trump administration for her children’s book Freckleface Strawberry.

I’ve seen my friend in a panto and in a solo show live, as well as a few performances online (it’s a long commute from Texas to England).  He’s very good at his job.  He’s empathetic and nurturing.  And I will positively go to war against anyone who says he’s doing anything but a positive service to the children who see his shows. 

But it’s not just panto, of course.  Many traditional Asian forms feature men playing women.  Ask virtually anyone to name a star of Chinese opera, and if they can think of anyone, it’s more than likely to be Mei Langfan, who was best exclusively known for—well, you’re ahead of me again, Gentle Reader—yes, playing the leading female role. 

Similarly, many Japanese Nō and Kabuki companies still employ traditional all-male casting; the onnagata (a male Kabuki actor specializing in female roles) is very much still a thing. But wait… wouldn’t that mean that the Iowa bill isn’t merely homo- and trans-phobic, but also racist?  Well, it kinda seems that way.

Of course, there are plenty of Western examples, too.  The most notable of these is probably Shakespeare’s As You Like It.  Curmie acted in it once and directed it once (that’s a photo from the latter at the top of the page).  There is no question that the play is very much about an actor playing a character not of the same sex.  What’s particularly interesting here is that there is no way to avoid that issue.  In the original, all-male production, we had a male actor playing a female character (Rosalind) playing a male character (Ganymede) playing a female character (Rosalind, again).  But whoever plays Rosalind, that actor is going to take on the identity of someone of a different sex; it just a matter of which scenes.

Curmie used to live in Iowa.  Imagine if you will, Gentle Reader, if Curmie had directed a production of that play with a special afternoon performance for local high schools.  This kind of thing happens all the time.  (We didn’t have such an audience when I did As You Like It in Texas, but we did for Macbeth.)  In this scenario, assuming a good attendance, the college and Curmie would each be on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, and both Curmie and every high school teacher who brought kids would have been charged with a felony.

Ah, you say, but no rational person would consider As You Like It a drag show even though it fits the description in the proposed legislation.  Well, no rational person would introduce a bill this fundamentally stupid, but here we are.  And I’m not ready to trust that Deputy Dunderhead, D.A. Doofus, and Judge Jackass aren’t more interested in parading their pseudo-morality than in exercising reason.

There are other examples, too, of course.  Arguably the greatest Spanish play of the 17th century, Life Is a Dream, and the greatest Italian play of the 18th century, The Servant of Two Masters, both rely on cross-dressing.  Is that “the main aspect of the performance”?  Well, it’s a main aspect of the performance, for sure.  And of course the multiple-Tony-winning musical Some Like It Hot is pretty much about the cross-dressing.

Curmie can’t think of a show he did in Iowa that would have caused problems, but he may well be forgetting something.  Beloved Spouse directed at a local high school there, and didn’t have enough boys audition for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, so she cast a couple of girls as “brothers.”  She probably would have been okay, though, as that wasn’t central to the production.

Similarly, when Curmie has occasionally cast women in roles originally played by men, he’s changed the character to female.  He did strap a fake beard on an actress to play a small part in Woyzeck, and had obviously fake mustaches drawn onto both men and women appearing as the fireman chorus in (Biedermann and) The Firebugs, but complaining about that would be a stretch even for Deputy Dunderhead. 

But Curmie has directed not just As You Like It and The Servant of Two Masters, but also The Breasts of Tiresias, in which the female lead decides to become a man (and does, beard and all), while her husband starts wearing a housedress and gives birth to tens of thousands of babies overnight.  (“Willpower!”)  Yeah, that one might rattle a few cages.  We didn’t have a lot of kids in the house, but those who came (and their parents) seemed to enjoy it.

There are also, of course, some productions (as opposed to the requirements of a play) which might raise the ire of the censorial set.  When Curmie and Beloved Spouse honeymooned in London many years ago, one of the highlights of the adventure was seeing Sir Peter Hall’s brilliant production of Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy.  

Publicity for the show emphasized the fact that the performance would be historically accurate in the sense that it would feature an all-male cast.  Thus, Clytemnestra, Cassandra, Electra, and the specifically female choruses of both The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides were all played by men.  Is that “the main aspect of the performance”?  Well, it’s the one that got highlighted in promotional materials…

We can, of course, add to this list any performance by a trans person.  Curmie can easily imagine a performance art piece by a former student describing his experience as an actress and the various psychological and physical forms of transitioning.  It would be, no doubt, a valuable service to those of us who have never experienced similar urges and especially, of course, to adolescents experiencing them right now.  Nope, can’t have that.

Which leaves us with the final term of the title of this essay: hypocrisy.  According to the sanctimonious right, it is reasonable to home school your kids even if you lack either the education or intelligence to do so.  It’s fine to deny them immunizations which would make them and indeed the entire population more impervious to diseases like polio, measles, mumps, etc.  You can make them go to your church.  What you do with your children is your business.

Well, it’s your business unless you decide to take them to a drag show.  Then, it’s a felony.  Your kids can attend an R-rated movie if you accompany them.  But if you accompany them to a drag show, even a drag queen story hour, perhaps even to a classic play, you’ll be arrested. 

Whoever thought this bill was a good idea is a clown.  Unfortunately, Curmie is developing a case of coulrophobia.  Perhaps you should, too, Gentle Reader.

Florida Out-Floridas Florida: On the Imminent Demise of Education in the Sunshine State

Four somewhat related stories appeared over the last few days. Curmie has already written about one of them, the saga of a marble statue’s dangly bits causing a Florida principal to be fired. Two other incidents—we’ll get to them in a moment—also in Florida (go figure), of capitulation to heckler vetoes further indicate that legislation like the “Parental Bill of Rights,” which passed the US House a few days ago, is aptly named. 

That’s the good news and the bad news. Curmie is going to assume that the good part is self-evident: that in general terms parents ought to be more aware than they have been of late about school curricula, safety concerns, etc. There are deeply problematic parts, too, of course. Demanding that teachers tell parents if students use different pronouns than they were born with, for example, is creepy at best. 

If those kids can’t be their true selves as they perceive themselves to be at home, then demanding that school officials nark them out has a legitimate chance of placing them in danger. The current law even in Florida (!) allows a school to withhold information if there is a legitimate fear for a child’s safety; the proposed national legislation does not. Having more of a 1950s mindset than Florida is not a good look. 

Curmie stipulates that the urge to use different pronouns than biology would dictate might be a “phase.” So be it; let it play out. But a truly loving home would never demand that children deny their nature. (The trans and gender fluid people Curmie knows have been, by and large, supported by their families, albeit sometimes after a period of confusion and dismay; that doesn’t mean that all such folks are.) 

Ultimately, though, however qualitatively damaging such incidents are, they’re likely to be rare. So it’s really the “parents’ rights” part that has the greatest chance to cause quantitative problems. As Curmie wrote a few days ago, “’Parental rights trump everything else’ is not merely problematic, but chilling. No, they don’t, or at least they damned well shouldn’t. Education is not, cannot be, about serving up whatever pabulum the most insular and doctrinaire parents want. It’s about students, and what is best for them must be the primary objective.” 

If we look at these bills in purely political terms, devoid of ethical or philosophical elements, the situation becomes clearer. Schoolchildren don’t vote and they don’t make campaign contributions. Parents do. And True Believers of every description are going to be more forthcoming with those political contributions than the average citizen will be. Thus, the wackadoodle base has outsized influence. 

The seemingly innocuous provisions of the Parental Bill of Rights actually provide a de facto open invitation for every homophobe, Christian nationalist, racist, or garden variety anti-intellectual within hailing distance to remove any topics of discussion, course materials, library books, or whatever else that might disrupt their myopic and theocratic view of the world. What purports to be an exercise in ideological balance and freedom of expression, therefore, is precisely the opposite. 

To be fair, this isn’t intrinsic to the bill, although we might reasonably suspect that some of its sponsors and supporters were aware of the dark ironies at play. Much of the blame can be placed squarely at the door of local school officials—boards of education, superintendents, principals—who tend to be (how to say this?) invertebratedly inclined. It’s easier to go along with utterly stupid interventions from even the most irresponsible sources than to say “no, this book stays, not only in the library, but in the curriculum.” Standing up to bullies can get you in trouble in places where being the loudest is all that matters. 

One of the cardinal principles of American government has always been, or at least was until recently, the twin concepts of majority rule and respect for the minority. The latter was often more aspirational than reality-based, but at least the concept was out there. But if you happen to be in a disenfranchised minority (if you’re gay or Muslim or—heaven forfend!—trans, for example), that respect is not always perceivable in certain communities even in tiny manifestations. 

Of course, BIPOC people are often at the center of these contretemps. Curmie isn’t going to deny that in some instances the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction (DEI regulations are often contrary to at least two of their three initials, for example), but the two specific cases Curmie mentioned in his introductory paragraph certainly do little to suggest that racism isn’t a major force in the “parental rights” movement. 

The first story is sort of a two-parter. The exact details are a little unclear, in part because there’s contradictory evidence, in part because not all journalists write well. We know, sort of, that some 73 books were returned to the distributor by the Duval County, Florida, school district in December. 

Quoting the online version of Jacksonville Today: “Among the rejected titles are a book about Martin Luther King Jr. intended for fourth graders; a biography of Rosa Parks for second grade classrooms; a first grade Berenstain Bears book about God; and multiple titles including LGBTQ+ characters and families.” Gee, I wonder what the agenda of those censors was. 

Homophobia and variations on the theme are still considered acceptable in some places, but rejecting books about perhaps the two most famous figures in the Civil Rights movement suggests a racial animus that ought to infuriate even the most conservative members of the citizenry. (Curmie grants that they could just be terribly written books, but if that’s your argument, you damned well better make it, and provide some evidence for the allegation.) 

Duval officials claim they didn’t really reject the Rosa Parks book because, you see, they never actually bought it to begin with. It was apparently shipped as a substitution for some other book in the order; anyone who placed an online order for grocery pickup during the pandemic understands this phenomenon. 

What appears pretty clear is that Duval did reject the book after it was delivered (intentionally purchased or not), and Curmie is tempted to wonder how it looks better for Duval that they’re now claiming they had the opportunity to order the book but declined, sight unseen. 

Books about black baseball players Hank Aaron and Roberto Clemente, the two greatest rightfielders of Curmie’s youth, were finally approved, but only after a long delay and a national outcry. Nope. Nothing to see here. Keep the line moving. Move along. 

But let’s return to Rosa Parks for a moment. The Grio reports that the publisher Studies Weekly actually tried pandering to Florida’s absurd governmental interference by producing multiple versions of their Rosa Parks story. One version omits race altogether, saying only that “She was told to move to a different seat.” Apparently this was too much even for Florida, but the mere fact that the publisher thought it was worth a try tells us more than a little. 

Let’s face it, Gentle Reader, we all know about Rosa Parks not because she was somehow accidentally in the wrong seat, but because people of her race weren’t allowed to sit where she was sitting. The publisher bears a good share of the blame here, but their cowardice wouldn’t have been necessary, even to them, if the state weren’t run by people whose paranoia is exceeded only by their authoritarianism. Hell, Curmie would settle for grown-ups. 

The last (please, let it be the last!) story in our trio looks a whole lot like the second, except in happened in a different city and about a different medium. This one comes, again, as the result of a single complaint, from a parent in St. Petersburg about the 1998 Disney film (well, technically an episode of “The Wonderful World of Disney”) ”Ruby Bridges,” which had been a staple in Pinellas County classrooms for years. 

Young Ruby, you may recall, Gentle Reader, was the 6-year-old girl who had the grim but significant responsibility of being the black child who integrated New Orleans schools in 1960 (six years after Brown v. Topeka, in other words). The film presents an accurate portrayal of historical events, centering, of course, on the steadfast courage Bridges showed, even as a child, in the face of racial slurs and threats of violence directed against her. 

Ah, but you see, an accurate depiction of those events might lead to the impression that white people hate black people. Or that’s the argument of a paranoid and/or racist idiot named Emily Conklin, who wouldn’t allow her child to watch the film and subsequently lodged a formal complaint. Needless to say, rather than telling Conklin to shut up and sit down, school officials capitulated, at least to the point of banning a program that was shown on network television over 20 years ago from all classrooms at North Shore Elementary until a committee can decide what to do about the situation. 

Now, of course, the school is saying they didn’t actually ban the film (despite considerable evidence that they did): it was a “miscommunication,” you see. If you take that excuse at face value, Gentle Reader, please accept my apologies, but you’re on the wrong page: this blog is for grown-ups. It’s far more likely that they got busted for being craven imbeciles, and now they’re backfilling as fast as they can. 

It’s worth noting at this juncture that Curmie has more than a little sympathy for parents who don’t want their child exposed to truly controversial materials. Curmie wouldn’t put images of Michelangelo’s David, a book about Rosa Parks, or a film about Ruby Bridges on that list, but whatever… None of this, however, grants a lone parent the right to prevent other people’s kids from having access to those media. 

Considerable damage has already been done, of course: damage to the schools’ reputations, to the possibility that good sense might someday prevail in Florida, to the education system in Florida and beyond. That this morass should be the direct result of political initiatives of the GOP—you know, the unintrusive small government, reduced bureaucracy, individual freedoms folks—is darkly ironic but hardly surprising. Duh: they’re hypocrites. 

Curmie isn’t saying the Democrats aren’t, of course. In the words of the image currently used on the cover photo on the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page, “A plague o’ both your houses.” (Note: you’ll have to click on the image to see the quote; Curmie hopes many of you will recognize John McEnery as Mercutio in the Roman Polanski film version of Romeo and Juliet, so you’d know what Curmie was up to without the quote.) 

There are, of course, a few professions that gather as much commentary from people who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about as teaching does—professional athletics comes to mind, acting is up there—but there are literally none which allow a tiny minority of often stupid and almost always ignorant people to have such an outsized influence on the way a profession operates. The subtitle of a recent article in Salon may be a little harsh, but it’s not altogether inaccurate: “Republicans want the dumbest parent at the school to control the curriculum.” 

But no one in the New York Jets hierarchy, for example—not the coach, not the general manager, not the owner—gives a damn that Joe from Poughkeepsie (or Curmie from Texas) thinks that spending potloads of money and talent to get a 39-year-old prima donna as their quarterback is a bad idea. But virtually every board of education or principal will do backflips at the behest of some moron who thinks Michelangelo was a pornographer. 

Curmie has often argued that the only people who know (or care) less about education than boards of trustees and boards of education are state legislators. It appears that US congresscritters felt overlooked in this analysis and wanted to assert their claim. But (with the exception noted above, which is inexcusable), at least some of them might have thought they were doing the right thing instead of paying obeisance to the prescribed talking points. Doubtful, but possible. 

But there’s a reason that all three of the incidents Curmie mentions here are from the same state. Ron DeSantis has been masterful at maintaining plausible deniability (Curmie has a half-written piece about this phenomenon that he may someday finish), but if he’s going to run for President using his intrusions into a space where he doesn’t belong, he needs to be held accountable. Indeed, he’s the scarier of the two front-runners for the GOP nomination. Donald Trump is just as wrong on the issues, just as authoritarian, and even more narcissistic, but at least he’s stupid.