Something that Alison Bailey wrote reminded me... she said something to the effect that men who identify as women have no reference with which to do so. They are actually identifying with misogynistic stereotypes of women. It's hideously ironic that Coaching HER pretends to challenge stereotypes that hold girls back while actively pushing to include boys who have no idea what it is to be a girl and are only identifying with stereotypes of girls
Even after following gender woo for several years, I still wonder how anyone could take seriously an individual's claim to "identify as" or to "feel like" a member of the other sex, much less as belonging to some made up category asserted to be a "sex". A human being cannot have any plausible idea of what it is like or feels like to be any sex other than the one born into any more than any human can think he knows what it is like to be, say, a bat.
"While eye-watering in her (his) delivery, Rude managed to convey..." I'm fed up with their language distortion and manipulation. Sorry to nitpick. I'm to the point where I want to know where someone stands of sex-based rights because I don't want my brain to shrivel by interacting with them. You should be overdosing on cod liver oil and seaweed to restore any neurons damaged from perusing their website.
I wanted to say that this flamingly uninformed trans activist, Mey Rude, actually said out loud what the Tucker Center and Nike were very carefully trying to make coaches believe. That they are f***ing transphobes if they don't accept trans-identified boys in girls sports. Coaching HER pretends to be a science-backed educational effort. It's no better than Mey Rude's sensitivity reader (ha) screed
If not accepting boys who identify as girls into girls'-only sports makes a person a transphobe, I will gladly take that label. I've been looking for an excuse.
The Big Trans cult leaders are filth, but I'm having a harder time trying to forgive (if I can) the run-of-the-mill, theoretically brain-still-intact adults that are going along with this.
All of them: the male leaders, the female handmaidens, the "moms" destroying their own child (Jazz), the titillated audience, the doctors, the teachers, the counselors, the politicians, etc., etc.
“An individual’s inner concept of self as a woman, a man, a blend of both or neither (non-binary). One's gender identity can be the same (cisgender) or different (transgender) from the cultural expectations of the sex assigned at birth. Gender identity is influenced by both environmental and biological factors. Increasingly popular gender identity phrases include: gender independent, gender creative, gender queer, gender fluid, gender expansive, gender non-conforming, and gender diverse."
Is there any scientific basis for these assertions? Is there a scientific consensus as to the validity of these claims or lack thereof?
ps: I can't read "Tucker Center" without thinking "Tucker Carlson." I bet I am not the only person who makes that dismal association. That gives me a pleasing little jolt of schadenfreude.
You are not the only person. When I read the first article, my mind turned every "Tucker Center" into "Tucker Carlson," which made the whole thing somehow even more macabre.
I'm not sure what they meant by "Gender identity is influenced by both environmental and biological factors." It seems like an attempt to make gender identity a scientific reality rather than an unverifiable feeling. As I noted, attempts to locate a biological source for gender identity have failed
Honestly, if everyone has a gender identity” then prove it 🙄 I just read another article about Nike ripping off a small business by stealing some tech. This, coupled with their treatment of Alyson Felix, hiring Dylan Mulvany to sell women a product he has no need of and the Coaching HER program too. It would just make my day to see them go under.
The currently fashionable idea that male advantage in sports doesn't begin until puberty is—as your citation of sex differences in the throwing ability of 2-year-olds shows—an outrageous lie.
I suspect most readers of this Substack alrdy know this well—but that fewer might know these two facts, especially the second one:
/1/ Male athletic advantage begins in utero.
/2/ In running and jumping events, the ENTIRETY of male advantage begins in utero.
•••MALE PUBERTY IS NOT EVEN RELEVANT TO THE SEX DISPARITIES IN THESE EVENTS•••
.
Fact no. 2 is proved by comparing sprint/jump performance differentials between prepubescent girls and boys, to those between adult women and men.
It's well documented that elite men's sprinting and running marks—from world records down to medal/podium times in random diamond league or collegiate meets—are consistently about 10 percent faster than elite women's, across all contested distances. In jumping events, the differences fall reliably close to 20 percent.
For adolescent girls and boys, the differentials are... consistently around 10 and 20 percent, respectively.
For *prepubescent* girls and boys, the differentials are... consistently around 10 and 20 percent, respectively.
Puberty changes NOTHING. (More precisely, female puberty accelerates sprint/jump performance for girls at the same rate as does male puberty for boys; the parallel developments 'cancel out'.)
(All the boys' records are clustered in the first half of the page, followed by all the girls' records in the second half—so, unfortunately, it's a bit of work to line up the comparable girls' and boys' figures. If you're on a laptop/desktop, I recommend opening two half-screen-width browser tabs, side by side, and scrolling them so that the girls' records for your chosen age group, in one tab, line up horizontally with the boys' ones in the other tab.)
.
So what IS the secret boysauce—starting in utero!—in these events? It's a few things.
.
MUSCLE FIBER DISTRIBUTION:
Late FIRST-trimester male foetuses—as little as 8 weeks from conception—have alrdy developed what will be lifelong higher concentrations of type II-a and II-x (formerly known as II-b... 🤷🏽♀️) muscle fibers (together known as "fast-twitch" fibers), in all skeletal muscles, than their female counterparts.
To be a bit simplistic, type II-a fibers are responsible for max raw strength (unimportant in running/jumping) as well as for "strength/speed endurance" (primary at distances 800m/half mile and up), while type II-x fibers are responsible for pure anaerobic performance at 100 percent capacity (primary for 100/200 meters).
300- and 400-meter races tend to place about equal demands on II-a and II-x fibers.
.
SKELETAL GEOMETRY:
Almost all joint angles differ on average between the sexes—once again from early pregnancy onwards.
Among the most consequential differences:\
ª "Q angle" or "quadriceps angle" between each femur and the pelvis: The Q angle in women and girls averages about 2x as far from the vertical as in men/boys.
The female pelvis is wider (for extremely obvious evolutionary reasons); female legs in standard gait are angled inwards from the hips, placing most women's footfalls closer to center. (Most women's footprints on the beach are close to single-file.)
Male hips, on the other hand, are narrower on average, and male legs tend to hit the ground much closer to perpendicular. (Most male footprints on the beach have distinct left and right tracks.)
Jumping and pushoff power can only be generated perpendicular to the ground,. So—even between a theoretical woman and man with EXACTLY the same height, weight, proportions, strength and muscle fiber composition (the last of which basically doesn't exist; see above)—the man will still outrun and outjump the woman, unless both of them are significant statistical outliers in terms of hip anatomy.
Women's wider Q-angles also reduce maximum performance potential in any "closed chain" weight lift (= any lift involving a push off the floor: squat, deadlift, clean/jerk/snatch, etc)—which is again compounded with the female relative deficit in II-a and II-x muscle fibers.
(Not directly relevant to peak performance, but still of note: Because women's and girls' legs strike the ground farther off of the perpendicular, they experience greater shear (parallel to the ground) stress at the knee than men do with each stride, takeoff, landing or closed-chain lift. This is why female athletes are at much higher risk for knee injuries—especially ACL tears—than male athletes.) and related injuries
Male arms in general are very close to perfectly straight at full extension, while most female arms are a few degrees askew in BOTH of the planes shown in the photos. This—together with the aforementioned muscle fiber (mostly II-x) disparities, plus the fact that men/boys have proportionally longer arms (and legs too) for their height—creates the almost unfathomable sex differences in punching power: men punch 263% as hard as similarly trained/untrained women of matching height and weight.
Also the reason why girls and women hold and bow violins differently, with even the youngest (4-5 year old) girls and boys needing different chin rests on their violins.
.
VO2 max:
This is the maximum about of oxygen that the body can "uptake" (= pass from the lungs into the bloodstream) per minute. It's a HUGE factor in "speed endurance" contests, including foot races from 300/400m all the way up to the marathon.
This is yet another male advantage that has nothing whatsoever to do with puberty. It's a combined function of lung volume—which is 10-20 percent larger in males after controlling for body size (women's smaller lungs are an evolved adaptation for birthing bigger babies; just look at a diagram of ribcage and lung displacement in late pregnancy and it'll make perfect sense)—and blood hemoglobin count, which is similarly higher in men although not for anatomically obvious reasons.
The differences in lung size and hemoglobin count—and therefore in future VO2max—are, like everything else described in this post, irreversibly established by early-to-mid foetal stage (late 1st/early 2nd trimester of pregnancy).
•
There are numerous other components of male athletic advantage that begin to accrue when a baby is negative months old, too—but those are the big three (and this post is already like 999,999 words long).
In fact, despite all the hemming and hawing from sports governing agencies about "transitioning after male puberty", the sports where sexed puberty DOES markedly widen the (already-existing) performance gap between men and women are almost certainly the exception, rather than the rule.
The testosterone levels of adult athletes, too, have NO statistical importance and NO predictive value in almost any elite-level sport (see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24593684/ for a starter study on this).
It's almost like the whole canard of "lowering testosterone levels" in "trans women" was picked BECAUSE it won't curb the male advantage.
“[S]ex isn’t the Ultimate Biological Reality that transphobes make it out to be. There’s nothing intrinsically male about XY chromosomes, testosterone, body hair, muscle mass or penises.”
How do we put an end to this evil lying? Coaching HER brings to mind the analogy of the frogs on the range in a pot of room-temperature water. Trans activists switch the heat on at the beginning of the exercise. By the time most participants reach the reality distortion portion of the training exemplified by the passage quoted above, they don't know they're boiling in the waters of trans propaganda.
Nike's participation in this travesty is rich. Not only is corporate Nike bro country, Nike athletics was in the news not long ago because of the abusive way its coaches were haranguing elite female runners about their excessive body fat. (It wasn't.) Somehow the guys didn't warrant the same concern.
Turning to the list of "common stereotypes," I found a few instances where the trait was a stereotype when it came to girls but a reality that applies to a majority of straight boys. By way of background, I was a gender nonconforming little sissy boy. While I shed my effeminacy (preciousness?) when I hit adolescence, I am a gay man who has always felt out of sync with most straight men.
Hence, I would say that while it is a stereotype that girls should be well behaved, most boys are not only expected to act out but encouraged to do so. In my experience, they do not need encouragement; they get there on their own just fine. Dennis the Menace was popular for a reason. As far as being emotional is concerned, in certain American socioeconomic groups and subcultures stoicism is both encouraged among and practiced by men and boys.
I realize these observations are of limited relevance to the main thesis of this piece. I guess I just like having a bone to pick with the mendacious creators of the Coaching HER gender identity indoctrination course.
The Washington Post has a recent article supporting men in women’s sports. “Her trans daughter made the volleyball team. Then an armed officer showed up.”
Thanks for sharing the archived version. Many thoughts on this but two stand out: 1) the mother deliberately misrepresented (lied) on her child's sports form by filling in an F next to sex. Though she had changed her child's legal marker, her biological sex, the factor that allowed the child to grow to 5'8" by eighth grade, will always be male. Mother and child need to understand that.
And 2) this paragraph is laughably false: "Though research on the subject remains limited, multiple studies have found that testosterone is the only driver of athletic differences between the sexes. The hormone can give a person a larger physical stature, denser bones and a greater capacity to build muscle. Without it, a trans girl like Elizabeth likely has no physical advantage, researchers have found." There are at least 18 studies on this subject, no one has ever suggested that testosterone is the only driver of male advantage (a female is NOT simply a male with low T), and many studies show even lowering T does not mitigate male advantage. The entire slant of this article is that the female category is a place for weak males. There is no recognition of girls as a separate and distinct class of human being
Pretty bad all right. I notice they had comments off. I saw another article on the subject there not long ago with comments on. The comments were overwhelmingly in favour of women only in women’s sports. The few arguing that “trans women are women” got few upvotes. This is at a left leaning paper too.
Something that Alison Bailey wrote reminded me... she said something to the effect that men who identify as women have no reference with which to do so. They are actually identifying with misogynistic stereotypes of women. It's hideously ironic that Coaching HER pretends to challenge stereotypes that hold girls back while actively pushing to include boys who have no idea what it is to be a girl and are only identifying with stereotypes of girls
Even after following gender woo for several years, I still wonder how anyone could take seriously an individual's claim to "identify as" or to "feel like" a member of the other sex, much less as belonging to some made up category asserted to be a "sex". A human being cannot have any plausible idea of what it is like or feels like to be any sex other than the one born into any more than any human can think he knows what it is like to be, say, a bat.
Sarah, another great column. Thank you very much. I am so disgusted by the Tucker Center and Nike. I am boycotting Nike.
Having really dug into this, I too can't believe how impactful and insidious this effort is.
yes, it is insidious and awful. I would like all of us to boycott Nike over this.
Wow. That was a huge piece, when you follow all the links, but a great one.
It just makes me so angry, for so many reasons.
"While eye-watering in her (his) delivery, Rude managed to convey..." I'm fed up with their language distortion and manipulation. Sorry to nitpick. I'm to the point where I want to know where someone stands of sex-based rights because I don't want my brain to shrivel by interacting with them. You should be overdosing on cod liver oil and seaweed to restore any neurons damaged from perusing their website.
I wanted to say that this flamingly uninformed trans activist, Mey Rude, actually said out loud what the Tucker Center and Nike were very carefully trying to make coaches believe. That they are f***ing transphobes if they don't accept trans-identified boys in girls sports. Coaching HER pretends to be a science-backed educational effort. It's no better than Mey Rude's sensitivity reader (ha) screed
If not accepting boys who identify as girls into girls'-only sports makes a person a transphobe, I will gladly take that label. I've been looking for an excuse.
The Big Trans cult leaders are filth, but I'm having a harder time trying to forgive (if I can) the run-of-the-mill, theoretically brain-still-intact adults that are going along with this.
Same. I am losing any patience I may have had with these people...especially women with daughters.
All of them: the male leaders, the female handmaidens, the "moms" destroying their own child (Jazz), the titillated audience, the doctors, the teachers, the counselors, the politicians, etc., etc.
Yep.
“An individual’s inner concept of self as a woman, a man, a blend of both or neither (non-binary). One's gender identity can be the same (cisgender) or different (transgender) from the cultural expectations of the sex assigned at birth. Gender identity is influenced by both environmental and biological factors. Increasingly popular gender identity phrases include: gender independent, gender creative, gender queer, gender fluid, gender expansive, gender non-conforming, and gender diverse."
Is there any scientific basis for these assertions? Is there a scientific consensus as to the validity of these claims or lack thereof?
ps: I can't read "Tucker Center" without thinking "Tucker Carlson." I bet I am not the only person who makes that dismal association. That gives me a pleasing little jolt of schadenfreude.
Nike is brotown, end of story. More later..
You are not the only person. When I read the first article, my mind turned every "Tucker Center" into "Tucker Carlson," which made the whole thing somehow even more macabre.
I'm not sure what they meant by "Gender identity is influenced by both environmental and biological factors." It seems like an attempt to make gender identity a scientific reality rather than an unverifiable feeling. As I noted, attempts to locate a biological source for gender identity have failed
Honestly, if everyone has a gender identity” then prove it 🙄 I just read another article about Nike ripping off a small business by stealing some tech. This, coupled with their treatment of Alyson Felix, hiring Dylan Mulvany to sell women a product he has no need of and the Coaching HER program too. It would just make my day to see them go under.
Girls need their space to be themselves. Let us define and explore evil as a concept in my podcast here:
https://soberchristiangentlemanpodcast.substack.com/p/s1-ep-2-scgp-rebroadcast
The currently fashionable idea that male advantage in sports doesn't begin until puberty is—as your citation of sex differences in the throwing ability of 2-year-olds shows—an outrageous lie.
I suspect most readers of this Substack alrdy know this well—but that fewer might know these two facts, especially the second one:
/1/ Male athletic advantage begins in utero.
/2/ In running and jumping events, the ENTIRETY of male advantage begins in utero.
•••MALE PUBERTY IS NOT EVEN RELEVANT TO THE SEX DISPARITIES IN THESE EVENTS•••
.
Fact no. 2 is proved by comparing sprint/jump performance differentials between prepubescent girls and boys, to those between adult women and men.
It's well documented that elite men's sprinting and running marks—from world records down to medal/podium times in random diamond league or collegiate meets—are consistently about 10 percent faster than elite women's, across all contested distances. In jumping events, the differences fall reliably close to 20 percent.
For adolescent girls and boys, the differentials are... consistently around 10 and 20 percent, respectively.
For *prepubescent* girls and boys, the differentials are... consistently around 10 and 20 percent, respectively.
Puberty changes NOTHING. (More precisely, female puberty accelerates sprint/jump performance for girls at the same rate as does male puberty for boys; the parallel developments 'cancel out'.)
Here's a USA Track & Field dataset, going all the way down to age groups that are obviously prepubescent (8-and-under), if you want to run some numbers yourself: https://www.usatf.org/resources/statistics/records/championship-meet-records/usatf-national-junior-olympic-track-field-champion
(All the boys' records are clustered in the first half of the page, followed by all the girls' records in the second half—so, unfortunately, it's a bit of work to line up the comparable girls' and boys' figures. If you're on a laptop/desktop, I recommend opening two half-screen-width browser tabs, side by side, and scrolling them so that the girls' records for your chosen age group, in one tab, line up horizontally with the boys' ones in the other tab.)
.
So what IS the secret boysauce—starting in utero!—in these events? It's a few things.
.
MUSCLE FIBER DISTRIBUTION:
Late FIRST-trimester male foetuses—as little as 8 weeks from conception—have alrdy developed what will be lifelong higher concentrations of type II-a and II-x (formerly known as II-b... 🤷🏽♀️) muscle fibers (together known as "fast-twitch" fibers), in all skeletal muscles, than their female counterparts.
To be a bit simplistic, type II-a fibers are responsible for max raw strength (unimportant in running/jumping) as well as for "strength/speed endurance" (primary at distances 800m/half mile and up), while type II-x fibers are responsible for pure anaerobic performance at 100 percent capacity (primary for 100/200 meters).
300- and 400-meter races tend to place about equal demands on II-a and II-x fibers.
.
SKELETAL GEOMETRY:
Almost all joint angles differ on average between the sexes—once again from early pregnancy onwards.
Among the most consequential differences:\
ª "Q angle" or "quadriceps angle" between each femur and the pelvis: The Q angle in women and girls averages about 2x as far from the vertical as in men/boys.
The female pelvis is wider (for extremely obvious evolutionary reasons); female legs in standard gait are angled inwards from the hips, placing most women's footfalls closer to center. (Most women's footprints on the beach are close to single-file.)
Male hips, on the other hand, are narrower on average, and male legs tend to hit the ground much closer to perpendicular. (Most male footprints on the beach have distinct left and right tracks.)
Jumping and pushoff power can only be generated perpendicular to the ground,. So—even between a theoretical woman and man with EXACTLY the same height, weight, proportions, strength and muscle fiber composition (the last of which basically doesn't exist; see above)—the man will still outrun and outjump the woman, unless both of them are significant statistical outliers in terms of hip anatomy.
Women's wider Q-angles also reduce maximum performance potential in any "closed chain" weight lift (= any lift involving a push off the floor: squat, deadlift, clean/jerk/snatch, etc)—which is again compounded with the female relative deficit in II-a and II-x muscle fibers.
(Not directly relevant to peak performance, but still of note: Because women's and girls' legs strike the ground farther off of the perpendicular, they experience greater shear (parallel to the ground) stress at the knee than men do with each stride, takeoff, landing or closed-chain lift. This is why female athletes are at much higher risk for knee injuries—especially ACL tears—than male athletes.) and related injuries
• Elbow hyperextension (https://musculoskeletalkey.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/F000067f006-014-9781455709779.jpg) and lateral deflection (https://musculoskeletalkey.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/F000067f006-002-9781455709779.jpg) at lockout:
Male arms in general are very close to perfectly straight at full extension, while most female arms are a few degrees askew in BOTH of the planes shown in the photos. This—together with the aforementioned muscle fiber (mostly II-x) disparities, plus the fact that men/boys have proportionally longer arms (and legs too) for their height—creates the almost unfathomable sex differences in punching power: men punch 263% as hard as similarly trained/untrained women of matching height and weight.
Also the reason why girls and women hold and bow violins differently, with even the youngest (4-5 year old) girls and boys needing different chin rests on their violins.
.
VO2 max:
This is the maximum about of oxygen that the body can "uptake" (= pass from the lungs into the bloodstream) per minute. It's a HUGE factor in "speed endurance" contests, including foot races from 300/400m all the way up to the marathon.
This is yet another male advantage that has nothing whatsoever to do with puberty. It's a combined function of lung volume—which is 10-20 percent larger in males after controlling for body size (women's smaller lungs are an evolved adaptation for birthing bigger babies; just look at a diagram of ribcage and lung displacement in late pregnancy and it'll make perfect sense)—and blood hemoglobin count, which is similarly higher in men although not for anatomically obvious reasons.
The differences in lung size and hemoglobin count—and therefore in future VO2max—are, like everything else described in this post, irreversibly established by early-to-mid foetal stage (late 1st/early 2nd trimester of pregnancy).
•
There are numerous other components of male athletic advantage that begin to accrue when a baby is negative months old, too—but those are the big three (and this post is already like 999,999 words long).
In fact, despite all the hemming and hawing from sports governing agencies about "transitioning after male puberty", the sports where sexed puberty DOES markedly widen the (already-existing) performance gap between men and women are almost certainly the exception, rather than the rule.
The testosterone levels of adult athletes, too, have NO statistical importance and NO predictive value in almost any elite-level sport (see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24593684/ for a starter study on this).
It's almost like the whole canard of "lowering testosterone levels" in "trans women" was picked BECAUSE it won't curb the male advantage.
This madness MUST STOP!!! Great to see resistance growing!!! A cartoon in support of girls' and women's sports: https://open.substack.com/pub/annecantstandit/p/game-over-guys?r=qowdg&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Nike should stick to the facts, male bodies do not belong in female sports!
https://youtu.be/v8LZaOICIMY?si=H9NkDnW2DkQXl9ii
“[S]ex isn’t the Ultimate Biological Reality that transphobes make it out to be. There’s nothing intrinsically male about XY chromosomes, testosterone, body hair, muscle mass or penises.”
How do we put an end to this evil lying? Coaching HER brings to mind the analogy of the frogs on the range in a pot of room-temperature water. Trans activists switch the heat on at the beginning of the exercise. By the time most participants reach the reality distortion portion of the training exemplified by the passage quoted above, they don't know they're boiling in the waters of trans propaganda.
Nike's participation in this travesty is rich. Not only is corporate Nike bro country, Nike athletics was in the news not long ago because of the abusive way its coaches were haranguing elite female runners about their excessive body fat. (It wasn't.) Somehow the guys didn't warrant the same concern.
Turning to the list of "common stereotypes," I found a few instances where the trait was a stereotype when it came to girls but a reality that applies to a majority of straight boys. By way of background, I was a gender nonconforming little sissy boy. While I shed my effeminacy (preciousness?) when I hit adolescence, I am a gay man who has always felt out of sync with most straight men.
Hence, I would say that while it is a stereotype that girls should be well behaved, most boys are not only expected to act out but encouraged to do so. In my experience, they do not need encouragement; they get there on their own just fine. Dennis the Menace was popular for a reason. As far as being emotional is concerned, in certain American socioeconomic groups and subcultures stoicism is both encouraged among and practiced by men and boys.
I realize these observations are of limited relevance to the main thesis of this piece. I guess I just like having a bone to pick with the mendacious creators of the Coaching HER gender identity indoctrination course.
The Washington Post has a recent article supporting men in women’s sports. “Her trans daughter made the volleyball team. Then an armed officer showed up.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2024/trans-sports-girls-florida-bans/
Archived copy: https://archive.ph/JUKwS
Thanks for sharing the archived version. Many thoughts on this but two stand out: 1) the mother deliberately misrepresented (lied) on her child's sports form by filling in an F next to sex. Though she had changed her child's legal marker, her biological sex, the factor that allowed the child to grow to 5'8" by eighth grade, will always be male. Mother and child need to understand that.
And 2) this paragraph is laughably false: "Though research on the subject remains limited, multiple studies have found that testosterone is the only driver of athletic differences between the sexes. The hormone can give a person a larger physical stature, denser bones and a greater capacity to build muscle. Without it, a trans girl like Elizabeth likely has no physical advantage, researchers have found." There are at least 18 studies on this subject, no one has ever suggested that testosterone is the only driver of male advantage (a female is NOT simply a male with low T), and many studies show even lowering T does not mitigate male advantage. The entire slant of this article is that the female category is a place for weak males. There is no recognition of girls as a separate and distinct class of human being
Pretty bad all right. I notice they had comments off. I saw another article on the subject there not long ago with comments on. The comments were overwhelmingly in favour of women only in women’s sports. The few arguing that “trans women are women” got few upvotes. This is at a left leaning paper too.