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The letter rails against “bullying tactics” and praises Idaho for “preserving fair competition for women and girls”.

It goes on to call for “women’s sports [to] be protected for biological females”, suggesting trans women and girls could compete within a separate category.

Its more than 300 signatories were mostly redacted, however Navratilova’s name was reportedly first on the list, according to a copy of the letter obtained by OutSports.

June’s wave of protest songs and statements of solidarity with Black Lives Matter among artists, activists, journalists, celebrities, and brands in and around hip-hop and beyond spoke to the ability of the community at large to mobilize around important issues. We’ve seen leaders called to the floor for their records on policing, organizations like the “Washington Football Team” reckoning belatedly with historical insensitivity, and renewed calls for representation in film, publishing, and journalism. Overdue milestones are being met.

But the summer has been marred by avoidable squabbles in the hip-hop community. J. Cole got into it in June with Chicago rapper and activist Noname, after he released “Snow on tha Bluff,” in which he criticizes an intelligent woman he believes to be lording knowledge over men who desperately need it.

When news broke that Megan Thee Stallion had been shot during a night out with Kylie Jenner and Tory Lanez, the internet exploded with jokes, reinforcing Noname’s frustrations just a few weeks prior. Model, author, and actress Chrissy Teigen landed in hot water by cracking wise about Meg twerking on Twitter.

Cam’ron weighed in on Instagram, saying “Tory saw that dick and started shootn,” parroting vile rhetoric that portrays trans women as deceitful figures who prey on unsuspecting cis straight men.

Submitting their stories anonymously via three Instagram accounts – dedicated to exposing anti-LGBT+ hate, racism and misogyny respectively – students have painted a damning picture of what it’s like to be a minority in the Iowa City community school district.

Black students reported being shown images of lynchings, hearing the N-word and having to endure classmates using Blackface. Multiple girls reported being sexualised, sexually harassed and even raped.

As if a Covid-19 pandemic wasn’t bad enough, the headlines suggest America is in the middle of a new wave of homicides — from New York City to Chicago to Minneapolis.

The data backs up the headlines, suggesting that homicide numbers are significantly higher in at least some major US cities. But it’s not clear if this is part of a nationwide phenomenon, or if it’s something isolated to urban centers, because we don’t have good data outside the large cities. To make matters more confusing, other types of crime, including violent crime overall, appear to have decreased in many of the same cities.

Still, there’s enough in the three data sets to draw some conclusions: At least in major US cities, homicides are up overall this summer — in some cases, significantly higher. But other kinds of crime, including violent crime overall, aren’t up and may actually have decreased so far this year. There was also a brief spike in burglaries in major cities starting in late May, an increase that was so brief and contained to specific cities that experts told me it was likely due to riots and looting surrounding some Black Lives Matter protests.

Beyond the pandemic, police are going to have more trouble fighting crime — including any current or future spikes — if large segments of the community don’t trust them. That’s where police reform comes into play. It’s a complicated topic, separate from a possible spike in violence this year. But, in short, experts say police should, at a minimum, show the communities they serve that they understand the concerns, acknowledge mistakes, and will change how officers are deployed and targeted.

Otherwise, there’s a good chance that protests against police will flare up, just as they did from 2014 to 2016 and have again this summer. If protests lead to more violence — whether by leading to depolicing, or sowing and exposing distrust in law enforcement — that’s going to create public safety problems.

In Dragon Ball Z, the popular anime series of the late ‘80s / early ‘90s, they have this thing called — hand to God — the Hyperbolic Time Chamber. Go into the Hyperbolic Time Chamber and you’ll experience a whole year’s time in a single day. On the show, friendly but aggressively jacked warriors essentially used it to cram for exams, squeezing in a few years’ worth of training into a weekend. That used to be a sweet idea to me: if I had one of those, I would hop in, not to get shredded but to watch TV. Four months into pandemic-induced isolation, that’s not as appealing anymore. I finally have all this time to watch TV, and I never know how to spend it.

Dear Therapist,

My husband and I have three terrific kids, ages 6, 4, and 2. Our oldest is cautious, helpful, and precocious. Our youngest is easygoing, affectionate, and goofy. Our middle child is persistent, bold, imaginative, and tenderhearted. Her personality is not as easy as her siblings’, but she’s a great kid. If she makes me want to pull my hair out five times a day, then she makes me laugh, surprises me, or melts my heart 10 times a day.

The problem comes from others. Our elderly next-door neighbor dotes on the oldest and youngest and all but ignores the middle one. More than once, she has asked whether our doctors have diagnosed her with any disorders. I just look at her as if I don’t understand her question. I’ve had others “praise” me for being so patient with our middle child. These kinds of comments make me so angry and sad.

We recently visited my husband’s family, and I grew resentful of the way my in-laws talked about and treated our middle child. Conversations seemed to focus on all the bad things she had done that day, or ever in her life. I’m sensitive that these narratives we tell repeatedly can lock a kid into acting a certain way, especially when she is treated differently by the adults around her. My husband’s parents played favorites with him and his siblings, and one sibling has suffered long-lasting trauma from this, and now has several mental-health issues. The final straw was when our oldest picked up on the comments from the adults, and started joining in the criticism of her younger sister. I scolded my oldest with hopes that the adults around the table would take the message to heart, but I didn’t address their behavior directly. My husband and I have discussed these issues since the visit, but we are both at a loss as to how to improve things.

Joshua Sutcliffe was sacked from the Cherwell School in Oxford in November 2017 before moving to a school in London, the Oxford Mail reports.

Within months, he was removed from his position after he made insensitive comments about Islam in a YouTube video.

“I believe Muhammad is a false prophet, I would suggest that Muslims have a false understanding of God because they’ve been led by a false prophet.

I do not believe that young children should be encouraged to self-select a ‘gender’ which may be different from their biological sex; or that everyone at school should adjust their behaviour to accommodate such a ‘transition’; or that people should be punished for lack of enthusiasm about it.

The figures Martin referenced included H.P. Lovecraft and John W. Campbell. (The late author and the late editor, respectively, each won a Retro Hugo award this year. The Retro Hugos are given to creators from years when the Hugo Awards did not exist. Lovecraft won for a posthumous story published in 1945 and Campbell for editing in the same year.) “Between each segment, Martin repeatedly used his time to promote the work and legacy of Campbell, Lovecraft, and to rambled about a number of self-aggrandizing stories from his time within fandom and of conventions that he attended between the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s,” writer Andrew Liptak said in a newsletter recap of the event. Liptak mentioned that Robert Silverberg, a writer with his own racist history, also gave a speech during the ceremony. Lovecraft was xenophobic, anti-Semitic, and ardent in his white supremacy. Campbell, known for founding the magazine Astounding Stories of Super-Science — now Analog Science Fiction and Fact — as for his racist and pseudoscientific beliefs, was a peculiar choice for Martin given Campbell’s recent history with the awards.