Dismembering Womanhood

March 16, 2022 By Jennifer Fitz

Confession time: In daily life the pronoun thing is off my radar. I live in the land of Ma’am and Sir, so everyone gets “gendered” constantly. I’m not bothered if someone calls me Sir (whether by slip of the tongue or genuine mistake — I’m not always the picture of feminine stereotypes, thanks), and like all the rest of the world, in my own routine courtesies I don’t ask to see paperwork, I just roll with whatever sex the person I’m speaking to looks or sounds like.

That’s normal life.

There are times, though, when sex matters. Here’s one of the less offensive reports on the latest crimes of serial killer Harvey Marcelin, a man who murders and dismembers women. The New York Post at least explains at the top of the article that Mr. Marcelin identifies as a transgender woman; I’ve seen other articles where “she” and “her” crimes are described at length before only mentioning at the very end of the story that we aren’t speaking of a woman at all, but a man. Because there are significant differences in the patterns of male and female homicide, sex matters.

***

Another time sex matters is when speaking of reproductive systems. Only women menstruate, conceive, and give birth. Men do sometimes lactate, but not as the means of nourishing newborns. In the effort to somehow prove that sex is a mutable characteristic, it’s become a fad to describe sex-specific physical traits rather than naming the sex those traits belong to. Men and women cease to be persons with lived experiences and instead get named by their genitals. Classy.

This desperation to divorce human beings from their bodies leads to some ridiculously unscientific terminology. Chestfeeding? You can just say breastfeeding. Men and women both have breasts, and any lactation that occurs comes from that breast tissue.

Lately I’ve been seeing bleeder to refer to women who menstruate. Again, terrible science. There are woefully few animal species that don’t have a circulatory system. Men bleed. Women bleed. Dogs and cats and goldfish bleed. We sometimes even refer to trees bleeding. It’s difficult to be any less specific than to use the term “bleeder.” In the desperation to erase distinctions between men and women, we’re now lumping together menstruation, paper cuts, and maple syrup?

***

Something else that matters is the differences between male and female patterns of cardiovascular disease. Here’s an explainer that does indeed drill down to XX vs. XY, which in this case is the relevant distinction.

When you, a man or a woman, try to get your disease diagnosed and treated, though, it’s not just your chromosomes that will protest if your physician ignores the sex-based differences in this area. You as a man or a woman may experience unnecessary suffering because of your sex, due to ignorance about the genuine physical differences between men and woman in this aspect of human physiology.

***

We cannot separate the experience of being a man or a woman from the experience of living in a male or female body. That’s what being a man or woman, male or female, is. I repeat: That’s what it is. Because of this, yet another area where sex matters is in sports.

In order to provide fair competition, all competitive sporting events categorize people by their capabilities. Depending on the sport, we use age categories, weight classes, years of experience, skill-based handicap scoring, or disability classifications in order to create as fair of a playing field as possible. The value of competition derives from playing someone as equally matched to yourself as possible, so that you and your opponent are both striving to perform at the limits of your ability.

Another way we usually (not always) categorize athletes is by sex.

We might do this for social reasons, regardless of whether there are significant differences in typical male and female performance capacity in a given sport. We might do it out of modesty in sports where players have intimate physical contact with each other’s bodies, recognizing that we are sexual beings who rightly place limits on physical contact with the opposite sex.

We also create sex-segregated sports because men and women do vary in their physical abilities, but both need opportunities for fair competition at an intense level. Because humans are not just pieces-parts but men and women, there is genuine need for men’s-only and women’s-only sports.

***

The recent fad for attempting to desexualize human beings — reducing women to bleeders and chestfeeders — is a process of dismembering womanhood. Rather than womanhood being the sum of all the many, diverse experiences of female humanity, “womanhood” becomes a disembodied abstraction built on stereotypes and labels, disconnected from the reality of being the female half of a sexually-dimorphic species.

And into that vacuum, men claim a “right” to female spaces. Protected spaces. Spaces women need in order to develop and thrive as women. Women who have spent generations fighting for equal access to education and to athletics are now told that our womanhood is whatever men decide it will be.

A woman who objects to men taking over women’s sports, or a man insisting on undressing in the women’s locker room, is told she needs to hush-up and obey her betters, or she can expect to be punished.

It’s not really a surprise, then, that our culture goes along with the fictions of a male serial killer who murders and dismembers women while claiming “womanhood” for himself.

Photo: Canadian women’s ice hockey team with gold medals, 2010 Winter Olympics, via Wikimedia, public domain.

Culture War and Civil War

February 16, 2022 By Jennifer Fitz

Hypothesis: Black Lives Matter riots, Antifa riots, Jan 6, and the Canadian trucker convoy — and all the European and Australian analogs to these — have something in common that we need to acknowledge if we don’t want to keep pushing people closer and closer to civil war.

***

Peaceful protest is nothing new. These recent events, however, have taken on a character that I have spent the last two years telling my children: This is not normal for our country.

I’m old. Born near the end of US engagement in Vietnam, reared in the post-segregation world, often-times oblivious to just how different, socially, the world of my boomer-parents’ youth was to my own. If you’re Gen X, you grew up with the Cold War as your defining paradigm, but not with a nation on fire.

And here is what I have to say, watching arson on the left and occupations on the right become far too normal: We need to stop creating whole classes of people who have nothing to lose.

I am not legitimizing lawlessness. I am saying: It doesn’t come from nowhere. We need to be honest with ourselves about that fact.

***

Lately an awful lot of people have been experiencing extremes of marginalization.

Nothing left to lose economically.

Some examples:

The entire gig-economy, descendent of the part-time servant-class economy.
Insane student debt burden as the entry-fee to middle-class employment, and somehow it’s legal for an 18-year-old to take on six-figure loans in pursuit of that dream — same kid who reputedly lacks the decision-making capability to be trusted with a can of beer?
Housing market booms and busts that wreck family financial security, but for which reckless bankers get bailed out and subsidized.
And yes, blanket vaccine mandates that push people out of work, even those who risked their lives keeping the world running pre-vaccine, even when the established science doesn’t support the stated purpose of a given mandate.

There are more and more people every year, from more and more different walks of life, who are getting a clear message: There’s no room for people like you in this economy. You get to just be poor.

Nothing left to lose socially.

People care about their reputations and they care about their place in the world.

The rhetoric of “deplorables”? Branding as “white supremacists” a movement in Canada that was taken up by many, many non-white people? The French president openly taunting the vaccine-hesitant with his plans to f*ck with them?

I know people who’ve been told at corporate trainings that they can’t use the words “husband” or “wife” about their own opposite-sex spouse, because those words create a “hostile environment” — but it’s okay to use those words for your same-sex significant other. We aren’t talking about tolerating anti-gay bigotry. We’re speaking of real, documented cases where employees have been threatened with discrimination charges if they discuss basic facts about the existence of another human being.

Girls who want female-only sports competitions? No matter how otherwise indifferent or even supportive they are of transgender classmates, they are being branded as hateful, death-wishing bigots if they don’t give way to the males who want their spot on the team.

Women who want female-only prisons and locker rooms and rape-survivor support groups are being accused of death-wishing towards the men they don’t want to share intimate spaces with?

It has become normal to brand as hateful anyone who holds an opposing viewpoint . . . and to threaten those “haters” with loss of livelihood. This is now the media, academic, and political mainstream discourse.

Eventually people begin to the get message: There is no place for me in civil society anymore. I guess uncivil society is what they want?

Nothing left to lose physically.

When the police — and a whole swathe of society — think it’s just fine to murder a suspect?

When we just somehow can’t avoid judicially-sanctioned police home invasions that are highly likely to be a death sentence for occupants caught by surprise?

And then we make excuses for these killings of people who do anything, whatsoever, alarmed or defensive when they are awoken from a deep sleep by armed strangers breaking down their doors?

Anyone who can remotely identify with Amir Locke (or any of the long slew of prior victims of police brutality) has been informed: There is no innocence for you. You and your family are available for us to murder at any time.

It is the ultimate in nothing-left-to-lose.

***

Are there criminal agitators behind this and that violent protest? We’ve certainly caught a few.

Some of the looting at my local 2020 BLM protest was carried out by agitators who were definitely not part of the BLM movement at any level, and we’ve seen frank criminals across the country use legitimate, much-needed protest as an excuse for vandalism, theft, and far worse.

It would be laughable to characterize Antifa as just a bunch of poor sweet zoomers and millennials trying to pay off their student loans by driving for Door Dash and turning Portland into a war zone. I am making no defense whatsoever of Jan 6. I’m not qualified to parse all the many strands of thought and action going on in Canada, but I do know I would personally go insane if people honked all day outside my window; it would not make me feel grateful that at least they weren’t pillaging burning. I am indeed, meanwhile, grateful in a general way for the civil rights movements in Europe, but I’m appalled and chilled to the core by the open anti-Semitism I’ve seen among a few of the reactionaries in that crowd.

Do not, for a moment, infer that I am supportive of hatred or violence. Just the opposite.

What I am saying is that otherwise-decent, non-criminal, non-agitating people are being drawn into increasingly powerful opposition events in part because they’ve been pushed to their limits by a society that openly disdains them.

This is not a left-right issue. It’s a cultural issue of accepting extreme marginalization as the ordinary business of the day.

***

Even if you don’t care about right and wrong, maybe you do have something to lose. Maybe civil war does not mesh with your plans.

In that case, please:

Stop slandering people you think are wrong. When you resort to ostracizing and doxing, you are personally responsible for growing the outlaw class. In the long run it only sows violence.
Tread very, very carefully any time a policy position is in play that will cause someone to lose their home or livelihood. Is it truly the only option? There’s no other way? You sure about that? “But they deserve to lose everything” does not build up the bonds of civil society.
Consider it your duty to protect human lives, rather than making up excuses for why those people had it coming.

If you’re comfortable with the level of “mostly peaceful” protest taking place over the past several years, there’s not much I can say to you. But if you’ve decried this or that spree of lawlessness, this message is for you.

I’m not selling nonsense idealism. Treating strangers and opponents with respect doesn’t do anything about criminal agitators who just want to stir things up. But simple civility and decency towards other members of society is indeed very effective at denying the agitators a crowd to do their bidding.

Photo of a bird perched, eating tranquilly, on the fingertips of an outstretched hand by Paweł Kuźniar, via Wikimedia, CC 2.5.

Catholic Writers Conference Online, Feb 11-13 strongly recommended

February 4, 2022 By Jennifer Fitz

Got an e-mail reminder that registration is still open for the Catholic Writers Guild’s online conference this coming weekend. If you are an aspiring Catholic writer, you should give serious thought to attending this conference.

(FYI: I forget what the clergy & religious rate is, but it’s generally *very favorable* so follow the instructions to inquire. If you qualify for it, you’ll very much like the discount.)

My experience with the CWCO:

I showed up for my first online conference with the CWG as someone who had always enjoyed writing, was the go-to person for office writing jobs, and at the time I’d just started blogging anonymously as a first foray into writing for a public audience. My first conference did two things for me:

I learned about the publishing industry and what, as a writer, I needed to do in order to be published.
I took several writing workshops that radically improved the skill level of my craft.

I came into the conference as someone who loved to write and who had plenty of practice writing, but whose formal training had ended at the level of English 101. So the conference was my entry course in professional writing, for both fiction and non-fiction. It was absolutely invaluable.

The other thing the conference did was introduce me to the Catholic Writers Guild.

Is the CWG for you?

As someone with no connections in the publishing world and no experience* or training in professional writing, the Catholic Writers Guild was the thing, the one thing, the life-changing thing that eventually led to my getting published.

However, let me caution you: Just joining doesn’t do the magic. You’ll benefit from the guild if you get actively involved volunteering. I met people across the industry while volunteering to work at the CWG’s conferences. I gained experience by taking on projects within the day-to-day operations of the guild. Through the process of doing that work — and it is work — I built relationships with other writers who shared my interests.

If you’re already a pro and you already have a path laid out for you in publishing the kinds of works you want to publish, then you probably don’t need the CWG. You might enjoy it, but professionally it’s not going to be your sole lifeline. In contrast, if you’re new to the writing industry, and especially if you are new to Catholic publishing and don’t know where to begin in accomplishing your goals, the CWG can absolutely help you succeed as a Catholic writer.

Is there a market for Catholic fiction and non-fiction?

Let me be clear: Catholic publishers are always looking for good writers with good material. It’s a question of developing your craft (which the conference can definitely help you do) and getting connected with the types of publishers who are interested in the kind of writing that you do.

Your perfectly-matched publisher may or may not be present at this year’s conference, but the people you meet at the conference and through volunteering with the CWG can help you get connected.

My experience with CWG pitch sessions:

I volunteered at the online and (when possible) in-person conferences for several years, which let me become familiar with how pitch sessions worked before I was myself ready to pitch a book. I will tell you that as a volunteer doing behind-the-scenes conference work, acquisitions editors who met me habitually asked if I didn’t have something of interest — I didn’t. But they will ask if you seem like a smart, friendly, polite person, because editors are highly motivated to bring in good books, and they will sniff them out aggressively. Eventually I had something to sell.

I pitched Classroom Management for Catechists to Our Sunday Visitor at one of the CWG online conferences. They were interested. I sent in a proposal, and if I recall correctly the acquisitions editor took a look and made a case for it to his committee at OSV. The book didn’t fit with what they were looking for that year (trust publishers on this — they know their business), so I didn’t end up with a contract. A friend from the guild recommended I reach out to Liguori next (she had written for them), and that turned out to be an ideal fit. I did significant re-writing, by the way; one of the things editors do is look at your proposal and tell you how to change it to make it what their readers need.

Once you’ve proven that you can deliver a well-written book and that you aren’t a complete nightmare to work with, editors who know you will start fishing for proposals. OSV is a regular at CWG conferences, but The How-to Book of Evangelization was actually a brainstormed project idea with an editor then at OSV who’d worked with me in the past on smaller projects (some of them unpaid for me — excellent apprenticeship experience, and sometimes a necessary step for someone with no prior experience in the profession, and which in turn led to paying work).

So I didn’t use the conference pitching process for my second book, but I did draw on the same basic skills. I would view pitching at conferences as an opportunity to make some initial connections, but it’s just a beginning. It’s normal for book-matchmaking to involve testing the waters, getting feedback, and refining your ideas.

Even though OSV didn’t end up publishing the first book I pitched to them, their interest gave me confidence and direction for where to shop my proposal next, and it established the beginning of a positive working relationship. Since OSV is one of the publishers hearing pitches at this year’s online conference, I’ll just go ahead and tell you: The editors I worked with all the way through the publishing process for The How-To were top notch. I’d happily work with them again if I had a suitable book to propose.

In conclusion . . .

If you’re a new or aspiring Catholic writer, I recommend the CWG’s online conference workshops.
If you need to reboot your career, you are moving into a new genre, or you just want some company with other Catholic writers, take a look at the workshops and see what you think. (Having looked over the schedule, if I physically *can* attend, then yes, I’m going. We’ll see.)
If you want to get published in Catholic fiction or non-fiction and you don’t know where to begin, I recommend joining and volunteering with the Catholic Writers Guild as your first apprenticeship.
If you’re not sure, click around on the various conference details and see if it looks like your thing.

There’s nothing magic about the Catholic Writers Guild, but if it’s what you need and you’re able to put in the work, it is absolutely the organization equipped to help you become a published Catholic author.

*Um: I’d written a few very nice drafts of instruction manuals explaining to my colleagues how to use our in-house accounting software? And my thesis advisors were pleasantly surprised that my research on a narrowly-defined aspect of the GATT negotiations was so eminently readable. So I mean, yeah, obviously I had genius talent. And an absolutely riveting portfolio, yes?

Reasoning vs. Rationalizing

January 21, 2022 By Jennifer Fitz

There’s a screenshotted homework assignment, reputedly from a Georgia virtual school, that’s circulating right now, generating outrage and counter-reaction. It reads:

Writing Prompt

Trail of Tears

Write letters from the different points of view listed in the questions. Remember to use facts to support your point of view.

The specific assignment then says:

Write a letter to President Andrew Jackson from the perspective of an American settler. Explain why you think removing the Cherokee will help the United States grow and prosper.

My initial reaction was I think typical: If the thought of writing such a thing doesn’t turn your stomach, you shouldn’t be teaching history.

Not asking anyone to be “literally shaking” or whatever. Historians have to face tough subjects all the time. It’s part of the job. And obviously we would have no fiction, no theatre, if someone weren’t willing to step into the bad guy’s shoes. Writers and actors have a variety of tools for probing the depths of evil without being harmed by it. But if you both know what happened (“genocide” is not an overstatement) and you have a conscience, this should at some level be a disgust-provoking exercise.

Nonetheless, let’s move on from the personal affront that this question is for many Americans, but which apparently doesn’t provoke an emotional reaction from some, for whatever reason.

I want to address two different questions related to this type of assignment. First are the developmental milestones involved in writing “bad guy” point-of-view. Second is the more fundamental issue: Is it necessary and beneficial to undertake exercises like this in order to learn how to reason well?

Finally I’ll finish with a reprint of my experience with teaching a debate course where students were forbidden to argue any position they knew to be false.

Seeing the World Through the Eyes of Evil

My background is this: I have designed and taught religion courses for students ranging from ages preschool through adult, in all kinds of contexts. One of the fundamental aspects of that work is helping your students hone their moral thinking. I have also taught literature, creative writing, debate, and history to middle and high school students. Those jobs requires cultivating an understanding of alternate points of view, including frankly immoral points of view.

(Obviously I’m writing on the Catholic Channel, duh, but everything I’m going to say applies regardless of your personal moral or religious framework. This isn’t about a specific religion, it’s about the development of the human mind. Also, clarifying here: I’m not sure I’ve ever taught a course that didn’t involve teaching history in some manner. So I guess I’m all-ages on that one.)

So. First thing you need to know is that human brains go through stages of development in their capacity for abstract thinking. There is a marked difference between the thinking of ten-year-olds and teenagers, not because one group is smarter than the other or more capable of reason than the other, but because puberty brings a leveling-up of abstract thinking abilities.

(Alas, the experience of your brain’s abstract thinking during the upgrade can be quite intense — you suddenly are able to perceive emotions you were previously oblivious too, and it’s a long few years there while you develop the skill of knowing what to do with those emotions. We who enjoy teaching middle school are a rare breed.)

What I’ve seen therefore is that fifth graders (age 10-11) are absolutely on board with being given facts about anything — including morality — and reasoning through how to apply those facts. If you say, “racism is wrong” and you have any credibility with your audience whatsoever, they will easily see the truth of your assertion and they will happily work away at figuring out how that truth applies in real-world situations.

Because they have a strong sense of justice, they will also feel deeply anything that smacks of unfairness. This is a good thing! As teachers and parents, we should not do anything to undermine or dull this sense of right and wrong.

What is helpful, because the kids we know are imperfect creatures just like ourselves, is helping students explore their own tendency towards rationalization, within the framework of clearly-defined moral thinking. So questions like “Why do you think some students are tempted to cheat on tests or copy homework?” can be good material for properly-guided discussion (not a test question!), because kids do know the excuses they make for their own bad behavior, and do benefit from learning to see ways to escape those excuses. (The ones who would themselves never cheat need help with resolve to not cave if pressured to share answers.)

What’s not helpful is teaching students to rationalize the cheater’s behavior. They don’t need any help with that. They need help with learning to examine their own motivations and sort out the good from the bad and develop confidence in claiming the good and discarding the bad.

You could call it self-centered, but it’s more accurately centering-the-self: A child who enters puberty with a clear sense of him or herself as a person who knows what is right and makes an effort to do what is right is in a strong position to process the abstract thinking abilities that are going to hit like a sledgehammer over the next few years.

Conclusion: Questions like the one posed in the sample homework assignment are utterly inappropriate for children. Developmentally this is just not where they are and what they need. So what about teens?

This is Your Brain on Puberty

Here is a very gross generalization that you can no doubt find exceptions to: Twelve-year-old girls start getting interested in role-playing the bad guy while twelve-year-old boys still just want to always be the hero.

Not rocket science. Girls and boys experience the changes of puberty at different rates (on average) and their ability to experience and process emotions differs as well (on average). The emotional-social dynamics of their same-sex interactions (sports teams, clubs, friend groups) are different because of this (on average).

But what this means for a teacher of tweens and teens is that some students are eager to explore bad-guy point-of-view and other students need more time solidifying good-guy point-of-view. As a history, literature, or writing instructor a legitimate assignment that respects these differing developmental needs would be something like: “Write a letter from a person living in western Georgia at the time of the Trail of Tears.”

There are students, usually a minority of students even into later teenage years and adulthood, who want to explore bad-guy point-of-view. For some people, it is a way of processing the reality of evil and thinking through the ramifications of evil. It can be a tool, for someone who is capable of this kind of emotional task, of developing a deeper sense of morality and self-examination. An open-ended assignment allows for students to choose to go that route if they are ready for it, but doesn’t force such an exercise on the many, many people of any age who have no desire or need to do such a thing.

Understanding Your Opponent Doesn’t Require Lying

There’s an extremely popular myth embedded in our culture that goes like this:

It is important and necessary to fully understand your opponents’ point of view.
Therefore, practice arguing from your opponent’s point of view is important and necessary.

#1 is absolutely true. #2 is wrong-headed in the extreme.

(I say this, remember, as a person who absolutely does permit students to freely choose, unprompted by me but allowed by me if requested, to write bad-guy point-of-view.)

This intellectual nonsense is the justification for assigning groups of students to argue crudely-defined “debate” topics, and in some cases belittling students who protest they don’t wish to pretend to believe something they know to be patently false.

The exercises are invariably absurd in their results, but alas many instructors are unable to see that it is so, because they’ve never been exposed to authentic, reasoned debate. Others can see the problem clearly, but don’t know any better way host reasoned debate in the classroom. They accept the wooden debate experience as the necessary cost of teaching an important skill. Unfortunately, these exercises don’t even accomplish the hoped-for learning.

When you are forced to argue a position you know to be wrong, the skill you develop isn’t reasoning but rationalization.

To reason is to think through a topic in the quest for the truth. Rationalization is to gin up defenses of a position you wish to promote, regardless of whether it is true or false.

I write all this as an experienced teacher, not some rosy idealist. I promise you, there is a much better way. You’ll have more engaged classes, your students will do more research, and you the teacher will have far more fun. What follows is a reprint of how you teach a debate class where students are never asked to rationalize and are always required to reason.

How to Teach a Real Debate Class

In prepping my first debate class for teenagers, I instituted a revolutionary rule: No participant would ever be permitted to argue a position he or she believed was false.

I can’t be the only instructor who’s ever done such a thing. Still, the pushback is proof of how strong our cultural prisons can be. The most common objection is: “How will students learn to see the other side of an issue?”

Well, that is where reasoning and research and good arguments come into play. If you forbid straw men, your debaters will be obliged to learn the actual beliefs of their opponents or else suffer mortal embarrassment as they are vanquished by the least little assertion of fact.

Teenagers do not enjoy being embarrassed.

***
Allow me to tell you what happens when you take a room full of teenagers from similar backgrounds, with similar religious beliefs, whose parents all hold similar political views, and who mostly get along with one another, and tell them that they must, as a class, debate the topic of their choice — and also everyone must argue a position they believe is true.

The first thing that happens is that the students gravitate towards emerging issues for which prudential judgement reigns. In my first debate class, the two big topics the teens chose to debate were (1) whether teens playing video games is helpful or harmful and (2) whether marijuana ought to be legalized.

The second thing that happens is that as the teens begin to research the issues, factions form and re-form as students change opinions as they learn more.

The third that happens is that even while, by debate day, there remain stark differences of opinion on a given topic, everyone has moved closer to a consensus.

Therefore, the fourth thing that happens is that when students present their cases, they marshal far more facts and use far more nuance in explaining how their position is different from a similar — but not identical — opponent’s position.

This is what happens when debate is treated as a tool for finding the truth rather than as a device for rationalizing one’s preconceived opinions.

***

Very few Americans today have ever experienced a course, at any time in their education, where they were taught how to use debate as a means of discovering truth.

Book cover: The Fallacy Detective by Nathaniel and Hans Bluedorn

Cover art for The Fallacy Detective by Nathaniel & Hans Bluedorn. Great resource for teaching reasoning skills, recommended for 8th grade and up, but no sooner than students are interested and capable. For some kids, that’s going to come much later in high school or even early college.

Catholic readers, if you’re interested in exploring how reason and argumentation fit into the bigger picture of evangelization, can I recommend The How-to Book of Evangelization by someone you apparently enjoy reading?

Medical Gaslighting Illustrated

January 15, 2022 By Jennifer Fitz

I want to run through a case study from a physician who writes about gaslighting herself when it comes to difficult-to-diagnose chronic illness. I think this example is super important because it illuminates just how powerful is the tendency to dismiss symptoms that aren’t easily assessed and explained.

This essay by Pooja Yerramilli ran in October 2020: “I have all the symptoms of a Covid-19 long-hauler — but I’m hesitant to identify myself as one.” It opens:

As a physician, I never thought that I would someday be lumped into the category of patients known as “not otherwise specified,” or NOS for short. This category is dominated by women suffering nonspecific symptoms that are inconsistently appreciated by clinicians who eventually conclude that the problem is entirely in the mind.

She explains her history:

Despite testing negative for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, the course of my illness mimicked that of the “typical” coronavirus patient. The relentless dry cough and fatigue were followed by shortness of breath. My mentors, also physicians with whom I had informally consulted, were concerned that mine was a false negative test; at the time, the sensitivity of the swab was thought to be around 70%. But my chart was never flagged as “CoV-positive,” so my story was never counted in the growing statistics of employees affected by the disease.

Unfortunately, for many people (especially women), post-infection antibody testing will not accurately indicate whether you’ve been previously infected: “A Two-Phase, Single Cohort Study of COVID-19 Antibody Sera-Surveillance.”

Dr. Yerramilli describes her slow recovery from the acute infection:

After a long month of isolation, asking every week to be cleared for work, I finally insisted that I was ready. I was no longer short of breath while walking around my apartment. The remaining symptoms — weakness, muscle aches, and low energy — were nonspecific, subjective, and, therefore, things I could surmount. My persistent painful cough was given various names. Some providers definitively labeled it as postnasal drip, others said it was new-onset asthma. My colleagues and I settled on post-viral bronchospasm.

Already there’s a disconnect between what she’s experiencing and reality. Neither benign post-viral asthma nor a generic, non-concerning lingering cough cause this:

After working several shifts, I found myself unable to get out of bed one morning: the aches and fatigue were taking over. “Get up! Push through!” my mind scolded my body. My body and mind played this game for weeks. Every time I returned to work, hopeful to care for patients, my body protested, breathing hard and exhausted by the end of morning rounds.

Obviously something serious is going on. But watch what she does to herself:

Four months into my “illness,” no closer to any answers, I settled on “deconditioning, NOS.” If I took the right precautions — sleeping nine hours a night and dragging a chair around on rounds — I could last through the workday.

Let’s be very, very clear: You cannot “decondition” this badly if you are otherwise healthy and making a sincere attempt to be as active as possible.

With true deconditioning, the effort of slowly increasing activity day by day will result in improved fitness. That’s how it works. That’s what “deconditioning” is. Even if she were deconditioned after a month laid out with a respiratory virus, she would be seeing a steady increase in stamina three months into recovery. Very clearly Dr. Yerramilli’s on-going illness is not due to a lack of exercise.

But around that time, clinics started to reopen and I finally met my primary care physician for the first time ever. As I walked with the medical assistant and felt short of breath again, I peeked at the oximeter: My heart rate had risen to 149, almost twice what it should have been, and my blood oxygen level gradually dropped to 79%, when it should have been close to 100%. “Is this why I’ve been feeling so tired?” my body asked.

Whoa! Oxygen levels dropping to 79% while walking? There we go, right? This doesn’t happen in healthy people. This DOES NOT HAPPEN IN HEALTHY PEOPLE.

For a comparison, as I write this, I am actively sick with COVID. Confirmed test to a textbook set of symptoms. Short-COVID, Lord willing, but five days in I have the dry cough, the fatigue, all that. (Probably the peaking infectiousness, too. Unless you’re intentionally trying to catch a potentially deadly or disabling illness, stay away from people who are just a week into their infection, eh?) For journalism reasons I just interrupted this paragraph and went out for a brisk walk with the pulse ox.

Results: Walking quickly (it’s cold out), HR was 120, O2 was 97-98%. Heart rate is maybe slightly high for me, hard to say because having COVID will skew your perception of speed and effort. Call it normal. After a short full-speed run (admittedly: my “full speed” is not very fast, but that’s not what we’re measuring), HR went up into the 150’s (normal), but oxygen? It actually bumped up to 99%.

That’s normal. I am not an athlete. I am a pushing-50 slightly overweight housewife with a disabling chronic illness. My exercise level (which varies from year to year depending on where we are in the disease experience) over the past six months has been light housework and going out for a walk when I can.

Here’s a non-paywalled NYT article on COVID and healthy O2 levels. In a South African study, high-risk COVID patients whose home pulse-oximeter readings dropped below 95% were instructed to call a doctor, and if below 90% to come to the emergency room ASAP for care. This single intervention dropped death rates 50%.

So naturally a doctor who experiences this extremely worrisome drop in her blood oxygen saturation while just walking is surely going to recognize that something is very, very wrong . . . right?

Dr. Yerramilli describes what she and her fellow physicians decided for a course of treatment, now that they realized her intense, unremitting fatigue was linked to this extreme, emergency-room-level drop in oxygen saturation:

But the results of these preliminary tests, completed five months after my first symptoms, were nonspecific. I was given no clear diagnosis or treatment plan. The consensus reached by the specialists was that the oximeter readings, which repeatedly showed my oxygen levels dropping as I walked, were faulty. Case closed.

“See?” my mind retorted. “It’s always just been in your head.”

Link to the whole essay.

***

Readers: If you are experiencing symptoms that you know aren’t right? Take your body’s signals seriously.

I think Dr. Yerramilli’s story is a powerful cautionary tale of just how deeply ingrained is the mindset of “if we can’t explain it then it must be your imagination” in the practice of medicine for many people. Pray for those doctors.

Then, if only for your own sanity: Keep looking until you find a physician who won’t give up on you, even when easy answers aren’t forthcoming.

Doctors who recognize the limits of their own knowledge and the reality that medical science is a field with many unanswered questions are out there.

More than ever, unfortunately.

Local surgeon—with decades of experience, in very high demand (>12-month waitlist), very physically fit (long-distance runner)—gets a mild case of Covid (never hospitalized), then abruptly retires due to persistent fatigue.

Another face of "mild" Covid.

— Harry Thomas (@DrHarryThomas) January 14, 2022

This. I personally know 2 surgeons who can only operate at <50% of their previous capacity due to #longcovid. Several other consultants who can’t work or on reduced hours/duties. No one is counting this in impact on NHS services. Why?#countlongcovid https://t.co/FR9kJuT7j5

— Binita Kane (@BinitaKane) January 15, 2022

Artwork: “Portrait of Dr. Félix Rey” by Vincent van Gogh (Public Domain).

PS for those who are wondering, I actually do have a lot of years of firsthand experience with:

Respiratory viruses that lay you out for a month, and then you recover.
Post-viral asthma.
Chronic (benign) post-infection cough-of-death that lasted years.

None of that caused anything like what Dr. Yerramilli and others are describing with Long COVID. Just not the same thing. Not at all.

Hidden in Translation: Downplaying the Seriousness of Civil Rights Threats

January 7, 2022 By Jennifer Fitz

The following essay is a detailed discussion of the political implications of the meanings of cuss words. I’m not the one who made this an international civil rights issue? But the topic is crucially important, and a clean-version is not possible. Can I recommend Happy Catholic* if you’d like something beautiful and good to contemplate today instead?

The Wine-Dark Sea is lyrical and thought-provoking, if you’d like to scroll some back issues and be edified. How about Siris, if philosophy blogging is your thing? Or at the other end of the clean spectrum, Aleteia is really quite good.

No? None of that? You want the cussing?

Okay, you were warned. Read at your own risk.

***

Our topic is the interview with French president Emmanuel Macron, described here (in French) and printed here (behind a paywall). We’re going to look at his word choice in French and its implications, and then, more briefly in conclusion, the decision of English-speaking journalists to mistranslate that word.

***

Imagine for a moment that Donald Trump, or President Biden if that’s more suited to your situation, made the following statement about people like you: “I am going to piss them off.”

You would rightly infer that this person planned to use his power to make you very, very angry. That’s what pissing off means. It’s the provoking of an emotional reaction.

Now imagine instead that your opponent threatened to “Screw with you” “F*ck with you” “Screw you over” “F*ck-up your life” or something else on those same lines. Different meaning. Now they aren’t just planning to make you angry, they are planning to sabotage you. To embroil you in genuine problems.

“I am going to piss them off” might be said of, say, a new paperwork requirement that’s irritating but manageable. Or perhaps a symbolic undertaking, such as displaying an offensive flag or monument, or intentionally naming a highway in honor of someone you find morally repugnant.

“I am going to screw them,” in contrast, would be paperwork “requirements” that effectively inhibit your ability to go about your daily life. Or, in the highway example, creating a “highway improvement project” that intentionally limits your ability to get to work, run a business, etc.

Both are displays of ill-will, but whereas the first aims to hurt you emotionally, the second aims to, well, screw you over.

***

So I’m honestly not great at the finer points of French grammar because I developed fluency in the language not by years of formal study but by attending high school in France. As a result, however, cussing in French comes quite naturally to me. And let me tell you: There are fine distinctions to vulgar language in French that have important implications even among, to the non-native speaker relying on dictionary translations, apparently synonymous terms.

***

First, the word Macron didn’t use: In French if you want to level-up from ticking someone off to full-on pissing someone off, in France you don’t urinate but defecate, using the verb phrase faire chier. Which means “shit” (literally: to make someone shit) and definitely shit in this case, not poop or crap or anything like that. Expressions built around chier are expressions of being made angry or frustrated. (And no, don’t use these in an interview. In my experience, the verb chier is somewhat more vulgar than emmerder discussed next, but there are plenty of ways to politely express a desire to anger others if that’s your intended meaning.)

The apparently-synonymous noun merde of course means “shit” (or “crap” if you prefer) but it’s not quite as vulgar nor as strong in France as the English-language counterparts are in the US. The president using it in a speech doesn’t have the same shock value in terms of word-choice generally, so set that aside — it’s how he uses the word that matters more. The related verb emmerder, which the word President Macron used in his interview discussing the forthcoming pass vaccinal, lacks an English counterpart: Enshitten would be the verb, if it existed.

[Update 1/30/2022: Thanks to The Diary of Samuel Pepys I learned that shitten is an adjective, anyhow. Okay, carrying on . . .]

On the face of it, comparing emmerder and faire chier, the dictionary seems to be proposing synonyms that largely can be translated to piss off. But, dear readers, President Macron picked the term that has an additional and politically very important implication, and one which he spelled out quite clearly: The plan is to emmerder the non-vaccinated minority by denying them a “social life.”

Access to restaurants, cafes, and theaters is what gets mentioned in most reports of the interview, so you might imagine vie sociale is just the nice, fun stuff people do together in their free time, as wikitionary’s definition indicates. In French, however, vie sociale can take on a more profound meaning — your life as a member of society, period. In most interview excerpts, it’s unclear which one Macron is implying.

If you look at the text of the passe vaccinal, however, you’ll see that the new law in question also denies access to regional public transportation — which in France means you are crossing over from merely “social” activities in the American sense (you can live without restaurants and movies) to making it impossible to, say, go to work in the morning. To participate in community life whatsoever. While some parts of France are, like the US, car-dependent, an enormous portion of the nation’s population is concentrated in urban zones where public transportation is the only viable means of travel beyond your immediate neighborhood.

Correction 1/13/21: On a closer look, local neighborhood public transit isn’t affected, my error there. Inter-regional trains are the big debate, with the complication that crossing regional lines, just like crossing state lines in the US, is more or less common practice depending on how close you live to a border. Many people won’t be affected at all, but others will find short, local trips subject to restrictions. And of course many people living in Paris or other densely-populated metro areas simply don’t own cars, and therefore, yes, would face massive problems if work or family obligations required a trip across regional borders.

As of this morning, here’s a good English-language synopsis of the current status of the bill. I’m once again noting how those of us at the “extremes” of Left and Right are finding common ground in defending basic civil liberties.

–> And as long as I’m in here admitting to my errors, I’m going to remind readers that all of this law is concerning a virus that is being actively transmitted by asymptomatic vaccinated people. The idea that vaccine mandates are stopping the spread is strictly fantasy. Vaccination is doing wonders for reducing the severity of the disease. But surrounding yourself with only-vaccinated people will in no way protect you from infection.

Okay, picking back up with the original essay:

Hence the word emmerder was chosen quite accurately. It’s not a strategy to aggravate you; it’s a strategy to create emmerdements or more colloquially, des emerdes — which are real problems that truly screw up your life.

All of that the French are discussing quite freely. Now getting to my point for US readers:

What strikes me as very important from a journalistic point of view is not only Google Translate’s imprecise rendering, but that an outlet like NPR alludes to the translation error but never clarifies it. There is a significant difference between a president creating emotional hostility with a portion of the general public and a president vowing to screw you over.

“I’m gonna piss you off” is, when it comes to legislation, radically different from “I’m gonna screw you.” The latter is what Macron vowed to do. To sugarcoat his words, as NPR and others are doing, is to be complicit in hiding the reality of the stated intentions of the law in question.

[Additional update 1/30/22, since I’m here: Anonyme Citoyen is an account documenting the protests in France. Turns out that actively provoking your citizens isn’t a popular move.]

***

Related: Please read this excellent essay from a fellow pro-vaccine columnist (note the part at the beginning where she mentions her husband is triple-vaxxed) who lays out the serious civil rights implications of vaccine passports.

For your own well-being, please put serious consideration into being vaccinated if you haven’t done so already. But also for your own well-being, please don’t destroy the republic. It’s not worth it.

And also, regardless of your politics, no matter desperately you really do want to screw over the people you are so angry at, please please please join the Clean Air club. It is both one of the lowest-risk interventions available and at this point appears to be the only viable option we have for actually stopping the pandemic. Worth a shot, seems to me.

Photo: Blue Angels flying in formation against a clear blue sky © Frank Schulenburg / CC BY-SA 4.0. This is a non-metaphorical picture of one of the reasons I’m so dang insistent on this whole civil rights business, as those who know can attest.

*Full disclosure: Julie Davis and I once got into a private debate about, among other things, cussing in movies. In retrospect, I think she was more right than I gave her credit for at the time. So her irony-meter is getting a full workout with this post. Though honestly looking through it, I ended up cussing less than anticipated.

PS: The etymology on chier is absolutely hilarious. If you’re into irony, anyway.

Resolutions, Rebranding, and the Body You Have

January 4, 2022 By Jennifer Fitz

What caught the eye of your internet-mom this afternoon was a weird bit of cross-discourse about body image, fat-shaming, and weight loss. No links, I’m going straight to bullet point answers to the questions and arguments these various voices are circulating:

Why yes, our culture is obsessed with body image, and it can’t help but fuel psychological hang-ups about being thin enough (women, generally) or muscular enough (men, generally). For women, in particular, take this challenge: Keep a tally of what portion of movies and television shows feature a female lead who isn’t noticeably slender. It’s a thing. The star is always skinny, that’s how it works. It’ll mess up your brain.
Absolutely, sloth and gluttony can cause weight gain. Doesn’t work for everybody, but it works for a lot of people.
Other things cause weight gain too, and you can’t control all of those things.
Also, some people just aren’t slender even when they are perfectly fit and healthy. Other people have serious health problems usually associated with obesity even though they are slender.
Therefore: Being either ashamed or proud of your weight is an emotional time-waste for most people. Your weight may or may not be something you can control, and it may or may not be an accurate reflection of your health.
Furthermore, it may be relatively easy or more difficult for you to adopt practices associated with good health, so pride, once again, is not just a deadly sin it’s an absurd one.
What you can control is the effort you put in to taking care of your health. Not your weight, your health.
While physical health is not more important than spiritual health (so you are deluding yourself if you look fantastic on Insta but your soul is a fetid pit), making an effort to improve your physical health is a good spiritual exercise.
There’s nothing like trying to work on your physical health to help you uncover other underlying factors that need to be addressed more urgently. So even if your resolution to be a better steward of your body doesn’t work out the way you hoped, if you allow it to do so it will help you discover things about yourself that you need to know. So that’s good.

What I’m going to recommend you work on is one of two things:

(A) Make an effort to improve your blood sugar. See, for example the results of this study reported in Science Daily: “Long-term blood sugar history predicts risk of severe COVID-19 among diabetics: Two- to three-year history offers more accurate prediction than shorter time period.”

If you are not sure where to start on dealing with your blood sugar problem, here’s a list of a few resources I mentioned last time I lectured you at length on this topic.

If you aren’t sure you have a blood sugar problem, invest $20 in an inexpensive but reputable-brand glucose monitor available over the counter at Walmart or your nearest pharmacy and for goodness sakes find out. Type II diabetes doesn’t tap you on the shoulder one night in a wave of the wand from the Sugar Fairy; it’s a condition you develop slowly over time, and which you can detect before you start developing serious health problems, rather than waiting for some random doctor’s appointment to finally catch it farther down the road.

It is one of the cheapest, easiest, most potentially life-changing diagnostic tests you can run, and you can do it at home whenever want.

And reminder, y’all: Even though you’re fully-vaxxed (good) and all your friends are fully-vaxxed (good for them, too), COVID infections are spreading among people who are carefully ensconced in their vaccine-mandated bubble, and they are causing serious disease among fully-vaxxed patients with underlying health conditions. Poor blood sugar control is the one underlying condition that is both tightly associated with serious disease and death and which you can have some control over.

PS: If you’re doing everything your doctor says to do to control your diabetes and it’s not working, then resolve to find out if there is a different approach to managing the disease that might work better for you.

(B) If you don’t have a blood sugar problem yourself, resolve to be genuinely supportive of people who do. And by that I mean I quit friggin’ flooding the world with cookies. And the like.

You know what I mean. You don’t need to drop hints. You don’t need to assist other people with their meal choices. But you could just completely quit bringing food to non-meals, and start only bringing real, unprocessed, unsweetened foods to actual meals. That would be fun.

(Also: Did you really need to have this meeting? Because there are people who’d like to be out getting in a quick walk, and instead you are making them just sit there? Fewer meetings is a great way to help other people improve their health.)

***

Finally, as long as we’re talking Plague 2022, resolution for everybody: Join the Clean Air Club.

Photo of a rusty pipes with big colorful valves courtesy of Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons / “Duisburg, Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord — 2020 — 7824-6” / CC BY-SA 4.0.