1. City Councilmember Cathy Moore reportedly plans to wait until after this year’s fall budget season—which, practically speaking, means until next year—to introduce legislation to roll back renter protections adopted by the previous city council. So far, we’ve heard Moore plans to introduce legislation that would roll back:
• A law requiring landlords to accept the first applicant who qualifies (under criteria set by the landlord, which can include standards like a minimum credit score). Landlords opposed this legislation, sponsored by former councilmember Lisa Herbold, because it prevents them from using vibes-based criteria such as “questionable character traits” and “who will best fit into the building’s community,” which can be a de facto form of discrimination.
• A law barring larger landlords from evicting their tenants between December 1 and March 1, which passed the council on a unanimous vote (with Debora Juarez and Lorena González absent) in February 2020. Landlords said this took away their right to evict nonpaying tenants who say “It’s winter. You can’t evict me.”
• A law requiring landlords to allow immediate family members (or one roommate, who can be kicked out if they don’t pass a screening test) to live with a tenant, within existing occupancy limits. Landlords have claimed this law results in overcrowding and takes away their right to screen family members, such as a spouse or parent, and reject their tenancy.
Moore is reportedly also considering legislation thatwould allow landlords to recover fees from groups like the Housing Justice Project, which provides representation for tenants facing eviction, for “frivolous” defenses against eviction
Asked about forthcoming renter-related legislation, Moore’s office responded, “Discussions around this topic are evolving and when we have something more definitive to share we will do so.”
2. PubliCola reported last week on problems at the city’s Community Police Commission, a staffed, independent city commission that is supposed to engage with Seattle residents from diverse communities and develop policy recommendations based on that engagement. Our story described a sparsely attended meeting in April about the then-upcoming police union contract; the meeting devolved into shouting and a debate about what kind of behavior is appropriate for the public and the commission.
A consultant hired to facilitate future public meetings, AV Consulting, issued a report after the meeting that made recommendations about how the CPC could improve its relationship with the community, which PubliCola obtained through a records request this week.
In the memo, AV Consulting identified a number of issues that came up during the meeting—including a need for more transparency, a lack of immigrant and refugee representation on the commission, the need to let community engagement staffers lead engagement work, and the importance of acknowledging and responding to community members’ concerns.
This last recommendation reflected an uncomfortable confrontation during the meeting, when Donnita Martin, whose son was killed during the 2020 protests after paramedics refused to go into the CHOP zone on Capitol Hill, asked the CPC what they were doing to help families like hers. Instead of responding to her question, CPC co-chair Joel Merkel thanked her for her testimony while Executive Director Cali Ellis sat silently and smiled.
AV Consulting recommended letting community members speak first at meetings, providing more transparency into the commission’s actions and budget, and being more respectful of people who have lost loved ones to violence, including police violence. “Demonstrate EMPATHY for lost loved ones FIRST in any reply. Acknowledge, validate, and respond,” they wrote.
The consultant also recommended a process of identifying past harms the CPC has caused to communities and addressing them to “rebuild trust with the community.”
Ellis responded to the report by informing AV Consulting, in an email PubliCola also obtained through a records request, that their services would no longer be needed. “At this time, we have decided not to move forward with further facilitation work,” she wrote. Ellis, who has been permanent director since last November, is currently on administrative leave, and the CPC is searching for another executive director.
Mayor Bruce Harrell and King County Executive Dow Constantine will submit legislation soon to disband the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s Implementation Board, PubliCola has learned. The Implementation Board is made up of people who represent different communities impacted by homelessness, including businesses, affordable housing providers, advocates, and people with direct experience of homelessness. Both councils have to approve the changes, which require amending the interlocal agreement that established the agency in 2019.
The board includes no elected officials or service providers with KCRHA contracts. A second board, the Governing Committee, is made up almost entirely of elected officials; under the proposed changes, the Governing Committee would take over the responsibilities of the Implementation Board.
Under the interlocal agreement, the implementation board is supposed to oversee the operations of the KCRHA and approve all budget and policy decisions (like the agency’s contentiousFive-Year Plan), and make recommendations to the elected officials on the governing committee, which can ultimately approve, alter, or vote down those recommendations.
Critics, including many elected officials on the governing committee, have called this process unwieldy, and have pointed to the two-board structure as a primary reason the KCRHA has struggled to reduce homelessness in the region. Ceattle City Councilmember Rob Saka, for example, called the structure “clunky and confusing” earlier this year. “As I understand it, there’s three boards oversight with oversight authority over KCRHA, and in my mind, that’s two too many,” Saka said—including in his calculation a federally mandated Continuum of Care oversight committee, which is unrelated to the KCRHA’s governance structure.
But Alison Eisinger, director of the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, says eliminating the implementation board will only ensure that the region’s homelessness agency is governed by a body that includes no one with direct expertise or experience with research, analysis, and on-the-ground work to address homelessness.
And, she added, making tweaks to the KCRHA’s governance structure doesn’t address the underlying issues that have made it challenging for the KCRHA to make a meaningful impact on homelessness—a lack of “deep, sustained, additional funding for housing, rent assistance, crisis response, and support. … The regional commitment to site, open, and operate quality housing, shelter and services that match people’s needs has to be made real by actions, not just words.”
Seattle and King County provide the vast majority of the KCRHA’s funding. As we’ve reported, the agency’s 2025 budget will require the closure of at least 300 shelter beds.
Eliminating the board will require significant amendments to the interlocal agreement, which would have to be approved by the King County Council and Seattle City Council. Constantine and Harrell’s offices did not respond to PubliCola’s requests for comment.
A young man testified in front of the City Council on Tuesday.
Bob Kettle accused Tammy Morales of failing to do due diligence before proposing legislation to release funds collected from a payroll tax increase this year.
By Erica C. Barnett
The Seattle City Council narrowly rejected a proposal from Councilmember Tammy Morales to release the full $20 million that’s supposed to be collected this year to fund youth mental health services. The previous council voted 6-3 to approve an increase in the JumpStart payroll tax for this purpose.
Dan Strauss, who voted with Sara Nelson, Maritza Rivera, Cathy Moore, and Bob Kettle against Morales’ proposal, then introduced an amendment that added $2.25 million for gun violence prevention to the $10 million the council has agreed to spend this year; the remaining funds will go back into the city’s JumpStart fund and can be used to address the city’s $260 million budget deficit.
The vote was virtually identical to the one the council, convened as the nine-member budget committee, took last week. What was different was the level of vitriol council members directed at both the original tax increase, adopted by a previous council that the new council has turned into a synecdoche for government waste.
Rivera kicked things off by asking Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington a series of leading questions about the actions of the previous council in order to establish that that council, unlike this one, “didn’t do the research,” chose $20 million as “an arbitrary figure that was not actually needed,” and “did not get guidance from mental health professionals.”
Saka (who ultimately voted for the proposal) piled on, saying there had been “no rational basis” for increasing the JumpStart tax to fund programs to improve student mental health, a comment that prompted astonished looks from some of the kids who had just testified about how such programs had benefited them.
Then Kettle jumped in, saying the previous council (which also included Lisa Herbold, Alex Pedersen, Debora Juarez, and Teresa Mosqueda, now on the King County Council) had shown an “absolute lack of good governance… lack of coordination, lack of anything, really.” Kettle then launched into a little interrogative exercise with Washington and Human Services Department director Tanya Kim, who were both on hand to answer questions.
Speaking about Morales as if she was not sitting right there, Kettle asked both executive staffers to confirm that Morales had not coordinated with the mayor or HSD when drafting her legislation to release the $10 million to the Department of Education and Early Learning. (Council members are part of the legislative branch, and are not required to seek approval from the executive branch before proposing legislation). Then, he turned to Council Central Staff director Ben Noble, who contradicted him—saying that “yes,” Morales did work with Central Staff on the legislation.
Kettle didn’t appear to like that answer, and corrected Noble, saying he clearly only meant yes “in the sense of getting the amendment into the system, calendaring, you know, into the system.” Noble responded that in fact, central staff put the same work into Morales’ amendment that they would put into any amendment, including an analysis of the underlying policy. Kettle switched tacks again, summarizing for Noble: “So, clearly, not with the executive, the people who have to carry out what needs to be done.”
It was a weird moment, made weirder by all the leading questions that gave the mayor’s office an opening to talk about how personally insulted and hurt Harrell and his staff were by the suggestion that the mayor would use mental health funding to close the budget gap.
“The mayor cares about this issue very greatly,” Washington said, “and so to just hear it put out there like he’s just going to take this money for mental health and [use it to] close the deficit gap was hard for me to hear, and very untrue, because he doesn’t have the power to do that.”
As the central staff analysis of the underlying legislation notes, in the absence of explicit action by the council to spend the full $20 million, “the remaining $10 million in appropriation authority will go unused, and the funds will either remain in the JumpStart Payroll Expense Tax Fund balance and be available for spending in 2025 or future years, or the appropriation could be abandoned, and the monies diverted to other eligible purposes in 2024.”
A sad spectacle played out at Seattle City Hall today, as council members who support a crackdown on sex workers made a series of baseless promises to people who live and own businesses on and around Aurora Ave. North. Many of these residents expressed understandable concern about a recent surge in gun violence in the area, but blamed it on sex workers and “pimps fighting over turf.”
Others argued that all or most of the women working on Aurora are victims of trafficking who would benefit from the city’s support, in the form of services after arrest, to escape their abusers.
And many simply expressed disgust at the visible presence of sex workers in the area, saying they could no longer walk outdoors because of scantily clad women, condoms, and “human waste,” which is also a common complaint about unsheltered people who lack access to toilets.
Council members did not address the points made by sex workers, advocates, and experts on sex trafficking who spoke against the bill and asked for the council to engage with them before adopting legislation that will impact them directly. They did respond to supporters of the legislation, assuring them repeatedly that the new laws targeting sex workers will reduce gun violence and eliminate sex work along Aurora once and for all, while giving victims of sex trafficking and exploitation abundant “off ramps” to escape the sex trade.
Finally, Moore claimed, police would have “the ability to approach and inquire and talk about, ‘how do we get you into services’?” Finally, Moore told groups that provide services for sex workers, the city would be able to “provide the tools to go after the buyers and the pimps, and to provide services, off-ramps, and the collaboration, the money that you need, to do the work that you are doing on a shoestring right now.” Finally, gun violence will become a thing of the past, as would-be sex workers are “deterred” by the threat of punishment and pimps find themselves out of a job.
None of these claims is based in fact. The legislation would do nothing to address gun violence, which is already a felony for which the police have full authority to make arrests. It doesn’t address sex trafficking, which is also a felony, beyond asserting, in a lengthy preamble, that the “intent” of the legislation is to stop it from happening. And it creates no “off-ramps,” and provides no money, to anyone working to help sex workers or victims of sex trafficking, saying only that police “should” attempt to divert people to programs when possible, without identifying or funding these unidentified programs.
Substantively, the proposed law would make it easier for police to arrest people they believe are “loitering” in order to engage in sex work. Prostitution is already illegal, as is paying for sex, and the city attorney already has the authority to prosecute people for either crime; felony sex trafficking is handled by the King County Prosecutor. The reinstated loitering law would simply lower the bar for police to search and arrest suspected sex workers—allowing police to target people who engage in behaviors such as waving, asking someone if they’re a cop, or “engag[ing] passersby in conversation,” rather than conducting a lengthy, expensive sting.
The Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution (SOAP) orders, which are part of the same bill, would also do nothing to help victims or address gun violence. Instead, it would empower the Seattle Municipal Court to banish people from hundreds of blocks around Aurora as a form of probation or a condition of their release from jail, pushing them into other areas. The bill would establish a new crime, a gross misdemeanor, for anyone who violates a SOAP order, even if they haven’t been convicted of the underlying misdemeanor crime.
Nearly 140 people signed up to speak about the legislation Tuesday morning; Kettle cut off public comment after about an hour and a half, when just over half the people who signed up had a chance to speak. (Not to be thwarted, many of them stuck around until the 2:00 council meeting and expressed their opposition then). Then he handed the floor to Moore, who showed an eight-minute video featuring supporters of her legislation, surveillance video showing unidentified women who Moore said were “commercially sexually exploited,” and video of several gun battles that sent the sound of gunshots ricocheting loudly throughout council chambers. The sudden, ear-splitting gunfire was an unpleasant surprise, as Moore didn’t warn the audience—which included many people who testified they had been traumatized by gunshots—that it was coming.
After this lurid display, Moore introduced a panel to speak in favor of her proposal—a group that included Kirkland real estate broker Kristine Moreland, who runs a controversial group called The More We Love. PubliCola has written extensively about The More We Love and Moreland, who originally performed private encampments sweeps at a rate of $515 for each person removed and now holds the sole contract for all homeless outreach in Burien. Moreland didn’t bring up her work in Burien, instead describing The More We Love as “an anti-sex trafficking organization” and talking about the need for more funding for supportive services for victims of trafficking.
Moore appears to have gone to great lengths to eliminate any suggestion that her legislation could have negative consequences from the official council record. As Ashley Nerbovig reported in the Stranger, she took the highly unusual step of removing references to the potential unintended consequences of her legislation from a council staff analysis, which is supposed to be assiduously neutral.
The language Moore removed included a reference to my reporting on the city’s ongoing use of undercover stings, which primarily target men of color, especially immigrants, who often plead guilty rather than exposing themselves to a risky criminal trial. In an interview, an experienced public defender said she had never had a white, English-speaking client charged with sexual exploitation (the city’s term for patronizing a prostitute).
Moore promised that as part of the fall budget process, she will propose funding for a new “receiving center” for sex workers who need services and help leaving the sex trade.
Reality check: The city is facing a $260 million budget deficit, and so far, the only programs that have received significant new funding are police recruitment initiatives. My prediction is that after the council adopts these new laws criminalizing sex work, they’ll end up giving $85,000 to an existing group such as REST or The More We Love and calling it a “pilot receiving center.”
Ironically, after making outlandish claims about a bill that makes gauzy, unfunded promises about future diversion and prevention programs, a majority of the council later voted against legislation from Tammy Morales that would release the full $20 million collected to pay for youth mental health programs this year—justifying their vote by claiming supporters of the funding failed to understand the perils of voting for legislation that lacks a detailed funding plan.
“It is problematic to be making promises to communities that we very well know we cannot fulfill, because what you saw today is what happens— people leave here and children leave here thinking that we are not supporting them… and that is very upsetting to me,” Councilmember Maritza Rivera said. “We shouldn’t be making promises to community that we know we cannot deliver in an act of symbolism, because community doesn’t understand the difference between a symbolic vote and an actual vote.” She could have been talking about the council.
As the city council prepares to reinstate an old law against “prostitution loitering” and establish off-limits zones for people accused of being sex workers, advocates say the proposed laws will not only harm the people they purport to protect but won’t accomplish their primary goal: “Cleaning up” areas like Aurora Avenue, where the sex trade has persisted for decades.
The legislation, along with a similar law reinstating the crime of “drug loitering” and establishing new Stay Out Drug Areas zones for people accused of violating laws like the recently adopted ban on public drug use and possession, will be heard in the City Council’s Public Safety Committee at 9:30am today, Tuesday, August 13.
North Seattle Councilmember Cathy Moore announced her proposal to crack down on sex work, which she’d been working on since last spring, earlier this month. The first part of Moore’s legislation would reinstate a law against misdemeanor prostitution “loitering,” or street sex work, that was overturned after an official city task force recommended getting rid of it in 2017. Under this law, police would again be empowered to arrest anyone who “remains in a public place and intentionally solicits, induces, entices, or procures another to commit an act of prostitution.”
The second half of the legislation would create an official Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution (SOAP) zone encompassing hundreds of square blocks around Aurora Ave. N. and empower police to banish anyone suspected of engaging in sex work from the area. Police could then charge suspected sex workers with a gross misdemeanor for violating their SOAP order, whether or not they’re ever convicted of the underlying misdemeanor offense. The law would also give police the power to stop and frisk anyone they believe is a sex worker and charge them for additional offenses, such as drug possession, if they find anything incriminating during their search.
People who “promote prostitution loitering,” which police are supposed to decide based on ill-defined “particular circumstances of each case,” could be charged with a gross misdemeanor, but would not—unlike sex workers—be subject to banishment.
Emi Koyama, an advocate with the Coalition for Rights and Safety for People in the Sex Trade, said repealing the prostitution and drug loitering laws was one of the few concrete victories to come out of the Black Lives Matter movement in Seattle. “We never actually tried defunding and investing in community the way the movement wanted. … On the other hand, we tried exclusion zones in the past, and it wasn’t working, it was causing harm, and it was racist —that’s why they got rid of it.”
Jenna Robert, who worked as an assistant city attorney under Pete Holmes, said Holmes stopped prosecuting most prostitution loitering cases and issuing SOAP orders before the Reentry Work Group—voted into existence by then-Councilmember Bruce Harrell’s public safety committee— finalized its recommendations because Holmes was convinced that the laws made it harder for sex workers to access services, which are concentrated on Aurora, and did nothing to reduce sex work or address trafficking.
“I think the Reentry Work group did a really good job of bringing up the harms that [the loitering law] caused,” Robert said. “We stopped charging even before it came off the books… so I thought, ‘I can’t imagine that anyone would ever put this this back on the books,’ because it’s so harmful to the people it’s supposed to protect.”
In its final report, issued in 2018, the Reentry Work Group concluded that the prostitution loitering law, adopted in 1973, “targets individuals in the commercial sex industry, a group already at high risk for trafficking, abuse, and other exploitation”—particularly Black women and other cis and trans women of color, who were disproportionately targeted under the law. “Bringing them into the criminal legal system will only exacerbate any underlying unmet needs and exposes them to further physical and sexual harm caused by incarceration.”
Jazmyn Clark, the ACLU of Washington’s Smart Justice Policy program director, told PubliCola that the proposed new penalties for drug users and sex workers “expand police power to harass our vulnerable neighbors and continue the failed war on drugs. Rather than provide support and resources, these zones push people to the margins of society and further stigmatize individuals struggling with substance use disorder or engaging in sex work.”
In a letter to City Attorney Ann Davison and the city council, Clark wrote that the laws also raise constitutional concerns because they deprive people who have never been convicted of a prostitution or drug-related crime of their right to free travel and association. The diversion group Purpose Dignity Action has described this aspect of the SOAP and SODA laws as a prohibition on “future otherwise-lawful conduct–just being present in a place, and doing nothing wrong.”
Proponents of the legislation, including business owners and homeowners near Aurora, have said their primary goal is to reduce gun violence and sex trafficking in the area— claiming, for instance, that a number of recent shootings were caused by “turf wars” between pimps in the area. Moore recently said this was one of her reasons for proposing the law, citing SPD as the source for her information.
But advocates for sex workers question that claim. “If it’s actually a turf war, we would see a drastic decline in the number of people who are [on Aurora], Koyama said. “The women won’t feel safe … and the buyers won’t come either if they realize there’s a huge risk.”
Koyama notes that supporter of the law who see women as an “access point” to fight against felony crimes, like murder and assault, are treating sex workers as people “outside the community”—saying, in effect, “‘We are just a peaceful neighborhood; it’s other people who are completely different from us who cause these problems.” During the press announcement, Moore, Kettle, and Davison repeatedly cited overwhelming support from “the community,” referring to the overwhelmingly white property and business owners who showed up to support the legislation.
Madison Zack-Wu, an organizer with Strippers Are Workers, said that while the legislation includes a lot of references to sex trafficking and gun violence, the policy language “really just focuses on criminalizing and policing sex workers and people in the sex trade.”
“When it comes to being at risk for trafficking, the main cause of vulnerability for trafficking is financial instability and poverty,” Zack-Wu said. “This bill focuses on pushing people away from community and into more marginalized areas. And that also increases trafficking,” because they have less access to communities that help keep them safe.
When Backpage, an online marketplace for sex workers and buyers, was shut down in 2018, many sex workers went from working online to more dangerous street work, and “even people that disagree with us acknowledge that it was really bad,” Koyoma said. “When conditions get worse, people have less bargaining power. More people get banished to more dangerous areas and more dangerous acts—people have to say yes to things they wouldn’t otherwise.”
Advocates also note that arresting and charging people for prostitution upends their lives and makes it harder to get jobs, access services, and find stable housing. Amarinthia Torres, director of the Coalition Ending Gender-Based Violence, said, “I think, honestly, that sometimes we underestimate the scope and reach of the criminal legal system—that one arrest can really follow a person for a long time, and it can follow them into all aspects of their life for the long term. People who have had that happen to them understand the way it can hang over your life and the choices you have access to.”
Historically, banishment zones and loitering laws have not been effective at reducing exploitation of sex workers, decreasing violent crime, or even “improving” the areas that are off-limits to sex workers or drug users, according to the 2010 book Banished, by Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert, a sweeping study of exclusion zones in Seattle. One major reason, the scholars wrote, is that people simply returned to the places where they knew people and feel safest, ignoring off-limits orders even when it meant going to jail repeatedly and racking up thousands of dollars in fines.
“Most people do return to the neighborhoods that they’ve been banned from,” Beckett told PubliCola. “[The vast majority] said it didn’t change where they went; they just accepted that they could be picked up on those charges and then lived with that. It didn’t accomplish what anyone was hoping to accomplish.”
Yet the city council, and Moore in particular, seem convinced that this time, everything will turn out different. During the press conference earlier this month, counncil public safety committee chair Bob Kettle said “the focus needs to be on those carrying out the sex trafficking and profiting off the abuse of women. For those caught up in this sad situation, we need to find diversion and support options. The goal here is not to punish those who are also victims, but instead to offer an opportunity to walk away and get help.”
Yet the legislation proposes no new diversion programs or funding, nor does it lay out a process by which arrested sex workers would “walk away and get help.” And if the goal is for police to become a conduit for sex workers to “escape” their current jobs (a dubious prospect, but one the council and city attorney have embraced), there is nothing whatsoever stopping cops from approaching and speaking to people they believe are sex workers now, without arresting them.
Beckett says people have a tendency to forget past failures and grab for easy-seeming solutions, even those that have failed in the recent past. “Our memories are fairly short-term. We forget that we’ve already tried all this,” Beckett said. “It’s also what we want to think is true. We want to believe there are cheap, easy fixes to structural problems that require actual investments.”
I can’t remember the last time the Olympics were a huge topic of conversation in my world—not in Tokyo 2021, certainly, except for a few discussions about the oiled-up Tongan flagbearers, COVID protocols, and those “anti-sex” cardboard beds.
One thing I love about the Olympics is that—at a time when nationalist leaders around the world are trying to swap out modernity for paternalistic, patriarchal politics—they celebrate internationalism, immigration, and real family values.
Two examples stand out, both from Team USA: Breanna Stewart, the women’s basketball star (and former Seattle Storm player), was featured in one of the interstitial mini-documentaries with her wife, Marta Casedemont, and their two kids—the picture of domestic bliss, and a well-deserved slap in the face to US viewers who embrace the warped JD Vance version of “traditional American values.”
Second, I fell in love with the bronze medal winner in men’s breaking, Victor Montalvo, whose dad and uncle, Victor and Hector Bermudez, were pioneers of the breakdancing scene in Puebla Mexico. The brothers immigrated to the US in the 1980s, joining family in the Orlando area, and Victor started breaking at around 6 years old; by the time he was in his 20s, he had earned enough through competitions to buy a house for his parents. MAGA America may have convinced themselves that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the nation, but the triumph of athletes like Montalvo (who won bronze) is a rebuke to their poisonous worldview. Will seeing America’s diversity on display change the minds of any red-pilled Republicans? Almost certainly not, but I’ll settle for making them uncomfortable.
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2. The Olympics, specifically: Surfing, breaking, and trampoline
Another great thing about the Olympics is that it makes millions of people become briefly obsessed with sports they may have never considered or even heard of before—think artistic swimming or kayak cross (the one where they drop into the water from 15 feet). My obsessions this year were surfing and breaking, and my discovery was trampoline, a variation on gymnastics where the men can fly dozens of feet in the air. (Their graceful, inventive routines made me wonder, not for the first time, why floor routines are considered too “feminine” for male gymnasts.) I love watching basketball and gymnastics as much as anyone, but I was just enthralled by this year’s surf competition (won, on the women’s side, by Team USA’s Caroline Marks) and by breaking, which was new at the Olympics this year; watching the men’s trampoline competition, meanwhile, gave me sympathetic stomach drops every time the competitors approached the net—and, yes, sometimes they fell off the side.
3. Tested
To keep with this week’s highly unusual sports theme, I highly recommend this CBC podcast about the history (and present) of “sex testing” in women’s sports—a sordid tradition that goes back much further, and is far less “scientific,” than you might imagine. The point of sex testing, from its origins in the early 20th century, has been to exclude women with characteristics deemed insufficiently feminine, such as large muscles, a “manlike” appearance, or internal testes. Originally, this was done by forcing women to strip and display their external anatomy. Today, women who are suspected of being insufficiently “female” are instead subjected to intrusive blood tests; the results can require them to abandon their careers or take unnecessary hormones, even in the absence of evidence that testosterone alone confers any special advantage on female athletes.
Whether women’s sports are already an area of interest or if you’re just curious about how elite athletic institutions decide “who is a woman,” this podcast is a timely reminder that even in the supposedly merit-based world of athletics, women are always subject to special scrutiny.
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My computer is the single most important piece of equipment I own, and for much of the last five years, I’ve relied on my trusty 2015 MacBook Pro to write and edit posts, tweet up a storm from public meetings, file public records requests, edit transcripts and photos, and generally keep The C Is for Crank in operation. Now it’s time to retire my old machine and trade it in for a newer model.
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• A law requiring landlords to accept the first applicant who qualifies (under criteria set by the landlord, which can include standards like a minimum credit score). Landlords opposed this legislation, sponsored by former councilmember Lisa Herbold, because it prevents them from using vibes-based criteria such as “questionable character traits” and “who will best fit into the building’s community,” which can be a de facto form of discrimination.
By Erica C. Barnett
