How'd That Work Out For Ya?

Stephon Marbury in July of 2007 upon hearing the news that Zach Randolph had become a Knick


7 months later here is that Zach Randolph in action in a game against Toronto this week


There's no way you can fully appreciate how much those made me laugh

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Archuleta's The Idol

once again I don't watch American Idol but I've heard so much good stuff about this kid David Archuleta that I had to check him out



wow. wow. first that boy does not sing like a 17 year old at all, Randy was right. secondly him meeting the season 1 finalists when he was 11 makes me feel really old. thirdly singing Dreamgirls at 11- he's gayer than a goldfish (even if he doesn't know it yet) but damn can he sing. hopefully they don't try to "straighten" him out. Paula is terrifying, btw
and yes i am prone to making outlandish statements like the title above based on 2 minutes of singing, I've done it before...
p.s. he kind of looks like Marco from Degrassi

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Bruce Pearl is Howard Dean

(Alternatively titled The Howard Dean of College Basketball)

If not in terms of results then at least in intensity and fieriness of rally speeches.

Fanhouse had this video of Bruce Pearl at a rally for the Volunteer faithful before their game against #1 Memphis /


And in the middle of watching that it struck me as being oh so familiar and that’s when it came to me- Howard Dean, 2004, Iowa


Except for Pearl lacking that unhuman scream of Dean’s they are way similar
And they kind of look the same too, don't they? like in the way where they both have grayish hear covering a squarish head and...shoulders?



right? am i right?

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Jew Haters Split on Love for Obama

On the one hand we have Anti-Semites for Obama

NASHVILLE, TN - The Tennessee Republican Party today joins a growing chorus of Americans concerned about the future of the nation of Israel, the only stable democracy in the Middle East, if Sen. Barack Hussein Obama is elected president of the United States.

“It’s time to set the record straight about Barack Obama and where he really stands on vital issues such as national security and the security of Israel,” said Robin Smith, chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party. “Voters need to know about two items that surfaced today which strongly suggest that an Obama presidency will view Israel as a problem rather than a partner for peace in the Middle East.

On Sunday, Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan on Sunday likened Obama to a new messiah, calling him “the hope of the entire world.” That’s the same Louis Farrakhan who has a history of making openly anti-Semitic statements, calling Judaism a “gutter religion,” and suggesting that crack cocaine might have been a CIA plot to enslave blacks.

Farrakhan, addressing 20,000 people at the annual Savior’s Day celebration in Chicago, praised the Democrat presidential candidate, calling Obama “The hope of the entire world that America will change and be made better.”

He also compared Obama to the founder of Islam, remarking that both had a white mother and black father, according to the Associated Press. “A black man with a white mother became a savior to us,” Farrakhan said. “A black man with a white mother could turn out to be one who can lift America from her fall.”

Obama, (pictured dressed in Muslim attire in a 2006 visit to Africa) has on the campaign trail pledged to rapidly remove American soldiers from Iraq regardless of the resulting instability and the creation of opening that would be filled by Islamic extremists, like Al Qaeda, in Iraq’s government and military.

Obama has pledged to hold a Muslim Summit to determine Middle East policy with the very leaders that have as their goal to remove Israel from the map, referenced Jews to be “dogs” and “pigs,” among other vile references.

Over the weekend, news reports surfaced casting more disturbing evidence of Obama’s anti-Israel leanings.

The board of a nonprofit organization on which Obama served as a paid director alongside a confessed domestic terrorist granted funding to a controversial Arab group that mourns the establishment of Israel as a “catastrophe.”

The co-founder of that organization, Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi, who also has held a fundraiser for Obama, is a harsh critic of Israel and has made statements supportive of Palestinian terror. Khalidi reportedly has worked on behalf of the Palestine Liberation Organization while it was involved in anti-Western terrorism and was labeled by the State Department as a terror group.

The Woods Fund, a Chicago-based nonprofit that describes itself as a group helping the disadvantaged, provided a $40,000 grant in 2001 to the Arab American Action Network, or AAAN, for which Khalidi’s wife, Mona, serves as president. The Fund provided a second grant to the AAAN for $35,000 in 2002. Obama was a director of the Woods Fund board from 1999 to Dec. 11, 2002, according to the Fund’s website. Tax records show he was paid $6,000 per year for his service in 1999 and 2001.

Also serving on the Wood’s Fund board alongside Obama was current University of Illinois-Chicago professor William C. Ayers, who was a member of the Weathermen terrorist group which sought to overthrow of the U.S. government and took responsibility for bombing the U.S. Capitol in 1971.

“You don’t even have to go outside Obama’s campaign to find advisers who are anti-Israel,” said Bill Hobbs, communications director for the Tennessee Republican Party. “Robert Malley, a principal foreign policy adviser to Obama, has advocated negotiations with the Iranian-funded radical terrorist group Hamas and urged that Hamas – which sends suicide bombers to kill innocent women and children - receive international assistance.”

According to DiscoverTheNetworks.org, an online guide to the political Left, Malley “consistently condemns Israel, exonerates Palestinians, urges U.S. disengagement from Israel, and recommends that America reach out to negotiate with its traditional Arab enemies.”

“Nothing in Barack Obama’s history or his choice of advisers suggests he will be a friend to Israel,” said Hobbs. “On the contrary, supporters of Israel should view a possible Obama administration with extreme caution, as America’s ally is being put in the cross-hairs by the anti-Jewish left.”

(via Wonkette)

but then we have those master haters, the KKK who are quite emphatic in their denial of ever endorsing Barack

Ku Klux Klan DOES NOT Endorse Barack Obama for President

Despite some rumors, the Ku Klux Klan is not endorsing Barack Obama for President. In fact, Thomas Robb, national director of The Knights Party says his organization has serious questions it would like Barack to answer. Said Robb, "Is he willing to stand for the protection of white men, women and children who are quickly to be America’s new minority. Just over two years ago, the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. stated that white children under the age of five were counted for less than 50% of the population. I do not feel it is an exaggeration to be very concerned about America’s future." Where does Barrack Obama’s allegiance lie? And what about Hillary Clinton or John McCain? Will they voice concern for the sons and daughters of the Republic?

The United States of America is a great nation! How great will we be should a traitor take office as President? Is America headed down a dangerous path? We believe so. While we do not take an official position toward any candidate, we feel that we represent the opinion of many dissatisfied people throughout the country who worry for the future of their children. Will anyone, be it Republican or Democrat, stand up and voice their support for white Christian Americans?

Rachel Pendergraft, the national spokeswoman for the organization said, "We pray for the day when we will see a strong candidate; a God fearing white man or woman, who will restore the principles of the Constitution, promote free enterprise versus a planned economy, put military troops on the border to stop illegal immigration, put an end to the social experiment called forced integration which has had a devastating effect on all races, and return our schools to a wholesome environment of learning by removing homosexual indoctrination"

(via Radar)
always seems to come back to the gays, doesn't it. But I must admit that the fact the KKK's website is so horrible and inept and glitchy, as well as their grammar really makes me feel better and gives me a good laugh.

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I guess they couldn’t dress him up as God

But let’s be honest we all know that’s what Kobe is.
Anyway as part of I guess a new sneaker campaign Nike has Kobe in costume as great geniuses of history

As Da Vinci (Kobe’s more talented all around)


Kobe as Mozart (Kobe’s more musical)


Kobe as Einstein (Kobe didn’t even need to go to college)


Kobe as George Washington Carver (people aren’t allergic to Kobe unlike peanuts. Oh and Kobe can dunk)


there’s one other Genius ad coming out to complete the series, though I’m not sure when it will be released or who Kobe will be. I kinda feel that for that one it’ll be cheesy and predictable and Kobe will play himself as like a genuis of the court, but I hope to be surprised


Nike Zoom Kobe III- Genius

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“Barack Called Me an Asshole”

is it perhaps possible that Barack isn’t some deity sent down to save us all in our darkest moment but is actually just a man and a [gasp!] politician?
(But messiahs aren't supposed to curse!)


Here is one reporter’s heroic tale of dealing with “the meanie"
as a young reporter covering a hungry state legislator It seems that the real Barack emerges

some excerpts

It's not quite eight in the morning and Barack Obama is on the phone screaming at me. He liked the story I wrote about him a couple weeks ago, but not this garbage.

Months earlier, a reporter friend told me she overheard Obama call me an asshole at a political fund-raiser. Now here he is blasting me from hundreds of miles away for a story that just went online but hasn't yet hit local newsstands.

It's the first time I ever heard him yell, and I'm trembling as I set down the phone. I sit frozen at my desk for several minutes, stunned.

I was flipping through right-wing rants on AM radio. Dennis Praeger was railing against Michelle Obama for her clumsy comment on being proud of her country for the first time.

Praeger went on to call her husband a blank slate. There's no record to look at, he complained, unless you lived in Barack Obama's old state Senate district.

Well, I lived and worked in that district for three years — nearly half Obama's tenure in the Illinois Legislature. D-13, the district was called, and it spanned a large swath of the city's poor, black, crime-­ridden South Side.

It was 2000 and I was a young, hungry reporter at the Hyde Park Herald and Lakefront Outlook community newspapers earning $19,000 a year covering politics and crime.

I talked with Obama on a regular basis — a couple times a month, at least. I'd ask him about his campaign-finance reports, legislation he was sponsoring and various local issues. He wrote an occasional column published in our papers.

Then, in 2002, dissatisfaction with President Bush and Republicans on the national and local levels led to a Democratic sweep of nearly every lever of Illinois state government. For the first time in 26 years, Illinois Democrats controlled the governor's office as well as both legislative chambers.

The white, race-baiting, hard-right Republican Illinois Senate Majority Leader James "Pate" Philip was replaced by Emil Jones Jr., a gravel-voiced, dark-skinned African-American known for chain-smoking cigarettes on the Senate floor.

Jones had served in the Illinois Legislature for three decades. He represented a district on the Chicago South Side not far from Obama's. He became Obama's ­kingmaker.

Several months before Obama announced his U.S. Senate bid, Jones called his old friend Cliff Kelley, a former Chicago alderman who now hosts the city's most popular black call-in radio ­program.

I called Kelley last week and he recollected the private conversation as follows:

"He said, 'Cliff, I'm gonna make me a U.S. Senator.'"

"Oh, you are? Who might that be?"

"Barack Obama."

Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.

"I took all the beatings and insults and endured all the racist comments over the years from nasty Republican committee chairmen," State Senator Rickey Hendon, the original sponsor of landmark racial profiling and videotaped confession legislation yanked away by Jones and given to Obama, complained to me at the time. "Barack didn't have to endure any of it, yet, in the end, he got all the credit.

"I don't consider it bill jacking," Hendon told me. "But no one wants to carry the ball 99 yards all the way to the one-yard line, and then give it to the halfback who gets all the credit and the stats in the record book."

During his seventh and final year in the state Senate, Obama's stats soared. He sponsored a whopping 26 bills passed into law — including many he now cites in his presidential campaign when attacked as inexperienced.

It was a stunning achievement that started him on the path of national politics — and he couldn't have done it without Jones.

Before Obama ran for U.S. Senate in 2004, he was virtually unknown even in his own state. Polls showed fewer than 20 percent of Illinois voters had ever heard of Barack Obama.

Jones further helped raise Obama's profile by having him craft legislation addressing the day-to-day tragedies that dominated local news ­headlines.

For instance. Obama sponsored a bill banning the use of the diet supplement ephedra, which killed a Northwestern University football player, and another one preventing the use of pepper spray or pyrotechnics in nightclubs in the wake of the deaths of 21 people during a stampede at a Chicago nightclub. Both stories had received national attention and extensive local coverage.

I spoke to Jones earlier this week and he confirmed his conversation with Kelley, adding that he gave Obama the legislation because he believed in Obama's ability to negotiate with Democrats and Republicans on divisive issues.

So how has Obama repaid Jones?

Last June, to prove his commitment to government transparency, Obama released a comprehensive list of his earmark requests for fiscal year 2008. It comprised more than $300 million in pet projects for Illinois, including tens of millions for Jones's Senate district.

Shortly after Jones became Senate president, I remember asking his view on pork-barrel spending.

I'll never forget what he said:

"Some call it pork; I call it steak."

Hyde Park was the most racially integrated neighborhood in a city with a long, tortured history of segregation. Along 53rd Street, the neighborhood's main commercial corridor, chess players filled the parks, student activists chanted political slogans and women clad in bright colors and elaborate headwraps sang church hymns while strolling the sidewalks.

I would sometimes sit smoking on the fire escape outside my office and feel like I'd wandered into a Spike Lee film.

The communities surrounding Hyde Park were predominantly black and impoverished, marked by high crime, boarded-up storefronts and vacant lots. In some residential areas, banks and grocery stores were several miles away.

On the stump, Obama has frequently invoked his experiences as a community organizer on the Chicago South Side in the early 1990s, when he passed on six-figure salary offers at corporate law firms after graduating from Harvard Law School to direct a massive voter-registration drive.

But, as a state senator, Obama evaded leadership on a host of critical community issues, from historic preservation to the rapid demolition of nearby public-housing projects, according to many South Siders.

Harold Lucas, a veteran South Side community organizer who remembers when Obama was "just a big-eared kid fresh out of school," says he didn't finally decide to support Obama's presidential bid until he was actually inside the voting booth on Super Tuesday.

"I'm not happy about the quality of life in my community," says Lucas, who now heads a black-heritage tourism business in Chicago. "As a local elected official, he had a primary role in that."

In addition to Hyde Park, Obama also represented segments of several South Side neighborhoods home to the nation's richest African-American cultural history outside of Harlem.

Before World War II, the adjacent Bronzeville community was known as the "Black Metropolis," attracting African-American migrants seeking racial equality and economic opportunity from states to the south such as Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.

Storied jazz clubs such as Gerri's Palm Tavern regularly hosted Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Josephine Baker and many others. In the postwar era, blues legends Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and B.B. King all regularly gigged in cramped juke joints such as the Checkerboard Lounge.

When the City of Chicago seized the 70-year-old Gerri's Palm Tavern by eminent domain in 2001, sparking citywide protests, Obama was silent. And he offered no public comments when the 30-year owner of the Checkerboard Lounge was forced to relocate a couple years later.

Even in Hyde Park, Obama declined to take a position on a years-long battle waged by hundreds of local community activists fighting against the city's plan to replace the historic limestone seawall along Lake Michigan — a popular spot to sunbathe and swim — with concrete steps.

It would be comparable to representing Barton Creek in Austin, and sidestepping any discussion about conservation.

Obama's aloofness on key community issues for years frustrated Lucas and many other South Siders. Now they believe he was just afraid of making political enemies or being pigeonholed as a black candidate.

Though it didn't make national news, Obama inflamed many residents in his old state Senate district last March when he endorsed controversial Chicago alderman Dorothy Tillman in a runoff election.

Flamboyant and unpredictable, Tillman is perhaps best known for once pulling a pistol from her purse and brandishing it around at a city council meeting. The ward she represented for 22 years, which included historic Bronzeville, comprised the city's largest concentration of vacant lots.

Just three months before Obama made his endorsement, the Lakefront Outlook community newspaper ran a three-part investigative series exposing flagrant crony­ism and possible tax-law violations that centered on Tillman and her biggest pet project, a taxpayer-funded cultural center built across the street from her ward office that had been hemorrhaging money since its inception.

The series won a national George Polk Award, among the most coveted prizes in journalism. Not bad for a 12-page rag with a circulation of 12,000 and no Web site. I had already left the Outlook and had nothing to do with the project.

In the end, Tillman lost the election despite Obama's endorsement, which critics said countered his calls for clean government. Obama told the Chicago Tribune that he had backed Tillman because she was an early supporter of his 2004 U.S. Senate campaign.

Many speculate Obama only bothered to weigh in on a paltry city council election during his presidential campaign as a gesture to Chicago's powerful Mayor Richard M. Daley, a Tillman supporter. Even so, Obama should have remained neutral, says Timuel Black, a historian and City Colleges of Chicago professor emeritus who lived in Obama's state Senate district.

"That was not a wise decision," Black says. "It was poor judgment on his part. He was operating like a politician trying to win the next step up."

Obama has spent his entire political career trying to win the next step up. Every three years, he has aspired to a more powerful political position.

He was just 35 when in 1996 he won his first bid for political office. Even many of his staunchest supporters, such as Black, still resent the strong-arm tactics Obama employed to win his seat in the Illinois Legislature.

Obama hired fellow Harvard Law alum and election law expert Thomas Johnson to challenge the nominating petitions of four other candidates, including the popular incumbent, Alice Palmer, a liberal activist who had held the seat for several years, according to an April 2007 Chicago Tribune report.

Obama found enough flaws in the petition sheets — to appear on the ballot, candidates needed 757 signatures from registered voters living within the district — to knock off all the other Democratic contenders. He won the seat unopposed.

"A close examination of Obama's first campaign clouds the image he has cultivated throughout his political career," wrote Tribune political reporters David Jackson and Ray Long. "The man now running for president on a message of giving a voice to the voiceless first entered public office not by leveling the playing field, but by clearing it."

At the time, the Illinois media had fallen head-over-heels in love with Obama and his squeaky-clean image. "As pedigrees go, there is not a finer one among the Democratic candidates," the Chicago Tribune gushed in its endorsement.

All this predated TV pundit Chris Matthews's more recent comment that Obama's speeches send chills up his legs.

"He's been given a pass," says Harold Lucas, the community organizer in Chicago. "His career has been such a meteoric rise that he has not had the time to set a record."

A week after my profile of Obama was published, I called some of my contacts in the Illinois Legislature. I ran through a list of black Chicago lawmakers who had worked with Obama, and was surprised to learn that many resented him and had supported other candidates in the U.S. Senate election.

"Anybody but Obama," the late state Representative Lovana Jones told me at the time.

State Representative Monique Davis, who attended the same church as Obama and co-sponsored several bills with him, also did not support his candidacy. She complained of feeling overshadowed by Obama.

"I was snubbed," Davis told me. "I felt he was shutting me out of history."

The morning after the story was posted online, I arrived early at my new offices. I hadn't taken my coat off when the phone rang. It was Obama.

The article began, "It can be painful to hear Ivy League-bred Barack Obama talk jive."

Obama told me he doesn't speak jive, that he doesn't say the words "homeboy" or "peeps."

It seemed so silly; I thought for sure he was joking. He wasn't.

He said the black legislators I cited in the story were off-base, and that they couldn't have gotten the bills passed without him.

I started to speak, and he shouted me down.

He said he liked the other story I wrote.

I asked if there was anything factually inaccurate about the latest story.

He repeated that his former colleagues couldn't have passed the bills without him.

He asked why I wrote this story, then cut me off when I started to answer.

He said he should have been given a chance to respond.

I told him I had requested an interview through his communications director.

He said I should have called his cell phone.

I reminded him that he had asked me months ago to stop calling his cell phone due to his busier schedule.

He said again that I should have called his cell phone.

Of course a lot of this is old news but I'm hopeful that this time around people actually pick up on it

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The Ol' High School Making Headlines

it's always a treat to see your high school alma mater on the main page of the L.A. Times as the subject and focus of one of the most viewed stories. Just wish it had a better headline (though I guess it's better than this one) (or this one...wow) WTF HW?

Cheating scandal roils elite Harvard Westlake school

Six students are expelled and others face suspension after midterm tests are stolen and passed around.

Six sophomores were expelled and more than a dozen other students faced suspensions Tuesday in a cheating scandal that has rocked Harvard-Westlake, a top-tier Los Angeles private school with a national reputation for its academics.

Administrators said students conspired to steal Spanish and history tests by distracting teachers in their classrooms. The tests were then shown to several other students before midterm exams last month, said Harvard-Westlake President Thomas Hudnut.

The history department had become suspicious about the world and Europe II exams when several students scored exceptionally well. Then on Feb. 8, the department received an anonymous tip that cheating had occurred. Based on that report, several students were called to the dean's office and accused of being involved, while others came forward to confess, Hudnut said.

The six students accused of stealing the exams will not be allowed to return to the school. Students accused of viewing advance copies of the Spanish III and world history tests were suspended for varying lengths of time, Hudnut said.

Administrators announced the outcome of a nearly three-weeks-long investigation by the school's honor board -- composed of students and faculty -- at an assembly Tuesday at Harvard-Westlake's North Hollywood campus, which serves 10th through 12th graders. The honor board issued expulsions in part because the acts were premeditated, Hudnut said.

Hudnut, who previously was headmaster, said the incident was an unprecedented "breach of trust" at a school that perennially produces among the nation's top SAT and Advanced Placement scores and numerous National Merit semifinalists.

"I've been at the school for 21 years and I have never heard of an exam or test being" stolen, said Hudnut, who was in New York attending a conference. "This is an aberration and as a result, an honor board made up of students and faculty wanted to respond very forthrightly to it because something like this has to be addressed and dealt with."

Hudnut said it was unlikely that the students in those classes would be required to retake the exams, since most students did not cheat. Those who admitted viewing the tests, however, will probably have their grades adjusted. Teachers and deans will hold several forums for students to discuss the school's honor code, which every student must sign.

The cheating scandal has provoked a wave of self-reflection at the closely knit campus, where about 870 students are enrolled. An additional 730 students attend the middle school in Holmby Hills. Harvard-Westlake's annual tuition is $25,000.

Earlier this month, six middle school students were expelled for violations related to drug possession. Those students would be allowed to reapply, but admission was not guaranteed, Hudnut said.

An opinion posted to the online blog of the Chronicle, Harvard-Westlake's campus newspaper, referred to the school's reputation for "superior academics" and said the cheating incident had "tainted the most precious and valued aspect of the school."

"Walking through the lunch area, one is inundated with speculation as to who will not be returning to the Harvard-Westlake community," wrote senior Michael Kaplan. "In classes, teachers have questioned outright whether there is an actual community anymore. At a school where students leave their backpacks strewn across the school, teachers now feel the need to lock their offices and question every piece of 'original' work."

According to a national survey of high school students by the Los Angeles-based Josephson Institute of Ethics, young people display deeply entrenched habits of dishonesty. The 2006 Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth, a biennial national survey, found high rates of cheating, lying and theft. In that report, 60% of students said they had cheated on a test, and one in three used the Internet to plagiarize an assignment.

Hudnut conceded that the incident probably would harm relationships between some students and teachers on the campus, at least initially.

"I think, in all honesty, something like this can sow some seeds of doubt," he said. "But after a tentative period in which teachers and faculty assess the recent actions things will actually not only return to status quo but [the incident will] serve to forge closer bonds."

Mr. Hudnut is now President of the school? Sounds way too official and corporate and business like. Headmaster was far more chummy and charming.
I wonder who snitched, but those kids if they were so smart they wouldn't have gotten caught; back in my day...

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This Is Just Eerie

The last season of the West Wing totally predicted this election. Watch for yourself- Hillary never had a chance


(pragmatic? really? Barack?! wha?!)
So maybe if I had watched the West Wing during that time I'd actually be happy with what's going on right now.
I guess this just goes to show television has a huge impact and influence on us
as does this Slate XX blog (which I usually avoid because of their Barackian vibe) post about what happens if you turn off the t.v. and actually pay attention. Issues not image, much?

I'm afraid to even say that among in this crowd, but I'm just trying to be fair. I mostly read the transcript of the debate, because I got home too late to watch it. And from the transcript, one gets a whole different impression. For one thing, you don't get the full force of her pettiness when you don't see it delivered from her pinched mouth. For another, she is just much more impressive, intellectually. Time and time again, she comes up with a smart and, more importantly, specific response that seals the argument, like the line: "It would be as though Franklin Roosevelt said let's make Social Security voluntary." That is a perfect and pithy summary of what her plan does, and it kills his complaint. And in this case, it was Obama who whined no fair and appealed to the moderator: "Brian, I'm getting fillibustered here." Whereas usually he just resorts to generalities, or refers to his days as a community organizer, or some version of the hope riff.

It's hard not to like him more than her. When I'm watching him, I'm thinking about his first book, and some of his great lines, and his wife, and all the things I like about him. When I'm watching her, I'm thinking of Bill's Jesse Jackson line, and her incredibly tedious books, and that embarrassing "Hillary" jazz-hands video. Unlike her, Obama seems constitutionally incapable of losing his cool. But he does not win these debates. On nearly any subject—health care, Iran, Korea—she's more impressive. So, I guess what I'm saying is I wish people would admit they prefer him just because they prefer him, and not give him points he didn't earn.

word. Poor Hillary if she'd run before 1960 (and been a man I guess) she totally would have won. Beauty before brains :(

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A Transgender History: Rise of Hatred

perhaps not coincidentally hatred's rise occurred along with the rise of capitalism and solidification of Christianity.

Here is part two of Mercedes Allen's 6 part series on Transgender History from Bilerico. Part 1 can be read here

Transgender History: The Rise of Hatred (the Middle Ages)

The advent of class divisions, the acquisition of wealth and power, and the ownership of property fed a movement toward patriarchal governing that ultimately became threatened by the existence of female and transgender spiritual leaders. While patriarchal societies were gradually able to synthesize and later entrench the notion that females should be subservient, gender-variant persons posed a more puzzling quandary, because of their uniqueness. It was for this reason that patriarchal religions, which reached their epitome with the Roman Catholic Church, felt that they had to stamp out transgender people (and also gay / lesbian people, who were often thought of as mixed-gender of a sort in early societies) and demonize their legacy.

This helped to facilitate the development of patrilineal inheritance, keeping the reins of power in hands that grew ever more elite. The status of women was degraded, and by so doing, leadership also typically portrayed any sign of gender variance as "less than male." Dual-spirited gods and goddesses, thought at one time to be doubly powerful, were turned into contemptible, "weak" entities.

For the "Greater Good"

In 186 B.C., when Rome banned the bacchanalia (a pleasure-centered festival to Dionysus), an oppressive campaign followed in the Greek territories, keyed on preventing the lower working classes from seeking their own happiness and betterment, and pushing them to focus on the enrichment of owners, employers and country, and / or to become willing to go to war for patriarchal society. The system became an efficient, self-propagating machine, later evolving into one in which war drove the economy and power trumped reason.

Gender-transgressive and same-sex amoury existence, although greatly reduced, still existed to an extent in Roman culture, but was tolerated only tentatively -- and only if it came from the ruling class or coincided with the agendas of the leaders and generals. Around 60 AD, Emperor Nero reportedly had a young slave boy, Sporus, castrated (eunuching, in early times, was believed to be the primary mechanism of gender change -- "eunuchs" ranged in form from males whose testicles had been removed to those also given a total penectomy), and took him as a wife in a legal public ceremony (Sporus was from then on clothed as an Empress, and accompanied Nero as such).

Birth of the "Homosexual Menace" Campaigns

When factional battles would break out, homosexual and transgender tendencies or loves were often used to justify the destruction of enemies. In 218 A.D., Elagabalus (or Heliogabalus) became emperor of Rome, and was later assassinated, mutilated and dragged through the streets (222 A.D.) before being thrown into the Tiber River. Justification for the overthrow was found in Elagabalus' penchant for wearing womens' clothing and makeup, in his reportedly prostituting himself, in his offering a large sum of money to any physician who can give him female genitalia (never claimed), and from declaring one of his male lovers to be his husband.

When Constantine I arrived in 342 A.D., his fusion of religions (the Roman Catholic church was a synthesis of early Christianity with Mithraism and worship of the sun god, Sol), and fusion of religion with the state strengthened anti-trans sentiment as it bolstered slavery (which had by then become the lot of most gender non-conformists and adherents to older traditions) and set the stage for feudal witch-hunts. These later evolved into the Crusades and the Inquisition, in which any evidence of early matriarchal and transgender-venerating paganism was stamped out. Repressive laws which aimed to crush gender variance and same-sex love evolved into part of the Corpus juris civilis, the Roman body of law upon which many legal systems were later based, including those of England and America.

This occurred because it was necessary to the land-owners (chief of which was the Roman Catholic Church) to break the spirit of the serfs toiling on their behalf, thus pre-empting uprisings. Communal bonds had to be erased, and the idea of communalism had to be demonized. Pagan tradition was reinvented as "witchcraft," and quashed with impunity.

Transgender Saints and Joan of Arc

But in true subversive fashion, what couldn't be completely suppressed was absorbed and reinvented to conform with the new ruling ideal. Early cross-dressing heroes idolized by the peasantry were canonized, with the church reshaping the reasoning behind the admiration of those historical figures, thus co-opting them. Saints Pelagia, Margarita, Marinus (Marina), Athanasia (Alexandria), Eugenia, Appollinaria, Euphrosyne, Matrona, Theodora, Anastasia, Papula and Joseph (Hildegund) were canonized transfolk who were female-bodied but lived as male, along with bearded women Galla, Paula and Wilgefortis (Uncumber). Pope Joan (John Anglicus) appears likely to have been a legend, but this legend was likely cultivated for the same purpose. There are no known male-to-female equivalents of transfolk elevated to sainthood, so it is quite likely that MTFs suffered a zero-tolerance agenda.
In 1429, at the age of 17, Joan of Arc dressed in male clothing, gathered several peasant followers and presented herself at the court of Prince Charles, declaring that her mission and dress were compelled upon her by God, said mission to be to drive out the English from France. The heir to the French throne put her in charge of an army of 10,000 peasants. Ultimately, the drive would be victorious, but she would be abducted by English sympathizers (who called her "homasse," or "man-woman") and turned her over to the Inquisition in England. Although the French king had the opportunity to pay her ransom, he felt threatened by the emotional sway she had over the peasantry, and left her to her fate. Eventually, the Inquisition decided that there was not enough evidence to have her convicted of witchcraft, but she was burned at the stake on May 30, 1431 for wearing men's clothing, which the Church referred to as "idolatry." The steadfastness with which she refused to recant and revert to female clothing, and the fierce loyalty from the peasantry over what her cross-gender expression symbolized to them paints a dramatic picture of old tradition resisting stubbornly under the boot of the now-entrenched patriarchal authority.

Into Hiding

Little by little, gender transgression became more limited, at first to peasant festivals, and then one by one, those festivals were outlawed. Halloween, or All Hallow's Eve, which was rooted in early matrilineal Celtic society (drawn from celebrations surrounding Samhain), is the most recognizable event still surviving today. The Celtic Winter Solstice (Christianized as the "Feast of Fools") did not fare as well, because it developed into a trans-inspired mocking of the Church.

Yet even the Church itself appeared to assimilate some transgender motifs into its trappings, such as the floor-length gowns, jeweled trappings for hierarchy and such (having a son join the priesthood, after all, used to be referred to sending him "into skirts"). It may also have been that trans priestesses had somehow inspired the practice of recruiting Castrati for Church choirs, even though Roman Catholic rule had technically forbid the castration of youths.

While much of this change relates to medieval Europe and rule that spread at times to Asia, the Middle East and northern Africa, similar transformations happened in some other cultures, or were later imposed on those cultures by patriarchal conquerors or their influence. Native Two-Spirit tradition would persist until the arrival of the white man in North and Central America, and the genocide and cultural subversion that followed. Trans traditions did still persist somewhat in other parts of the world though, such as Japanese Noh dramas, which find their root in the harvest folk dance, dengaku. And in a few untouched places, notably among the Polynesian Islands (parts of Samoa, Tonga and Tahiti), communal and trans-affirming traditions would survive to this day.

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