Friday, April 21, 2023

Sports Illustrated remembers Renée Richards (June 2019)

                               This is a reader-friendly copy of a memorable                                 Sports Illustrated link from 2019. 

She's a Transgender Pioneer, But Renée Richards Prefers to Stay Out of the Spotlight

JON WERTHEIMJUN 28, 2019

Sports Illustrated’s annual “Where Are They Now?” issue catches up with the stars and prominent figures from yesteryear—past features have included Sammy Sosa, Brett Favre, Dennis Rodman, Tony Hawk and Don King. The 2019 issue features an inside look into the new life of Alex Rodriguez, Yao Ming’s mission for Chinese basketball and more.​

It was the equivalent of a serve that came back with more spin and more heat than the sender ever expected. In February, Martina Navratilova wrote an op-ed in London's Sunday Times, discussing the hot-button issue of transgender athletes. Her point, she thought, was hardly tendentious, arguing that male athletes who transition to become female athletes but declined to undergo gender reassignment surgery should not be allowed to compete against women. "I am happy to address a transgender woman in whatever form she prefers," Navratilova wrote, "but I would not be happy to compete against her. It would not be fair.... It's insane and it's cheating."

The response was swift, forceful and often vicious. Social media did its thing. Transgender athletes from Sydney to Seville demanded apologies and retractions. Navratilova gave neither. Then, despite her status as a gay-rights titan—and perhaps the first athlete to come out in the prime of her career—she was dropped by Athlete Ally, an LGBT advocacy group, over her "transphobic" take.

If Navratilova "caught a lot of s---," as she puts it, she also found a swath of supporters who agreed with her point that identifying as a woman should not, in itself, bring about the right to compete in women's sports. And that transgender athletes who take hormones but have not undergone sexual reassignment surgery are conferred an unfair competitive advantage against a field of females, mostly because of their muscle mass.

Among those standing by Navratilova: her former tennis coach, who's also a world-renowned eye doctor, still practicing in her mid-80s. This doctor drew on her understanding of the science, citing medical journals. As she reaffirms months later in a deep, authoritative voice: "It is just biology. Men have 10 times the amount of testosterone that normal women have. [The peer-reviewed journal Clinical Chemistry has that number at seven or eight times.] Now you want to get rid of that testosterone? O.K., but then it is going to take a couple of years for that to equilibrate. And men still have a larger frame with a larger cardiac output, a larger lung capacity."

These comments wouldn't have been especially remarkable, but for the identity of the doctor, who not only transitioned herself successfully from a man to a woman, but also in the 1970s successfully sued to play professional tennis against women. In the years since, she has retreated from the public eye, building her medical practice rather than her profile as an activist. "Sports' accidental transgender pioneer," the Telegraph called her recently. She has no desire to be at the forefront of today's debates over, say, transgender bathrooms or gender pronouns.

And so it's easy to forget that a full four decades before Bruce Jenner became Caitlyn Jenner, long before a television show called Transparent would win Emmys and Golden Globes, this self-assured and companionable doctor, Renée Richards, is believed to have been the first transgender woman to play a pro sport.

Imagine the gilded American life in the 1950s and it might look a lot like Richard Raskind's. The son of immigrant doctors from Russia, he grew up in New York City amid privilege and providence. He was tall, muscular and strikingly good-looking. At Horace Mann, a Bronx private school, he swam, pitched and played wide receiver. Raskind's best sport, though, was tennis. He became one of the country's top players at Yale, marrying a thunderclap of a lefty serve with pinpoint groundstrokes. He was the captain of the team and one of the few Jews admitted into a secret society. He also shaved his legs in his dorm room and furtively dressed in women's clothes.

After college Raskind considered a full-time pro tennis career—he had an invitation, too, to try out for the Yankees—but instead went to medical school at the University of Rochester and became an ophthalmologist, specializing in eye-muscle surgery and correcting double vision. Still, he found time to compete in tennis, playing in the U.S. Open five times between 1953 and '60. Meanwhile, he enlisted in the Navy and won both the singles and doubles in the All-Navy Championships. (He was never called into active duty.)

Raskind wound up a successful Manhattan surgeon, married a model and, completing a checklist of success signifiers, earned his pilot's license. "You talk about it," says tennis great Billie Jean King, a longtime friend, "Dick Raskind had it."

For all his outward success, though, Raskind also suffered a deep sense of isolation. Daily psychotherapy did not help him untangle the feeling that he was a woman trapped in a man's body, dressing in heels and a skirt to walk his dog. He traveled at one point to Casablanca, carrying $4,000 in cash that he planned to pay a doctor known to perform gender reassignment surgery—a "sex change," in the vernacular of the time—but decided against it. He returned home and became one of the best 35-and-over tennis players in the country.

What changed? "It wasn't that I felt I had to do something about this," Richards says now. "I didn't have a choice." So in August 1975, at the age of 41, Dr. Richard Raskind underwent gender reassignment surgery at a New York City hospital, emerging as Dr. Renée Richards. (A fact lost on few: The new first name is French for "reborn.") Richards's plan was to move to California and hit the reset button on her life. She divorced and joined an ophthalmology practice in Newport Beach.

If privacy was the goal, her gynecologist advised, competitive tennis would have to go. ("Nobody is going to not notice that windup on the forehand you have.") The sport, though, was a refuge, and Richards began entering women's events in Southern California under the name Renée Clark.

After "Clark," then 41, won a 1976 tournament in La Jolla, a reporter, tipped off by someone in the crowd, effectively outed Richards. Women's Winner Was a Man became a headline and, inevitably, a titillating national story. Soon came word from the U.S. Tennis Association that Richards would be unwelcome in the women's field unless she passed a chromosome-screening test.

Gene Scott, a tennis promoter who briefly overlapped with Richards at Yale, pushed back and invited her to play in the Tennis Week Open in South Orange, N.J. When she accepted, 25 players in the field promptly withdrew, claiming Richards still had the "muscular advantages" of a man.

This was 1976—the same summer that Jenner won the Olympic decathlon—and Richards faced a decision: Retreat further and try to lead a life in repose, or fight a battle to the detriment of her privacy but the benefit of her conscience. She chose the latter and sued for the right to play. In August '77 her case reached the New York State Supreme Court.

As Richards saw it, she was a woman and therefore entitled to compete as one. Besides, it was a fair fight. Yes, she conceded, she had certain advantages, starting with her lithe 6'2" frame. But she also was in her 40s. Two decades earlier she was beating pros like Tony Palafox, who won the doubles titles at the U.S. Open (in 1962) and Wimbledon ('63). "If I had played [women's tennis] in my 20s, I would have won Wimbledon," she says. At 40, though? "I wasn't going to be the best, and I knew that." (What if she had won Wimbledon? Richards laughs. "I would have quit. That wouldn't have been good for anyone. Not me and not women's tennis.")

The tennis world was split. Some players were hostile, going so far as to wear shirts that read GO AWAY, RENEE. Others, like Navratilova, were supportive. A third faction was concerned about precedent. "If we could be sure it was only Renée, then I think we could all just let it ride," one anonymous player told The Washington Post. "But there's always the nagging feeling that there will be another transsexual, younger and stronger, in a better position to dominate the tour." Richards's future mixed doubles partner, Ilie Nastase, put it less delicately: "What are they afraid of? She's old enough to be their mother."

At the New York County Courthouse, on Centre Street in Manhattan, the USTA deployed a battery of experts and mounted a defense that often relied on junk science and Cold War hysterics. The group's lawyer raised the specter of "worldwide experiments, especially in Iron Curtain countries, to produce athletic stars by means undreamed of a few years ago."

For all the complexity and all the thorny questions raised about sexuality and gender, Richards made her case with just two affidavits: one from the doctor who had performed her surgery, the other from King. "Both attested to the fact that, at this point, I was female and deserved to be allowed to play other women," Richards says. "And that was it."

Judge Alfred Ascione agreed, and in a 13-page decision he ruled that, as a woman, Richards was free to play in the U.S. Open without taking a chromosome test. He also rejected the USTA's bizarre claim that allowing transsexual players to compete would unleash an army of male athletes seeking gender reassignment in order to infiltrate women's sports. "When an individual such as plaintiff, a successful physician, a husband and father, finds it necessary for his own mental sanity to undergo a sex reassignment," Ascione wrote, "the unfounded fears and misconceptions of defendants must give way to the overwhelming medical evidence that this person is now female."

Two weeks after that decision was handed down, Richards entered the U.S. Open and lost in the first round to Virginia Wade, who had won Wimbledon a few weeks earlier. Richards did, however, reach the doubles final with her partner, Betty Ann Stuart, losing to Navratilova and Betty Stöve. After four more years on the circuit, only briefly cracking the top 20, Renée Richards retired at age 47.

In the ensuing years she built her practice and performed more than 20,000 eye surgeries. She traveled. She began a decadeslong friendship with Judge Ascione's daughter, Diane, bonding over human decency. She wrote two mem-oirs and was the subject of a documentary (Renée, in 2011) as well as a TV biopic (Second Serve, in 1986) in which she was portrayed by Vanessa Redgrave. Rightfully, she takes pride that her life would assume many dimensions beyond being a prominent transsexual.

But here's one thing Richards did not do: become the voice or the face of a movement. Owing perhaps to the same fierce streak of individualism that guided her to undergo reassignment at a time before most Americans knew such a thing existed, she resists the talking points of the trans movement and believes firmly that gender is binary. ("I like the difference between men and women," she told The Telegraph in March. "I like the concept of male and female.") In addition to her defense of Navratilova and her skepticism of trans athletes who compete without gender reassignment, Richards does not believe in the gender fluidity at the core of the trans movement. "There is no such thing," she says flatly. "The population doesn't repopulate itself from fluidity. It's what the world is all about, right?

"I never would have been allowed to play on the women's tour if I was a 'trans' something. But now it's a third category. It's not male-female. It's gender fluidity. It's something in between .... I am as bewildered by it as the average person. But look, things are different now. The world changes."

There’s a tennis court in the backyard of Richards's home an hour north of Manhattan, where she lives, platonically, with her longtime assistant, Arleen Larzelere. The court, though, sits idle, a repository for weeds and wildlife. It's not that Richards, at 84, can't play the sport in which she made her name, twice. But she worries about aggravating a knee injury. "Wheels, wheels, wheels," she says. "Tennis is all about wheels."

She still follows tennis on television and social media. She has now been Renée Richards for a few years longer than she was Richard Raskind. Fittingly, she's a member of two Facebook groups—one composed of her WTA contemporaries from the 1970s; the other of men against whom she competed before that.

She has, however, been seduced by golf. On most afternoons in the spring, summer and fall, you can catch her at the sprawling course near her home, stepping up to tees—the ladies' tees, it should go without saying—taking a gentle backswing and letting fly. Her handicap, once in the single digits, is now 18. "But that is O.K., because my age keeps going up too," she says. "I have shot my age a couple of times."

Richards would much rather talk about golf—or her beloved Yankees—than identity politics. She notes, correctly, that after her decision, men did not batter down the women's locker room doors. In all, there have been only a few transgender professional athletes, in sports ranging from golf to mixed martial arts, but none who have competed at Richards's level. (As an Olympic sport, tennis adopts the IOC stan-dard that transgender athletes can play as long as they've been living for a minimum of 12 months as a woman, with no more than five nanomoles per liter of testosterone.)

Even beyond sports, Richards is uneasy with the idea that she's a pioneer. "Years ago I was the pioneer, no question about it. They all quoted me and my court case," she says. "But I am not anymore." She notes the MLB tradition of having all players wear number 42 each April 15 on Jackie Robinson Day. "They asked one young black player what he thought about Jackie Robinson. And the answer was, 'Jackie Robinson? I don't know Jackie Robinson.'"

Asked whether that's an ignorance of history or, perhaps, an earmark of progress, Richards pauses. "Well, you can take it for whatever you want, but that is the way it is."

The notion that the culture has, perhaps, progressed more than this pioneer crystallized when she spoke earlier this year at a sex and gender symposium hosted by Horace Mann, the school she attended as Richard Raskind 70-odd years ago. That afternoon she shared the stage with King but didn't say much, letting her old friend field the tough questions about gender and the use of pronouns. "I think of my father being bewildered when the telephone didn't have a cord attached to it—I am almost as bewildered by some of this stuff," Richards says now. "I stay out of it. I know what I am. And I know what I was, and how I became what I am."


Wednesday, April 19, 2023

In Memoriam for Kaylin Gillis and Ralph Yarl

Thread by Ibram X. Kendi

In Hebron, NY, a group of friends searched for a friend’s house. They pulled into the wrong driveway. As they left the driveway, a White man named Kevin Monahan came outside. Fired two shots at the car. Tragically murdered 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis. 1/

There are White people who think what happened to Ralph Yarl will never happen to them. Think again. 2/

‘Buckets of tears’: mother of Black teen shot after going to wrong address speaks
Cleo Nagbe speaks out after white man charged with Missouri’s equivalent for attempted murder for shooting Ralph Yarl
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/18/ralph-yarl-mother-interview-kansas-city-shooting

With endless racist media reports of “Latinx invaders” and “Muslim terrorists” and “Native savages” and “greedy Jews” and “infected Asians” and “Black criminals” ... With the endless stockpiling of 400,000,000 guns to protect homes from all these so-called dangerous people ... 3/


With the endless praising and defending of vigilantes, soldiers, cops, and White supremacists when they shoot to kill whenever they claim they are threatened ... 4/


With the endless elections of politicians who pardon, arm, and empower — or increase funding for — these violent vigilantes, soldiers, and cops in the name of keeping us safe ... 5/

Daniel Perry, whom Gov. Abbott wants to pardon, has a history of racist social media comments | Houston Public Media
Perry made the comments before and after killing 28-year-old Black Lives Matter protester Garrett Foster in 2020. Last week, Perry was convicted of murder.
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/2023/04/14/449240/daniel-perry-whom-gov-abbott-wants-to-pardon-has-a-history-of-racist-social-media-comments/

With all of this going on, we have built a nation of fear that endangers and kills people of color, White people—us all. One person's fear—what racist power endlessly produces and manipulates—is another person’s death sentence. 6/


We need to build a fearless nation. An antiracist nation. Where we don’t fear groups of people, but we do recognize the actual dangers in our midst. 7/


Where people view assault rifles, poverty, racism, toxic masculinity, job deserts, book bans, climate change, poorly funded schools and hospitals, voter suppression, union busting and exploitation as dangerous ... 8/


Not groups of people, not that person you don’t know. Not that person ringing your doorbell or coming onto your driveway. Not that person who looks differently, loves differently, worships differently, or thinks differently than you. 9/


Rest in your peaceful recovery, Ralph.
Rest as we work to transform this nation.
To tackle the actual dangers.
To create true peace for us all.
10/10



Rest in peace, Kaylin.

Sunday, April 16, 2023

The meaning of Fascism -- Two Twitter thread links

 I'm keeping these two Twitter thread links for future reference.

THE UNDERTOW  by Jeff Sharlet.

TOM NICHOLS THREAD about a Sharlet's thread.

Here is Sharlet speaking about the Nichols thread...

Tom Nichols has an interesting thread on what he sees as the misuses of “fascism.” As someone who once argued that actual full-fledged fascism wasn’t possible in U.S.—and now sadly admits I was wrong—I think it’s worth reading even as I disagree. Here’s why…1/  (Unroll available on Thread Reader)

Most common error I see in smart “this isn’t fascism” arguments (vs. more numerous know-nothing cases) is conflation of fascism and *fascist regime.” Nichols is right: we don’t have a fascist regime, & Trump didn’t get that far. But Trumpism is a fascist *movement.* 2/ 

Related error is to contrast buffoonery of Trump, DeSantis, MTG, etc. with hindsight perception of fascist leaders as smart & strong. But of course nearly all of them began aa vain buffoons, & were vain & buffoonish. All were dismissed. 3/ 

This isn’t to say Trump or MTG are Hitler. But as Robert O. Paxton writes in Anatomy of Fascism, most fascist movements don’t succeed & thus never look strong & organized in hindsight. W/ work, ours won’t either. 4/ 

Third error is to overemphasize “ideology” of fascist regimes and underemphasize coherence of fascist movements. Social movement theory helps see beyond the finalized programs of fascist regimes… 5/ 

Social movements often look to outsiders like unified waves. In fact, they are unsteady, usually temporary convergences of streams that may not have even run parallel before mutual hopes—or mutual hates—brought them together. 6/ 

So too this fascist moment which aligns the once neoliberal Christian Right with a less-organized Christian nationalism with deliberately profane Proud Boys & rightwing libertarians & confused populists & Catholic right intellectuals… 7/ 

Fascism wants us to see it as a monolith. (And for some to miss its approach because they rightly recognize the movement before them isn’t monolithic.) Bad news is it marks a powerful convergence. Good news is coalitions can crumble. Let’s help this fascist one do so. 8/ 

But doing so requires that we recognize that fascism thrives not so much as a clear ideology in a sense recognizable by traditional politics but as an anti-politics. It is a purity myth. Most authoritarianisms gesture that way but only fascists make it central. 9/ 

& yet, our fascist movement does have an “ideology,” too. What else does Frank Luntz mean when he asks in the NYT how to advance Trump’s “agenda” without Trump? The “agenda” is fascism. “Just” a style? Yes, in a sense, but no “just” about it. Fascism is an aesthetic. 10/ 

Among elements of the fascist aesthetic is a perpetuation and expansion of a kind of corporate capitalism via state entanglement for loyal captains and punishment & demonization for enemies of “the people”—Soros, Disney, now Budweiser. 11/ 

Nichols insists that fascists are well-disciplined. I think this may be a conflation of the pre-existing militaries of some fascist regimes with fascism itself. In fact, fascist regimes are always a mess of hysterical infighting & intrigue. 12/ 

Which is good news. Fascist movements are melodramatic messes. Actual organization—real democracy—can beat them. But not if we tell ourselves fascism isn’t here because just look at those goofballs. The “goofballs” are running more & more states. 13/ 

Nichols seems to suggest that this movement can’t be fascist because it’s anti-govt & true fascists revere the state. But you know what? Mussolini didn’t actually make the trains run on time. A) this movement hates gov’t it doesn’t control B) by “the state” it means power. 14/ 

Mistake I think Nichols makes on fascist hallmark of “cult of personality” is believing fascist lie that the “personality” matters. That’s “Great Man” school of history. Right now the personality is Trump; what makes this fascism is the “cult,” which can shift its affections. 15/ 

I think of Pastor Hank Kunneman, rising star of the pro-civil war prophetic right, who says “Trump” will return, whether it’s the man himself or the spirit of Trumpism in the flesh of another. Cult? Check. “Personality”? Check. Trump himself? Maybe. 16/ 

But maybe the most important point of disagreement I have w/ Nichols is what seems to be his believe that fascism can only be what it was in mid-century Europe—as if it didn’t keep evolving, in, say, Suharto’s Indonesia, Saddam’s Iraq, Mobutu’s Zaire, Putin’s Russia. 17/ 

Nichols asks where are the fascist masses, thinking of 20th century European pageantry. Well, there is some of that—consider Waco, consider the Jan 6 Choir, definitely consider all the flags—but it’s changed. The masses are also online. That’s different, yes. Fascism evolves. 18/ 

For instance, I argue in The Undertow that the latest US contribution to fascism (as historian James O. Whitman write in Hitler’s American Model, it’s not the first) is to ditch its emphasis on racial or ethnic purity. 19/ 

American fascism is white supremacist, to be sure, but as historian @AntheaButler writes in White Evangelical Racism, the “promise of whiteness” seduces some people of color into its ranks—which then “inoculates” its white majority from acknowledging its racism. 20/ 

But these are also fault lines we can exploit. I don’t agree w/ Nichols that if this is fascism we might as well give up on politics & law. I *do* agree that we must & can defeat fascism in those arenas. I’m all-hands-on-deck, fight fascism however you can wherever you can. 21/ 

I’m also, when it comes to fascism, a “Which Side Are You On” guy. In that sense, @RadioFreeTom (whom I don’t know personally) and I are on the same side. We see the hope of democracy genuinely at risk. We see that the struggle is now. So, onwards, right? (End) 

And this is the original Nichols thread... 

A longish and quixotic thread on the misuse of "fascism."

Why does it matter what we call things? Because labels tend to guide choices and allocation of attention and political resources. So I'm going to give this a try. /1 

Fascist regimes, as we knew them in the 20th century, have some things in common with the current American right: cult of personality, vicious nostalgia, and anti-intellectualism. But that describes *many* authoritarian regimes. Why is "fascism" different and more dangerous? /2 

Because fascist regimes had articulated ideologies, highly disciplined cadres, well-developed party structures, and bureaucratized chains of command. This made them more resilient and highly dangerous because they were focused and effective. /3 

Their leaders, even strutting roosters like Mussolini, were not stupid; indeed, they were tough and smart and even personally brave. They were hyperfocused, on running movements on the principle of one Leader, one Party, one State.
Perhaps you see where I'm about to go. /4 

Many of you are seeing a weak, scared man hiding in Florida, and seeing "fascism." This is inane. There is no party, no program, no ideology. It's just a rich guy using donations from rubes to abuse the legal process and save himself. The GOP has zero ideology or discipline. /5 

Many of you see DeSantis as a fascist. DeSantis is a smarmy and authoritarian opportunist, to be sure. But again, fascism is not donor-service, poll-tested hot buttons, look-at-me stunts. (Look how fast he backtracked on Ukraine.) He's too timid even to criticize Trump. /6 

Now, I will grant that the rightists who want to institute crackpot "common good" legal theories are a lot scarier, but they're also very comfortable in the universities and right-wing punditry. Ironically, they're part of a soft intelligentsia that real fascists would hate. /7 

None of these legal theorists or oped guys are going to give up tenure or resign their editorial positions to salute Trump or DeSantis and then lead the masses in the streets. That's way too much work.
And in truth, most of them hate those masses more than anyone. /8 

Speaking of the masses, where are they? There is no party organization, no overriding ideology, no mass meetings, nothing. Jerks yelling at teachers and posting racist memes from mom's basement are not gonna put the cheetohs down for Kim and Don Jr. or, now, even for Trump. /9 

Also, there's a disconnect here about government itself.
Fascists love The State. They don't do "don't tread on me" anti-statism. They want to capture and run the State in all its glory. /10 

That kind of hyperstatism requires smarts and organizational skill. The GOP isn't nearly that organized. I suppose with the right leader, they could be, but so far, they can't organize a piss-up in a brewery. Look at the House right now: Not exactly a Reichstag in waiting. /11 

I also will grant that the federal and state courts have some crank judges who will do whatever they think Dear Leader wants, but again, without any real ideological guidance. That ideological issue matters, more than you realize.
And here's where federalism saves us: /12 

There is no single judiciary, and even the *federal* judiciary is a mix of political views and will be for years. State and local government is strong. (A solid fascist would have targeted that on Day 1 in 2017, as the Nazis did. But Trump just fired a lot of appointees.) /13 

Yes, Trump has put some doozies on the bench. SCOTUS is going to roll back more rights by 6-3 margins. But fascism's natural milieu is among *weak* institutions, not deep ones. We can still fight repressive ideas in the US with a free press, voting, and legislation. /14 

Also, fascists don't "run" for office. They don't do polling. They don't try to win court cases. They don't try for "earned media." They use discipline, ideology, and violence to build a mass movement that terrorizes those weak institutions into paralysis and collapse. /15 

That's not happening in the US now. The GOP is so up its own ass that the leader of its party was shuttling around in the same hotel between Mike Pence's speech and meeting Trump. If you think that's fascism, there's 100 years of fascists who are insulted at the comparison :) /16 

The bottom line is: if you we are fighting fascism, then the logic is to give up on politics, to give up on voting, on laws, on court cases. Don't!
(Btw: Three cheers for lawyers, who have been doing the heavy lifting of defending democracy in court.)
/17 

Yes, I know, some ppl love the idea of duking it out in the streets with "fascists." Resorting to violence, imo, is how you *create* fascism; defending the rule of law is how you avert it. "Fascists" didn't win on J6; they're going to jail and staying home when Trump calls now. 
Are there fascists in the GOP? Absolutely.
But are you facing a disciplined, organized, ideological party led by a charismatic and tough leader? Not by a longshot.
So don't pysch yourselves out with fear. VOTE. Donate. Organize. Speak. /18 

Don't keep devaluing "fascist." Don't wear out the ability of your fellow citizens to hear that word and be alarmed. (That's already happening. It's like "woke," it's becoming meaningless.) The day may come - and soon - when we'll *need* that word. Conserve it. /19x 

Saturday, April 8, 2023

Mueller, She Wrote -- a Twitter Thread


For some reason the Threadreader app cannot handle this priceless thread so I blogged it for safekeeping.


THREAD: A STORY: When I was working for the Department of Veterans Affairs as the supervisor of the San Diego VA Health System Call Center as a GS-9, I wanted to create a monthly customer service award. Kind of like an “employee of the month”. 1

But the VA wouldn’t budget for a plaque and a trophy, so I went about buying one with my own money. First, I contacted my supervisor, who directed me to the ethics officer. I picked up the phone and they told me I couldn’t spend more than $20 per policy. 2/

I then had to fill out an approval form to be signed off by about five of my superiors, up to and including the VISN director and the undersecretary of health operations in DC. After a few months, I received the green light to spend less than $20 on the award. 3/

I also had to submit the parameters of HOW the award would be determined to the Union. I received approval for that after some negotiation with the Union Steward, then I went on the hunt for a trophy that cost less than $20. I hit pay dirt on eBay. 4/

Someone was liquidating an estate for a man who had recently passed away and was selling an 18” copper bowling championship trophy from 1963 I bid $10, and with the shipping and eBay costs, the total came in at just under $20. 5/


When I received the trophy, it had a little bowling guy on top and a plate on it that read GLENN WELDEN :: LEAGUE CHAMPION :: 1963-1964. At first, I thought about removing the plate and replacing it with CUSTOMER SERVICE AWARD, but that would put me over the $20 limit. 6/

So I contacted the eBay seller to find out more about Glenn Welden. 7/

Here’s what I got back from the seller. 8


Then I googled Glenn and learned he was a WWII veteran, then spent the remainder of his life in public service working for the US Department of the Interior 

 Bureau of Reclamation to protect waterways in Oregon. So I wrote back to the seller. 9/


Ultimately, I decided to keep the Glenn Welden plate and call it the “Glen Welden Public Service Award.” 10/

So with $19.98 and a ton of paperwork, I was able to comply with VA ethics. AND CLARENCE THOMAS DOESN’T THINK A $500,000 TRIP NEEDS TO BE REPORTED. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK. DRAFT IMPEACHMENT ARTICLES. We don’t have the votes, but we need to get the GOP on the record. END/