Discrimination and hate are bullshit

Despite widespread opposition, the ASAA Board votes to ban trans girls from most high school sports in Alaska. Plus, read my "Read Banned Books" commentary.

What I most remember from my junior and senior years in high school are my coaches (Mr. Jack, Nancy Bahnke, Mr. Nance, Homelvig, Andre, and Mr. Sullivan). I remember the 5:30 a.m. wrestling practices and Mr. Jack’s legendary intervals. I spent most of my free time in Nancy’s classroom, racing to finish my homework before practice. My coaches were the ones who said my name correctly and let me experiment with different nicknames when I got tired of my name being mispronounced. My coaches were the ones who fought for me to be allowed to wrestle (because “girls shouldn’t wrestle”) and who corrected my behavior when I acted unsportsmanlike.

Coaches can play an incredibly important role in young people’s lives. They can be confidants, trusted adults, and advocates. They teach about sportsmanship, humility, and teamwork. Coaches provide safe outlets and safe spaces for young people to make mistakes and own up to consequences. Coaches deal in facts, and they know the score, which means they know full well there there is no wave of young men trying to get an unfair advantage in high school sports by claiming a different gender identity.

Coaches know that every body type is different. I wrestled against young men whose muscle mass was twice mine. I played basketball against girls whose height dwarfed my own. Every day our kids play in environments that reflect the world around them, which is often seemingly unfair and filled with unwarranted obstacles. Coaches help young people build on their strengths and recognize that competitive advantage sometimes is not held within one’s body type. It may sound cliché, but it’s what’s inside that counts.

The trans girls’ sports ban approved on Monday by the Alaska School Activities Association Board of Directors is not about fairness. It is about fear-mongering about a very small group of very vulnerable kiddos who are simply trying to find a place to be safe and belong. It is about using kids as political pawns. By adopting a discriminatory policy against trans girls, they will continue to perpetuate a harmful stereotype. It is not okay to demonize kids, no matter who they are and how they present themselves. The trans girls’ sports ban is about codifying the fear and hate of a very few young girls. Girls whose lives our coaches know are at significant risk.

The policy change to high school sports in Alaska being put in place by the actions of the State Board of Education and the ASAA Board of Directors is part of a national campaign targeting transgender and gender-nonconforming people. These are some of the most vulnerable people in our society, especially those in their teen years, and it is unfathomable that they are now the target of state-mandated discrimination, bigotry, and bullying. This is discrimination and should be challenged in court.

Going forward, I hope the actions of the State Board of Education and the ASAA Board of Directors do not fundamentally change the role coaches play in the lives of young women. I implore coaches across the state to remember that you hold the precious lives of young girls in your hands. Young girls who are scared every day and who are threatened every day. Young girls need a champion, a safe space, and a trusted adult in their lives now more than ever before.

Stop the Kroger-Albertonss merger

Monopolies are bad. They stifle competition and keep wages low. That’s why I joined colleagues in the Alaska House and Senate in sending a letter to the Federal Trade Commission urging them to stop the pending $24.6 billion merger between two of the largest grocery suppliers in the country. The proposed merger between Kroger Company and Albertsons could result in the closing of 14 grocery stores in Alaska. Kroger owns 12 Fred Meyer stores in Alaska and Albertson's owns 35 Safeway stores in Alaska. In September, the companies said they would sell 413 stores across the country as part of the merger.

“The merger creates an opportunity for monopolistic practices and an environment that lacks competition, as these companies are Alaska’s two major grocery store chains. Alaska already has some of the highest grocery prices in the nation, especially in our more secluded and rural areas, connected only by air or water. We cannot, in good conscience, support unnecessary cost increases that place barriers on Alaskans’ ability to put food on the table.” - Excerpt from the letter sent by Sen. Tobin and other lawmakers to the Federal Trade Commission

A huge concern with the proposed Kroger-Albertsons merger is that it will further exacerbate the trend of closing grocery stores in moderate-income areas in favor of super-fancy stores that cater to those with higher incomes. That kind of business practice may be good for corporate profits but it is bad for people. My fear is that areas of Alaska and Anchorage that need a local grocery store the most will not be served well by a merger endorsed by corporate board members and not the check-out clerks and stockers that we depend on for our daily bread.

If you want to learn more about the proposed Kroger-Albertsons merger and the possible impacts on Alaska, I would recommend the article written by James Brooks for the Alaska Beacon. James delves into the last big grocery store purchase in Alaska that ended up with six closed stores.

My “read banned books” commentary has been published

(Last week, the following commentary was published in the Anchorage Daily News and the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman.)

As efforts intensify to remove books from libraries across Alaska, let me double down on this simple life ethos: Read banned books.

My earliest memories of being encouraged to read banned books come from selecting my take-home books for the week from the local library. My mother handed me a copy of “The Color Purple,” shortly after I had been called the n-word on the playground and was lost in frustration and confusion. Later, after my first menstrual cycle, my mother gave me a copy of the perennially banned book “My Body, My Self,” which helped me understand what exactly was taking place inside my quickly changing body.

Banned books have taught me that the good guys don’t always win — ”The Chocolate War” — and that some things are worth great sacrifice: ”The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” It is through banned books that I realized my own biases — ”Stranger in a Strange Land” — and challenged my own assumptions about the places in which I have lived: ”The House on Mango Street.”

We all know books create windows into unimaginably fantastical moments — ”Moby Dick” — and describe experiences so far removed from our own they seem almost mythical, such as ”Siddhartha.” We learn more about ourselves by what we choose to read, and we learn more about the world by what we are asked to read.

Reading “A Diary of Young Girl” as a family in middle school meant many late nights answering questions and explaining difficult and challenging topics. Reading “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” produced many tears and halting family stories. It is these moments that stay with me as an adult. Books elicit difficult and informative conversations that educate and teach about the way the world is, and often about how the world should be.

Now as an adult, it is my responsibility and privilege to pass along the knowledge I gleaned from my favorite books to future generations. To be one that helps answer difficult questions with transparency and humility. America’s nation-building did not happen without great harm and ignoring or preventing young minds from acquiring and learning from these truths is an abdication of our shared responsibility to honor those who came before us and give tools to those who come after us.

In America, the books and information allowed in our public institutions should not just reflect a small subset of our population or a chosen populist narrative. Books are meant to challenge us, to make us feel, and to help us grow. Read with your children and share books with your nieces and nephews. Spend an afternoon immersed in a classic novel. Get frustrated with a how-to book or pick up an autobiography and read about the absurdity of someone else’s life.

But whatever you do, don’t ban books. Don’t perpetuate the thing that we know does the greatest harm — ”Fahrenheit 451,” “Brave New World,” “1984.″

In 2008, I compiled a list of the top 50 books I believed every young person should read before they graduate high school. Over the years, many of the books on this list have been banned at one time or another. In honor of this year’s Banned Book Week, Oct. 1-7, let me re-share that list with you. My only oversight: “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison didn’t make the cut.

• “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain

• “Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman

• “The Good Earth” by Pearl S. Buck

• “Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank

• “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck

• “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison

• “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” by Malcolm X

• “Macbeth” by William Shakespeare

• “The Odyssey” by Homer

• “Romeo and Juliet” by William Shakespeare

• “The Crucible” by Arthur Miller

• “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

• “Paradise Lost” by John Milton

• “Stranger in A Strange Land” by Robert Heinlein

• “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee

• “The Iliad” by Homer

• “The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway

• “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville

• “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

• “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac

• “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou

• “1984″ by George Orwell

• “Animal Farm” by George Orwell

• “Of Mice and Men” by John Steinbeck

• “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding

• “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” by Harriet Beecher Stowe

• “The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne

• “As I Lay Dying” by William Faulkner

• “The Mayor of Casterbridge” by Thomas Hardy

• “The Painted Veil” by W. Somerset Maugham

• “The Giver” by Lois Lowry

• “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley

• “Fahrenheit 451″ by Ray Bradbury

• “Pygmalion” by George Bernard Shaw

• “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Bronte

• “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker

• “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

• “The Chocolate War” by Robert Cormier

• “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood

• “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• “The House on Mango Street” by Sandra Cisneros

• “Catch-22″ by Joseph Heller

• “A Farewell to Arms” by Ernest Hemingway

• “Siddhartha” by Herman Hesse

• “Black Like Me” by John Howard Griffin

• “A Raisin in the Sun” by Lorraine Hansberry

• “Death of a Salesman” by Arthur Miller

• “Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Beckett

• “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair

• “Schindler’s Ark” by Thomas Keneally