Caitlin Clark has generated tons of interest in women’s basketball because of her long-range shooting and deft passing. She’s been likened to Golden State Warriors great Stephen Curry, and that comparison ain’t crazy...that’s how special Clark is.
Epidemiologists have long been concerned that a type of influenza that mainly infects birds, called H5N1, could develop into the next pandemic. So far it has infected relatively few humans but has been devastating to wildlife in local incidents. So far it lacks the ability to attach easily to most human cells and to be transmitted human to human. But it is an influenza virus, and its cousins have those abilities.
Now it is being found in dairy cows in the US. The map above shows the states in which it has been confirmed. Additionally, virus particles have been found in milk in stores. Emphasize “particles.” These are pieces of virus that have been deactivated by pasteurization. (Another of the many reasons to avoid unpasteurized milk, if you’re inclined that way.) No live virus has been cultured from store milk.
The USDA, CDC, and FDA gave a closed briefing today. Eric Topol was there and reports.
Here are the key points:
Confirmation of H5N1 infected dairy cattle herds in 8 states. But the FDA report yesterday of commerical milk PCR positivity strongly supports that the cattle spread is far wider than these 8 states. Important to emphasize that (PCR) is testing for remnants of virus, not live virus, which would be unlikely with pasteurization. Other tests, assessing potential evidence for any live virus (egg viability and culture), are to be reported by the FDA going forward. Limited culture tests are all negative to date for any live virus in milk.
From the great work of U Arizona evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey who (heroically) analyzed the 239 H5N1 sequences that were released Sunday night for the first time, it was likely a single initiation of transmission from bird to cows. USDA stated they believe teh outbreak in dairy cattle in the US began in late 2023, initially inTexas.
There is confirmation from sequencing of cattle to cattle and cattle to poultry back transmission. Also there is confirmation of asymptomatic dairy cattle with H5N1 infections but the extent of testing is unclear. The cows that have been infected appear to have a mild illness lasting about 2 weeks with discoloration of their milk. More information on the natural history of illness in cows and the proportion who remain asymptomatic are needed. The only documented human case to date was a dairy worker through direct contact that resulted in conjunctivitis.
For the readiness plan in case human transmission does occur, the public officials asserted that Tamiflu would be effective and it has been stockpiled, that gearing up testing would be done and, if necessary, the US could fully shift its annual flu vaccine production to make H5N1 shots at scale. They have 2 candidate H5N1 vaccines in hand that are well matched to the current sequence and there is the possibility to augment vaccine supply via mRNA-nanoparticle production. Nicely summarized by Helen Branswell at STATnews here.It appears very unlikely, but the more the H5N1 is spread unchecked, the bigger the reservoirs and chances for further functional mutations to take hold. So better to plan for a worst case scenario.
A Federal order was put out this morning to mandate testing and reporting of cattle infected, measures to avoid further spread.
Routine testing of pigs, which is important due to their potential facilitation of spread to humans, has been negative to date. To date, data we have are based on dairy cattle; little is known or available about beef cattle, but occupational exposure notifications have been put out to dairy farms and slaughterhouses.
In the US, one person, a farm worker, has been infected with the virus, which caused conjunctivitis (“pink eye”). It’s good to see the federal agencies getting on this and getting information out.
Oh hey, do you know what time it is? It is highly specific resource time!
Today we have the Royal School of Needlework Stitch Bank! There are HUNDREDS of stitch types in the RSN Stitch Bank.
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And more added regularly, let’s look at a recent addition
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I picked the first one in the 25 recently added Elizabethan stitches, the Elizabethan French Stitch
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The stitch bank provides written and photo tutorials as well as a video option to learn to do it yourself. There are examples of the stitch in use, resources, references, everything but a needle and thread!
I looked at some of the tutorials last night and holy shit I’m so impressed! They’re SO thorough! Not only do they have written and video instructions, but there are photo and illustration options for each image AND a “flip view” button so that left handed people can see all the images in reverse!
When Barnard junior – and former Teen Vogue cover star – Isra Hirsi, 21, tweeted on April 18 she was suspended for her involvement in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University, I immediately headed uptown so we could talk about the suspension. While I was on the subway, she stopped responding. Columbia students launched the encampment in the center of campus at 4 a.m. on Wednesday April 17, timed to a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism featuring Columbia University President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik. Though her mother, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), would go on to make noteworthy contributions at the hearing, Hirsi was otherwise occupied with the occupation.
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Social media posts showed that during that same 1 p.m. block on Thursday, Shafik emailed the Columbia University community, informing them that she had officially told the New York Police Department to enter campus and dismantle the encampment. Isra, fellow Barnard junior Soph Askanase, and Barnard freshman Maryam Iqbal were the first to receive suspensions at the encampment; the three were arrested alongside over 100 students in the 20 minutes it took me to get into Columbia’s campus — past the police officers, campus security, additional hired Allied Universal private security, media, and protesters swarming the locked gates. (Despite the heavy security presence, NYPD Chief John Chell later told the Columbia Spectator that the students “offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner.")
That Thursday, Columbia became one of the nation’s trending topics, and Hirsi in particular caught intense heat, though not for the first time, as a longtime advocate on social justice issues. After her release, Hirsi faced being evicted from her dorm and inflamed social media backlash — much of which, she says, is based on “misunderstanding” and “misrepresentation.” Simultaneously, pro-Palestine campus encampments in solidarity with Columbia’s were popping up across the country, from Miami University in Ohio to the University of North Carolina to Yale. We met on Saturday at Morningside Park, 48 hours after her arrest.
This conversation was condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Teen Vogue: Should we start at the beginning of the encampment Wednesday, or with the suspensions and arrests Thursday?
Isra Hirsi: I think there's some misunderstanding of what the camp was and what was happening in the camp. There's been a lot of assumptions about whether it was peaceful or not. Wednesday we set up at the crack of dawn. By the time the student body was awake, we had people watching, people supporting. We had faculty come and talk to us, we had a teach-in from a professor who was at Columbia during 1968.
It was a really beautiful community space; so many people providing donations, food, blankets. We had such an amazing crowd come and join us Wednesday night, which was so powerful and also made the camp feel stronger. We had had a very core group of folks who understood the risks, and then having that number grow alleviated a lot of our stress. We felt like we weren't alone.
TV: Who do you think is misrepresenting the encampment?
IH: In my suspension email that I received on Thursday morning, which has to do with what happened on Wednesday, it says that the school has to “ensure the students’ own physical or emotional safety and well-being, or if the student poses an ongoing threat of disruption of, or interference with, the normal operation of the College” — and to clarify, what happened was not at [Barnard] College, it’s at the university, and also was outside, so I don't really know how we were disrupting campus life. I think that those are misrepresentations. The university's president has been trying to state that this is a massive disruption, rather than what I would say is a community building space. (Teen Vogue reached out to Columbia University and Barnard College for comment.)
TV: All this was happening on Wednesday, while your mother was speaking at the Congressional hearing regarding your school, which people acted like was a big shock after news broke of your suspension.
IH: It was public information. It's pretty obvious. She tweeted congratulating me. On the internet you can easily find what university I go to, so I'm a little bit confused, especially because she is a free speech advocate and has always been, has always fought for the rights of students. But I mean, of course she was upset; I was sprayed with the [alleged] chemical weapons [in January], I was directly impacted, a lot of my own friends were hospitalized, and she was aware of that. It is personal for her.
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TV: Were you following along with the hearing, or was that not possible, given the encampment?
IH: Yeah, I was. It is a Republican-controlled committee, so I was waiting to find out when she was gonna go on. We all were hearing about the students that were not being let into the Congressional hearing, so that was mostly the only thing we were paying attention to. Our biggest concern while this was happening was the thought of an imminent sweep. At that moment of time, we were really focused on survival and maintaining the crowd.
TV: At this point the cops haven’t come in, right?
IH: The police did not enter until literally the moment we were arrested. They had been outside of campus for a very long period of time, especially because of the solidarity actions happening outside, and they had been prepping; we had seen riot cops multiple times. But yeah, they did not enter until 1:30 on Thursday.
TV: So Thursday morning, you wake up in the camp.
IH: I woke up at 9 am. I was helping with security, standing by the door to see who enters and exits. If folks wanted to join us, we would have to give them the spiel of like, “do you know the risks?” as informed consent. I was walking around doing that, trying to get a meal, then me, Soph, and Maryam received the email at 10:23 am. At that moment, we made an announcement to the camp – because there were an overwhelming amount of Barnard students at camp – and let them know that we had been basically evicted and not allowed into our space, but also officially suspended.
From there, we ended up talking to school newspapers, then there was a support rally we spoke at, and then right after that rally had formally ended, we got notice that they were about to come in. We got into our formation, which was two concentric circles, linked arms, and prepared for arrest. That's when the police came onto the lawns and issued the LRAD and gave us our warnings. They kicked off all the press, they arrested our legal observers, and then they then arrested us. (Teen Vogue reached out to the NYPD for comment.)
From there I went to the correctional bus. It took about an hour for us to even get off the bus, and then I didn't enter One [Police Plaza] for another two hours, I was in the back of the line. Then when you got in it was an even longer process, because we had so many people who were born [assigned] female in our group that they didn't have enough space for us. It was a very slow process in getting everybody into the cells. I was zip-tied for about seven hours and wasn't released for about eight. So that was Thursday, and then we left and everybody was waiting for us at jail support. I got out, I think, between 9 and 9:30 pm.
TV: And you were charged with trespassing?
IH: Yes. The legal [National Lawyers Guild] observers got harder misdemeanor charges, “obstruction of governmental administration.”
TV: But you got out and couldn’t go back to your dorm.
IH: Honestly that was my biggest concern. Me and Maryam are the only ones that live in the dorms, and we were suspended pretty early, so we knew that we were not allowed to get back. When I got to 1 Police Plaza, my roommates had brought me a bag of clothes because they knew that I was likely evicted. We were reading our email and it said we had 15 minutes to go get our shit if we wanted it, and we'd have to go with a public safety escort. I was like, I'm not going to do that. But I was a little bit frantic, like, where am I going to sleep? Where am I gonna go? And also all of my shit is thrown in a random lot. It’s pretty horrible.
Have you seen the photo they showed to the desk attendants? The “no entry” photo? Maryam posted hers on Twitter, SJP posted mine. I live in a building where professors also live, and a lot of the professors that live in our buildings are in [Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine], so I reached out to them before I got out of jail like, can you guys please talk to desk attendants in my building? They were like, can we bring her in as our guest, anything? And they were like no, essentially. They also showed that [no entry] photo to every single public safety officer at Barnard and sent it to all my professors, so I kind of have no option.
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TV: Are you formally banned from campus?
IH: The language isn't “banned,” the language is I don't “have swipe access.” For the Columbia students that were suspended, their language says that if you are found on campus you will receive more disciplinary action, but ours doesn't say that. And also, in my email, it doesn't explicitly say what else I have violated. [...]
I don't know when I can go home, and I don't know if I ever will be able to. I haven't formally been evicted. I haven't been sent a “move out” email, but they've just said that I can't get in, whatever that means. I have like four shirts, two pairs of pants. Only Barnard students are evicted, and I think it's pretty crazy.
I cannot go to the dining hall. I sent them an email like, “Hey, I rely on campus for my meals, I rely on my dining plan,” and they were like, Oh, you can come pick up a prepackaged bag of food, a full 48 hours after I was suspended. There was no food support, no nothing. The Columbia students still have access to a dining hall and to their homes; they can't go anywhere else, but they can go home and to one dining hall.
TV: Why do you think it’s going differently for Barnard students?
IH: I think it's really on a school-by-school basis, and Barnard has decided to take a very egregious stand against us. I think that they feel like there isn't a big limelight on them right now and that they have the ability to do this, because Shafik was on the congressional stage and is actively being harassed about what she's doing, versus [Barnard president] Laura Rosenbury has the ability to skirt what's going on. She's not the one sending the correspondence, it's all College Dean [Leslie] Grinage.
It is really confusing and concerning, especially because the majority of the Barnard students are femme-identifying.... A lot of them are staking out in their dorms right now because they haven't been kicked out. We've told them the best option is not to leave, the minute they leave, they can't get back in.
TV: So what next?
IH: Genuinely we have no clue. Our interim suspension is contingent on what happens at our hearings, which has not been set. They told us that we would receive a date by Monday at noon, so I'm basically at least houseless until then. …
They are literally starting a 15 minute timer if you go and try to get your stuff. I know Maryam did it; I refused, I'm not going to subject myself to that. One of my professors went and tried to retrieve a student's belongings and public safety treated her like complete shit as well, like the student was a criminal. It's not the fault of public safety, but it's egregious to make them enforce such cop-like procedures, this is not in their purview. [...]
TV: How has the last week’s focus on Columbia felt?
IH: A lot of us are grateful that people are paying attention and noticing how severe our campus repression has been, but it has been a little bit frustrating to focus on Columbia over the focus of what is even happening in Gaza. The whole point of the encampment was to shed light on Columbia's complicity in genocide and to focus back on the folks in Gaza, so a big thing for all of us is trying to redirect the language.
We will [also] be donating as much as we can, after all the suspended students have been supported, to Gaza. We know that we don't need this much money. Things for the camp are being purchased, but our big thing is so many Barnard undergrads have no food, so it's our first thing.
It is very difficult being evicted and not having access to our homes; so many of the PhD students are [being threatened with] losing their jobs. These are all detrimental and horrible things, but alhamdulillah we are all still here and alive and have roofs over our heads, despite it all. People have supported us. Shifting the focus, I think that's what the encampment is trying to do right now. We're holding it down, but we're holding it down for Gaza, not just because of the folks that have been suspended; and the repression is explicitly because of the fact that we were fighting for ending the war in Gaza. That also is really important to remember.
TV: Leading up to the Congressional hearing and continuing now, people have made accusations calling you all “terrorists.”
IH: Columbia is the one supporting the purchasing of weapons [through their investments]; that's what we do not want.
It's really frustrating, because when we were arrested, we were literally sitting in a circle singing songs, sharing a meal together. I think it is really egregious of them to completely misrepresent what was happening and have the audacity to call us things like terrorists. We are students at this university and many of us pay thousands of dollars to go here. There's a reason why we felt the need to take this escalation: It's because we do not feel heard, despite the numerous actions that we've been holding all year long. What else did they expect us to do? Stay silent?
TV: People are now tweeting about your public politics, as if you haven’t been public about them for a long time.
IH: This is why I get off Twitter; every three months when I was in high school, I would get crazy dogpiled. What's the point? You guys can be mad about the hammer and sickle [emoji in my bio]; then what? I've had that in my bio for what feels like four years, so I'm confused why everybody cares so much. This is not news.
When I got into Barnard, [people] tried to get me kicked out of Barnard because of my politics. Multiple donors called. What's crazy is despite all of this shit I was getting online, Barnard College told me that they were here for me, and they were willing to support me despite it all. Public Safety met with me on my first day, at move-in, and were like, we're here for you, we care about you. It feels like it's been all thrown out the window, the minute you do something that makes them look bad.
The commie thing is really, I think, a little bit silly. They're really honing in on it. But it makes it easier for them to call me a terrorist, so I kind of get it for that reason.
TV: How does it feel re-entering the public conversation like this?
IH: I was not a target at this university. Everybody knew that my mother had a child here, but not everybody was tuned into who I was, so I had the ability to lay low in my organizing; but this has really blown that up. Now I feel a little bit too hypervisible. I have been really re-thinking my own safety and what it looks like to be a student that just has so many eyes on them right now. I knew this was going to happen, I just had no idea the scale. When I got out of 1 [Police Plaza] it felt like paparazzi, the amount of flashes in my face. It's such a surreal experience.
It was really intentional for me to take that step back. It's really difficult being hypervisible, but I've taken that time for myself, to focus on my local organizing, my campus organizing. I've been mentally preparing myself for this for this moment, and I'm pretty okay with it, I'm pretty ready. It's just a really big reality check about my own positionality.
TV: In terms of your vulnerability?
IH: Yes. And also realizing I've been able to be a little bit delusional in thinking nobody knows who I am, and that's just not true. I've been able to have a wake up call and be like, oh, like, right, I can't just disappear, people are intrigued by my mother and what I have to do.
One of the weird things about bodies is that so very many people seem to have them, and yet not all of them are the same! This is something relatively recently discovered by such luminaries as NASA rocket scientists:
525,600 tampons. How do you measure a trip into space?
The details and implications of this knowledge are still being debated. But one interesting thing that happened along the way is that, according to The Atlantic, doctors started to realize that the questions that they asked FtM folk when they began therapy that artificially changed their hormone levels were not at all the same questions that they asked cis women going through spontaneous hormone changes at menopause.
Marci Bowers thought she understood menopause. Whenever she saw a patient in her 40s or 50s, she knew to ask about things such as hot flashes, vaginal dryness, mood swings, and memory problems. And no matter what a patient’s concern was, Bowers almost always ended up prescribing the same thing. “Our answer was always estrogen,” she told me.
Then in the mid-2000s, Bowers took over a gender-affirmation surgical practice in Colorado. In her new role, she began consultations by asking each patient what they wanted from their body—a question she’d never been trained to ask menopausal women. Over time, she grew comfortable bringing up tricky topics such as pleasure, desire, and sexuality, and prescribing testosterone as well as estrogen. That’s when she realized: Women in menopause were getting short shrift.
Menopause, for the uninitiated, is not merely relief from monthly bleeding. It’s a whole damn thing affecting more organs than you knew you had. And the transition from a stable adult menstrual cycle to a stable post-menopausal body state can be long and chaotic and affect far more than anyone has bothered to research. Kind of like menstruation itself! And while it’s caused to some significant degree by changes in estrogen, neither is that the only cause nor is replacing estrogen the only cure.
Bodies are highly individual things, almost like each person has their own version and it’s not the same as any other. Mind you, this has caused some distress for the medical profession, which has a history of very much wanting to square humans’ pegs and holes, regardless of the harm this might do. Recently, it seems, doctors have even become aware that hacking at the bodies of others in order to maintain binary illusions of an oppressive society may, in fact, be somewhat less than the ethical best practice.
As a result of all this exposure to radical trans antifa, BLM-HRT, police-defunding, highway- and puberty-blocking activists, a few doctors have been questioning a binary or two their own selves.
Although clinicians lack high-quality research on the role of testosterone in women over age 65, they know that in premenopausal women, it plays a role in bone density, heart health, metabolism, cognition, and the function of the ovaries and bladder. A 2022 review concluded, “Testosterone is a vital hormone in women in maintaining sexual health and function” after menopause.
Yet for decades, standard menopause care mostly would mostly pass over androgens. Interest in testosterone therapy has only begun rising—and rapidly—within the last 10 to 15 years. (Nota bene: the lack of research on testosterone use by perimenopausal women was not cited by the NHS as a reason to shut down such “experimental” prescriptions. This is our shocked face.)
There are more barriers than lack of research, however. It turns out that getting cis women comfortable with taking testosterone is not always easy even when it would be medically helpful, for they sometimes think the doctors are calling them trans for the temerity of ceasing menstruation:
[Cis women] have to get used to the idea of taking a hormone they’ve been told all their lives is for men, at just the time when their femininity can feel most tenuous […but…] taking testosterone wouldn’t change a menopause patient’s gender identity.
And patients are not the only ones struggling with holistic care for bodies that produce lots of hormones to varying degrees. Pharmacists, too, have a hard time believing leavening estrogen therapies with a bit of testosterone is kosher:
Some of [Dr. Kelly] Casperson’s female patients have had their testosterone prescription withheld by pharmacists; one was asked if she was undergoing gender transition.
While rapid-onset vaginal dryness has been observed as a side effect of even small doses of Ben Shapiro, the Cooties Hypothesis asserting social transmission of perimenopausal sexual symptoms seems unlikely to go viral, and there is as yet no movement to withhold testosterone from 52-year-old cis women for Baby Jesus and Western Civilization.
What does this all mean?
It means that trans people fighting for the medical establishment to take their care seriously has knock-up effects for cis health, and thus the more doctors get comfortable with trans lives, the better cis women’s care. Queer cis women, too, have benefited straight cis women’s care by challenging assumptions that what women want is too obvious to bother actually asking women. After centuries ignoring women’s desire, The Atlantic reports doctors are beginning conversations with
“Tell me about your sexuality. Tell me, are you happy with that? How long does it take you to orgasm? Do you masturbate? What do you use?”
And the benefits go both ways: trans men who experience menopause as a result of hormone therapy can now benefit from topical vaginal estrogen cremes originally developed to relieve dryness and vaginal pain during straight, menopausal women’s penetrative sex. (Though given the historical lack of conversation about cis women’s desire, it’s likely that these cremes were developed more with an eye towards the benefits to cis het men who didn’t like being turned down.)
This isn’t the only benefit either. Doctors have recently been studying menstruation and fertility in FtM folks taking testosterone, and to the surprise of many a third still ovulated. This should not have been news as testosterone isn’t birth control. Indeed it was tried decades ago to poor effect. And yet this was news in trans communities.
Why don’t we already know these things, study these things, talk about these things?
Part of the problem is that society insists on treating different communities as entirely separate, even when that’s radically inappropriate. And society does this in ways more hypocritic than hippocratic. For decades drug manufacturers would only include cis men in clinical trials of medicines because female bodies were considered a confound and male-bodied trans people were considered to have a confounding illness, even though there was no reason to think that a medicine would know your gender identity and function differently because of that. Yet after trials, manufacturers wanted their drugs prescribed to everyone as if they had been found safe and effective for every body. Even today the safety of many drugs for fetuses or pregnancies or female fertility has gone unstudied, yet the drugs are still prescribed for people who are or may become pregnant, with barely (and not always) an “ask your doctor if” warning.
But they’ve taken the opposite approach when the benefits might flow to patients instead of investors: anti-trans fuckfaces continually insist that puberty blockers have not been proven safe for trans children going through puberty. Yet these are old and well-tested drugs. And yet, the Cass Review is right there, insisting that bone density development during the years of postponed puberty must be studied before puberty blockers can be considered safe for adolescents diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Scotland has even decided to ban the use of puberty blockers until the age of 18, which Yr Wonkette thinks we can all agree misses the point of “puberty blocker” by rather a large margin.
We have said before that trans rights are reproductive rights, and that we are all in this together, and we are not the only ones to notice. Sad Brown Girl writes, “Despite the ongoing rhetorical battles over how trans people should be included in discussions of abortion, the link is unambiguous for those seeking the end of both: as goes abortion, so too transition, and vice versa.”
The Vatican on Monday declared gender-affirming surgery and surrogacy as grave violations of human dignity, putting them on par with abortion and euthanasia as practices that it said reject God’s plan for human life. […]
[Pope Francis] has also denounced “gender theory” as the “worst danger” facing humanity today.
Yr Wonkette does not pretend to know whether asking someone what name they prefer is worse than climate change burning Canada to death and choking New York City on the ash, but we do know that the Pope is unlikely to be factoring in the benefits to straight cis women’s sex lives that accrue when all of us, regardless of gender, are treated as whole, complex people who deserve healthy bodies and happy lives.
Yr Wonkette does not pretend to know whether asking someone what name they prefer is worse than climate change burning Canada to death and choking New York City on the ash, but we do know that the Pope is unlikely to be factoring in the benefits to straight cis women’s sex lives that accrue when all of us, regardless of gender, are treated as whole, complex people who deserve healthy bodies and happy lives.
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