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Ken Jennings sets the record straight
(imgur.com)
FYI, Sesame Street went public-private in 2016 when they signed a deal with HBO to fund new episodes which then were permitted to air on PBS several months later.
In Dec 2024, HBO/Max called the deal off and effectively cancelled the show. Now they’re shopping for a new home and, with the threats of PBS funding cuts, the notion of returning to PBS is in question.
So basically the showrunners of Sesame Street are at least partially responsible for the corner they painted themselves into here.
The article is paywalled. Here’s the text:
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California tried to make trans people’s lives easier. It unwittingly opened a backdoor to harassment
By Sara Libby,
Politics Editor
May 8, 2025
The first plaintiff in a lawsuit seeking to bar transgender athletes from college sports is someone known only as “Swimmer A.”
Keeping that person’s identity anonymous was critical, lawyers argued in the suit, “because she is currently enrolled at and attending an NCAA institution and reasonably fears retribution” for challenging the rules.
Pages later, the lawsuit treats another athlete much differently.
It doesn’t just identify San Jose State University volleyball player Blaire Fleming by name — who at that point was not publicly out as transgender — it goes into detail about her life, from her injuries to the number of sets she recorded on the volleyball team the previous season (61). Some details, like her bruising 80 mph spikes, appear to be made up out of thin air.
This dichotomy between Swimmer A and Fleming got me thinking about who is and who isn’t entitled to the protection of anonymity in California. How can mudslingers stay hidden while those with the most to lose have their lives ripped apart in public?
It turns out state lawmakers recently stumbled into this question as well, ironically, because of their desire to help transgender people live more authentically.
The state in recent years has made it easier for transgender and nonbinary people to change their gender and sex identifier on their official documents. Unfortunately, those efforts appear to have opened a backdoor to harassment.
The process for updating identification documents enables virtually anyone to access a trove of information about the person requesting the change. Under the current rules, anyone seeking to update their driver’s license and other IDs must obtain a court order. That court record, which contains their home address, former name and gender and new name and gender, is public. While it’s possible to seal those records, it’s up to individual judges whether to OK such a request.
This has given bad actors a state-sponsored tool to identify and out transgender residents.
Now, two bills making their way through the California Legislature would make it harder to exploit loopholes like these. SB59 by state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, would make records regarding a person’s change of gender or sex identifier confidential. SB497, also by Wiener, would lock down access to sensitive health data to prevent other states from punishing patients who obtain gender-affirming care or abortion care in California.
“These are just human beings who are just living their lives and trying to be who they are, and there’s this slanderous narrative that trans people are all trying to scam their way into women’s spaces, and they’re faking it and they’re predators,” Wiener told me.
A description of one of the bills posted by Real Impact, an anti-trans Christian advocacy group, gives away the game: “The bill also makes sure that records from past petitions are kept private. If someone violates these privacy rules, the person who was harmed can take legal (action).”
The group inadvertently acknowledges that forced outing harms its targets, and that Wiener’s efforts would provide a mechanism to address those harms.
Fleming, the SJSU volleyball player, told the New York Times last month that the ordeal was “the darkest time” in her life and that she “felt suicidal” as it was happening. Meanwhile, her teammate, Brooke Slusser, has insisted she was entitled to deeply personal information about Fleming simply by virtue of being on the same team.
“At no point during Brooke’s recruitment from the University of Alabama or during the 2023 volleyball season did SJSU or Fleming advise Brooke that Fleming is a male,” Slusser complains in the lawsuit.
Yet every day, we operate out in the world among other people whose politics, biases, health conditions and bodies don’t match our own. Many people go to college precisely for that exposure.
But in our current moment those differences can spell danger for some.
President Donald Trump’s recent executive orders targeting trans people don’t simply deny the existence of transgender and nonbinary people. They insist transgender people have a “corrosive impact” on society and pose a threat to women; doctors who provide gender-affirming care are guilty of “chemical and surgical mutilation” and being a military service member who identifies as transgender “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle.”
These disturbing characterizations have given Trump’s supporters implicit permission to demand to know whether someone around them is transgender.
Nonprofits that serve transgender communities, including several based in the Bay Area, are suing the Trump administration over some of those executive orders.
Michael Munson, executive director of Forge, a Wisconsin-based nonprofit that serves transgender and nonbinary survivors of violence, said in a recent court declaration “transgender people reached out in a panicked state asking for support on how they can update their identity documents and asking what harm could be done if they apply for name or gender changes.”
During a recent training the group held, Forge leaders noticed something unusual: The vast majority of participants would provide only their first name.
Meanwhile, a lawyer testifying in support of Wiener’s SB59 drove home how justified those fears can be.
After her client, known in court records as M.T., went through the legal process to change her gender and name, the documents appeared publicly online, including her private medical records and contact information.
A court initially denied her request to seal the records, but the state Court of Appeal reversed that decision and found that “whether a transgender person's gender identity conforms with their assigned sex at birth is intimate personal information entitled to protection under the right to privacy.”
But for M.T., the damage was already done. She was outed on social media as transgender and subjected to harassing messages. Someone called her employer and revealed her identity there, too. She was fired soon after.
Whether those disclosures were made by one person or multiple people, it’s impossible to know: They remain anonymous.
Reach Sara Libby at sara.libby@sfchronicle.com