If You Build It, “They/Them” Will Come: The Misgendering of Transgender Nonbinary Athletes Is Discrimination on the Basis of Sex

This article provides necessary context to adequately engage in a discussion about transgender and nonbinary individuals, including defined terms. It then provides a brief history of Title IX, articulates the requirements for compliance with the statute, and discusses its application to transgender athletes. Next, this article provides an overview of Title VII of The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the recent statutory analysis of its prohibition on employment discrimination because of sex in Bostock v. Clayton County extends that analysis to the statutory language of Title IX, and summarizes the recent interpretation by the Department of Education applying that analysis to Title IX. The article then discusses the implications of the persistent misgendering of transgender nonbinary athletes and argues that only by allowing all athletes to compete as their true gender will the inclusive goals of Title IX be realized. The article concludes that the requirements for Title IX compliance are not inclusive of transgender nonbinary athletes and contradictory to the prohibition on discrimination on the basis of sex articulated by the statute itself. The article proposes several necessary changes to the language of those requirements for compliance and argues that the Department of Education must make changes in its interpretation toward more inclusive language to truly achieve the goals of Title IX.

Humanism in Red: A New Mainstream Narrative in the Pop Songs in 1980s' China

This is a preprint of an article accepted for publication in Oxford Handbook of the Music of China (Oxford University Press ) The articulation of humanism is a recurrent theme in various Chinese literature and arts over the history. One of such well-known cases is the classic novel Journey to the West (Xi you ji) dates from the 16 th Century which stresses the issues of freedom, fighting with the authorities, the loss of belief, and the importance of self-direction. Various adapted versions from this novel popular over since then which hinted strong desire to humanism expression under China’s tight central governance. The recent interpretation of nationwide impacted products is an online novel The Wu Kong’s Biography (Wukong zhuan, written by Zeng Yu, pseudonym Jin Hezai, 2000) which adding the ambitions to challenge the authorities, an imaginary compensation of the young people in China (Liao, 2017). The great popularity of the novel leads to the release of its film version Wu Kong in 2017. Even the theme song of this movie “Equaling Heaven” (music and sung by Hua Chenyu, lyrics by Jin Hezai) brings a real hit in Chinese popular music scene. It was performed by Tibetan singer Zahi Bingzuo, the 2017 winner of The Voice of China in his final song-battle in that show (Qian, 2017: 57-8) and then Hua Chenyu in the TV talent show Singer (Geshou) in 2018. The humanism articulation of the song, same as in the novels and movie, shown well in the song: When I were young and wild, were worthy of it, who would give me a belief? …I could still smile before dawn… ignore the fate decided by the god and I would say the fate follows my heart. 1 Humanist articulations are part of a trend in Chinese pop song that dates back to the 1980s, when that genre first reappeared as an indigenous entertainment genre within China itself. As a transitional phrase during which multiple pre-existing and newly emerging social

Moral peace and moral pleasure in the Analects

ABSTRACT This article examines Confucius’ ideas of moral peace (an 安) and moral pleasure (le 樂) in the Analects. It argues that an and le are two correlated aspects of a self-cultivated state of being (jing-jie 境界) that is grounded on practising benevolence or human-heartedness (ren 仁) and on following the Way (dao 道). The state of an-le involves not only one's reason (i.e., knowing ren and dao) and one's will (i.e., willing ren and dao), but also one's love or ‘emotional liking’ (hào 好) with respect to the practice of ren and dao. It is a state that resembles Kant's idea of intellectual contentment but, pace Philip Ivanhoe's recent interpretation of Confucius, it is different from Aristotle's concepts of pleasure and eudaimonia.

Does the Buddhist doctrine of non-self denies the concept of subject?

The object of this research is the Buddhist doctrine of non-self; while the subject is the content of this doctrine and its evolution with the course of time. Special attention is given to demonstration of the fact that initially the Anatta doctrine did not imply the denial of existence of the subject (self) as such. The author examines such aspects of the topic as the doctrine of non-self in the early Buddhism (Pāli Canon) and the problem of interpretation of the phenomenon of self in modern Buddhism, including by such cultural and philosophical figures as Ngawang Lobsang Tenzin Gyatso (14th Dalai Lama). The novelty of the conducted research consists in carrying out the first in Russia comprehensive study of Buddhist doctrine of non-self and outlining a new perspective on the problem. The author’s special contribution is lies in translations of the passages from Sutta dedicated to Anatmavada, which allowed formulating the fundamentally new conclusions. The following conclusions were made: 1) throughout history, Anatmavada underwent a difficult path from solely soteriological teaching that did not imply denial of self or subject to the open denial of subject in Buddhism of later period (the author sees recent interpretation of Anatmavada as incorrect); 2) two concepts of Anatta in early Buddhism can be determined: more common Anatmavada-2 and more “marginal” Anatmavada-1, which tends to denial of Anatta; 3) Anatmavada has evolved over the course of history from Anatmavada-2 to more nominalistic interpretations observed in the Buddhism of later period in form of the denial of self as such; 4) early Buddhism is not interested in ontological discourse on the existence of self; 5) Skandha in early Buddhism should be viewed from soteriological perspective – as a subject for meditation on the emergence, existence and elimination of certain moments of experience.

The Virtual Hand Illusion in Obesity: Dissociation Between Multisensory Interactions Supporting Illusory Experience and Self-Location Recalibration

The Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) is used widely to investigate the multisensory integration mechanisms that support bodily self-consciousness and, more specifically, body ownership and self-location. It has been reported that individuals affected by obesity show anomalous multisensory integration processes. We propose that these obesity-induced changes could lead to an unusual susceptibility to the RHI and anomalous bodily self-experience. To test this hypothesis, we administered a modified version of the RHI (using a picture of the participant’s hand) to individuals affected by obesity and participants with a healthy weight. During synchronous and asynchronous stimulation, we compared the subjective experience of the illusion (using a questionnaire) and the effect of the illusion on self-location (i.e., proprioceptive drift). In accordance with the illusion phenomenology, both groups had a comparable subjective illusory experience after the synchronous stimulation. Nevertheless, individuals affected by obesity showed less recalibration of self-location than healthy weight participants. In light of a recent interpretation of the multisensory integration mechanisms that underpin the RHI, our findings suggest that in obesity visuo-tactile integration supporting the subjective experience of the illusion is preserved, whereas visuo-proprioceptive integration for self-location is reduced.

Attributable Risk to Assess the Health Impact of Air Pollution: Advances, Controversies, State of the Art and Future Needs

Despite the increased attention given to the health impact assessment of air pollution and to the strategies to control it in both scientific literature and concrete interventions, the results of the implementations, especially those involving traffic, have not always been satisfactory and there is still disagreement about the most appropriate interventions and the methods to assess their effectiveness. This state-of-the-art article reviews the recent interpretation of the concepts that concern the impact assessment, and compares old and new measurements of attributable risk and attributable fraction. It also summarizes the ongoing discussion about the designs and methods for assessing the air pollution impact with particular attention to improvements due to spatio-temporal analysis and other new approaches, such as studying short term effects in cohorts, and the still discussed methods of predicting the values of attributable risk (AR). Finally, the study presents the more recent analytic perspectives and the methods for directly assessing the effects of not yet implemented interventions on air quality and health, in accordance with the suggestion in the strategic plan 2020−2025 from the Health Effect Institute.

The Enduring Kantian Presence in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy

Most commentators hold that Schopenhauer breaks with Kant’s transcendental idealism insofar as he identifies the thing-in-itself with “Will.” By contrast, in this chapter, the author argues that Schopenhauer’s system bears a complicated yet faithful relationship to Kant’s transcendental idealism. After examining an interesting, recent interpretation by Alistair Welchman that reads him in this transcendent way, the author argues for an alternative view: Schopenhauer’s identification of the thing-in-itself with “Will” should be understood as metonymic, and the metaphysics he offers should be understood as hermeneutic. In sum, he is not giving a transcendent metaphysical doctrine so much as an immanent “interpretation” of the inner meaning of the world—along the lines of an interpretation of the meaning of a work of art—and one that, by the lights of Schopenhauer’s own methodology, should stand or fall on the basis of how well it makes sense of the phenomena.

Exploring the Boundaries of Texts and Literary Cults

The essay focuses on the interrelated phenomena of literary cult and cultic text. Bearing on the conceptual ideas of Sergey Zenkin and Péter Dávidházi, we problematize the boundaries between text and cults on the example of two case studies. One has to do with a recent interpretation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a nineteenth-century bestseller novel that had a great impact on literary and political life of the United States in the antebellum period. David S. Reynolds argues that Ulyanov-Lenin’s escape from the Finnish mainland by breaking his way on the broken ice of the river to an island might have been inspired by Uncle Tom’s Cabin where a fugitive slave Eliza does exactly the same thing. This essay suggests seeing this random encounter of the East and the West, the fictional and the “real” not as а curious anecdote or coincidence but as a mechanism of inventing a cultic text. What happens when one of the prominent figures of the European historical narrative, the crown prince assassinated in 1914, reads the works of the Russian poet before the fatal day in Sarajevo? Milorad Pavić building his short story Prince Ferdinand Reads Pushkin upon recognizable allusions to Pushkin’s texts, highlights similarities and differences, the fatal and the accidental in the stories of the poet shot in the duel and the Austrian crown prince being a victim of an assassination — two intersective storylines that may be described as “isomorphic plots.”

The Archaeology of Population Dynamics

A critical evaluation of the recent interpretation of aDNA data that link the adoption of domesticated plants and animals across Europe with a migration of human populations from southwest Asia and the Aegean. These data have been used to question previous models that argued for the uptake of farming by indigenous hunter-gatherer populations.