We Can't Choose How We're Made

I'm going to hide what is possibly the most important thing I've ever written in between countless baseball posts with no readership. Well, second most important. It's a reading exercise. Read this, this and then this. It's a lot of reading; the first one is at least twice as long as it needs to be. But if you make it through and have no problem with the sequence of events detailed within, we can't be friends. I check Grantland pretty much every weekday, because their sports coverage is thought provoking and informative, and their pop culture coverage is so pretentious and asinine it makes me feel good about listening to twenty-year-old alternarock, watching the same old syndicated cartoons until I've memorized every episode of The Simpsons, American Dad, and King of the Hill, and playing my Playstation 2. But continuing to read them after this is going to be tough for me. None of what happened is OK. Admitting ignorance and vowing to improve is a great first step, but for me it's too little too late. If you don't get it and you know someone in the trans community, ask them why it's not OK. I think they'll say what I'm about to say right here: the idea of outing a trans person without their or their family's consent is beyond the goddamn pale and I can live without Steven Hyden and Bill Barnwell. Maybe I'll sneak a Jonah Keri every now and then, because fuck it, I love baseball and Jonah's the best. If you just don't care about this, that's alright. There's plenty of stuff I don't care about. But it means we can't be friends. Again, I wish I could be nicer about this. But I wish- no, I fucking beseech whatever gods exist, have existed, and will exist- that everyone could be smarter about this.