Just a reminder, if a man were to become unconscious in a women's sorority, he would wake up with a warm blanket and a cup of water next to him. [paraphrased from tt]

Northeast Portland's The Sports Bra, the women's sports bar on NE Broadway, has spent two weeks as the target of a manufactured fight.

It started on September 6. A group of five patrons was asked to leave The Sports Bra after other bargoers were made uncomfortable by their apparel. The shirts were from XX-XY Athletics, a brand built on the slogan that sex is binary and that women's sports should be sorted by chromosomes rather than gender identity. A staff member told the group there were people uncomfortable with the shirts and asked them to leave, saying that if authorities had to be called to remove them, they would be. One of the group, Amy Sousa, filmed the exchange and posted it. The footage passed 6 million views on X. That same day, Sousa and seven others were removed from a Portland Thorns match at Providence Park, with security citing an NWSL code of conduct infraction. Group with 'XX-XY' apparel kicked out of Portland OR's Sports Bra bar, Thorns match +3

From there it escalated on cue. About seven demonstrators gathered across the street from the bar on September 11 to protest the decision, and more than 30 counterprotesters, including members of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, showed up in response. The two sides traded chants along Northeast Broadway before the confrontation moved into a nearby parking lot. Transgender rights activists accused conservative livestreamer Thomas Allen and people with him of spraying a chemical irritant at demonstrators and entering a nearby grocery store while carrying weapons. Police arrived around 5:45 p.m., directed both groups away from traffic, reviewed two complaints about irritant spray, cited insufficient probable cause to arrest anyone, and reported no injuries. Portland women’s sports bar clash draws police after ‘XX-X +3

It happened again today. A counterprotest group gathered outside the bar on Sunday afternoon in response to a reported anti-trans demonstration, with about a dozen people standing across the street to protest the bar's decision. KOIN.com

The shape of it is worth stating plainly. A private business enforced its own dress code. That decision was filmed, clipped, and handed to a national audience primed to be angry about it. The protests followed the camera. They did not come first.

There is a tell in who is angry about this. A few years ago the right to refuse service was a conservative cause. When a Colorado baker declined to make a cake for a gay couple's wedding, the same broad coalition now protesting The Sports Bra defended it's right not to be compelled to endorse a message they disagreed with, and the prior it took the Supreme Court to do it. A bar asking patrons to cover a message it disagrees with is that same principle pointed the other way. The anger was never about the principle. It is about who is holding it this time.

Now the shirts.

"XX-XY" is meant to read as settled science. Two chromosome pairs, two sexes, nothing further to discuss. The trouble is that the people wearing it are claiming a certainty that human biology does not have.

Start with how many people are not the karyotype they assume they are and never find out. Klinefelter syndrome, an extra X producing XXY, occurs in roughly 1 in 500 to 1,000 births assigned male, and most cases are never diagnosed. XYY occurs at a similar rate and usually goes unnoticed for an entire lifetime. Triple X, an extra X in someone who develops as female, shows up around 1 in 1,000 and is likewise usually silent. A person can carry any of these, live an ordinary life, and die without ever once having had a reason to get a chromosome test.

Then there are the cases where the chromosomes and the body point in opposite directions. In Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, a person has XY chromosomes but their cells cannot respond to testosterone. They develop as female, are raised as girls, and frequently do not learn their karyotype until puberty fails to arrive or a fertility workup turns it up. Swyer syndrome is another XY-female presentation. Running the other way, de la Chapelle syndrome produces XX males, because the actual trigger for male development is a single gene called SRY, which normally rides on the Y but can end up translocated onto an X.

The most self-assured alpha male in the room could be carrying XX chromosomes and never know it. That is documented biology, not a thought experiment. there's a 1 in 500 chance that maybe even one of the people wearing those shirts is.

That is the error at the root of the slogan. The Y chromosome is not what makes someone male. SRY and the hormonal cascade it sets off are, and both can and do come apart from the chromosomes they usually travel with. Sex has at least four layers that can disagree with each other: chromosomal, gonadal, hormonal, and anatomical. For most people the layers line up. For a real and countable number of people, they do not.

None of this means most people aren't XX or XY. They can be. It means the slogan takes a layered biological opinion and prints it as a clean two-box sorting problem, then wears the mistake on its chest as though it were a credential. The people most sure that sex is simple are, as a rule, the ones who have never had cause to look at how it works.

Grow up. Get a life. And think next time you deny someone a wedding cake over their sexual orientation. It only makes you look hypocritical when you then freak out about being denied over a t-shirt you shouldn't have worn somewhere you knew it wasn't welcome.

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TO BE CLEAR: For the people that do not understand that there ARE LIMITS TO FREE SPEECH.

They were on private property. Freedom of speech means they can express that opinion right up until the property owner tells them to leave. That's the whole legality of it, and it cuts exactly one way. The First Amendment stops the government from punishing them for the message. It says nothing about the bar. A bar is private property and a business open to the public, and the owner decides what happens inside it.

So yes, they got to wear their dumb shirts. Nobody arrested them. Free speech worked. And then they got a response, which is also free speech: the bar asking them to leave.

Both sides are exercising the exact same right. The difference is whose property they're standing on. Once the owner says go, the shirts don't buy them another second inside. Staying isn't speech anymore, it's trespassing, and legally they were required to leave.

By this insane logic that "freedom of speech" is some magic cure-all for your sick opinions, I could walk into your home, get in your face about everything I think, and you COULDN'T REMOVE ME. My shirt is speech, my mouth is speech, so you have to host me indefinitely. Obviously insane. Your home is yours. You'd throw me out in about four seconds and every court in the country would back you. A gay bar telling bigots to leave is the same act, on the same legal footing.

That's what makes this take so dumb. It doesn't defend free speech, it inverts it. "The bar has to put up with them" would mean forcing a private owner to host a message they don't agree with. That's not protecting the First Amendment, it's violating it, just pointed at the bar instead of the bigots.

The people crying free speech are demanding the one thing free speech actually forbids: compelled hosting of speech on someone else's property.

A grand jury indicted her, and she risks jail...

I'm just... so tired of all this. I was just happy to find that thread on bluesky, to find anyone willing to point out how insane this situation is.

There are these really good videos from Schmod3r and Ophie Dokie as well, and I wish they got more views.

But yeah... fuck.