From Drawing Rooms to Hyperplanes: Listening, Truth, and the Work of Defending Human Dignity

In Emma, by Jane Austen, Mr. Knightley tells Emma that he said to himself that even Emma would think that Harriet Smith and John Martin were a good match. Emma asserts that Martin is her societal inferior. Mr. Knightly questions how it could be a degradation to her illegitimacy and ignorance to be married to a respectable, gentleman farmer.

Looking back on her interactions with Mr. Elton, Emma assures herself that his manners must have been unmarked, wavering, or doubtful for her to be misled in his intentions. She questions who could possibly have seen through his “thick-headed nonsense.” She had frequently thought that is actions toward her were unnecessarily gallant.

Mr Frank Churchill, Mrs Weston, and Emma walk directly to Highbury. Frank is delighted with everything, and begs to be shown the house in which his father had long lived.

When Emma later enters a little sitting-room, it seems to be tranquility personified. Frank, busy, has yet to wear a happy outlook on his face. He tells Emma that she caught him trying to be useful.

 Emma considers it a sad trade to have her father opposed to her instead of his brother. Mr. Woodhouse is quite at ease with an event they planned. The day of the party, Mr. Knightly tells Miss Fairfax that he hoped she didn’t venture too far in the rain.

January 9th and 10th was the board retreat for the ACLU of Utah. It was my first to preside over as President. I am incredibly grateful to the Executive Driector and staff for helping put this together. We had a board and staff get together at Casot on 1500 E Friday afternoon, and I was encouraged by all the mingling that was occuring. I had some wonderful conversations with board and staff members.

Saturday morning, we started the retreat off with everyone’s homework assignment. Everyone was asked to discuss a bill of right, consitutional amendment, or supreme court case that they felt were impactful and gave them meaning. I shared how the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was valuable to me. For me it represented the right to equality and inclusion. The most important thing to my wife was Equality. Without equality, many groups of people can be and often are relegated as outcasts, and not free to have the opportunities to live up to their full potential as human beings. There followed an incredible presentation on all the valuable amendments, and rights that we need to protect and why we need to protect them.

We didn't make it two weeks into the year, and already a woman has been murdered in Minnesota while attempting to clear the way for ICE agents. The right-wing media tried to spin it as if she were trying to run over an ICE agent, based on video from the agent. They tried to spin it as a justified shooting in defense. Deeper analysis shows it was not, thanks to the multitude of simultaneous recordings by people who had shown up to warn of ICE’s presence in their neighborhoods.

The agents were harassing the lesbian couple and the ICE agent that shot the driver had walked around the vehicle filming the situation from his perspective with his cell phone in his right hand. As he cleared the front of the vehicle, the driver having already turned her wheels to the right, and started to pull forward. At that point, he fumbled his camera to his left hand as he drew and fired at the driver who had just said that she was not mad at them. He called her a “fuckin’ bitch,” and failed to render assistance after he shot her when he was not in the right to escalate violence. In addition, the other ICE agents eventually called 911 and refused the assistance of a physician who was nearby. It took 6 minutes for the paramedics to get there. The driver’s death is a gross misjustice, and points out the evil that is being perpretated on our citizens.

I replied to a Facebook post by the congresswoman who created a bill to stop all gender affirming care for children. I added my voice to others indicating that this would cause more harm than good, that no minor receives gender confirmation surgery, the earliest age that cross-sex hormone treatment is given is at 16, and that puberty blockers only suppress puberty for adolescents who are struggling with their body. It gives them time to deal with their issues and decide whether they want to continue to transition or resume their natal hormones. I also pointed out the effects of puberty blockers are completely reversible.

The accusations were pouring in that this was abuse to children, and that puberty blockers were used to chemically castrate incarcerated people. One person even suggested that trans kids were being recruited, which is absolutely ridiculous. No one chooses to be transgender; life would be so much easier if we weren’t. But the fact is there are some people who suffer chronic anxiety or depression because of a mismatch of natal hormones and the hypothalamus receptors. I gave them a portion of my own story as an example and how suppressing testosterone helped with my anxiety. People started calling me sir, and one person suggested I should be given the same treatment as the woman who was murdered in Minnesota. I reported the latter response as bullying. Another person pointed out that Lupron, the preferred hormonal suppressant was permanent because it was used to chemically castrate inmates. Besides the fact that I consider involuntary medical procedures unethical, I did a little research and discovered that three to four months after stopping Lupron, hormonal levels return to normal. It is not permanent castration when used for a brief period. I shared this information with the person who was worried about castration. Following that, another individual shared a detransition Facebook group of videos of people who repeated all the “harms” of transitioning, including lower bone density. The latter is the easiest to address. There are over the counter vitamin D and calcium supplements that are widely available. When one of my doctors noticed my lowered bone density, which was due to a lifetime of lower than normal testosterone and negiglible estrogen, I was advised to start taking the supplements. It was literally no big deal.

There is a lot of misinformation out there and it is fueling a lot of bullying and hateful speech toward people who want to share the part of the story that is not told, what researchers, medical professionals, and scientists have found. Physical gender dysphoria is caused by a brain/hormonal mismatch. If you try to operate on the brain, you kill the individual. It is far better to enable them to live full productive lives in a culture that seeks to understand and support what a particular individual needs, rather than to harm that individual based on an opinion of the masses which has been deliberately fed by misinformation.

There is some concern that all this legislation against transgender individuals is paving the way for genocide of transgender people. I certainly hope that it is not the case. I began my transition nearly 18 years ago, am better off for it, and still have no regrets. Neither am I trying to “recruit” people to be trans. I don’t abuse youth. I have two daughters of my own, and four step granchildren. Whatever they need, I feel they should have. I want what’s best for the next generation, whatever that may be. I only ask that people are truly listened to before they are judged, especially when it comes to personal medical decisions, which, frankly, is nobody else’s business but their own.

Anil Ananthaswamy, in Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI, shares how in 1991, Vladimir Vapnik wanted Bernhard Boser to implement the algorithm detailed in Remark No. 4, “Methods for Constructing an Optimal Separating Hyperplane,” found in the addendum, “Remarks About Algorithms” in his seminal book Estimation of Dependencies Based on Empirical Data. In an infinity of separating hyperplanes, some are better than others. Ananthaswamy depicts a perfectly valid hyperplane based on an initial set of data on which a percepton is trained.

Marvin Minsky missed the point when he surmised that multilayer neural networks perhaps couldn’t do anything that single-layer networks couldn’t. In the 1970s, backprop couldn’t possible have been developed empirically. Hopfield started with an artifical neuron that was part Roseblatt’s perceptron and part McCulloch-Pitts Neuron.

Anil Ananthasamy describes how George Cybenko felt like a rock star. Being held up as the person who had hampered deep learning was a misunderstanding of what he had done. To answer what Cybenko did that brought him celebrity status in deep learning and caused others to joke how its deletrious effect, the author jumps into the time line of neural network research.

Google AI is turning out to be a cool tool. Instead of attempting to scan the Utah legislative database, I let Google’s AI agent tell me which bills are impacting the LGBTQ+ community, and there are a lot. The community, particularly the transgender community is under siege:

Key 2026 Legislation

• HB183 (Gender Identity and Sex Revisions): Described by advocates as one of the most far-reaching bills, it seeks to replace the term "gender" with "sex" throughout state law. Its provisions include:

  • Removing "gender identity" from anti-discrimination protections for housing and employment.

  • Banning the changing of sex designations on birth certificates.

  • Prohibiting school districts and Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS)-licensed providers from assigning transgender employees to roles interacting with children.

  • Requiring courts in child custody cases to favor parents who do not support a child's transgender identity.

• HB196 (Renaming Harvey Milk Boulevard): This bill would grant the state authority to rename locally owned roads to override municipal decisions. It specifically targets Salt Lake City's Harvey Milk Boulevard (900 South), seeking to rename it Charlie Kirk Boulevard.

• HB174 (Tapering Transgender Medical Care): This bill requires healthcare professionals currently providing cross-sex hormones or puberty blockers to minors to begin tapering patients off those treatments. There is also a corresponding effort to convert the state's existing moratorium on such care into a permanent ban.

• HB193 (Public Funding Ban): This proposal would ban the use of public funds for transgender-affirming medical procedures.

• HB114 (Drag Show Restrictions): This bill seeks to restrict and criminalize drag performances in public spaces or in the presence of minors.

• HB95 (Public Employee Speech): This bill would prohibit any disciplinary consequences for public employees, including teachers, who refuse to recognize an individual's gender identity

  
  

The following is the negative impact of these bills:

1. Systematic Erasure of Legal Identity

• HB183 (Sex Designation Amendments): Critics argue this bill effectively "erases" transgender people from state law by replacing the word "gender" with "sex" in anti-discrimination statutes.

• Loss of Protections: By removing "gender identity" from anti-discrimination laws, the bill would "green light" the ability to discriminate against the transgender community in housing and employment.

• Birth Certificate Bans: It prohibits individuals from amending the sex designation on their birth certificates, which can lead to harassment when presenting inaccurate IDs for jobs or travel.

2. Threats to Livelihood and Employment

• Workplace Restrictions (HB183): The bill prohibits state-licensed providers (including hospitals, mental health facilities, and foster care) from assigning transgender employees to roles involving face-to-face contact with children.

• Impact on Teachers: Educators could be barred from teaching or interacting with students for more than five minutes if they "present" as a sex different from their biological sex.

3. Medical and Health Consequences

• Forced Medical Tapering (HB174): This bill would force doctors to taper minors off existing gender-affirming treatments, which medical experts warn can cause severe mental health distress and physical harm.

• Loss of Care: Advocacy groups state these measures ignore medical consensus and violate the rights of parents and youth to access necessary healthcare.

4. Impact on Families and Children

• Child Custody (HB183): Courts would be required to favor parents who do not support a child's transgender identity, which advocates say undermines parental rights and potentially places children in unsupportive environments.

• Social and Mental Health: Continuous legislative targeting has created a "demoralizing and exhausting" atmosphere for LGBTQ+ youth, contributing to a "hostile environment" and increased "fear and anxiety".

5. Social and Cultural Marginalization

• Symbolic Erasure (HB196): Renaming Harvey Milk Boulevard to honor a conservative activist is viewed by Salt Lake City leaders and Equality Utah as a "cruel" and "petty" culture-war gesture intended to provoke the community.

• Criminalization of Performance (HB114): Banning drag shows in public spaces would criminalize a form of artistic expression central to LGBTQ+ culture, further pushing the community out of the public eye.

• Unchecked Misgendering (HB95): Protecting public employees who refuse to use a person’s correct name or pronouns can lead to a lack of safety and dignity for students and staff in public institutions.

Yesterday, we had a fairly brief Central Committee meeting for the Salt Lake County Democratic Party. The main business was to elect a new first vice chair. Before and after the meeting, candidates were tabling at the event, giving committee members an opportunity to meet with them. I also had a former board member expressing interest in coming back to board of the Utah Stonewall Dems.

Today’s Queer Connect was at the Left Fork Grill, and we had a pretty good turnout. Overall, sixteen people attended, a number we haven’t see in awhile. They filled the long table set aside by the restaurant.

The price of fish has skyrocketed lately. $28 for fish dinner appears to be the norm. I had the turkey reuben with fries. The small platter was still $15. Things are certainly not getting affordable; in fact, it’s quite the contrary.

I let the attendees know that according to Google AI, there are six bills that have been filed that impact the LGBTQ+ community for the legislative session that starts in a couple of days. I told them that I still have to cross-reference the bills, just in case any of them were hallucinations. I also told them how they could use the legislative website to get automatic notifications for when the bills were headed to committee so that they would know when they could testify.

I also reminded them how important caucus night is. With Caucus Night scheduled for St. Patrick’s Day, we need to make sure that we are electing delegates that will nominate candidates that will fight for the caucus’s values. A couple of the candidates asked about our endorsement process, and which events they would attend to ask for our endorsement. For one of the candidates, it was the Salt Lake County Convention. for the other it will be the Utah State Convention.

From Austen’s drawing rooms to modern board retreats, from neural networks to neighborhood organizing, the throughline in all of this is the same: progress depends on our willingness to look past easy assumptions and actually engage with reality as it is. Whether we are evaluating a match, a model, a medical decision, or a piece of legislation, truth emerges only when we listen, verify, and center human dignity over fear. Misinformation thrives when people disengage; justice advances when they lean in. The work ahead—protecting civil liberties, defending marginalized communities, and safeguarding democratic processes—will require curiosity, courage, and sustained participation. That means reading the bills, showing up to caucus night, challenging false narratives, and standing with those whose lives are treated as abstractions by others. The future is shaped not by those who are loudest, but by those who are attentive, informed, and willing to act.