The Supreme Court on Tuesday passed up a chance to intervene in the debate over bathrooms for transgender students, rejecting an appeal from an Indiana public school district.
Federal appeals courts are divided over whether school policies enforcing restrictions on which bathrooms transgender students can use violate federal law or the Constitution.
In the case the court rejected without comment, the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an order granting transgender boys access to the boys’ bathroom. The appeal came from the Metropolitan School District of Martinsville, about 30 miles (48 kilometers) southwest of Indianapolis.
Why would anyone care where people go the bathroom? Where do you think transsexuals have been going all these years? What nonsense.
Hey! I appreciate your support, trans rights are human rights!
In the future, could you please use transgender instead of transexual? The latter is a really dated term and ties a gender and societal issue to sexuality. While they may be closely associated, they’re not the same thing and any little bit helps break that association.
I’ve proven I can’t remember this kind of stuff, but I’ll try.
That’s how it’s done, people.
That’s all anyone can ask of you. It’s appreciated!
Good on you for working on it though!
You can also edit your comments, it would be preferred if you would change it so that you aren’t using what many of us consider a slur.
Would it not be better to leave it as is to teach others? Censoring serves no purpose here and it would prevent people from learning
You can edit in a cross out with two tildas ~ surrounding the word and put the correct word next to it if that’s your style. But it’s still somewhat akin to using the n word for some of us.
It’s not our word for how we describe ourselves/ what we transition for, when we transition, and it can have nothing to do with sex, mostly, we can be any sexuality.
That old language centers everything on the fact that people see us as sexual fetishes and not people. Transition is about gender, of which sex sometimes is not even a part, asexuality exists too. Thus the word transgender
Not disagreeing about the use of the word, just erasing a teaching moment. Fair enough regarding the editing choice though
And yet it’s still the most upvoted comment, keeping a slur up that hurts many trans people, but sure the teaching moment is more important than being inaccurate and insulting, but keep patting yourself on the back.
Alternatively you can collapse the comment and you no longer have to see it.
While this is true, editing posts to avoid controversy is weird. They wrote what they wrote and noone can change that. Can’t unsay something, too. This also makes this conversation difficult to read for future passerbys.
Seconded, transgender is more accurate and how we describe ourselves.
The one exception is older trans folk who use that label because it is the one that resonated with them when they were figuring themselves out. Despite the label’s history with transmedicalism some of the elders are not down to have their identities questioned by us younger folk and their experiences are valid.
Mostly true, but I am a transexual in my 30’s. I agree that trans is the best term to use for our community. But when I refer to myself transsexual is the term I use. Transgender is still accurate of course, but it doesn’t quite feel right as I talk about the differences between sex and gender to people.
But that’s just me, and you are absolutely right that everyone should use whatever term they are comfortable with.
Please forgive my error, I think you are the first I’ve personally met under 50 that has embraced the label. I must admit that there is a bit of me that twinges with the carrying on of it but also recognize that’s partially a me problem. Trans medicalism and the distinction of having to possess a fully changed physicality to be accepted by both outside and inside the trans community has traditionally been the hammer weilded by binary trans folk against the non-binary trans community as a “you’re not a REAL trans person” style accusation so it generally makes me personally a bit skittish hearing “trans sexual” from anyone my age or younger.
But it’s largely the fault of pressures that effect us all. When someone is under pressure to glean any amount of respectability to survive cracks form in solidarity and some will take the opportunity to point to the next person down the line that’s even harder to understand and go "Oh, I’m nothing look at them. Aren’t I just reasonable by comparison? " I think nowadays I see more growing solidarity inside the community than a decade ago but the memory of those divisions and the language used still makes me twitch.
But inside the non-binary trans community we have a similar bit of friction with people who use it/its pronouns… Like for a lot of us that is very VERY unwelcome because it has dehumanizing connotations but for some that is legit what they feel best supported by in their experience. I know some inside the group have the gut instinct to feel kind of undercut by that minority inside our minority for creating a “bad” example to the straights but the world is full of nuance and it can probably afford some extra.
It’s just unfortunate even when there’s a lot of us around in a place a lot of cis folk don’t know the very basics of what is common good practice versus what is kind of a special case. It drives the instinct to self police more then we should have to.
Please forgive my error, I think you are the first I’ve personally met under 50 that has embraced the label.
/phew I was a little worried that you would just tell me 30s count as old. 😉
But I understand completely where you are coming from, and let me just take a moment to entirely refute the entire concept of “truscum transmedaclist non binary erasure”, it’s gate keeping bigotry that has no basis in understanding of gender and just pure outdated hogwash. Very much not an ideology I agree with nor support. You are absolutely allowed to feel however you like about the term transexual, we all have our own personal history that comes with emotional responses. Yours are very understandable, and even if I couldn’t understand it, you would still be valid in those feels.
For me, this type of conversation comes up a lot around the term “queer”, which I prefer to use as a more encompassing alternative to LGBTQIA+ acronyms. But at the same time, I also recognize that there are people who have had the term applied to them in a defamatory way and I don’t blame em an inch for feeling reticent to reclaim the term for themselves.
At its core, it’s just the pedantic in me that feels like transexual is the best term to describe my body when I look in the mirror. I haven’t, and don’t have plans to, have any trans related surgery. But with my particular combination of secondary sexual traits, transsexual just feels “right”. However, I also know that because I haven’t had surgery there are transmedaclists out that will say I’m not a “real transexual” either. Far be for me to think I am any different from any other trans person, no one is more or less trans based off their medical history or diagnostic requirements and that is a terrible metric to use for identity. Much less identity policing of others.
Yeah no worries on the 30’s thing. I am pushing 40 and have actually had the “Ummm yaaa Aren’t you a little old to be a non-binary?” levied at me… Like it’s a fad for edgy teens and not something that I had to shelve for 20 years because I figured people would think me a loon for outwardly expressing because nobody talked about it.
I am lucky to be in a place were I have been able to meet older trans folk because the community where I am has been a stronghold of queer identities since before it was more widely accepted as cool. There is a bit of reverence inside the community to be had for anybody who survived the AIDS epidemic and the rough persecution of those times, particularly trans activists over 60 who have been out aince rocks were soft there maintains a “I eat roofing nails instead of cereal for breakfast and honey badger don’t give a shit” vibe about them. From that very select demographic “trans sexual” almost seems to have like a “badge of honor” status where heaven help the little shit who tries to call them “transgender” because they will turn you inside out with a stare and incinerate what’s left with words.
Like I have gotten some real bad enbyphobia off of one of them and have had secondhand warnings regarding others but the general concensus amoungst others in the Pride volunteer realm is kind of like they get a free pass.
I also prefer transexual and wish it hadn’t been discarded for transgender. Feels like a euphemism train, but transcending the idea of what gender I am, versus the boundaries of biological sex isn’t as strong of an idea or conceptual framework to me.
Apologies if this comes off as too explain-y and mentions some of what you already know. I am a queer history nerd and I don’t get many opportunities to trot this out.
A lot of the reasoning of the shift to transgender came with the transition away from focusing on the strict sexual characteristics of the people involved. Trans sexual was seen as either implying heavily the medical involvement of alteration of sexual characteristics was always the intended goal or defining factor that disqualified people from being properly trans or referenced the highly discredited and now generally considered transphobic connotation of someone being sexually attracted to the characteristics of the opposite sex so much that they they treat transition as a fetish which had “moral” considerations. Basically the whole auto ando/gynophillia stuff. They varied their approach based on whether they thought you were in it for kink and were generally more lenient if you were trying to model what they considered heterosexual norms.
Gender was selected as the more blanket friendly term which applies to how someone self conceptualizes themselves. This does include in it’s definition gender euphoria and dysphoria so by it’s definition it featureshow one feels about their personal physical sexual characteristics… It just places zero emphasis on how one chooses to respond to those forces leaving the door more open to a wider range of different transition presentations including purely social ones.
It’s less a euphemism and more a widening and restructuring to shake up the old harmful preconceptions that existed in old DSMs…it also had a particular historic use for trans people.
Functionally some of the lesser known history is it had a temporary practical purpose of providing red flags for patients of medical and psychiatric professionals who remained out of date to the rather durastic changes to the DSM that retired notions of sexuallity and attraction as a set of Freudianeque assumptions to the underpinning of behaviour that happened between 1990 and 2013. Basically if the doc was still using the term trans sexual you knew they were probably making a lot of their recommendations and limiting your choices based on whom you were sexually attracted to. If you knew your doc was not keeping upto date it gave you some level of personal advocating power in a system regularly stacked against trans patients.
Regardless of how one personally feels about the term it is not a euphemism.
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I think this is goofy. More than half my life I’ve heard the word transexual and I certainly don’t think it’s offensive.
Because you are old. Also this is to help young people understand better. We will not convince the fossils.
Retard used to be the nice word back in the day. Language evolves and people suck. It can be difficult to accept both.
I prefer transexual if I’m honest though, Transgender feels flimsier. I’m not trying to transcend the idea of what gender you see, I’m trying to transcend the boundaries of biological sex
That is implicitly more powerful to me.
Yeah a transexual sounds more like someone who is sexually attracted to transgender people.
The actual word for that is Skoliosexual…
( weak and offkey GI Joe theme played on a kazoo as I melt back into the internet)
OkCupid has a definition that means someone who wants to align their gender to a biological sex through medical intervention.
They have a whole
fantasyconspiracy they’ve cooked up where we’re sneaking in to women’s restrooms to do human trafficking and dark web revenge porn and shit.And that’s the typical projection of the conservatives who revealed that they would do that if they had the ability.
If a trans man sneaks into the boys room, everybody in the room spontaneously turns gay.
If a trans woman sneaks into the girls room, it’s a lesbian orgy.
I don’t make the facts.
I think a bigger concern are regular men using this as an excuse to creep on women in bathrooms.
At least that’s what I hear women saying. They’re afraid of men using their restrooms.
It’s so much easier for a cis man to say he’s a trans man than for a cis man to dress as a woman and try to pass as a trans woman.
Not saying you haven’t, but I’ve never once heard a woman afraid of men creeping on women in the bathroom. But I’m curious, aside from someone outside the bathroom doors either checking genitals or birth certificates, how exactly would enforcement of a bathroom bill work?
Cis woman here, I not only have never been afraid of the possibility that a man might enter the woman’s bathroom, if I ever encountered a man in the woman’s bathroom I’d just assume they accidentally went in the wrong one or maybe it was a dad taking his daughter in or something similarly innocuous.
I really hope all trans women can feel safe one day entering the women’s room (and trans men with the men’s room) so they can use it in peace. Bathroom policers can fuck all the way off.
They don’t think we’ve been around for years.
I’m reading this super awesome book called “before we were trans” That kind of goes over the history of gender non-conformity and transgender identities. It’s fucking amazing
I don’t have anything to back it up but I think it’s a large group’s correlation between trans/gay == pedophilia. When I was a kid, my mom(southern baptist republican) didn’t differentiate between gay people and illegal sexual activity like molestation(this was in the 80s). If my mom had been told that a guy that viewed himself as a girl wanted to use the girl’s restroom, she would have immediately decided it was because he wanted to do something terrible to the girls.
I think the main reason for that is because her God told her gay people were going to hell… It made it easy for her to view them as evil.
They don’t believe transexuals exist.
Worse: they are expending huge amounts of tax dollars over the right to act in a discriminatory way.
It’s frustrating to hear comments about “trans people” or “gay people” or whatever other identifier they choose, the conversation is never about treating them like people. The way they speak would make more sense if they were talking about a stray dog than an actual feeling, thinking person.
Trans folk are the newest “others,” though it seems that others basket is getting quite full lately.
Anytime someone in power says anything about needing to protect you from others, they are purposely sowing discord. It is the speaker that is trying to direct your anger away from them and unto the others.
Everyone is capable of being awesome and assholes. No identifying characteristic makes one anymore likely to be an asshole.
Yeah, fuck your genitals, show me how big your dookies are! Who’s gonna help me start a petition to build a national weekly poopie scoreboard? USA! USA! USA! USA!
Username checks out…
Women don’t like going to the bathroom with men.
They tolerate it on campgrounds, but not places of business that they frequent often.
You keep saying this, but you don’t speak for all women. I am a woman who does not care one flying fuck if the other ladies in the restroom were born with a penis, a vagina, or some variation thereof. I care much more about whether they flush & wipe the seat.
I’m certain you’re not conflating trans with violent, right?? Or sticking up for people who do?
Absolutely, but the barrier is not coming from men who don’t want to share restrooms with women.
No, actually, as transfem the only time anyone ever confronted me about the bathroom I used was a man before I switched. Evidently I was freaking guys out at the urinals 😅
I’m a woman and I don’t care. I’ve been in the bathroom with men before and even had a nice conversation with them. Do I not exist? Who gave you the rights to speak on behalf of all women everywhere?
I specified women because there is not a significant amount of men who are vocal about being opposed to sharing restrooms with women.
If you listen to women, many of them are legitimately afraid of sharing bathrooms with men. I think it’s unfair to pretend their concerns don’t exist just because you don’t share them.
It’s not like we watch each other pee? It’s not the men’s room.
I think it’s more of a safety concern mixed with sexism.
I’ve come across women that flat-out say they are more afraid of men on average and try to avoid them if possible.
One in four women face sexual violence. I get it.
It sure would be nice if they’d stop to consider how women like me would feel to be forced to be surrounded by men in the men’s restroom.
I’m 100% a supporter of trans right to use the bathroom of their gender.
There is a reason that bathrooms are separated by gender.
So if you can’t understand why people who don’t believe trans people exist are upset that people are using the wrong restroom, you’re just like the people who can’t understand that trans people exist: it’s a lack of being able to see beyond your own self and understand the position of others. While I strongly disagree with them, their position is not very complicated and easy to understand.
I dont think there’s any need to give the benefit of the doubt to these people anymore. You might argue they believe LGBTQ people shouldn’t exist, and I might believe you, but I tend to think their main motivation is just stirring up anger and resentment against the “other side”.
If people were concerned about privacy or safety, the us would have single user bathrooms or at least stalls that didn’t have 1in gaps around the doors (my 90s high school didn’t have stall doors at all, and in some bathrooms didn’t even have stalls, just a toilet next to the sink in the locker room). The same people aren’t upset about those things, because they don’t actually care about any of this.
I dont think there’s any need to give the benefit of the doubt to these people anymore.
It’s troubling how often I come across the opinion now that one is free to believe the worst of anyone they want.
There is a reason that bathrooms are separated by gender.
And that is?
Awkward conversation at the urinal is a male dominated sport?
There are urinals for women! They look kinda interesting. Not terribly common, but they are out there.
The history of gendered bathrooms is no secret, if this is a good faith question, the answer is easily researched.
If it’s so easy to find, then why don’t you tell me? Or can you not find it?
I know it and can find it. Howeve, I also don’t believe it to be a good faith question, and this response further confirms that suspicion.
In the case the court rejected without comment, the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an order granting transgender boys access to the boys’ bathroom.
So, meanwhile, transgender individuals win. At least that’s something. 👍🏻
With any luck, this will hold untill the rest of the nation follows suit.
Only in those circuits where the court has allowed students to use the bathroom of choice. There are several circuits that voted to deny this. Your rights now depend on where you live in the country until either the SCOTUS one days takes it up or some sort of Title IX changes force it.
With this court the country might be better off without them weighing in. Those fucks are likely to make it so the whole country has even more hostile laws.
Wouldn’t want to reveal any bigotry during an election year.
Have you ever seen an election year?
Revealing the bigotry is basically the point. Trump talked about immigrants poisoning the blood of the country and it made him more popular.
If he gets even more than 74 million votes this year, I’m going to shit a whole pallet of bricks
Pretty sure they don’t give a shit about revealing bigotry when ever they feel like it. In fact it’s a feature for the right
I wish there were more non-gendered restrooms.
The one’s I’ve been to usually has shared sinks and has stalls that fully enclosed, as in you can’t look under the stall. Most restrooms in the US, you can see under the stall in front and from an adjacent stall.
And the urinals is usually in a separate area of the restrooms.
This, these are the best bathrooms anyways. I’d rather not listen to someone on the phone with someone else while using the restroom, lol. Animals, man.
I think the reason we don’t have separate toilet rooms is because people would use them to shoot up and businesses don’t want that.
Problem is women don’t want to go to the bathroom with men.
My highschool did gender neutral restrooms well over a decade ago, and had been doing it for years. (Mostly, it was an old building, and there weren’t enough restrooms to make them all gendered and separate). Everyone had their own enclosed bathroom, with real walls and real doors. It worked fine. Better than fine, as the students were tasked with cleaning the entire school, so nobody tried to destroy the restrooms as some other group of students would have to clean it up. New students got used to it in about 15 minutes, and it wasn’t a topic of discussion throughout HS. This was well before the culture wars though.
as the students were tasked with cleaning the entire school
What, as in they did the job of the cleaners?
I personally have no issue with making students clean their schools. It teaches them responsibility, proper cleaning habits, and respect for public spaces. A kid should know how to scrub a toilet, sweep, take out trash, and not soil a public space.
Honestly think that should be standard. Can always hire cleaners to use more powerful equipment and to clean up after sick kids and whatnot.
Well depends on the type of cleaning and the chemical use.
Picking up trash might be okay, but cleaning washrooms?? That’s not only expose them to harmful chemicals but also require training and proper ware which is a job that you need to get paid for.
Making sure the classroom is tidy and in a respectable state at the end of the day, absolutely. But it’s not the schools responsibility to teach them those things, it’s on the parents.
Essentially, yes. They still had cleaners, but the students were primarily responsible for cleaning. They’d form groups with students from grades 6-12, and a teacher as the leader, and each team would be responsible for things like a classroom, a public area, the school grounds, etc. So nobody wanted to mess up the school because everyone was responsible for keeping it in order. It was usually a half hour 2-3 times a week, and the school was kept remarkably clean and damage-free.
If you’ve ever been at a sports stadium when the women’s line is incredibly long and the men’s line is short, you’ll find plenty of women who miraculously discover a love of gender neutrality.
The fear that most people have - and I’ve seen this as common among women as men, particularly when you invoke Gay Panic - is of sexual assault. And in a country, like the US, which seems to be either unwilling or unable to discourage sexual assault via public policy, there’s a real anxiety for lots of people whenever they use any kind of public restroom.
There was a very similar outcry back during the 60s, when Jim Crow was struck down and bathrooms were racially integrated. You had certain people show extreme distress at the prospect of sharing a lavatory with some of a different race. And, as a consequence, we got a lot of suburban white flight and de facto segregation through modern day red-lining and private security harassment. There was a whole thing during the 80s, where black people trying to use restrooms in private malls (particularly in the South) would be harassed, expelled, and even arrested under nakedly untrue claims of shoplifting. Bunch of News Hour TV shows made a big stink about it for a long time.
But the idea that “women just don’t want to” is heavily overstated. A lot of this anxiety is manufactured. A lot more has far less to do with gender generally speaking and more to do with the individual’s personal experiences.
When you ban trans women from women’s bathrooms you’re opening them to trans men and all a cis man has to do is say “no worries, I’m a trans man, don’t mind the beard.”
You make it EASIER for men to infiltrate women’s bathrooms.
You make it EASIER for men to infiltrate women’s bathrooms.
It is comically easy to enter a woman’s restroom. There is often not even a door in the way. If a man wants to walk in, the only thing keeping him out is peer pressure from the women inside.
What I’ve seen from the trans-panic isn’t women somehow better policing their restrooms from men. What I’ve seen is women trying to clock other women, and harassing - even to the point of physical assault - anyone who doesn’t “look womanly” enough for their tastes.
Case in point, a video of a woman being dragged out of a restroom by police because she was dressed too boyishly.
Here’s another case of a woman who was “clocked” and harassed while using the restroom in a Danbury, NC Walmart. Her pixie cut and baseball cap was enough to provoke another patron into going apeshit.
asking for ID to go to the washroom is to protect people’s “privacy.”
WTF
If the lower courts are divided, isn’t it the job of the Supreme Court to make it clear?
They kinda have made it clear though. By rejecting the appeal, they’re saying that the 7th Circuit Court’s decision stands.
Except the
FourthEleventh Circuit went the other direction with an almost identical Florida school policy, so the question of “Is it ok under the US Constitution for schools to force transgender students to use a particular bathroom?” has a different answer depending on where you live, which is the exact kind of thing the Supreme Court is supposed to deal with.e; Whoops, had the wrong court and wrong case. That’s been updated now, but for the record here’s the older case I had been linking to
Yeah, well, SCOTUS hasn’t ever been real good at upholding the spirit of the 14th Amendment. I can reel off a long long list of things that SHOULD be the same no matter where you live but somehow aren’t.
This article you linked - it gives good reasons why a circuit split is not a problem here. I support trans rights - as I assume you do - but don’t think your point is as well-made as you thought.
Ah, that was the wrong article looking at an older court case, here’s the correct and more recent one,
Isn’t the Florida case in alignment with the Chicago one? The courts ruled for the transgender kid in both.
Turns out I linked the wrong Florida case, here’s the one I meant to post
Except that they aren’t overriding the other courts, so really they are saying that it’s up to every circuit to set their own standard.
They’re basically saying it’s grey when trying to apply the constitution to the issue, giving regions their own jurisdiction. It’s how it’s supposed to work, like it or not.
But circuit judges are appointed federally, by the president. They’re not voted on regionally, so they do not represent the will of the region they preside over.
Typically, yes. Now, not so much.
They’re saving all their energy for the upcoming craziness if/when Trump is elected President while in prison.
“Legal precedent would make it almost impossible for us to avoid standing up for a transgender person if we took this case and we couldn’t possibly have that.”
I thought they’ve made it clear that they don’t believe in precedent
Of course it’s southern indiana. 100‰ regressive region bordering 100% regressive states.
I hate my state.
upheld an order granting transgender boys access to the boys’ bathroom.
Why is it only focusing on 1 gender?
Probably because the lawsuit was filed on behalf of a transgender boy.
The case originally required John R. Wooden Middle School in Martinsville to allow a seventh-grader identified only as A.C. to have access to the restroom while litigation continued.
I wonder why the Pope told them to take a pass for now.
Always think its odd they want someone like this or this in the women’s washroom…
Ultimately, what it boils down to is that they want to force trans people to de-transition, go back into the closet, and hopefully kill themselves. The pain and aggravation caused by these stupid bathroom laws is quite literally the point.
The cruelty is the point… They don’t want us to exist
It’s really fucking stressful being under a bathroom law. There aren’t correct choices. It’s supposed to be either committing a misdemeanor or getting the shit kicked out of you.
I’m really sorry you’re going through that. It sucks, and I can only hope that as the future inevitably progresses, things improve.
My son is trans (FtM). We’re lucky to live in a sane state that doesn’t have this bathroom bill garbage. But my heart goes out to those that do.
It’s like killing yourself because in physics they teach v=s/t instead of v=ds/dt. Cruelty. Clearly, v=s/t doesn’t work.
I really don’t get it. If you have a penis you would like to use a urinal. If you don’t you wouldn’t.
Stand to pee devices exist and are pretty common. Some people have prosthetic set-ups. Some folks have even had bottom surgery and can stand. Not to hard to use a urinal, although I’ve never used a men’s bathroom that didn’t have a stall in it.
The cruelty is that I am a man. I have about two inches of beard and a mat of chest hair that peeks through a t-shirt. I’m not out at work, I’m not out at restaurants, I’m not out really in any setting that doesn’t require me being nekkid. Requiring me to use the women’s bathroom because I don’t have a penis would require me to cause a massive scene - am I supposed to drop my pants to prove I’m in the “correct” restroom? My drivers license says male on it, do I need to carry around my birth certificate to use the bathroom?
Your physics example is extremely poorly formed. I’ve taught physics for years and have no idea what you’re trying to convey.
How is it possible that you have beard without men genitals?
I’ve been taking testosterone injections for roughly ten years. They are prescribed to me, I inject myself in the thigh once a week. I experienced male puberty. My voice cracked and dropped. I slowly developed stubble that developed into a terrible patchy beard, and with time the ability to grow a fairly decent one.
It’s entirely possible to have a beard without injections or testicles - conditions like PCOS can cause fluctuations in hormone levels. Some women are just naturally hairy, human bodies are complicated 🤷♂️
That’s a slippery slope.
Most of the women I see who have an opinion on this are afraid of men sharing their bathrooms. They have a legitimate fear of men that borders on and often crosses over into sexism.
Trans women aren’t men, and every time I see someone insist that their anecdotal reports of women terrified that the bathroom stall next to them might contain a trans woman, they invariably fail to cough up any actual statistics on it. Maybe you’ll be different.
In any event, this is someone born with a vagina:
Do you think that person should use the women’s restroom?
So we should give cis women’s imaginations more rights than trans women’s real health and safety?
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