Friday, September 17 to Sunday, September 19, this on-line event requires advance registration

Please join us for the 13th Annual TransOhio Trans and Ally Symposium, which will take place, virtually, Friday, September 17 to Sunday, September 19. The theme this year is “Into the Unknown.”

Providers Day: Friday, September 17, 2021

Providers Day is specifically directed towards providers of the greater trans and nonbinary communities. Continuing education credits are offered for qualifying medical and legal professionals at no additional cost. Keynote speaker Dr. Kyl Myers will join us after lunch to share their perspective on gender creative parenting, as well as to give insight and spark meaningful dialog about how we can better care for our transgender youth here in Ohio and beyond.

General Symposium: Saturday, September 18, 2021

The Ohio State University is Columbus’s most well-known landmark. Its national prominence stems primarily from its major, largely male sports teams, with Wexner Medical Center a distant second. Beyond the sports news, one of the nation’s half-dozen largest public universities attracts little attention.  

The Dr. Richard Strauss sexual abuse scandal and alleged misuse of endowment funds at Moritz College of Law – and OSU’s responses – begin to shed light on the unusually opaque institution. This essay is a call for much-needed scrutiny and transparency. After all, OSU is a public university. 

Athletics – and the unbridled quest for championships – dominate all other aspects of OSU, despite its declining revenues. It does not benefit the academic domain. Regardless of financial strains, salaries and perks of the athletic director and head football and basketball coaches only grow, outpacing faculty and staff rates of increase. Passionate Buckeye fans have little interest in OSU as a teaching and research center.  

A recent New York Times op-ed was perhaps the strangest, most awkward and tentative defense of the military-industrial complex — excuse me, the experiment in democracy called America — I’ve ever encountered, and begs to be addressed.

The writer, Andrew Exum, was an Army Ranger who had deployments in the early 2000s to both Iraq and Afghanistan, and a decade later served for several years as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East policy.

The point he is making amounts to this: The last twenty years of war have been a disaster, with our pullout from Afghanistan sealing history’s final judgment: We lost. And we deserved to lose. But what a crushing blow to the men and women who served with courage, indeed, who sacrificed their lives for their country.

I have frequently said to a friend who was born and reared in Jim Crow Nashville that Donald Trump is the spawn of George Wallace, only taller. Like Trump, Wallace was bombastic, rude and in perpetual motion. Pugnacious and argumentative, he also wore a permanent sneer as he railed against the elites whom he imagined were looking down on him, the son of a working class family. The term “the politics of rage” was invented for George Wallace. But unlike Trump who came to politics fairly late in life, politics grabbed Wallace by the lapels at a young age, and refused to let go.