The war on epidemiology continues.

Why? Why is it? How do we know it is? Why would the government want to “control” us in the sense of forcing us to wear masks for no reason? What does it gain from doing that? Cui bono? What does Fauci gain from it? Why hasn’t Fauci been telling us to wear masks for the past 40 years, pandemic or no pandemic? What is it for?

So many levels of meta that you can’t figure out what is being said:

I awoke this morning as I do every morning with a burning, unquenchable lust to be seen. Thankfully, what with it being Transgender Day of Visibility and all, I might finally have that need met.

You see what I mean. That sounds like self-mockery, but would the Guardian be publishing genuine self-mockery by a trans person? Does any trans person ever self-mock? Especially for wanting to be seen every god damn second?

I, personally, began my morning with a mantra: “I am seen. I am visible. I am here to represent.” I repeated this into my phone screen, its front-facing camera reflecting my face back to me, while still lying in bed, wrapped in the powder-pink weighted blanket I got for free last summer in a Pride sponsorship with Local Linens, the national bedding conglomerate that partnered with Amazon for an exclusive line of products.

Clearly self-mocking, surely, but…to what purpose? Aren’t we under strict orders to take all this with deadly seriousness?

My friend Xanthippe, a New York-based diversity and inclusion consultant who’s been working with Amazon

Oh come on – laying it on a bit thick don’t you think?

who’s been working with Amazon for the past couple of years to help them improve their facial recognition software so that it stops misgendering trans and nonbinary people, helped get me that deal. I’m so lucky to have the support of my community.

Rolling out of bed, I slipped on my fluffy, trans flag Ugg slides and ambled to my dresser where I retrieved an oversize black T-shirt made made by Macy Rodman, a musician here in Brooklyn and trans woman herself. If I was going to be seen today – think of it as me channeling Annette Bening in American Beauty, I will be seen today – it would only be right that I use my platform, ie, myself, to promote members of my community, yeah?

Consumerism, pop culture, insatiable narcissism, yes, we get it, but…

Lacing up my boots and donning my new favorite mask – a cloth one featuring a beaded portrait of Dr Rachel Levine, the first openly trans federal official confirmed by the Senate, that was hand-embroidered here in Brooklyn by a local trans ally – I set out to scrounge up the visibility I deserved at the coffee shop two blocks away.

…

Visibility is a fraught subject for many within the trans community, which itself is a very real thing and not a reductive myth of a fictive monolith perpetuated to make it easier for individuals to make sweeping, universal claims on behalf of the whole collective. “Trans visibility and recognition has skyrocketed,” wrote Alex V Green for BuzzFeed two years ago, “but Black and brown trans women are still dying. It doesn’t seem like a politics of visibility can really save the most vulnerable among us.”

…

Those are very good points, but what about me – the first openly trans woman to order an iced oat milk latte at my neighborhood coffee shop this morning? Surely, that’s significant – brave, even. That kind of representation is so important … right?

It was published on March 31 – maybe it was meant as April Fool hur hur but a mole at the Guardian jumped the gun.

None so blind as those who will not see.

Yes, fgm and female infanticide are things done to female people because of “gendered ideas” but those ideas are about female people as opposed to male people. They are rooted in the sex of both. Female “purity” and male ownership of that “purity” exist because the female people gestate the babies.

In a different world, where girls and women were bigger and stronger than boys and men, the ownership of the gestational person wouldn’t work the same way. It would have to be a consensual form of ownership, which wouldn’t be ownership but loyalty or devotion. But we don’t live in that world, sadly, so girls and women are subject to control and violence while men and boys are trained to see them as sluts and whores and rebellious witches. All of that is because girls and women are that subordinate sex that gestates the babies. Men can transition until they turn blue but it won’t make them that subordinate sex that gestates the babies.

Trump must be chewing the carpet with rage that he never managed to do this: Putin passes law that benefits Putin.

Vladimir Putin has signed a law that will allow him to run for the presidency twice more in his lifetime, potentially keeping him in office until 2036.

I wish news outlets would stop saying stupidly redundant things like “in his lifetime.” Obviously in his lifetime; he’s not going to pass a law saying he can run for office after his lifetime, now is he.

But the point is: behold the man, making laws that grant him more power.

The Russian president signed the legislation on Monday, ending a year-long process to “reset” his presidential terms by rewriting the constitution through a referendum-like process that his critics have called a crude power grab.

What do his admirers call it? An elegant power grab?

Officially, the new law limits Russian citizens to two presidential terms in their lifetime, outlawing the kind of shuffling between the presidency and the role of prime minister that Putin employed earlier in his career.

But the law specifically does not count terms served until it entered into force, meaning that Putin’s past four terms (including the current term) do not count and he can still serve two more. 

Yep, that’s crude all right.

Sometimes trans allies are so relentless in their allyship that they end up having to apologize to people for telling smelly lies about them.

He’s still at it though.

Another random set of tweets! But they’re too hilarious to pass up.

You’re thinking it’s parody. I looked him up, and he’s an art student and he’s written in this vein elsewhere so nope, he’s not joking.

There’s more; it’s all funny.

Here’s a wild idea: maybe it’s not that Jeezus wuz tranz but that the idea of being trans is rooted in the magical thinking of Christianity. God is ONE and also THREE but definitely ONE. God in three persons, blessed triniteeee. Plus there’s a pigeon in there somewhere. If God is God and also his son and also The Holy Ghost/a pigeon, then men becoming women by saying so is a doddle.

Moira Donegan at the Guardian has more on Sonmez and the Post.

When Sonmez tweeted a link to a Daily Beast story about the 2003 rape allegation against Bryant, with no commentary of her own, she received a torrent of abuse and threats from his fans.

They were angry at what they saw as Sonmez besmirching Bryant’s memory by acknowledging the accusation that he had been sexually violent towards a Colorado woman; they were willing to avenge this disrespect, or so they claimed, with more violence against women. The name-calling escalated into threats, and some of those threats seemed credible. Her home address was published online. For her own safety, Sonmez went briefly into hiding.

The Post did not stand up for her.

“A real lack of judgment to tweet this,” Marty Baron, the Post’s executive editor, wrote to Sonmez in an email, which contained a screenshot of Sonmez’ tweet. “Please stop. You’re hurting the institution by doing this.” Shortly thereafter, Barron suspended Sonmez from the Post as punishment for the tweet. She was not reinstated until a groundswell of support from hundreds of other reporters embarrassed the Post into retracting their decision.

You can look at it another way – you can see it as not Sonmez hurting the Post, but the Post and other news media hurting their own reputations by glorifying a man while ignoring his alleged violence against a woman. You can see that as the real issue here. Why do we treat male athletes as heroes and women as trivial expendable riffraff who should shut up about violence done to them by those male athlete heroes? Why is what we value and what we throw under the bus so wrong way around?

Sonmez first came forward as a survivor of sexual violence in the spring of 2018, when she wrote of being attacked by a colleague she had had worked alongside in China. Her descriptions of the man’s conduct mirrored allegations made by other women. But the exposure of coming forward subjected Sonmez to a new ordeal: public scrutiny, some of it hostile. A libertarian magazine published a long piece arguing that the fate of Sonmez’ attacker, who resigned from his job after an investigation, was an example of #MeToo gone too far – the piece was amplified by conservative media personalities. Then, at the Post, Sonmez was informed that because of her past history, and her public statements about it, she would not be permitted to cover stories that pertained to sexual violence.

The libertarian magazine was Reason, and the author of the piece was Emily Yoffe.

Donegan continues:

According to Sonmez’s Twitter, the Post has posited a curious rationale for the ban, claiming that they do not feel that Sonmez’ personal history would make her biased in her coverage of sexual violence – and indeed there seem to be no complaints about the quality of her work – but that other people would perceive her as biased. Indeed, the Post’s decisions about Sonmez seem to have been motivated largely by social media pressures and the fear of bad press. 

…

If we can take the Post at their word that they are worried not about Sonmez’ capacities, but about the perceptions of others, this is a very strange choice. In effect, this rationale is misogyny by proxy, with the Post outsourcing the moral responsibility for a sexist outcome on to their readers. They have to do a sexist thing not because they are sexist, but because other people are sexist, and those other people might be mad if the Post does not enforce a sexist outcome. The Post’s account of their own choices regarding Sonmez’ work, then, is that in personnel decisions, they defer to what they imagine are their readers worst impulses, and therefore are obligated to reproduces the bigotries of the public.

Or, more simply, when in doubt, assume/act as if the woman is lying.

Yes it’s just a bed of roses being a woman in journalism or any other bit of public life.

It was supposed to be an upbeat town hall to rally the newsroom, as Washington Post leaders highlighted their moves to defend reporter SEUNG MIN KIM from internet trolls. But sources tell us the March 16 Zoom meeting with hundreds of staffers went off the rails briefly when FELICIA SONMEZ, a breaking news reporter who has spoken openly about her experience as a sexual assault survivor, typed a pointed comment in the chat box: “I wish editors had publicly supported me in the same way.”

Sonmez was referring to an incident that occurred the day KOBE BRYANT died in January 2020. Former top editor MARTY BARON and upper management suspended Sonmez for tweeting a reminder that the basketball legend being showered in praise had also been accused of raping a woman. The Post retracted the suspension after more than 300 reporters signed a letter demanding her reinstatement. It also sent physical protection for Sonmez, who had to leave her house after her Bryant missive went viral and she received death threats.

Well you can see their issue though. On the one hand, a basketball legend. On the other hand, some woman journalist. You do the math. Male athletes are important. Female journalists are not. Female anythings are not, to be perfectly honest.

More than a year after the incident, the wounds are still fresh. On Friday night, Sonmez publicly criticized her boss, national editor STEVEN GINSBERG, after he was quoted in a Vanity Fair piece about the need to support female journalists when they’re subjected to harassment online. “Wish the same Post editor who is quoted in this piece supported me when I was doxxed and had to leave my home,” she wrote on Twitter, adding Ginsberg’s handle. (The decision to suspend her was made by Baron.)

She didn’t stop there. Sonmez also publicized that she is barred from writing about anything related to sexual misconduct or #MeToo. According to several people familiar with the decision, the prohibition began around the time that sexual misconduct allegations surfaced against Supreme Court Justice BRETT KAVANAUGH, and continued recently with news about Rep. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ (D-N.Y.) acknowledging she is a survivor of assault as well as the harassment allegations against New York Gov. ANDREW CUOMO.

Well if that’s their policy it means no female journalists can report on sexual assault, because all women have experienced it. Nice little racket. Also nice little incentive for men who like to grab them by the pussy to do it to every female journalist they can reach, so that no woman can cover the story. Also nice way to damage the careers of all female journalists.

Sonmez, according to emails obtained by Playbook, has implored senior management at the Post to reverse the coverage ban. In an email to Ginsberg and his deputies last May, she wrote that “it is humiliating to again and again have to tell my colleagues and editors that I am not allowed to do my job fully because I was assaulted.”

Punish the victim to protect the perps. Nice all around.

Yes indeed, if you’re a man and you want a baby or six, there’s just one slight obstacle.

Lesbian couples! Perfect! You can get two babies at once!

But if he had any empathy for women he wouldn’t be OJ.

Huh, the Suez backlog is cleared. That’s good, because reports were saying it could take weeks.

The last ships stranded by the grounding of a giant container vessel in the Suez canal passed through the waterway on Saturday, according to the Suez Canal Authority (SCA).

…

Osama Rabie, the chairman of the SCA, said 85 ships were expected to pass through the canal from both sides on Saturday. They included the last 61 of the 422 ships that were queuing when the container vessel was dislodged, thus ending the backlog of shipping that built up during the crisis.

Good job. The port city of Seattle sends a fist-bump.

The one-guy insurrection in DC yesterday:

Early in the afternoon, a man rammed his vehicle into two Capitol police officers standing in front of a barricade. Exiting the vehicle, the suspect then lunged at officers with a knife. He was shot dead.

Yogananda Pittman, acting chief of Capitol police, told reporters two officers were taken to hospital after the attack. One, William “Billy” Evans, an 18-year department veteran and the father of two young children, died from his injuries.

It’s Trump who planted this particular seed.

Police did not immediately name the suspect and the motive remained unclear. Multiple news outlets, however, named the attacker as Noah Green, who was 25 and from Indiana.

Friends and family members told news outlets they had been concerned about Green’s mental health in recent years, especially after he posted disturbing comments to social media.

I know the feeling.

The title is perfect:

How Do I Define My Gender if No One Is Watching Me?

How indeed? But we mustn’t point out that the whole idea of “defining” one’s “gender” is entirely about who is watching the Precious Self.

By Alex Marzano-Lesnevich

Mx. Marzano-Lesnevich writes extensively on transgender issues and is working on a memoir about nonbinary identities.

In other words Mx. Marzano-Lesnevich has nothing in her his their head other than this fiction of trans and non-binary idennninies.

When the lockdown started he she they thought it would be a nice rest from taking the idenniny out on parade.

Alone in my apartment, I imagined that all my difficulties in being seen and recognized as transgender-nonbinary would evaporate. No one would gender me except myself; my pronouns would be right there in the text box on my Zoom screen.

So I was surprised by how much my gender instead seemed to almost evaporate. No longer on the alert for how to signal a restaurant’s waitstaff that neither “he” nor “she” applied to me, or for whether colleagues and neighbors would use the right language — devoid of anyone to signal my gender to — I felt, suddenly, amorphous and undefined.

Lordy. They she he don’t seem to realize how much she he they is revealing.

What if – just spitballing here – what if this whole gender thing is all about signalling one’s magic gender to other people? What if it’s just a novel way to demand extra attention? What if there’s really no more to it than that? What if Mx’s artless confessions are spilling the beans on the pathetic truth?

Where did my own gender reside, then, if not in sending signals of difference? My friends and I had long joked, “Gender is a social construct!” every time one of us needed shoring up after a messy encounter with the expectations of the gender-conforming heterosexual world. But without that world, we now added a rueful punchline: “Too bad there’s no more ‘social’!”

No more social and no more Mean Mommy and Daddy in the shape of the gender-conforming heterosexual world (which of course includes all those evil radical feminists, who are not “gender-conforming” at all but don’t let that slow you down). With no Cis Enemy what is even the point of being gnc?

With the gender binary all but gone, what did it mean to be nonbinary? How do I define my gender when I — accustomed to how visible my gender usually makes me — am no longer being watched?

I know this one. You grow up, that’s what. You realize that nobody actually cares, because people are interested in other things, things that aren’t you. You realize you’re not that special. You realize that thinking of yourself as that special is kind of adolescent and embarrassing, so you stop doing it.

Of course that’s not the lesson Mx Mx learned.

As an apology to all the people who (quite reasonably) are not entirely fond of posts based on random tweets from random people, a completely random tweet from someone I don’t know that is its own justification.

The governor of Florida is a “my sacred right to do whatever I want regardless of the harm to others” jackass.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis on Friday announced an executive order banning “vaccine passports” in the state, which like the rest of the US continues to suffer under the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Suffer” as in die a horrible gasping death or have friends or family die such a death or be an intensive care nurse or doctor and watch patients die gasping. That kind of suffer. It’s absolute hell.

Companies around the world are working to develop such “passports”, secure records of vaccination against Covid-19 that might be used to help society and businesses return to full operation by managing entry to buildings or events. New York state has launched its own version.

The tin hat crowd is running around squawking about the secret police and our sacred liberties are gone and yadda yadda. Apparently they get to draw from the goods of society but can’t be expected to give anything back, even something so obviously reasonable as trying not to spread the virus.

But the Florida governor’s order claimed “requiring so-called Covid-19 vaccine passports for taking part in everyday life – such as attending a sporting event, patronizing a restaurant or going to a movie theater – would create two classes of citizens”.

That’s so fucking stupid. No it wouldn’t. It would temporarily create two categories of citizens, for pressing public health reasons. The end.

Vaccine passports have become the latest flashpoint in increasingly politicized battles over coronavirus policy. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a controversial far-right Georgia Republican, has said vaccine passports are Joe Biden’s “mark of the beast”, the Hill reported. She has also introduced a bill to ban such passports and fire Dr Anthony Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser.

But what justifies this? What’s the thinking? In what way is public health “political”? Even right-wingers don’t want to die gasping for breath in an ICU surrounded by exhausted traumatized nurses and doctors. What on earth is the point of making a political issue of precautionary measures? I’ll never understand it.

The other thing about Alice Roberts’s dead people tweet [sorry Harald!] is that she’s right that the dead don’t come back to life, but then…why does she believe (or say she believes) that men do become women? Many are asking.

Ahhh yes, thank you for mentioning it. No beliefs should be beyond scrutiny and criticism! Including beliefs about whether or not men are women if they say so. And yet the belief that they are is pushed on all of us, often very hard, with insults and menaces and ostracism and terminated careers. What about that, Professor Roberts?

Ahhhh unscientific beliefs is it…like the belief that men are women if they say they “identify as” women. Imagine if your children said they identified as tigers and owls, not at age 4 but at age 15 or 20. Wouldn’t you see that as an unscientific belief?

Quite right, and skirts and high heels don’t make women.

Can you think of another damaging myth we push onto children, Professor Roberts? Because I can.

Is the impulse (or habit or need) to set people straight about things a necessarily religious one? I don’t think so, I think it’s a lot broader than that, although religion is certainly one area of life where people are encouraged to do it even unto the end of days.

I get what he means, and accept the mockery, but still – I think it’s a broader impulse than he’s implying, and also a more useful one. If you know how to get a fire going better than the people in the next hut over, you’re doing them a favor if you show them your skills.

But, of course, evangelism doesn’t come with a false positives detection kit. The impulse can be to bring people out of darkness into the light of your personal or shared delusion, and that’s not necessarily a benefit.

Or maybe I’m just constructing a rationalization for why I like to argue about nearly everything.

Trans woman Grace Lavery interviews trans advocate Jolyon Maugham:

Maugham: I was making the point in the summer of 2020, repeatedly, that the lawyer that Keira Bell had retained was using was someone with links to the religious right.  He himself has said so.  And you can look at the cases he has brought.  They’re attacks on abortion rights.  They’re attacks on gay rights. And he has associations with organizations that have attacked assisted dying.  And he appears on the sort of tv channels of organizations who are religious conservatives, let me put it that way.  So I didn’t think he would deny that he comes from that background.  His name is Paul Conrathe. It’s certainly abundantly clear that he does.  The barristers, I don’t have any reason to suggest that they come from that standpoint. And the judge who is believed to have written that judgement—a judge called Natalie Lieven—doesn’t come from that background.  She is simultaneously a hero amongst the Good Law Project’s overwhelmingly female staff team for the work that she’s done as a judge protecting the right to an abortion.  And now, a sort of fallen hero for what we all regard as the work that she’s done to roll back trans rights, to empower transphobia and transphobes in domestic public discourse.  She comes from a very particular place, and I don’t know whether this is mirrored around the world, but in England there is a very, very dominant…strand of feminism.  Not dominant numerically but dominant because it’s a feminism of privilege that is deeply opposed to trans rights.  And that demographic is the demographic that she fits perfectly in.  I’m not saying she’s a transphobe.  I’m just saying that she is in that demographic.

A feminism of privilege is it. What kind of privilege? And what of Jolyon Maugham? What about his privilege?

More basically, of course, there’s the usual obligatory lie that it’s “transphobia” to continue to understand that people can’t change sex.

Anyone reading your newsletter will know that J.K. Rowling complained bitterly of the abuse that she received on social media––and I think she’s entitled––right indeed––to complain about that.  But much of it wasn’t genuine abuse.  It came not from member of the trans community but from accounts that were set up, I believe, to discredit the trans community. And what I was particularly angry with J.K. Rowling about, somebody who I’ve spoken to privately in the past and previously had a good relationship with was that I thought that she weaponized in a rather mischievous way the abuse that she received.

So typical of women, isn’t it. We weaponize rape, we weaponize sexism in the workplace, we weaponize misogynist abuse – there’s just no end to it. We’re so mischievous.

What’s not to like?

But also watch the huge man in the tank top, and how unashamed he is to go right up to the much smaller woman and tower over her while being an angry opponent. It’s threatening as hell and he thinks he’s fine doing it because hey trans rights.

Even TIME is promoting the big lie.

Saying You Support Trans Rights Isn’t Enough. Here’s How to Prove It

Enough for what? Enough for whom? Why do I have to “prove it”?

The author is someone named Emme Lund. I have no idea if “Emme” is a name for female people or male people or “non-binary” people. Lund doesn’t bother to tell us before telling a story about a childhood friend.

Growing up, my best friend wore extensions in his hair, blue braids swinging down to his hips. He wore short leather skirts and platform boots. He bought me a fishnet top when I was 14 (a long-sleeved shirt I hid for years from my religious family). We used to walk home from the mall together and recite entire TOOL albums. He taught me it was O.K. to disrupt gender norms.

Then, a few years ago, we got in an argument on Facebook. I explained to him the harmful concept of gender essentialism, the belief that gender is determined at birth and cannot be changed, and he told me he believed that a trans woman would always be a man in his eyes. I wasn’t out then, but anger boiled inside me. I deleted his comments and blocked him.

As one does. “Omigod my childhood friend sees men as men. The anger, it boils!”

When you are trans, you never know who to trust. Our gender identity can be hidden for years, even from ourselves but especially from others.

That “even from ourselves” is telling. If it’s hidden even from you yourself, maybe it was never there in the first place. Maybe it’s the “finding” it that’s delusional, not the failure to see it. Maybe there is no “it”, and you just are what you are, like all of us.

I’m not sharing anything new, but it’s important that everyone understand why it is so hard for trans people to trust even the most well-meaning cisgender allies.

Maybe that’s not what’s important. Maybe what it’s important for everyone to understand is that people’s sex is what it is, and that what varies is the set of cultural beliefs about how women and men dress and talk and walk and behave.

After I came out to my wider family and friends, I received a lot of supportive messages, but people also asked why I had not come out sooner, offended by the idea that I could not trust them with a secret so big. I make it a point not to hang out with bigots, but I still wasn’t sure who would be able to love and support me and fully embrace my identity.

You know, that isn’t something that is just due you (or anyone) no matter what. We’re allowed to have reasons for being friends with people, and to stop being friends with X if X changes radically in some way that matters to us. If a friend “comes out as” a frothing reactionary rage-monger who sees masks as yellow stars and Fauci as unspeakably evil, then that’s going to change things. Some reasons are better than others, but nobody owes anybody permanent loyalty no matter what. Nobody has to “fully embrace” anyone’s identity.

We are in the midst of a giant backlash with politicians looking to strip away the rights of trans people.

No we’re not. Nobody wants to take away trans people’s rights. There is no “right” for men to join women in the women’s toilets or the rugby team.

It may seem like I’m asking a lot. I am. But I need my cisgender friends and family to take on this fight as well. Don’t ask the trans people in your life if they trust you. Assume they don’t. Instead show us that you can be trusted, that you will fight alongside us, and that you believe that trans people deserve to be loved and respected. You care about trans lives? Good, go prove it.

Trusted to what? Agree that you’re a woman when you’re not? Fight alongside you to what? Force other people to agree that you’re a woman when you’re not?

No. Sorry, but no.

Uh oh, the monstrous regiment of women.

In Michigan, women hold power. Not everyone seems comfortable with that.

The chairman of the Michigan Republican Party called three top statewide elected officials “witches” in a speech last week. He said he wanted to “soften up” the women — Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Attorney General Dana Nessel and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson —  so when he had GOP candidates to run against them, they’re “ready for the burning at the stake.”

Well at least he didn’t call them cunts. Progress?

Weeks earlier, the state’s Senate majority leader said of Whitmer that the party had “spanked her hard on the budget, spanked her hard on appointments.”

In December, another state senator said Whitmer was “neutering” lawmakers. He had described two women colleagues’ words as “shrill outrage” months earlier.

Anxiety much?

“Misogyny does happen, subtly and blatantly,” said Democratic state Sen. Erika Geiss, one of the women described by a male lawmaker as having “shrill outrage” when she made a statement on the Senate floor last May about partisanship. “It is problematic, and it has been problematic for years.”

For as long as women have had any power, would be my guess.

Ron Weiser, the chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, apologized Saturday for his “witches”  remarks made late last month. 

Soraya Chemaly, the author of the 2018 book “Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger,” said Weiser was using gender stereotypes ”to depict women with power as unnatural, as irrational.”

Chemaly drew a line from the man captured in a photo with his feet on a desk in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office during the Capitol insurrection to what’s happened to Whitmer.

“The thought that a woman can have this power over men is really hard for many people. It’s particularly hard for conservative men,” she said.

Naturally enough, since many of them don’t even believe in the principle, let alone the practice.