Earlier today, I published an article titled “Why Laws Banning Transgender Athletes Are Bad.” Within only a few hours, at least three different people who are on my mailing list left comments objecting to this post, insisting to varying degrees that they are sick of my political opinions, that they didn’t sign up for “Tales of the Woke,” and that this blog should be reserved exclusively for content that is immediately relevant to pre-modern history.
I initially decided that these commenters have a point and deleted the post, thinking that those who want to read it could still read it on Quora, where I have published it as an answer. After some more thought, though, I decided that, since I already published the article here, I would restore it.
I have, of course, written about politics on this blog ever since the beginning. One of the very first articles I ever published on this website nearly five years ago in November 2016, when I was much younger and much more naïve, was partially a commentary on the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In the past, however, I have generally kept my commentary on this blog relevant to pre-modern history in some fashion and reserved my less historically relevant commentary for Quora alone. By double-posting my not-at-all-historically-relevant commentary on trans athletes to this blog, some readers evidently felt I crossed a serious line.