David,

I was one of those "tomboys" when I was little. My older brother is only 15 months older than I, and we played together, and with all the neighbor kids ALL the time! At one point, I wanted to BE a boy so badly, and that was the time when the City we lived in, in the Midwest, had organized little league baseball and girls (at that time) were not allowed to sign up and play. All of us neighbor kids used to play baseball together every spring, once the snow melted, then all summer long and well into the fall. Big brother could throw the baseball a bit further than I, but I could swing a bat and connect with ball much more often than he could, and I could actually run the bases faster, too. I would get so mad every summer when he could sign up and play, but I couldn't, even the one year our Mom was the assistant Coach of his team.

All of that passed as the years rolled by, and I grew older, but I can't even begin to imagine what might have happened if I was that same little girl today, wishing I was a little boy! Granted, it was only during the baseball season that I wanted to be a boy, and was very happy and content being a little girl, and doing and playing at all little girl things the other eight or nine months of the year!

If some stupid psychologist had existed then, and caught wind of me wanting to be a boy at the beginning of summer, and tried to intervene, telling my parents that the ONLY way I could ever find, and be, my "true self" was to load me up with puberty blockers and push testosterone into my system, my parents, and even I would have said, loudly and frequently, "NO! NO!! and HELL NO!!! NO, NOT NEVER!!! NOT OVER MY DEAD BODY, NO!!!!"

BTW: I am very happy and very proud wife, mother to three adult children, and grandmother to five of the most awesome, healthy, happy and beautiful young people, ever!!

Little shows more courage than standing up for your own principles. The one thing that does is standing up to a mob attacking a persecuted minority. She is doing both!

A one-woman filibuster has shut down the Nebraska legislature for the last three weeks. State Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh (D) has followed through on her promise to filibuster every bill that comes before the legislature this year even the ones she supports after a bill that would outlaw g****r-affirming care for minors advanced out of committee. Cavanaugh has spent entire days of her filibuster discussing everything but the bill, including her favorite Girl Scout cookies, Omaha's best doughnuts, and the plot of the movie "Madagascar." "If this legislature collectively decides that legislating h**e against children is our priority, then I am going to make it painful painful for everyone," Cavanaugh said. "I will burn the session to the ground over this bill" Today marks the halfway point of the 90-day session, and not a single bill has passed thanks to Cavanaugh's persistence. In Nebraska's unicameral legislature, there are 17 Democrats and 32 Republicans. Since it's the only state to have a single legislative chamber, a filibuster there is more impactful than anywhere else in the U.S. because there's no alternate chamber to pass legislation.