In this essay, a response to an article by Patrick Parkinson, Shannon Gilreath disputes Parkinson’s claim that religiously motivated discrimination against transgender people should be the subject of special exceptions to prevailing antidiscrimination law, especially where the transgender person does not seek to conform to the traditional male/female gender binary. Gilreath maps the ways in which Parkinson’s proposal is an argument for biological superiority, which has been the rationalization for systematic and systemic social inferiority throughout history, including most notably in the contexts of race, gender, and sexuality oppression. In concluding that Parkinson’s proposal is little more than a restatement of the faulty differences-based approach to equality through law, Gilreath ultimately concludes that its principles are wholly inconsistent with the legitimate purposes of antidiscrimination law.

The 1622 publication of Imprisonment of Mens Bodies for Debt marked the beginning of a decades-long tradition of anti-carceral activism in London's prisons. By recovering prison activists’ practices of publication and republication, the article reveals a vibrant world of textual production in prisons that enabled political interventions grounded in the material and structural conditions of incarceration. Anti-carceral activism relied on the varied uses of print and manuscript that formed part of the day-to-day experience of incarceration. These local practices were combined with new processes of national political communication, from parliamentary petitioning and news printing in the 1620s, to manuscript pamphleteering and the demand for legal texts in the 1630s, and the explosion of radical printing and political agitation in the 1640s. Operating at the intersection of quotidian textual practice and developing forms of political communication, prison activism became engaged in wider currents of national debate. Thus, the article demonstrates how a relatively marginal social constituency could utilize these modes and networks of political communication across multiple media and how, in turn, such groups could both develop connections to radical political networks and come to imagine their cause as part of a wider political moment.

In his article “Gender Identity Discrimination and Freedom of Religion,” Patrick Parkinson raises the important question of how the government should reconcile conflicts between the rights of religious people and the rights of transgender and gender-nonconforming people. By focusing on whether gender identity is best defined as a medical issue or a belief system, however, Parkinson does little to answer it. Whether gender identity is a medical issue may be relevant to determining the sincerity of an individual’s faith-based objection to complying with an antidiscrimination law. It has no bearing, however, on the strength of trans and gender-nonconforming individuals’ countervailing interest in being protected from discrimination. Defining gender identity as a belief system does no more to undermine this interest. This should be apparent to defenders of religious exemptions, who assert that belief systems offer a basis for extending, rather than contracting, legal protections. Characterizing an individual’s gender identity as either a medical issue or a belief system thus does not show why that individual’s interests should give way to the interests of religious objectors through an exemption. To reach this conclusion, one must instead turn to other values, such as those implicit—though inadequately defended—in Parkinson’s article.

Is there a legitimate basis for religious exemptions from laws that prohibit gender identity discrimination on the basis of people’s beliefs? The author argues that much depends upon how gender dysphoria is understood. If it is seen as a problem requiring medical diagnosis and treatment, then arguably there is no religious basis for discrimination, except in a few situations where being a biological male or female is theologically essential to a particular role. Transgender identification, understood as a medical issue, fits within a belief system that God created two sexes of human beings, male and female. Within that belief system one can make room for an understanding that there are those who experience disorders of sex development and those who have such a profound sense of being born in the wrong body that they undertake steps toward medical transition to align their bodies, as far as possible, with the opposite sex. However, recent reinterpretations of what it means to be transgender involve an assertion that it should not be seen as a medical issue, that affirmation of a person’s self-declared gender identity, with or without having hormonal treatment or surgery, is a matter of human rights and that the law should recognize that people may have a gender that, however described, is nonbinary. These views rely on certain beliefs and positions that have a very weak basis in science. They challenge religious beliefs, which accord with mainstream scientific understanding, that human beings are intrinsically a sexually dimorphic species. People of faith need the freedom to reject beliefs that are incompatible with their worldviews. That does not mean that ill-treatment of someone on the basis of their gender identity can ever be justified; but it does support a religious exemption from a legal obligation to accept someone else’s self-declared gender identity. It is one thing to ask me to respect your beliefs about yourself. It is another to ask me to act toward you as if I share your beliefs.

In this paper, I first provide a brief review of how scholars have conceptualized, tested, and elaborated aptitude frameworks relevant to second language (L2) speech learning. Subsequently, I introduce an emerging paradigm that assigns a fundamental role to domain-general auditory processing (i.e., having a good ear) in L1 speech acquisition and proposes that the same faculty acts as a cornerstone of L2 speech learning (i.e., the Auditory Precision Hypothesis-L2). This hypothesis predicts that learners with more precise auditory processing ability will be able to make the most of every input opportunity, which will result in more advanced L2 speech proficiency. To close, I will provide suggestions on how scholars can assess L2 students’ auditory processing ability (e.g., our team's offline test deposited at L2 Speech Tools for Researchers & Teachers [http://sla-speech-tools.com/]) and discuss how the results can be used to maximize learners’ L2 speech learning opportunities via optimal, profile-matched training programs (e.g., explicit vs. incidental training; naturalistic vs. classroom learning; phonetic vs. auditory training).

The spectacular collapse of the Liberal Party in Britain has often been regarded as the result of a crisis in Liberal values, supposedly provoked by the unprecedented militarization of British society during the Great War. However, this interpretation typically fails to recognize the extent to which the most important and visible legacies of that process of militarization were accommodated within the Liberal Party itself. Between 1918 and 1929, more than a hundred ex-servicemen were elected to Parliament as Liberal MPs, and scores more stood as Liberal candidates. This article examines how these men negotiated, presented, and performed their military identities within the framework of postwar electoral politics; analyzes how they operated in Parliament; and traces the longer-term trajectories of their political careers. It challenges the assumption that Liberals were temperamentally or ideologically incapable of engaging with the war's legacies, demonstrating the ability of Liberal candidates to exploit the iconography and rhetorical tropes of military service when appealing to an electorate that had been profoundly shaped by the experience of war and military mobilization. Liberals sought to contest Conservative Party attempts to monopolize the politics of patriotism after 1918 by constructing gendered electoral appeals that acknowledged the unstable meanings of the Great War and the ambiguous status of the men who had fought in it. However, the inability of Liberal politicians to unite around a shared understanding of what the war had meant ultimately prevented them from exploiting the memory of the conflict as effectively as their Conservative and Labour rivals.

It is often argued by health professionals working within the field of palliative care that palliative care and euthanasia/assisted suicide are incompatible. Across the literature, this claim is grounded on the three claims that (1) palliative care and euthanasia/assisted suicide have different aims, (2) euthanasia/assisted suicide is at odds with the doctor’s fundamental role as a healer, and (3) euthanasia/assisted suicide constitutes patient abandonment. Furthermore, even if palliative care and euthanasia/assisted suicide are compatible, it is often argued that the availability of palliative care renders euthanasia/assisted suicide redundant. This depends on two claims that (1) palliative care is always available and effective, and (2) palliative care is always preferable to euthanasia/assisted suicide. This article argues that all of these claims are false, ultimately aiming to establish that palliative care and euthanasia/assisted suicide are complementary rather than mutually exclusive.