The Cost of Redefining What a Woman Is

Hello, and happy Sunday, Sept. 20, 2026. Fall's two days away, which means it's your last legal weekend to pretend summer isn't over.

My calendar says it's Pepperoni Pizza Day, Fried Rice Day, String Cheese Day, and Cleanup Day. Reward yourself with pizza, fried rice, or string cheese — ideally not all three in one sitting — and pick up a little trash on your way to get it; the planet won't clean itself, and neither will your kitchen counter. That's a particularly amusing comment for those who have seen my kitchen.

Today in History:
622: The Prophet Muhammad and Abu Bakr arrive in Medina, an event associated with the beginning of the Islamic calendar.
1187: Saladin begins the siege of Jerusalem during the Crusades.
1519: Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan sets sail on the voyage that will become the first circumnavigation of the globe.
1792: The National Convention replaces the French Legislative Assembly, pushing the French Revolution toward a republic.
1870: Italian forces annex Rome, completing the unification of Italy and ending centuries of papal rule over the city.
1881: Chester Arthur takes the oath of office as the 21st president, a day after James Garfield dies from his assassin's bullet.
1946: The first Cannes Film Festival opens in France, seven years late thanks to World War II.
1962: University officials temporarily bar James Meredith, a black student, from enrolling at the University of Mississippi.
1969: Chemical Bank opens an early U.S. ATM in Rockville Centre, New York.
1973: Tennis star Billie Jean King defeats Bobby Riggs in straight sets in the nationally televised "Battle of the Sexes."
2001: President George W. Bush addresses a joint session of Congress and declares a global war on terrorism.
2017: Hurricane Maria strikes Puerto Rico as a Category 4 storm, killing thousands and knocking out power across the island for months.

Birthdays Today include: George R.R. Martin, author of the A Song of Ice and Fire series; Sophia Loren, actress and Academy Award winner; Red Auerbach, Basketball Hall of Fame coach; Fran Drescher, actress from The Nanny; Jelly Roll Morton, jazz pianist and composer; and Upton Sinclair, novelist and Pulitzer Prize winner — if today's your birthday too, happy birthday.

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Today's subject is a bit of an editorial minefield. So, my comments here will be a bit stilted, to say the least.

For well over the year I've been part of the PJ Media team, I've called the government of the UK the canary in the cultural coal mine— watch what collapses there first, because it's coming here next. This week flips that script. The canary this time isn't a British institution. It's a story out of Xenia, Ohio, that an American press corps won't touch honestly — and it took a British tabloid to just say what happened in plain English. I have to give the Daily Mail, an outlet I have no shortage of issues with, some respect for having the courage to go with this story.

This has got to be one of the craziest headlines from the woke era. pic.twitter.com/NRJZcjri1i

— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) September 19, 2026

Wait. Flashing her penis?

Yeah.

The Daily Mail's write-up lays out the basic facts: Xenia Municipal Court Judge David McNamee found Darren Glines — who now goes by Rachel — not guilty on three counts of indecent exposure at the local YMCA. McNamee's actual reasoning wasn't about anatomy hidden by body fat in the cartoonish way the headline implies; his written ruling said the facts weren't in dispute, but Ohio's statute at the time only covered exposure of "private parts," a term the law left undefined, and prosecutors couldn't clear that specific bar. Glines had permission from YMCA management to use the women's locker room at every Greater Dayton-area branch, was never charged with trespassing, and the judge ruled the exposure element of the statute simply wasn't met on the evidence presented.

That's the polite legal version. Here's the part that actually matters: this wasn't a one-time misunderstanding. Complaints against Glines date back to 2021, with at least three separate women reporting they'd seen a naked man in the women's locker room — one report specifically noting minors were present when it happened. When one of those women went to the front desk to complain, WHIO reported that a YMCA employee told her Glines "identifies as a woman" and that she shouldn't be disturbed by it. Try explaining that sentence to a parent who just watched their daughter walk into that locker room.

I truly do not envy the Babylon Bee its increasingly impossible job. How a satire site is supposed to compete with source material this mind-numbingly stupid, coming from institutions that are ostensibly serious, I have no idea. Then again, if nothing else, this case is a pretty good clue as to why so many otherwise reasonable adults suddenly can't define what a woman is anymore.

Glines' attorneys, for their part, released a statement saying they were relieved that the "rule of law and the truth" had prevailed and that the community could "move on in peace." Move on, presumably, until the next locker room, since this pattern goes back four years and involves multiple complaints. Even the Daily Mail's own reporting couldn't avoid pointing that out.

And here's where the story stops being just an aggravating anecdote and becomes a genuine policy fight: Ohio lawmakers are now using this exact case as Exhibit A for HB 249, legislation aimed at closing the statutory hole that let Glines walk. A state representative testifying before the Ohio House Judiciary Committee pointed directly at this ruling, arguing that because the law defined "private area" but left "private parts" undefined, the legislature accidentally built a loophole a judge had no choice but to drive through. Opponents of the bill counter that its real target is broader than one Xenia locker room — Rep. Josh Williams reportedly confirmed on the House floor that the bill would stop transgender Ohioans generally from using facilities matching their gender identity, which critics says shows that this is about policy well beyond one indecent-exposure statute.

Both things can be true at once, and that's worth sitting with instead of picking whichever half is more convenient. The Xenia case really did expose a genuine, narrow drafting failure in Ohio law — leaving "private parts" undefined while defining "private area" is the kind of legislative sloppiness that lets a judge rule exactly the way McNamee did, correctly, under the statute as written, while every ounce of common sense in the room says something went wrong. And the bill built on top of that failure really does reach further than the case that inspired it, which is exactly the kind of legislative overreach that deserves scrutiny on its own terms rather than a free pass just because the underlying case is this embarrassing.

Look, I'm already pushing the edges just writing this up, and there isn't much I can add without drawing my own editorial blood. Thing is, the facts, laid out plainly, do the work by themselves — which might be the most damning thing of all. It took a British paper, several years of complaints, and one exceptionally awkward legislative hearing before anyone in a position of authority in Ohio decided this was worth actually fixing.

To sharpen the contrast further, put that Xenia case next to the outraged reaction to actress Sydney Sweeney's ad for the sports-trading platform Novig. Other outlets have covered the ad itself in detail, so I won't belabor the specifics — but the shape of the backlash is worth examining closely, because it's the perfect companion piece to the story above. I have said many times and still maintain that if illegal aliens all looked like her, the green-haired contingent would be arming themselves and standing watch on the southern border. The reaction to that ad does nothing to dissuade me from that conclusion. 

Sweeney, posing nude and using sports equipment to cover herself while insisting the campaign is "just sports," drew swift condemnation from a chorus of prominent female athletes. Australian Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus called the ad a "kick in the face to every woman who had dedicated her life to perfecting her craft" and told Sweeney to "do better." British sprinter Amy Hunt went on Good Morning Britain to say her objection was "nothing personal," just a stand against sexualizing women's sports. British athlete Lucy Davis posted that it's 2026 and everyone needs to "stop sexualizing women in sport." Sweeney, for her part, defended the campaign as "confidence, humor, and a playful edge," and clapped back by posting old ESPN Body Issue covers of nude athletes, including Serena Williams and Ronda Rousey, apparently daring her critics to explain the difference.

So here's the juxtaposition, laid bare. (Yeah, bad pun. Sorry.) On one hand: a woman who is unambiguously, biologically, undeniably a woman causes a genuine firestorm — across multiple countries, among actual professional Olympic athletes — for the crime of being visibly, unmistakably, alluringly female in an advertisement. On the other: a biological male who's had to lean on a gap in Ohio's indecent-exposure statute, rather than any actual argument about anatomy, just to avoid a conviction for repeatedly over a period of years exposing himself in a women's locker room in front of minors draws a shrug from the same activist ecosystem that mobilized three continents' worth of Olympic athletes over a betting commercial.

I don't need to manufacture outrage here. I just need to point at both stories and let the math speak. A woman being a woman: national scandal. A man in a women's locker room, four years running, multiple witnesses, minors present: "she shouldn't have been disturbed by it." If you can find a cleaner illustration of a society that has completely lost the thread on what it's actually trying to protect and why, I'd genuinely like to see it. Common sense didn't die of natural causes. It got legislated, litigated, and press-released out of the room, one carefully worded statement at a time.

And I, for one, am damned sick of it.

Thought of the Day: The big problem with fantasy is that it never survives contact with reality. 

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Have a great Sunday, gang. Glad you made it today. Let's plan on doing again tomorrow, shall we? See you then. 

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