To the editor:

The Houghton Daily Mining Gazette’s cartoon on the subject of transgender athletes was offensive, inconsiderate, and demonstrates a total lack of concern for the truth, which I thought was the purpose of a newspaper. It mocks a population faced with social scorn, resulting in an accelerated rate of suicide.

The “joke” titled “March Madness” shows a male athlete telling his coach he can’t cut it so he is transferring. Coach “To another school?” Player’s reply “No, the woman’s team.”

Living the life of a transgender comes at great cost to the person involved thus the high suicide rate. I doubt the validity of the situation presented.

The same type of fear is presented on the subject of transgender and bathrooms. I guarantee more conservative anti-gay republican political figures have been caught soliciting gay sex in public bathrooms than a transgender.

Instead of presenting facts on a controversial subject the paper reinforced false assumptions, promoting hate for an unfortunate group of people. Unlike what the cartoon displays gender assignment is not clearly male or female.

In humans, biological sex is determined by five factors present at birth: chromosomes, gonads, hormones, internal reproductive anatomy, and external genitalia. Not all of them line up the same gender all the time.

Sex is typically divided into male, female, or intersex (i.e., having some combination of both male and female sex characteristics). Some conditions include ambiguous genitalia, hermaphroditism, as well as other hormonal abnormalities. To make lite of people born with any of these conditions and confused about who they are is cruel and shows a lack of knowledge, understanding and empathy.

Shame on the Gazette.