In 1953 Christine Jorgensen famously returned from gender confirmation surgery in Denmark to a swarm of reporters at New York City’s JFK (then Idlewild) Airport. (makinggayhistory.org)
ChatGPT:
That’s essentially right—with one small historical tweak.
Christine Jorgensen returned to New York in 1953 after undergoing gender-affirming treatment in Denmark, and she was indeed met by a large crowd of reporters and photographers at Idlewild Airport (what is now John F. Kennedy International Airport).
The key nuance: “gender confirmation surgery” wasn’t a single procedure in her case. She underwent a series of treatments—starting with hormone therapy and followed by multiple surgeries—under the care of Christian Hamburger and other physicians in Denmark.
By the time she arrived back in the U.S., her story had already broken in the press, which is why the reception turned into such a media spectacle. The moment became one of the first widely publicized instances of a transgender person in American history, and Jorgensen went on to become a prominent public figure, speaking and performing for years afterward.
Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Sunday’s Hungarian elections is an enormous victory for the democratic cause. The Hungarian prime minister and self-declared champion of “illiberal democracy” had become a poster boy for antidemocratic movements. The opposition, led by Péter Magyar, did more than pull off the most stunning election upset in the country’s history. It also may have offered a playbook for how to defeat other illiberal leaders across the globe.
Read Sandor Esik on the political strategy that ousted Orbán as well as our other coverage of the most consequential European election of 2026. And stick around for more of our essays from the new issue of the Journal of Democracy.
Translation is a 5-step process of “straight thinking in the abstract” comparing and contrasting what seems to be truth with what you can syllogistically, axiomatically and mathematically (using word equations) prove is the truth. It is not an effort to change, alter or heal anything other than our consciousness.
The claims in a Translation should be outrageous and mind-blowing, but they are always (or should always be) based on self-evident syllogistic reasoning. Here is one Translation from this week.
1) Truth is that which is so. That which is not truth is not so. Therefore Truth is all that is. Truth being all is therefore total, therefore whole, therefore complete, therefore full. I think therefore I am. Since I am and since Truth is all that is, therefore the beingness of me is Truth. Since I am mind (self-evident) and since I am Truth, therefore Truth is Mind (Two things equal to a third thing are equal to each other.)
2) Conflicts/disharmony in the psyche lead to conflicts/disharmony in the body.
Word-tracking: conflict: collide, clash, strike, hit, slay, destroy, fight, argue, dispute, to take apart harmony: join, fitting things together fit: suitable, appropriate, proper, true psyche: soul, mind spirit, breath of life, mental storehouse storehouse: storehouse of experiences, conflicts, harmony or disharmony, constructs, piling up of experience body: to be awake, to observe (etymology) experience: observe, to watch, to participate participate: to take part in, share
3) Since to argue is to take things apart and since harmony is to join things together and since Truth is one, therefore Truth is harmoniously put together. Truth being all that is, therefore Truth is all that can be experienced. Since Truth is all that can be experienced and since Truth is harmoniously put together, therefore oneness, harmony is all that can be experienced. Since Truth is Mind and since Truth is harmonious, therefore Truth is harmonious Mind. Since Truth is harmonious Mind, therefore Truth is harmonious manifestation, harmonious body.
4) Truth is harmoniously put together. Truth is all that can be experienced. Oneness, harmony is all that can be experienced. Truth is harmonious Mind. Truth is harmonious manifestation, harmonious body. 5) I am the Body harmonious.
Weekly Invitational Translation Group invites your participation. If you would like to submit a Translation on any subject, feel free to send your weekly Translation to zonta1111@aol.com and we will anonymously post it on the Bathtub Bulletin on Friday.
Or join us each Saturday for Translation Saturday Meeting at 11 a.m. Pacific time for current, up-to-the-minute Translations on the issues of the day. Email zonta1111@aol.com for the Zoom link.
In a crisis — any crisis — The Prosperos offers Translation. Translation Saturday Meetings is a weekly series of Translation presentations by veteran Translators, live and up to date on the issues of the day.
It is not a Translation workshop, It is not a Translation class. It is not a group Translation in the usual sense, though group participation is encouraged.
It is, however, restricted to those who have taken Translation class. So if you have never taken Translation class, check the calendar tab on The Prosperos website (TheProsperos.org) or get in touch with us and we will schedule a class.
Last week our sense testimony was: Resentment and indignation can be habit-forming and cause illness. And our conclusion was: I, being Truth, am in a constant state of innocence, wonder, awe and being just.
“We are celebrating the feast of the Eternal Birth which God the Father has borne and never ceases to bear in all eternity… But if it takes not place in me, what avails it? Everything lies in this, that it should take place in me.”
“The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred… Unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.”
J.W. Goethe (1749-1832) German Poet, Playwright, Philosopher
AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY
“To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt,” poet and philosopher David Whyte wrote in his reckoning with the depths of life. “Forgiving,” Hannah Arendt offered a generation earlier in her splendid antidote to the irreversibility of life, “is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven.”
And yet our culture holds up forgiveness as a moral virtue in too binary a way, placing the brunt of repair on the wounded, making little demand of the wounder. We need more nuance than this, and such nuance is what rabbi Danya Ruttenberg offers in On Repentance And Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World (public library) — a field guide to the rewards and nuances of forgiveness, drawing on the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides’s classic Laws of Repentance, using their ancient wisdom to calibrate our cultural reflexes and modernizing their teachings to account for our hard-earned evolution as a species conscious of its own blind spots.
She writes:
The word “forgive,” in English, comes the Old English forgyfan, which translates primarily as “to give, grant, or bestow.” One Old English dictionary connects it to the Hebrew word for “gift.” It’s a present that is offered, something that is granted to someone freely, without, necessarily, a conversation about whether or not they have earned it. It’s an offering, of sorts.
And yet, Ruttenberg observes, such a conception of forgiveness makes repair a wholly one-sided process, tasking the person wounded with the whole of it. The Hebrew language itself offers a vital remedy of greater subtlety:
In Hebrew, two different words, each with its own shade of meaning and weight, are used in the context of forgiveness. The first is mechila, which might be better translated as “pardon.” It has the connotation of relinquishing a claim against an offender; it’s transactional. It’s not a warm, fuzzy embrace but rather the victim’s acknowledgment that the perpetrator no longer owes them, that they have done the repair work necessary to settle the situation. You stole from me? OK, you acknowledged that you did so in a self-aware way, you’re in therapy to work on why you stole, you paid me back, and you apologized in a way that I felt reflected an understanding of the impact your actions had on me — it seems that you’re not going to do this to anyone else. Fine. It doesn’t mean that we pretend that the theft never happened, and it doesn’t (necessarily) mean that our relationship will return to how it was before or even that we return to any kind of ongoing relationship. With mechila, whatever else I may feel or not feel about you, I can consider this chapter closed. Those pages are still written upon, but we’re done here.
Slicha, on the other hand, may be better translated as “forgiveness”; it includes more emotion. It looks with a compassionate eye at the penitent perpetrator and sees their humanity and vulnerability, recognizes that, even if they have caused great harm, they are worthy of empathy and mercy. Like mechila, it does not denote a restored relationship between the perpetrator and the victim (neither does the English word, actually; “reconciliation” carries that meaning), nor does slicha include a requirement that the victim act like nothing happened. But it has more of the softness, that letting-go quality associated with “forgiveness” in English.
At the core of this ancient distinction is a central concern with what is needed for closure. (Here, we must remember that closure itself is largely a myth.) Maimonides offers a fascinating and very precise prescription: The wounder should make three earnest attempts at apology, showing both repentance and transformation — evidence that they are no longer the type of person who, in the same situation, would err in the same way; if after the third attempt they are still rebuffed by the wounded, then — and this is Maimonides’s brutal twist — the sin now belongs to the wounded for withholding forgiveness. The intimation is that a person who, in the face of genuine remorse and evidence of change, remains embittered is too small of spirit and too cut off from their own noblest nature. Mic-drop.
Maimonides wrote:
It is forbidden for a person to be cruel and not appeased; instead, a person should be satisfied easily and get angry slowly. And at the moment when the sinner asks for pardon — pardon with a whole heart and a desirous soul. And even if they caused them suffering and sinned against them greatly, [the victim] should not take revenge or hold a grudge.
While Ruttenberg acknowledges that no one is obligated to grant forgiveness at all costs, she considers how withholding forgiveness harms not only the repentant but the withholder:
Maimonides’ concern about the victim being unforgiving was likely at least in part a concern for their own emotional and spiritual development. I suspect that he thought holding on to grudges was bad for the victim and their wholeness. That is, even if we’re hurt, we must work on our own natural tendencies toward vengefulness, toward turning our woundedness into a power play that we can lord over the penitent, or toward wanting to stay forever in the narrative of our own hurt, for whatever reason. And perhaps he believed that the granting of mechila can be profoundly liberating in ways we don’t always recognize before it happens.
[…]
If you are still so resolutely attached to the narrative that you were forever wronged, you are harming yourself and putting a kind of harm into the world. Try to respond to those who approach you sincerely — and who are sincerely doing the work — with a whole heart, not with cruelty.
Still, at the heart of the book is not the responsibility of the forgiver but the responsibility of the repentant, and the complex question of what repentance even looks like in order to be effective toward repair, doubly complicated by the fact that, in many situations, one can be both wrongdoer and wronged.
With an eye to the myriad causes that might drive even the best-intentioned people to do harm — our blind spots, our unexamined beliefs, our own tender places and past traumas, our despair — Ruttenberg considers the necessity of letting go of our attachment to a particular self-image as a person who means well and therefore could not possibly have caused harm:
Addressing harm is possible only when we bravely face the gap between the story we tell about ourselves — the one in which we’re the hero, fighting the good fight, doing our best, behaving responsibly and appropriately in every context — and the reality of our actions. We need to summon the courage to cross the bridge over that cognitively dissonant gulf and face who we are, who we have been — even if it threatens our story of ourselves. It’s the only way we can even begin to undertake any possible repair of the harm we’ve done and become the kind of person who might do better next time. (And that, in my opinion, is what’s truly heroic.)
[…]
This work is challenging enough when facing the smaller failings in our lives — how much more difficult is it when our closest relationships or our professional reputation is at stake, or even the possibility of facing significant consequences? And yet this is the brave work we have to do. All of us. We are each, in a thousand different ways, both harmdoer and victim. Sometimes we are hurt. Sometimes we hurt others, whether intentionally or not. The path of repentance is one that can help us not only to repair what we have broken, to the fullest extent possible, but to grow in the process of doing so.
‘We haven’t quite made it to the promised land. We’re getting close.’
Tom Perrault, right, a longtime SF resident and activist, took part in a novel HIV study from UCSF.Courtesy of Tom Perrault
By Gillian Mohney, News Editor April 15, 2026 (SFGate.com)
Tom Perrault distinctly remembers the time he received an electric shock in the name of science.
“I have a pretty high threshold for pain,” he told SFGATE. But he had never experienced electroporation before, a procedure in which an electric current is used to disrupt cell membranes and make them more permeable to medical treatments.
The treatment was one of the first interventions in a recent medical trial based out of UC San Francisco. Researchers were trying to retrain Perrault’s immune system to track down and hunt a hidden viral invader: HIV.
The disease may no longer be a death sentence, but it isn’t yet a medical relic. There were nearly 39,000 HIV infections in the U.S. in 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Globally, 1.3 million people contracted HIV in 2024, according to data from the World Health Organization, and 630,000 people died due to HIV-related disease.
And so, Perrault is part of a cohort of 10 study individuals who took part in a novel medical trial at UCSF that used three different therapies to treat people with HIV. Perrault recalled the warning from his medical team about the electroporation: “It’s gonna be like somebody punched your arm.”
“So I go in, I’m a little cavalier about it,” he told SFGATE. The medical team held him down on the exam table, startling him, before giving him an electric jolt and a type of vaccine called a DNA vaccine simultaneously.
“I screamed,” Perrault recounted. “I’m like, ‘That was not a punch, that was an electric shock, people!’”
Unfortunately for Perrault, the procedure had to be immediately repeated in his other arm.
“I started trembling. I’m like, ‘That was bad, that was scary,’” he recalled. The researchers warned Perrault he would need another round of electroporation in a few weeks.
Many people might give up before voluntarily subjecting themselves to pain like that again, especially with no promise of a cure. But Perrault, a former board chair for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, had longed for this type of study for years. At the end of all these treatments, he would finally be able to pause his HIV medication for the first time in years and see firsthand how close the world is to a cure.
“Gay men in the ’80s and the early ’90s would have crawled over glass on their hands and knees to get to a pill or a vaccine, “ he said. “… Anything I can do to advance the idea that science is important.”
‘Dark days’
In 1981, the CDC published a report of five sick young men who showed up in Los Angeles hospitals dying from a type of pneumonia commonly associated with older adults. Physicians realized their immune systems had essentially stopped working, but they didn’t know why. It was the first ever time the condition known as (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) AIDS was documented as a disease.
For years, there was little the medical community could do for AIDS patients. In the beginning, those with the disease were only expected to live one to two years after diagnosis. Not only was the new disease extremely deadly, but research, funding and treatment access were stalled because of the stigma of a sexually transmitted infection most commonly associated with gay and bisexual men. President Ronald Reagan didn’t even publicly mention the word AIDS until 1985, a full four years after it was discovered.
In San Francisco, the disease took a devastating toll on the queer community, although the city was also a model for care and opened the first outpatient AIDS clinic in the country in 1983.
In the decades since, HIV treatment has come a long way. Early antiretroviral treatment discovered in the late 1980s was toxic and much more fragile; a single missed dose could allow the virus to return. Today the modern form of ART, discovered in 1996, is much more effective and durable, effectively tamping down viral levels until they are undetectable in most people. If viral levels are undetectable, then people living with HIV cannot spread the infection to others.
Dr. Steven Deeks, a professor of medicine and an HIV expert at UCSF, designed and led the study Perrault took part in. He says while the current regimen of ART treatment is good, it still isn’t good enough to solve a global problem like HIV.
“The big fundamental problem with treatment is that it has to be taken daily for life,” he told SFGATE. “That means you have to find a regimen that you can tolerate, you can afford, that works and that’s available. And that just doesn’t happen for a large number of people globally, and even some people in San Francisco.”
Deeks completed his training in San Francisco in the late 1980s, a time he calls the “dark days.” He said the current success in treating HIV and stopping its spread remains tenuous and subject to political whims; in 2025, the Trump administration cut key funding for HIV treatment abroad. This year, the Trump administration moved to cut $600 million in public health funding for multiple states — including California — that was earmarked for initiatives including HIV and sexually transmitted infection prevention and treatment.
‘Unprecedented’ results
Human immunodeficiency virus, aka HIV, is an insidious disease that attacks cells key to the immune system. Without a properly working immune system, a person with untreated HIV is vulnerable to even minor infection. The disease can grow for years before causing symptoms, hiding in cell DNA in tissue so the immune system doesn’t know it’s there. If left untreated, HIV evolves into acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, aka AIDS.
By stopping the virus from replicating, antiretrovirals can keep HIV in check, but they require a patient to take the meds for life.
Deeks has been researching HIV for decades and is the principal investigator of the Institute for HIV Cure Research under the American Foundation for AIDS Research, or amfAR. The trial Perrault took part in got its start in 2016 when amfAR launched a $20 million, five-year partnership with UCSF to find a cure for HIV.
Deeks and his team began enrolling patients in their study in 2020. They created a three-pronged approach to the immunotherapy treatment after being inspired by three different primate studies. Normally, when a person with HIV stops taking their ART medication, the virus rebounds in a matter of weeks. The researchers hoped to retrain the immune system of HIV patients to keep the virus at bay without medications for a longer period of time.
In 2020, the 10 patients in the trial received the DNA vaccine, along with the electroporation, to train their T cells, a white blood cell that’s a key component of the immune system, to find and destroy HIV cells. Then the individuals received two different types of antibodies, called broadly neutralizing antibodies. These proteins, which are a key part of the immune system, bind to foreign invaders like viruses or bacteria to destroy them. The antibodies used in the study can prevent HIV from entering healthy cells as well as prime key immune cells to identify and destroy the virus.
Researchers combined this first antibody treatment with another drug designed to force HIV out of hidden reservoirs in the body when it’s in the latent stage. By forcing the HIV to be visible, the retrained immune system could, in theory, find and destroy the virus on its own.
After eight months, study participants were asked to stop taking their regular ART medication. Forty-eight hours before they stopped taking their medications, they received a dose of different broadly neutralizing antibodies in the hopes of drastically reducing any trace amounts of virus in their body and preventing the disease from returning as strongly as before.
The entire process took 34 weeks and included dozens of appointments and treatments. Perrault remembers the first day he woke up and didn’t take his medication. It had been a decade straight of daily pills.
“I remember it feeling very momentous,” he said. “It was like, ‘Wow, I’m like, literally stopping my meds and I’m going to see what my body can do.’”
For weeks, and then months, after, Perrault and the other study participants had their viral levels checked periodically to see if the virus had rebounded. At no time did the UCSF team promise a cure; it was always expected the patients would have to go back on their medications.
But as Perrault went one, then two, then five months without the virus reappearing, his initially wary attitude became hopeful.
“End of October, the virus still hasn’t come back and I’m thinking, ‘Wait a minute, what magic is going on here people?’” he said.
Then on a trip home to Washington, D.C., for Thanksgiving, he got a call from the team at UCSF. The virus had returned. It had been five months without meds.
“I just go up into my room, and all of a sudden I start sobbing,” he said. “Because I didn’t realize, really, the enormity of it. Like f—k, you know? We were so close.”
Still, the study results, which published in December, were significant. Six of the 10 individuals in the study went months without medication before the virus returned to levels that required treatment. One individual never saw a return of measurable HIV levels during the 18-month study period.
Most importantly, the viral burden remained lower in those seven individuals overall compared with before the trial began, a result that Deeks called “shocking.” A lower viral burden can mean less strain on the body from the infection. (The other three patients did not experience the same pause in viral levels and had to resume medication much sooner.)
“To keep seven out of 10 people to show some degree of control, that was unprecedented,” he said.
Passing the torch
Medical researchers as a rule do not like to overpromise. Whether a single-shot cure for HIV is possible remains to be seen. But Deeks says this research shows a viable path forward.
“We haven’t quite made it to the promised land. We’re getting close, but we need to make it better,” he said of treatments. “And to make it better, we need to understand the mechanism.”
There are already signs the UCSF team’s approach is an effective one. In a new study presented in February in London, researchers from multiple institutions including Oxford University found similar results to UCSF’s trial in a study of 34 participants.
Perrault said he’s happy he got to be part of the study, even if he’s now back on his HIV medications. At 60, he’s spent over half his life in San Francisco after arriving in the Castro in 1991 after he followed his partner at the time west from Washington, D.C.
“I came of age and came out at a time where the generations of men above me were all dying,” he told SFGATE. “A friend of mine, who also turned 60 this year, said, ‘Hey, you know, Tom, we’re the first generation of out gay men to come of age to make it to 60.’”
Perrault says he took part in the study to make things even better for the next generation.
“I want them to avoid ever having to go through what the older generation of gay men went through,” he said. “We can do better as a country, we can do better as the world. And we should all be doing everything we can to absolutely get a cure.”
Gillian Mohney is a breaking news editor at SFGATE. Previously, she worked at Healthline and ABC News, where she covered health, science and national news. She is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and has lived in the Bay Area for nearly a decade.
The word “forgive,” in English, comes the Old English forgyfan, which translates primarily as “to give, grant, or bestow.” One Old English dictionary connects it to the Hebrew word for “gift.” It’s a present that is offered, something that is granted to someone freely, without, necessarily, a conversation about whether or not they have earned it. It’s an offering, of sorts.