It doesn’t say the girls are trans.

A teacher has been arrested after allegedly sexually assaulting four girls.

The 28-year-old suspect, who works at a school in Birmingham, is also accused of sending indecent images of himself.

I take it he’s not trans and the girls are also not trans?

I wonder if he’s transitioning right this minute, and will be informing the police of his new reality with the swiftness of thought.

In a statement, the police said: “We’re investigating sexual assault accusations against a teacher at a Birmingham school.

“It’s alleged the 28-year-old man assaulted four different girls and sent indecent images of himself.

“He was initially arrested on 9 May on suspicion of sexual assault and released on police bail with conditions including not to have unsupervised contact with children.

“However, we moved to arrest the man again in the early hours of this morning [Saturday] at his home in Birmingham, having received additional information. He remains in police custody for questioning.”

But is he a cis man or a trans man? Oddly, the police don’t say. And are the four different girls trans girls or cis girls? How can we know?

Man brags about inserting himself into an abortion rights protest.

He shouldn’t be “really proud” of that. He should be really ashamed of it. He doesn’t need abortion rights, he’s not a woman, the war on abortion rights isn’t a war on him, he should sit down and be quiet.

He’s right you know.

It is, literally (all too literally), the kind of language that aspiring or existing fascist strongmen use to incite violence against The Chosen Enemy. It’s not just rude or over the top or “extreme,” it’s intended to provoke hatred then rage then violence.

“Pedo grifters.” That’s getting into blood libel territory.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Equally valid.

What follows is likely old hat to many here, but it’s something I’ve come to realize, partly in the course of writing this very comment. It might be completely off-base, but still, I’ll run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes.

Tatchell is being surprisingly candid, and perhaps unconciously so. First, he’s distinguishing between biological women (in reality, the only kind there is) and socially constructed “women” who do not share the biological characteristics of actual women. The claim of “both” being “equally valid” depends on the admitted existence of actual, biological women. The putative “equal validity” of “socially constucted women” (i.e. TiMs) has nothing to emulate, aspire to or usurp without the existence of an original, authentic prototype or exemplar. Without women, TiMs have no destination, no end point to aim at. And everyobody knows this. Everybody knows what a woman is. Without women, TiMs have nobody alongside of whom they can declare themselves to be valid. The paradoxical attempt to dilute or dissolve the definition of “woman” is an attempt to lower the drawbridge long enough to be admitted into the inner circle of the definition they must overthrow to be included in. Once they’re “inside” they need a definition of “woman” that includes them, but still permits actual women in whose reflected existence and validity they can bask.

Like the contradictory and self-defeating need of TiM sports cheats infiltrating women’s leagues and teams, it stops offering affirmation and validation if everyone else on the team or in the league is a TiM. They’re no longer “one of the girls” because at this point there are no real girls left. Ultimately, this is as disastrous as “lesbian” TiMs having only other TiM “lesbians” from whom to find dates. They know that other TiMs are not really women either. Cheating is only a worthwhile strategy so long as there are enough honest players against whom it can be deployed. It’s like the Larson cartoon where a group of wolves in sheep’s clothing are just realizing to their surprise and disappointment that there are no real sheep left. It’s not really much of a “community” at all if the presence of other ostensible “community” members ruins your strategy of selfishness, which only works for “lone wolves.” It’s a pyramid scheme that can only ever satisfy the first ones in. Johnny-come-lately joiners fail to win the big payoff of validation, which has been skimmed off by the pioneering TiMs who managed to gain access while there were still enough women to satisfy the TiM-narc supply.

The near pathological contempt and hatred that some trans activists evince comes across as a variation of the Madonna/whore dichotomy. How can it be that men who are claiming to actually be women despise the sex they aspire to be or become so much? If they loathe women as much as they do (and far too many of them do), why on earth would they ever want to be one? Perhaps it’s more than just the realization that, because humans can’t change sex, they can never achieve their goal. Maybe discussion of exclusively female experiences and issues is triggering for more reasons than the fact that TiMs will never experience them. Maybe part of the rage is their unacknowledged dependence upon the existence of female humans as a role model or standard in the first place, and why erasing them completely is self-defeating for their own impossible goals?

TiMs count on women’s socialization to “be kind” in trying to gain access to women’s spaces, yet never show “womanly” kindness themselves. Yet if they drive women from single sex spaces, the absence of women will deprive them of the validation they’ve come for in the first place. A women’s rape crisis centre that ends up having only TiMs as clients stops being attractive to them because there are no real women among whom they can situate themselves, which was the point of accessing these spaces in the first place. It’s the “team full of TiMs” all over again. Forced inclusion ends up being self-defeating. Would Clymer and Admiral Whatshisname have been happy to preside over a group of “lesbians” made up of TiMs only? No. It would be like ending up with a gender neutral toilet. That’s like getting a participation award when what you want is to win the gold. Being given a space of your own is pointless when what you really want is access to women’s spaces. That doesn’t happen if all the women have left. Then you’ve got to go find out where the women have gone, locate whatever facilities and services that they’ve set up for themselves, and then demand access to that. It’s a never ending cycle of perpetual dissatisfaction. They can never win for long. They will always need women to intrude upon, to be “women” alongside them. They realize, as does Tatchell, that they are not actually women. Never have been; never will be.

Julie Bindel had a very horrible time at York University last week.

It was a sign of the times that the group that invited me to give a talk on feminism at York was the university’s Free Speech Society. It was scheduled for February but trouble immediately materialised and both the feminist and the LGBTQ societies got it cancelled. But my hosts did not back down and, pledging to guarantee the safety of both students and speaker, rescheduled the talk. It happened last week, in an atmosphere I found both deeply disturbing and profoundly distressing. 

…

I heard the noise before I saw the crowd. ‘Bindel, out!’ ‘Not welcome on our campus,’ ‘Decrim(inalise) sex work now’ and the like. I could have cried. How has this mad transgender ideology so captured the female students who, just a few years ago, would have welcomed me warmly as a mentor? 

It would be understandable if the university had been swamped by neo-Nazi students, but this is the Left devouring its own. This is why we can’t have nice things.

My hands were shaking. I could not let the protesters see how sick I was feeling, so I approached some of them and tried to speak to them, but was blocked by a man who kept pushing a sign in my face: ‘Not on our campus’. 

Every time I tried to take a photograph to record what was happening to me, he would thrust the sign towards my face as though he was going to hit me with it. 

Someone waved a ‘Kiss my man boob’ placard at me. There were explicit comments about what I should do to their ‘trans dick’. Students — and a few members of staff — shouted vile things at me through megaphones. Female students turned their backs on me. It felt aggressive and hugely, horribly personal. I have reported from war zones — these were just a bunch of students. And yet it was devastating to hear them scream at me. 

Because she doesn’t think prostitution is a great career option for women, and because she doesn’t believe men can become women.

How can I answer the charges when they are so at odds with reality? I speak all over the world on the global sex trade and its harm to women and girls, including at the United Nations. I have campaigned with sex trade survivors to change the law so that women convicted of prostitution-related offences have their records expunged. 

Yet one twenty-something activist felt moved to mischaracterise my beliefs to her social media followers in this way: ‘Bindel is an advocate for the Nordic model. This is a model that criminalises sex-working individuals and denies them worker rights, which has been proven to put them at an increased risk of rape, murder, and coercion. Bindel’s whole career is founded in supporting the mass homicide of sex workers.’

Mass homicide? Of women I’ve campaigned alongside for 40 years? 

Ffs.

All very normal, very healthy, nothing to worry about.

Why did we elect those pedo grifters, anyway? I forget.

That sounds kind of familiar.

Fresh Air on Tucker Carlson part 2.

DAVIES: One of the things you hear a lot on his show is him looking into the camera, as he does in his opening monologues, and speaks to his audience and says, they don’t like you. They don’t care about you. They want to control your lives. Who’s the they?

CONFESSORE: In Carlson’s telling, in his narrative, they is the ruling class. And the ruling class is pretty much anybody he wants it to be. It’s people who actually are in charge and have power and are elected to office – presidents, vice presidents, people in Congress. It’s pro athletes. It’s Chelsea Clinton. It’s comedians who make jokes about America. It’s pretty much anybody who’s in the news that day for whatever reason. And his great skill as a broadcaster, among others, is that he can always take whatever’s happening that day and make it part of his narrative of the ruling class. If someone’s talking about making pot legal, he goes on the air and says that the ruling class is trying to legalize pot because a plying population is a good population. So it doesn’t matter what the story is, it always gets wrapped back into the narrative of the day versus you.

They is the snobs, versus The Salt of the Earth. Trump is The Salt of the Earth, because, and schoolteachers are snobs, because.

A lot of it is about fear, Davies says.

CONFESSORE: Yeah. You know, I would – I talked to one former Fox employee about the programming strategy on Carlson’s show and across it – or board more broadly. And what he said – I’m going to paraphrase – is, anger gets people to tune in and stay locked onto the network, keep their TVs on. But what’s better than anger? Anger and fear. And what you see on Fox in the last few years, but especially on Carlson’s show, is rage inflation. You see an effort to just dial it up to 11 every night. And the point is, keep people tuned in.

Why not rage about the failure to do anything about climate change though? Or about the yawning gap between wages and housing costs? Or predatory payday loan companies? Or the Sackler family?

How much do ratings drive the content?

CONFESSORE: What our story shows is that from the beginning, Carlson’s show, his provocations on the air, his escalating rhetoric are all part of a careful and intentional effort to build and hold Fox’s audience in an era when the cable audience in general is in decline. And it’s been incredibly successful overall. You saw that in 2020, Carlson attracted more viewers than any other show in the history of cable news. And on one night during the George Floyd protests, he had the highest rated show on all of television, broadcast and cable. It’s very potent. And for a lot of people, it’s really gripping viewing. And so I think it’s important to understand that – I think these are his real views. And we show in the story kind of how he got there.

But I also say that, you know, I was talking to two people who worked with him at The Daily Caller, which is an online tabloid he founded in 2010. And they each separately volunteered a quote from Kurt Vonnegut, and it really struck me. And the quote was basically, we are who we pretend to be. And if you think about that, I think it explains a lot about how you build a personality on cable TV. You start with what you think and know, but you’re also watching what the audience responds to. And in the case of Fox, you are seeing a minute-by-minute analysis of the ratings, right? You’re seeing, down to the minute, what makes the audience change the channel. And so, of course, you give them more of what makes them stay, and that becomes who you are, and that becomes your persona.

In other words, what there is of democracy and solidarity in the US is being systematically ground to powder so that one tv network can make lots and lots of money. A trivial self-interested motivation and a catastrophic turn of events. It’s a tad annoying.

DAVIES: You and I are speaking on Wednesday. And Tuesday night, I watched Tucker Carlson’s opening monologue, which was about Karine Jean-Pierre, who is the new press secretary who is replacing Jen Psaki. And, you know, he spent a long time mocking her and the fact that she is Black and LGBTQ and that she’s the first person in that role from that background. But he also repeatedly said how she had no qualifications. And the fact is, she has a fairly substantial history in political communications. Is this a common theme of his? Is he tough on women of color in particular?

CONFESSORE: He definitely is. I mean, he’s tough on a lot of people. He thinks a lot of people are stupid. But what we found in our reporting was that he really seems to reserve special scorn for Black women. In his cast of characters, you really see a disproportionate focus, I think, on Black women – on Kamala Harris, who he’s insinuated only has her job today because of who she dated; to Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who he’s demanded the LSAT scores of – I don’t recall him demanding the LSAT scores for Brett Kavanaugh – Karine Jean-Pierre. And on Carlson’s show, it’s not just that they’re wrong or they have bad ideas. They’re stupid and evil and unqualified. And you see that theme, you know, over and over. And certainly it’s not only Black women, but that jumped out when we saw – you know, often repeating the same words about different people over and over again.

$$$$$$

CONFESSORE: White nationalists and neo-Nazis love Tucker Carlson’s show. They watch it. They talk about watching it. They post clips from it. They cheer it online. And the reason is simple. He has taken ideas that were caged in a dark corner of American life, on a few websites that don’t get that many visitors, and he made it the animating force on the most popular cable news program in history. And if you listen to them, what they say is, Carlson is taking our ideas. He is the most effective popularizer of the importance of white identity of any person around today. And Carlson just kind of waves us away. He says, if you want to know what I think, watch my show, which is a way of evading the question.

And there’s Putin. Apparently we’re all wrong to think Putin is not a fine head of state.

CARLSON: Good evening, and welcome to “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” Since the day that Donald Trump became president, Democrats in Washington have told you, you have a patriotic duty to hate Vladimir Putin. It’s not a suggestion. It’s a mandate. Anything less than hatred for Putin is treason. Many Americans have obeyed this directive. They now dutifully hate Vladimir Putin. Maybe you’re one of them. Hating Putin has become the central purpose of America’s foreign policy. It’s the main thing that we talk about. Entire cable channels are now devoted to it. Very soon, that hatred of Vladimir Putin could bring the United States into a conflict in Eastern Europe.

Hating Putin is a mandate? I totally missed that.

Before that happens, it might be worth asking yourself, since it is getting pretty serious. What is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs? These are fair questions, and the answer to all of them is no. Vladimir Putin didn’t do any of that.

He did other things though. Anna Politkovskaya? Alexander Litvinenko? Sergei and Yulia Skripal? Alexei Navalny? Ring a bell?

So why does permanent Washington hate him so much? If you’ve been watching the news, you know that Putin is having a border dispute with a nation called Ukraine. Now, the main thing to know about Ukraine for our purposes is that its leaders once sent millions of dollars to Joe Biden’s family. Not surprisingly, Ukraine is now one of Biden’s favorite countries. Biden has pledged to defend Ukraine’s borders even as he opens our borders to the world. That’s how it works. Invading America is called equity. Invading Ukraine is a war crime.

That “for our purposes” is interesting.

Fresh Air did a conversation about Tucker Carlson of Fox “News” yesterday.

If you follow cable TV at all, you probably know that Fox News host Tucker Carlson is one of the most influential commentators in conservative media and one of the most provocative. He’s known for praising authoritarian leaders such as Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and warning his viewers about the dangers of foreign immigrants and elites who want to control their lives. Our guest, New York Times reporter Nicholas Confessore, recently wrote a series of articles about Carlson drawing on an analysis of more than 1,100 episodes of his show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” conducted by Confessore and a team of Times reporters as well as interviews with dozens of current and former Fox executives, producers and journalists.

One thing they found, to the surprise of no one, is that Carlson isn’t careful about truth.

CONFESSORE: Well, I thought it was important to capture his whole story. And I set into this with an open mind. On many occasions, I asked myself, so what is Carlson correct about on his show, and what’s he wrong about on the facts – not on the opinions but on the facts? And what we found, first of all, was just a long pattern of overhyping and wrong facts and misleading statements on the show. You could pick almost any show and find one.

“Wrong facts” are not facts at all. (Again, as with Tatchell, this is just the product of live interview-having to think on your feet: flubs are inevitable.)

Upshot: they found a lot of racism.

And I’ll give you one example, which we can come back to. This idea of replacement theory – you’ve probably heard about it. And even if you’re not paying much attention to cable news, you’ll probably recall that last spring he got in some hot water for saying, yeah, the elites in this country are trying to replace Americans with obedient people from what he called the Third World.

Now, that is a direct borrowing of language and concept from white nationalists and not just conservatives. I’m talking about people who are neo-Nazis, open nativists, white nationalists, people who get together in dark corners of the internet, mostly, and propound theories about how a cabal of elites – sometimes Jews, sometimes broader – are trying to replace Americans. Now, that theme hadn’t just popped up on the show last April. A version of it has been present in 400-plus episodes of the show.

But then what is it to “replace Americans”? It’s a nation of immigrants. The immigrants mostly displaced (and abused and genocided) the people who had been living here for centuries. Americans who aren’t Native Americans are all the product of immigration. (I suppose you could say the same about the people who moved in when the Bering Sea wasn’t a sea, but that was a hella long time ago.)

Then they play a sampler of Carlson saying The Thing. The breaks indicate different shows.

TUCKER CARLSON: They can embrace the issues the middle class cares about, or they can import an entirely new electorate from the Third World and change the demographics of the U.S. so completely they’ll never lose again.

Democrats know if they import enough new voters, they’ll be able to run the country forever.

Dramatic demographic change means many Americans don’t recognize where they grew up.

As with illegal immigration, the long-term agenda of refugee resettlement is to bring in future Democratic voters.

Illegal immigrants are the key to their power.

The point is to import as many new Democratic voters as possible.

The whole point of their immigration policy is to ensure political control, replace the population.

This policy is called the great replacement, the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries.

That last one startled me a bit. Legacy? Wtf? In the cutthroat world of university admissions, legacy students are children of alumni/ae who wouldn’t otherwise get in. I guess “Legacy Americans” are the ones who get to be here because their very preppy ancestors got here before them? Something like that?

CONFESSORE: Well, we went and looked. We were like, so where does he get that? Where did that come from? We could find no trace of that phrase in mainstream media until he started using it. Where we found it was far-right sites. It was VDARE, which is a nativist site also popular with white nationalists, with some other corners of the internet. He literally plucked that phrase from the racist right and started using it on the air on Fox News.

DAVIES: And it means what?

CONFESSORE: You know, it’s a little bit of code, right? It doesn’t explicitly mean white Americans, although certainly it suggests people who are already here – right? – or have been here for some generations. And it harkens back to an earlier era, Carlson’s childhood and mine, when America was not just majority white but disproportionately and overwhelmingly composed of white citizens. So when I hear legacy Americans, I hear a dog whistle.

Preppy. Preppy, white – same thing.

(Not really. Preppy just assumes white; it’s much more about class. Class, money, and class.)

More later.

The GB News piece behind Tatchell’s “there are two kinds of women” tweet:

Speaking on GB News, Mr Tatchell said: “What I do say is that I think the fuss about the definition protects us from the dignity, rights, welfare and safeguarding of all women, including trans women.”

I think he meant “prevents us from protecting” rather than “protects us from” – that’s just the fumble of commenting live, which is natural. But the claim is idiotic even if we correct the wording. How can we protect the rights of people we can’t define correctly? Suppose we want to campaign to protect the human rights of Uighurs – they certainly need it. Suppose we want to do that and we say there are two kinds of Uighurs, a mostly-Muslim minority group in the Xinjiang autonomous region of China, and a non-Muslim majority group living anywhere in the world who identify as Uighurs. How would that work? We might as well campaign for the rights of people who persecute Uighurs.

“There is a woman defined by her biological sex and there is another different form of woman defined by her gender identity.

He continued: “They are different, they are not the same, but both are equally valid. I think we need to find a common ground instead of what divides us, but all women, including trans women, do suffer from misogyny, hate crime, domestic violence and rape. Let’s all work together for heaven’s sake to protect all women.”

It’s All Lives Matter. They do, of course, but if you’re campaigning specifically against racist abuse, then it’s not helpful or relevant. If you’re organizing a labor union it’s not useful to say bosses work too. If you want to protect lesbian and gay rights it’s a distraction to say straight people have rights too. Peter Tatchell is deluding himself if he thinks he’s campaigning for women’s rights by insisting that some men are women.

Tatchell preaches the gospel.

No there aren’t. Not in that sense.

It depends on what you mean by “kinds,” for a start. There are millions of “kinds” of women in the sense of human variety, but in the ridiculous sense Tatchell is using, there aren’t. He might as well say there are two different kinds of house, one a building made of wood or bricks or stone for humans to live in, the other a tall animal with a long neck that eats acacia leaves.

Chase goes after infants, privileged little shits that they are.

What is that “discourse”?

Remember that? Boycott Nestlé? Because it markets formula as better than breast milk, thus promoting malnutrition and starvation in poor countries where most people can’t afford to buy formula?

Nestlé is the target of a boycott because it contributes to the unnecessary death and suffering of infants around the world by aggressively marketing baby foods in breach of the International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes and the 19  World Health Assembly  Resolutions that have been adopted by the  World Health Assembly since 1981. 

Whatever. The important thing is the narcissistic needs of a young white woman in the US who pretends to be a man and thus does not want to hear anything about breastfeeding infants thank you very much.

Fantasy identities are more important than real African babies, yeah?

But this is a very healthy, reasonable, compassionate movement.

Definitely. If you grew up with a violent father – if you were groped or raped by a man in childhood or adolescence – if you were raped in high school or at university – if you’ve been mocked and bullied by men at parties or in bars or on trains or on the street – or anything else along those lines – suck it up, bitch, we’re going to be in all your spaces whether you like it or not. No locks on the door for you, slut.

This is just maddening. White House Roundtable With Lesbian Leaders – and of course you know what’s coming next.

Yesterday [April 26], in celebration of Lesbian Day of Visibility, the White House hosted a roundtable conversation with trailblazing lesbian and LGBTQI+ senior leaders from the White House and the broader Biden-Harris Administration.

So make that with “trailblazing” men bullying their way into lesbians’ day of visibility, just as they bullied their way into Michfest and then pushed all the women out. Lesbian is one thing and T and Q and I and + are other things. Lesbian Day of Visibility should be for lesbians, not men playing games.

The roundtable included lesbian and queer advocates ,community leaders, leaders across the federal government, several of whom are the first out lesbians to hold their position, including: Ambassador Chantale Wong, Director of the Asian Development Bank, who is the first out lesbian to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate to an ambassador post; Admiral Rachel Levine, Assistant Secretary for Health, who is a lesbian and the first openly transgender woman to achieve the rank the four-star admiral in any of the country’s uniformed services…

That is, he’s a man, and has zero business being there at all. Let us know when an actual lesbian achieves the rank of four-star admiral.

Participants highlighted that lesbians who are also women and girls of color, transgender women, women with disabilities, and older women face additional intersecting challenges to achieving economic security and full inclusion.

All true except for the transgender women part. Sneaky of them to try to hide it in the middle of the list, to fool the unwary. Men dressed as women don’t belong at lesbian round table discussing the challenges lesbians face.

External participants included:

Charlotte Clymer, Transgender Activist, Military Veteran, and Board Member, LPAC Action Network

Of course. Notorious loudmouth and women-interrupter Charles Clymer was there, hogging a seat that should have gone to a woman. Of course he was.

Levine in uniform, Clymer in the pale blue jacket. Seven people visible, two of them men masquerading as women. “Lesbian Visibility Day” in a pig’s eye.

Eliza Mondegreen has a brilliant piece on Chase Strangio at The Glinner Update:

We’re supposed to pretend everything we know about sex is wrong: that legislatures never knew just who they targeted when they denied women the vote. That pimps and johns never knew whose bodies they sold. That the reproductive potential of child brides is pure guesswork. That the burdens of human reproduction settle, if not evenly, then at least mysteriously across the population.

Can be interesting as a thought experiment. As an alternative reality, it’s a train crash. The tottering of Roe makes that all too obvious.

We can argue about whether it makes sense to reorganize society on the basis of individuals’ personal identification with gender stereotypes, but whether we recognize sex or not, whether we name it or not, whether we like it or not, sex will continue to matter. Half the human race bears the burden of human reproduction. That means that these people—even if the language that keeps these people together dissolves in an acid bath of ideology—share experiences, needs, and interests. We used to call these people ‘women’ and the feminist movement used to center these very issues. Now mainstream ‘feminism’ has become a mixed-sex movement that prioritizes male identity claims over female realities, while self-identified feminists attempt to defend women’s most basic rights to determine the shape of our own lives by reducing us to “birthing bodies,” to reproductive functions and services. As if treating women like walking wombs isn’t what got us here in the first place.

…

Stop pretending some inner sense of identity matters here. Only some people believe they have an inner sense of gender identity but everyone—including every woman and girl who has ever lost her life in pursuit of an abortion—has an inner sense of who they are: what matters to them, what they want from life, what they have to offer the world. The point is that—when it comes to abortion and whether it’s safe and accessible and legal or not—identity is wrapping paper. Help us rebuild a feminism that cares about what’s inside the box. You’re keen to specify how the rest of us should talk about you—but I’m more interested in how we talk about us, in the first-person plural. How do we advocate for what we uniquely—and, yes, exclusively—share and why it matters?

Women who refuse to play your game of make-believe when our most basic rights are at stake are not asking you to pretend you don’t exist—much less wishing you didn’t exist at all—so cut the hyperbolics. We’re asking you to put the toys away. We’re saying it’s dangerous to pretend not to know what everybody on earth knows: mullahs, pimps, Supreme Court justices, legislators with trigger laws in their back pockets, abortion vigilantes. As our political opponents know full well, successful organizing requires clear-sightedness and clear speech. We can’t afford any more pretending.

This article was first posted on Writing Behavior by Eliza Mondegreen.

H/t Sackbut

Men telling women what they will allow us to think. Quite the spectacle.

That “provided.” He’ll allow it, provided we do what he tells us. He’ll allow us to be aware of reality, provided we obey him. All we have to do is ignore everything we know about men’s physical advantages over women and what some men do with those physical advantages.

Also in what world is anyone “entitled” to be treated as something they manifestly are not? That’s not a rule. It’s never been a rule. Adults often go along with children’s fantasies and playacting because that’s fun for everyone, but there comes a time to put away childish things. If a work colleague bounces in one day and claims to be Barack Obama is anyone obliged to “treat the colleague as” Barack Obama? Of course not. You could swap as many terms for “Barack Obama” as there are nouns in the language, and the answer would be the same. Nobody is “entitled” to force other people to participate in fantasy role play.

Also it’s not a matter of “wishing” to have a “belief” that people are what they are. We don’t “wish” to have it, we just have it, and it’s not a “belief,” it’s awareness. We can’t help being aware of what we’re aware of. If we’re outside at midnight and it’s cold and raining we’re aware of it; we can’t make it be noon and warm and sunny by “wishing.”

In short Craig Murray is a pompous bossy git.

Hmm. Who is inciting violence here?

A graduate student in philosophy has solved the problem of unfairness to women in sport:

The desire for a protected female sports category is a reasonable one. How could it not be? Males have an unfair physical advantage over females in sports, and we should want everyone – not just men and boys – to have inspiring athletes they can look up to and emulate.

But what follows from here? Should all trans women athletes be banned from female sports because of what their birth certificates say, as Florida’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act entails? I don’t think so.

Why not? He doesn’t say. Trans women are men, so why shouldn’t they be “banned from” (that is, simply by definition not included in) female sports? Why doesn’t he think so? He doesn’t say. Much philosophy.

He claims that hormones are the “most relevant” sexual attribute in sports, which is fatuous. How about the larger frame, the narrower straighter hips, the broader chests, and all the rest of the permanent differences? He doesn’t say – too busy getting to the core of his “argument.”

But there is one hiccup. Preliminary research suggests that some sex-based advantages may remain for trans women athletes who went through a male puberty, even after several years of hormone therapy. As a result, while many trans women athletes best fit into the female sex category, they may still enjoy a small unfair advantage. So what are we to do?

We shrug it off, that’s what! Why did no one think of this before?

You might think that the fairest solution would be to create a new protected sports category for trans athletes to compete in. But there are probably not enough people to create such a category, and the whole idea smacks of being distastefully ostracizing anyway.

The fact that letting men intrude on women’s sports smacks of being distastefully indifferent to women is neither here nor there.

Another option, the one that I embrace, is to let trans women athletes compete in women’s sports – and to just accept the “unfairness” of doing so. Life is not fair, as the old adage goes, and sports are no exception.

There it is! That’s his solution to this difficult problem, his slicing through the Gordian knot – just don’t give a shit! So simple, so easy, so quick! Just accept the unfairness to women because hey who cares anyway, amirite?

Shorter: just suck it up, bitch.

Lara Bazelon in the Atlantic on the ACLU’s lurch into the void:

[I]n 2018, following the ACLU’s successful litigation to obtain a permit for white supremacists to march in Charlottesville, Virginia, which ended in death and disaster, the ACLU issued new guidelines. Citing concerns about “limited resources” and “the potential effect on marginalized groups,” the organization cautioned its lawyers to take special care when considering whether to represent groups whose “values are contrary to our values.”

Like feminist women for instance. They prefer women who are actually men, or who identify as men.

By “our values,” the ACLU was referring to the progressive causes it has championed with fervor and great fundraising success since the election of Donald Trump: immigrant rights, LGBTQ rights, reproductive freedom, and racial justice.

Not so much LGBTQ rights, more like TQ rights. It has championed putative trans rights, like the right to displace and silence women, at the expense of lesbian and gay rights, not to mention women’s rights. Civil liberties have been replaced by Chase Strangio.

Should its lawyers decide to take on a client espousing opposing views, the organization instructed them to engage in a public campaign “denouncing those views in press statements, op-eds, social media, and other available fora,” and “participating in counter-protests.” How, exactly, loudly disavowing their clients is consistent with lawyers’ duty to zealously represent them was not explained. Speaking as a criminal-defense lawyer, I don’t think it can be.

That is utterly bizarre. “If you must take on a client whose views we don’t like, turn all your energies to trashing the client in public.” Seriously??

It would explain a lot though.

Some replies to the ACLU’s calculated insult to women yesterday:

“You may as well just say you hate women at this point and that you are actively working to erase women as a political class. It would be way more honest.”

“Way of disappearing the one, coherent group of people that are solely affected by it: women and girls, female people. Patriarchy has always tried to separate women from one another to better control us because our sisterhood is dangerous to them.”

“WOMEN female sex humans these are the people disproportionately harmed.”

“I’m puzzled as to how the abortion ban disproportionately affects gay men. I must be missing some terribly sophisticated point you’re making because there’s no way you would just vomit up letters randomly in order to avoid saying the word woman. When discussing abortion.”

ACLU even worse if that’s possible.

It is possible, and this is worse, because it takes so much more effort to remove “women” from a list of this kind rather than a generic “this is bad for women people” blurt. They really took care over this one, rubbing our noses in it over and over again.

In reality abortion bans disproportionately harm Black, indigenous, and other women of color. They are the ones forced to carry the pregnancy for nine months and then painfully push it out. Men are not.

In reality abortion bans disproportionately harm lesbians. They harm gay men very little, apart from the sympathy and anger gay men may feel for their women friends.

In reality abortion bans disproportionately harm immigrant women. They’re also bad for immigrant men who have to help support the resulting babies, of course, but the men get to skip the nine months and then push aspect.

In reality abortion bans disproportionately harm young women. The harm to young men is negligible in comparison.

In reality abortion bans disproportionately harm women working to make ends meet, because of the nine months and then push and because of what to do with the baby while working.

In reality abortion bans disproportionately harm women with disabilities, because duh.

Say the word. Say us. Say “women.”