The Guardian has a piece by the author of “The Family Sex Show” saying it was right-wingers who objected to onstage porn for 5-year-olds.

The show is called The Family Sex Show. Its aim is to reimagine the way we think and talk about relationships and sex.

And it’s for children. What could possibly go wrong?

It doesn’t seem to have crossed Josie Dale-Jones’s mind that responsible parents don’t necessarily want Josie Dale-Jones “reimagining” the way we think and talk about relationships and sex onstage for an audience of their children. Who is Josie Dale-Jones? What’s her expertise? What does she know about child abuse, pedophilia, child groping, child grooming, child rape? Why is it up to her to reimagine such things for small children?

Making it was a process of collaboration with a diverse group of people who have varied life experiences.

There again – yes, and? Does that make “it” either harmless or good for small children? Do we want a group of random strangers explaining sex to small children in a theater?

The show is a fun and playful performance made up of songs, dances and personal stories. It is about bodies and how society views them. It also explores themes including gender, sexuality, pleasure and boundaries.

Again. Not automatically or obviously a good thing. To be more specific, the very fact that this fool thinks it would be a good thing is enough to make me think no children should go near it.

But really, the show is about care and mutual respect – and it exists in the hope that it can be a part of breaking down some of the systems of oppression alive today.

Let me guess. Like the systems of oppression that say men shouldn’t be guiding children’s hands onto their penises?

As a performance, The Family Sex Show is an invitation to experience something together as a family (whatever family means to you), encourage questioning and signpost places for audiences to figure out answers for themselves.

“Whatever family means to you” – so that can be the kid’s groomer then. Awesome.

As a guardian, the show is designed to help open conversations with your child about relationships and sex.

As a guardian? The show is a guardian? Who appointed it a guardian, and what inquiries were made? Maybe it’s not a good idea to “help open conversations” about sex with whatever random adult has brought a 5-year-old to see this play as the child’s “whatever family means to you” family.

The stupidity and cluelessness of this piece are breathtaking. The Guardian’s publication of it is a sour joke.

The ACLU has an article promoted on Facebook about Alito’s draft, so I clicked on the link to see if they managed to mention women at all. The answer: as little as possible.

What to Know About the Leaked Supreme Court Abortion Draft Opinion, and What’s Next

On Monday night, Politico published a leaked draft of the highly anticipated Supreme Court opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The draft majority opinion, penned by Justice Samuel Alito, overturns the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, which has been on the books for nearly 50 years and has ensured abortion is a protected federal constitutional right. If this draft decision is issued as the official decision, it would be unprecedented and would take away a fundamental right for millions of people…

No, it wouldn’t. It would take away a fundamental right for millions of women. That isn’t incidental, it’s central in all sorts of ways.

The word “women” appears only four times in the piece, which is not short. The first appearance is in the first para, above – it’s in the title of the case, so they’re stuck with it.

The second:

Brigitte Amiri: If this is really where the Supreme Court is headed — that you only have a constitutional right if it was contemplated by white men in the 1700s — then there’s a whole host of issues that we work on here and that people care about in our country that are at risk, like access to contraception and LGBTQ rights. These are rights that will most directly impact women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community.

No again. Women, including women of color and lesbians. There’s no reason to drag “people” and “communities” into this except as a craven attempt to shove women backstage. If they want to say this will fall especially hard on women of color, lesbians, poor women, immigrant women and so on, by all means, but don’t pretend they’re not all women.

ACLU: Justice Alito also refers to a 13th Century treatise that designates abortion as homicide, and relies on medieval common law in which women are likened to chattel.

Yes. Women, not people in general. Makes you think, doesn’t it.

The last one:

BA: Right, so we know these are Justice Alito’s views, and maybe this is ultimately written as a concurrence, rather than the majority opinion. But it is really terrifying that someone who is so powerful holds these views about people’s roles in society and women’s roles in society.

Oops. She slipped up there – she must have realized it doesn’t make much sense to talk about Alito’s views on people in society. Sometimes you just have to use the word “women,” dammit! It’s so embarrassing and awkward.

These people are about as useful as a leaky rowboat in the middle of the Atlantic in Janurary.

Ain’t this the truth.

The Guardian reports:

A paedophile has been jailed for 10 years after using social media to groom children.

Rachel Fenton, who police said was known as Richard Fenton when arrested and charged, pleaded guilty to 21 child sexual abuse offences and a drug offence and was sent to a male prison.

The Guardian understands Fenton was living as a man when arrested in November 2020 and was later charged under that name.

But during the sentencing hearing on Monday, Manchester Minshull Street crown court heard Fenton had changed their name and was in the process of transitioning to become a woman.

Gee I wonder why. Couldn’t possibly be to escape violence from male prisoners could it?

A spokesperson for Greater Manchester police (GMP) said the force first heard about Fenton’s transition in a pre-sentence report in April.

And knew exactly how to understand it, I’m betting. But that won’t stop them arresting women for saying trans women are men…or will it. Could the ship be ever so slowly changing course?

Fenton was arrested after a group of people posed as an underage girl online and an undercover cop did the same thing, and he tried to lure all of them into underage sex.

After arrest, Fenton breached bail by inappropriately contacting a third “child”, who was in fact another undercover operative using a fake profile of a 13-year-old girl.

He doesn’t learn fast, does he.

Fenton has been in a male prison on remand since January 2021.

Despite being a Rachel now?

It’s a start.

For ALL women, meaning including men.

Ok it appears it’s going to be wall-to-wall tribunal here for a bit, because what’s coming out is too astounding to miss.

At this point they’re talking about whether Kirrin Medcalf [KM] consulted with other people before emailing Garden Court. KM is head of trans inclusion at Stonewall, and was a new hire at the time.

“people might be in a space with someone who wanted to physically harm them” – meaning, I take it, Allison. This is where this imbecilic ideology takes people. KM utters variations on that over and over again.

Oh it’s a potential scenario that might happen. Definitely more than enough reason to tell Allison’s chambers to bully her or get rid of her.

Why this ideology is so grotesque. Women worry about their safety around men in some circumstances, and Stonewall waves a magic wand and turns that into women being a danger to men who call themselves women.

Jaws are dropping everywhere.

At the tribunal: is “terf” derogatory or no?

Ahhhh there it is – radical feminists who are in power and are oppressing trans people. Those women it’s ok to threaten and assault. How dare radical feminists have any power. Women’s job is to tell men they are whatever they say they are.

There you go, it’s perfectly ok to call women any degrading name you want – cunt, slag, bitch, karen, whore, terf – if you tell yourself they’re “doing harm” by saying men are not women.

“They are being angry.” Yes, we know. Funnily enough that tends to be when the slurs come out. “You cunt.” “You nigger.” “You faggot.” Derogatory words that come out when people get angry are slurs, of course they are, that’s why they come out. KM’s support dog must have been rolling her/his eyes.

And then there’s “cracker.” Of course it’s a slur. As a response to a snarled “nigger” it’s quite a mild slur, but it’s still a slur. If a rich Harvard-educated white guy calls a Georgia truck driver it it’s a good deal less mild.

What is transphobic and what isn’t?

To sum up, not believing that men are women if they say they are is crimethink and a reason to remove people from their jobs.

Originally a comment by Tigger the Wing on Age appropriate.

Four? Nope. Eleven? Well…

Yesterdat evening, eleven-year-old grandson and I were discussing our tastes in computer games etc. and he suddenly blurted out “We’re transgender!” Now, I got the impression it was a new word he’d overheard and had worked out the likely meaning in his head; and that he couldn’t wait to impress Granny with a word which she might not know (that age group does like to get one over on the adults). After some gentle probing, I discovered that he did, indeed, think that ‘transgender’ means ‘gender non-conforming’.

Over the course of a somewhat eclectic and rambling conversation (because eleven and ADHD) I explained that everyone is either male or female, which is what sex we are, and that gender means the set of unwritten rules every society applies to each sex.

Cue side-quest to explain ‘unwritten rules’ and how they are enforced, not by courts and the law, but by other members of society banding together to express disapproval of certain behaviours which are supposed to be for the opposite sex – like being mean to him because he has long hair and likes make-up and glittery nail polish, and being mean to me because I wear men’s clothes, don’t wear make-up or nail polish, and worked in jobs which are done mostly by men.

Cue second side-quest to explain how the unwritten rules for male people are called ‘masculinity’, and how that changes from culture to culture; for example, Irish men are expected to be strong and hard-working; but, unlike men in some other parts of the world, they are also expected to be gentle and nurturing to their families, and definitely NOT aggressive or violent.

We agreed that being mean to someone who doesn’t follow rules which are stupid (since they don’t take into account individual personality) is wrong; and not following arbitrary rules in a way which doesn’t hurt anyone else is not wrong.

After a bit of back-and-forth to establish our definitions of words were the same, I was able to agree with him that the word ‘transgender’ would make perfect sense if it meant ‘someone who follows different gender rules to the ones they’re supposed to’, but that some people think it means that when you are gender non-conforming you must really be a girl in a boy’s body, or a boy in a girl’s body, and that is obvious nonsense, isn’t it, since every cell in our body is the same sex.

Cue side-quest to discuss what cells are. Cue (quite long) sub-side-quest to discuss the fact that women who have had babies usually have some cells from those babies living in them for the rest of their lives, and so blood tests can sometimes detect male cells in a woman, but that doesn’t make them male. Cue sub-sub-side-quest to explain that no, that doesn’t mean that Mammy will feel anything if he hurts himself; that’s not how cells work.

Anyway, the upshot of our nice cosy conversation was that he knows that it is perfectly acceptable for him to have waist-length hair and like make-up and nail varnish, just as it is perfectly acceptable for his granny to prefer none of those things (although we’ve been having an informal competition, from the beginning of the pandemic, to see whose hair will grow the longest. His was shoulder-length at the start; I had a buzz-cut. Mine is growing curly, though, and so he’s bound to win); that believing that someone can be the opposite sex to themselves is obvious codswallop; and there is nothing wrong with being yourself, even if the unwritten rules of your society say that your behaviour should be masculine if you’re male, and feminine if you’re female.

BradfemlyWalsh shared the best tweet from the Allison Bailey tribunal to date:

“Yes KM, his support person, his mother and his support dog.”

It’s a gift, I tells ya.

KM by the way is the “Head of Trans inclusion at Stonewall” who wrote to Garden Court Chambers to complain about Allison.

I wonder if he had his mother and his support person and his support dog with him when he sent that complaint.

Conor Friedersdorf set off an interesting [cough] exchange of views by asking if preschool children can understand what gender-obsessed adults mean by “non-binary.”

I don’t think young children will understand a word of that. I think complicated explanations with many moving parts and unfamiliar concepts just go over their heads. What kind of “love” are we talking about here? Do we know that preschool kids understand it? I think they understand statements like “I love my cat”; “your sister loves you”; “Mommies love their children very much.” I don’t think they understand the kind of love where a boy loves a boy and so he’s called gay. I think it’s both absurd and sinister to try to coach them on Gender Ideology at age 4.

People of Twitter of course don’t agree.

Hm. No it isn’t. Kids learn 1-10 early, and they learn to count 2 things or 6 or 10 early, because it’s not complex. It’s how many fingers you have for a start. It’s not the same kind of thing as erotic love or gender dysphoria, let alone magic identity and being “non-binary.”

(How much easier all this would be if the favored label were GNC instead of non-binary. Not conforming to the rules of gender requires zero acceptance of bullshit, while non-binary requires a non-stop supply of it.)

No, see, again, that’s not a good analogy. All those examples are small discreet facts, not big woolly mysterious concepts.

The real issue of course is that a lot of people want to feed this big woolly mysterious horse shit to preschool kids so that they will absorb it and assume it’s true starting as young as possible.

Pelosi wrote a letter to the Dems today:

Dear Democratic Colleague,

Last Monday, the Nation saw a draft of a Supreme Court decision that sadly would overturn Roe v. Wade, an action which is the culmination of Republicans’ decades-long crusade against women’s fundamental freedoms.

With this draft ruling striking down the nearly fifty-year-old precedent of Roe v. Wade and undermining the Constitutional right to privacy, Republicans would rip away women’s right to make the most intimate and personal decisions.  If handed down, this decision by GOP-appointed Justices would mean that, for the first time in our history, America’s daughters will have less freedom than their mothers.

Republicans have made clear that their goal will be to seek to criminalize abortion nationwide.  Republican state legislators across the country are already advancing extreme new laws, seeking to arrest doctors for offering reproductive care, ban abortion entirely with no exceptions, and even charge women with murder who exercise their right to choose.  These draconian measures could even criminalize contraceptive care, in vitro fertilization and post-miscarriage care, dragging our nation back to a dark time decades into the past.

Make no mistake: once Republicans have dispensed with precedent and privacy in overturning Roe, they will take aim at additional basic human rights.  At this pivotal moment, the stakes for women – and every American – could not be higher. 

And the prospects could not be bleaker. Well they could, but they’re more than bleak enough. It’s all too likely that the Dems will lose both the House and the Senate in just six months. Gilead is on the horizon.

Aaron Rupar watched the governors gloat so that we don’t have to.

If the Supreme Court follows through on a leaked draft decision that would end the federal right to an abortion, abortion procedures would immediately become illegal in the 22 red or purple states that already have bans on the books. Comments from Republican governors on the most recent round of Sunday news shows served as grim reminders of what that would mean for women — and hinted at rights Republicans will come for next.

Spoiler: they’re not stopping with abortion.

Hutchinson [Arkansas] and Reeves [Mississippi] know they’re essentially making women second-class citizens. During their Sunday interviews, both governors tried to soften the blow by vowing to provide more support to mothers and children. But as host Jake Tapper pointed out to Reeves, he’s had plenty of time to do that and hasn’t bothered. When ranking states by child well-being, Mississippi consistently lands near the bottom, and there’s no reason to believe that’ll suddenly change if abortions are banned.

Or for any other reason. Reeves doesn’t care, end of story.

If you don’t live in a red and purple state, you might be tempted to think that as horrible as the looming rollback of reproductive rights is, it won’t directly affect you. But think again. Republicans are already talking about a federal abortion ban.

Women must be kept enslaved by their own bodies. It’s god’s will.

Trump gets to shove his penis wherever it will fit but women have to be punished for seeking abortion.

We haven’t finished yet, they gloat. There’s more, they smirk. Your life belongs to us, they sneer.

The Republican governor of Mississippi has refused to rule out attempting to ban some forms of contraception if the supreme court ruling that guarantees the right to abortion should fall.

…

Speaking on CNN on Sunday, Reeves confirmed that his state’s trigger law would go into effect if Roe is overturned.

Reeves’ host on CNN, Jake Tapper, then referred to neighbouring Louisiana, where Republicans have advanced a bill to make abortion a crime of murder.

Tapper said: “They’re talking about not only criminally charging girls and women who get abortions as committing homicide, but they’re also talking about defining the moment of conception as fertilisation, which would theoretically … mean if you use an IUD [intrauterine device], you are committing murder.

“… I’m not making this up. These are the conversations going on in legislatures in your area. So, just to be clear, you have no intention of seeking to ban IUDs or Plan B [morning-after pills]?”

Reeves waved it off with a “we’re not thinking about that right now.”

One thing we can predict: roughly half of the babies born because abortion was unavailable will grow up to have no right to stop being pregnant. Yay?

How dare women talk about women things.

Another walkout:

A body representing football writers in Scotland has apologised after a speaker’s sexist and misogynistic jokes prompted attendees to walk out of its annual awards dinner.

…

Gabriella Bennett, the co-chair of Women In Journalism Scotland, told BBC Radio Scotland: “I really enjoy it as an event, but there are always off-colour jokes made by the speakers … sexist or misogynistic. But last night’s speech was really next-level. I walked out after about five minutes of maybe a 20-minute speech.

“My table stood up to leave, and I saw Eilidh Barbour and people on her table start to leave. But there were loads of people laughing at these jokes. We were two tables in an enormous room and lots of people found it really funny, so there’s lots of work that we still need to do in really changing people’s minds about what’s acceptable.”

Wimmin got no sensa yuma.

Trump again artlessly tells the world what an incompetent fool he is by talking trash about people he himself gave the jobs he says they did so badly.

Trump, in a written statement to CBS’s 60 Minutes, said he had “no comment” when asked whether he ever asked ex-defense secretary Mark Esper about sending “missiles into Mexico” to destroy drug cartel labs in the country, which Esper claimed in a memoir published this week.

So that’s a yes.

“Mark Esper was weak and totally ineffective, and because of it, I had to run the military,” Trump’s statement to 60 Minutes boasted. “He was a lightweight and figurehead, and I realized it very early on.”

Well not “early on” enough, clearly, because there he was, being the defense secretary. A competent boss would find that out before hiring the lightweight figurehead, not after.

“I fired Yesper because he was a Rino (Republican in name only) incapable of leading, and I had to run the military myself.”

Then wudja hire him for, sir?

Australia’s Labor Party is disappearing women from its policies.

Labor has “betrayed” women by axing the words “mother”, “breastfeeding” and “pregnant women” from its official policy platform, say women’s rights advocates.

The official ALP National Platform, a blueprint for its direction in government, has even got rid of an entire section devoted to “maternal and child health”.

Because…what? None of that is needed any more?

The current 2021 policy document which “sets out the contemporary policy agenda that an Albanese Labor Government will implement” does not mention the word mother once.

In the older 2018 version it spoke about mothers four times, and also had references to pregnant mothers and breastfeeding.

Now the new policy references “people” and “individuals” who are pregnant, which feminists say is part of a transgender debate around “erasing” female specific words.

Same old same old. Erasing women from all conversations out of some warped impulse to humor a tiny fraction of the population who think they’re the opposite sex.

“ … Labour supports the rights of individuals to make decisions regarding their reproductive health,” the updated policy now states.

See that makes no sense. Reproductive health is vastly simpler for men; women have a lot more needs around repro health than men do. Also (though far from unrelatedly) women are the subordinated of the two sexes, so disappearing us is disappearing the people who are in a permanent struggle for equal rights. Imagine Labor dropping all words that related to indigenous people in Australia – would anyone think that was a good idea?

Another sentence says: “ … whether people choose to continue their pregnancy or not”.

Which is insulting. If “people” got pregnant then women wouldn’t be subordinated. It’s the pregnant-getting that is why women are subordinated. To pretend that pregnancy is a universal experience, while not ceasing to subordinate women, is a massive grotesque insult.

Oh look, scrolling down I see

Oh look, scrolling down I see

Oh look, scrolling down I see

Oh look, scrolling down I see Coalition for Biological Sex founder Stassja Frei made the same point I did:

“We don’t elevate the rights of indigenous Australians by referring to them simply as ‘people’.

What I’m saying.

Ok so I am reading Sullivan’s revolting piece, because I’m masochistic that way. 14 words in I’m already pissed off.

To say that a leaked draft of a Supreme Court ruling prompted an elite meltdown would be a gross understatement.

“Elite.” What an asshole. Does he think non-elite women want to be forced to bear children they don’t want? You can’t even phrase it so that it makes sense – women who don’t want a pregnancy don’t want the pregnancy, so of course no women want to be forced to do what they don’t want to do. It’s a contradiction in terms. But here’s smug Sullivan calling us “elite” for saying so. Easy for him.

The seriously stupid bit, as we already know, is where he pretends to think Kamala Harris meant all women vote yes on abortion rights.

Kamala Harris also found her voice:

Those Republican leaders who are trying to weaponize the use of the law against women. Well we say, ‘How dare they?’ How dare they tell a woman what she can do and cannot do with her own body? How dare they? How dare they try to stop her from determining her own future? How dare they try to deny women their rights and their freedoms?

The premise here is that all women support abortion rights.

The hell it is. She doesn’t say, or imply, “all women support abortion rights.” She says how dare they [the theocrats] tell women what we can do with our bodies? That doesn’t imply anything about the views or loyalties of the women in question. It’s a statement about rights, not a statement about opinions or votes. There is no premise about how women vote.

What strikes me about all of this is not the emotive hyperbole — that’s par for the course in a country where every discourse is now dialed to eleven. What strikes me most in these takes is the underlying contempt for and suspicion of the democratic process — from many of the same people who insist they want to save it.

Democratic process? What democratic process? The Supreme Court isn’t a democratic process. The appointment of justices isn’t a democratic process, although it is in theory the outcome of one…but of course we know it isn’t, strictly speaking, since Clinton got more votes than Trump. It’s a gerrymandered process that relies on a grotesquely undemocratic Senate and Electoral College, so Sullivan should start complaining about that before he complains about angry feminists dissing Our Demokrasee.

I’ll leave it there. He scrapes my nerves.

Remember how we were told the FBI was investigating Kavanaugh? When it wasn’t? Remember how Kavanaugh lied under oath in his hearing? Remember his fake tantrum? Remember who and what he is?

Oh yay, we can all live together at last.

Absolutely. Half of us told we have no rights over our own bodies will do wonders for living together.