La lutte continue.

So I read the other guy’s 6 and 7 so that I’d know what Andy was replying to. I became very tired when I got to this bit:

In my first letter, I gave a definition of gender that highlights that it is a complex construction involving a wide range of inputs and outputs, and that we are still actively involved in the process of understanding how those factors interact.

No it isn’t complex, except in the sense that it’s become fashionable to misunderstand it and try to make a personality out of it.

Andy’s response to that part:

I am not going to pick apart your ideas on gender, but for the record, it looks as if you gave up on trying to define what a “gender” is and resorted to a “it’s complicated” type non-argument. And that leaves me with not a clear target to address. Science requires precision. And your approach, to be honest, looks more like mysticism and hiding behind the supposedly ineffable. 

Precisely. It’s tiresome.

Yet another guy cheerily giving away women’s rights.

He’d rather destroy women’s sports than “erase” trans people (by which he means not allow men to compete against women). Easy for him, it’s not his ability to compete fairly in a sport that’s being waved away.

He would rather erase women. So many of them would. It’s astounding.

Jess DeWahls sees it too.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Connections found.

“The idea that history stands still is nonsense because you keep finding new things.”

It’s not just a matter of things being “found” or “discovered.” It’s that new information is being disclosed or officially acknowledged, instead of being hidden, or swept under the rug. It completes the story, telling it more fully and honestly.

On this side of the Atlantic, the official acknowledgement of the foundations of Canada and the United States in genocide, and the disposession of the Original inhabitants, along with the importation of kidnapped, enslaved Africans, is a work in progress.* It’s not that this was ever really secret (certainly not to those on the receiving end of colonial power), but these aspects of the founding mythos of the political administrative units concerned have been purposefully left out, ignored, or glossed over. That the perspective of peoples whose perception of and part in “official” histories differs from, or contradicts these mythologies, is a sign of hope. We are now, belatedly, hearing the voices of people who were forced to pay the price for power and luxuries that they were not permitted to share. This includes not only the examination of historical injustices, but their continuation into the present. It’s not just “history.” Too often the idea of “moving forward” from the past is just a euphemism for ignoring, or running away from it.

I’ve just started reading the book Unreconciled by Jesse Wente, a combination of personal memoire set within a broader picture of the experiences of Indigenous Peoples within Colonial Canada. I’ve already been given one head-slapping reality-check moment from the inner flap of the dust jacket: “Wente argues that ‘reconciliation’ is a flawed concept: peace between First Nations and the state of Canada can’t be recovered through reconciliation because no such relationship ever existed.” Holy shit. I’d never thought of it like this. Of course, I’ve never had to. Now that is White privilege (unironic, without scare quotes) in (in)action. More of the same, please, Mr. Wente.

This more complete disclosure is akin to the relatively recent requirement to provide ingredient lists and nutritional analyses on food products, or the enumeration of the totality of a medication’s actions, including so-called “side effects”, which are simply inconvenient, unwanted, yet inevitable consequences of its use. Perhaps, more importantly it is like an attempt to find out a patient’s complete medical history before committing to a course of treatment for present ailments. Accurate, honest information is more likely to result in an effective outcome. Of course, the first step is admitting you have a problem.

*Not to mention the historical, and ongoing, exploitation and destruction of other living beings and biomes, redefined as “resources,” in the name of “development.”

We keep seeing them, men breezily giving away women’s rights. There’s an endless supply of such men.

Yes, how dare girls’ schools continue to be girls’ schools. Never mind the fact that girls flourish in girls’ schools – add some boys to the mix anyway, because Tom Harwood is fine with it.

Sean Gunn, of course, absolutely merits being listened to. I wonder what the difference might be.

But clearly Sean Gunn knows far more about why JK Rowling should STFU than JK Rowling knows about what a woman is.

Why is Devin Nunes walking? To take up an awesome opportunity to run a new Media Thingy invented by Donald Trump! (Actually because redistricting has made it hard for him to get re-elected.) Who is better at inventing awesome new media thingies than Donald Trump??? He’s invented about six of them since he lost the election, and they’re all so successful that they make Twitter and Facebook look like the local coffee shop’s noticeboard.

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) officially resigned from Congress on Monday to become the CEO of ex-President Donald Trump’s new media venture, Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG).

…

The California Republican’s plans for resignation were revealed in early December. Trump claimed in a statement at the time that Nunes would be an “excellent” CEO for the company, which has been working on the launch of a new social network called “TRUTH Social” as an alternative to Twitter.

Ah yes. Trump thinks “social” is short for “social media.”

Nunes, a former dairy farmer with no professional experience in media, touted his new role as an opportunity to “allow for the free flow of ideas and expression without censorship” on the Internet.

Including planning genocides, yes?

While in Congress, Nunes filed multiple goofy lawsuits against his critics on Twitter, including people pretending to be his mom and a cow in order to troll him.

How about TRUTH COW Social?

Devin Nunes has resigned.

Buh-bye.

Graham Douglas in a comment told us about a statue that has been moved from a prominent place in front of the National Trust property Dunham Massey Hall.

The Dunham Massey Hall sundial is a lead sculpture depicting a kneeling Black man holding a sundial on his head. It was created during the early 18th century, and until 2020 stood outside Dunham Massey Hall, a stately home in Cheshire, England.

Its subject matter attracted criticism and in 2020 the National Trust removed it amid the global wave of statue removals connected with the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. It is currently held in storage.

The sundial sculpture is a black, polychromed cast-lead statue. It depicts a life-size kneeling figure of an African man wearing a feathered loincloth and holding a stone and brass sundial on his head. The figure’s eyes are painted white with blue pupils, and the loincloth is painted blue and green. It dates from the 18th century and has been attributed to Andries Carpentière (1677–1737). It is thought that it was cast after a model by Jan van Nost (c.1660-1711-13) which was installed in 1701 in the Privy Garden of Hampton Court Palace.^[1] It was probably commissioned by George Booth, 2nd Earl of Warrington (1675-1758).

The figure is an example of a tradition in western European art called the “blackamoor“. These caricatures appeared in a wide range of arts including sculpture, painting, architectural decoration, ceramics, silverware and furniture, and generally depicted a generic black person in exoticised costume and posted in a servile position, holding an object.^[1]

Close to the sculpture was a plaque containing the words: “This sundial is in the style of one commissioned by King William III. It represents Africa, one of four continents known at the time. The figure depicts a Moor, not a slave, and he has knelt here since before 1750.”^[2

But “a Moor” and “a slave” are not mutually exclusive, I think. Some “Moors” owned slaves but others were slaves. A kneeling figure with a sundial on his head doesn’t look like a free citizen to me.

In June 2020, the National Trust announced that it was “reviewing” the statue amid the global wave of statue removals during the Black Lives Matter protests.^[2][3]

Shortly afterwards, the Trust took the decision to remove the statue from its prominent location outside Dunham Massey Hall, stating that the sculpture “caused upset and distress because of the way it depicts a black person and because of its prominence at the front of the house”. The National Trust also stated that it did not plan to “censor or deny” colonial history, but intended to devise a new way of displaying it “in a way that fully acknowledges the appalling histories of slavery and the slave trade”. Historic England noted that that the National Trust had not requested listed building consent prior to the removal of the Grade II-listed sundial.^[4]

In a way, of course, the removal sanitizes history, and makes Dunham Massey Hall look more innocent than it was. In a way that’s unfortunate. At the same time, leaving it there feels like an insult to every non-pale visitor to the place.

Yes? Yes.

Apparently learning more about history is excessively “woke.”

The head of the National Trust has said she received anonymous death threats during a “culture war” row over the organisation’s perceived “wokeness”.

Oh no, what did they do? Rename themselves the Critical Race Theory Trust?

The row was sparked by NT efforts to learn more about the history of its properties, including a report published last year that found connections between 93 of its historic places and colonialism and slavery.

Oh. They reported on the fact that the money that built those historic places came from somewhere.

What was the thinking before that? That it’s all just a miracle? Somehow a few men designated “aristocrats” were rewarded with prodigy houses and large estates by means of a secret magic mechanism that has never been explained?

The NT plans to build on work after the report published last year detailing connections between 93 of its properties and colonialism and historical slavery.

“Every day we uncover another bit of history. We have an obligation to tell this huge, complex, layered story of the history of the three countries we’re responsible for. The idea that history stands still is nonsense because you keep finding new things.”

And, it’s interesting. Yes it’s about a hideous historic injustice, as is a lot of history, but that doesn’t make it not worth knowing about.

She insisted: “No one is forcing this down your throat. No one is trying to make you read this stuff. There’s no sense that we’re trying to preach and, certainly, definitely not judge. We’re trying to provide layers of information; we’re taking nothing away. We’re adding to the complexity of the information available. But if [people] want to come along and walk around the garden and have a lovely cup of tea, I am delighted about that. Why would I be prescriptive as to how people should engage with the National Trust?”

A cup of tea AND a biscuit.

Whew it’s been a weather here. A week ago today, early in the morning, it started snowing as if being blasted from a fire hose, and the temperatures went down way below freezing and stayed there until today.

So now there is slush everywhere, but even so walking is easier than it’s been for a week, and tomorrow it will be more so. I just walked up and down the block 8 times because the sidewalk is naked from one end to the other and that’s still a rarity. Before that I walked to the library – it had been closed for the whole week.

Your Chicago and Minneapolis don’t close down when it snows but then it snows a lot more there, and also Seattle is all hills.

It was 108 Fahrenheit here during the heat dome, and 17 F during the snow week. I think that’s a record temperature spread for one year.

Harry Miller v College of Policing might as well not have happened.

Finally – a NO!

A group of the UK’s leading girls’ schools will not accept transgender pupils because they are worried it will ‘jeopardise’ their status as single-sex institutions. 

Stupid place to put scare quotes. Yes, jeopardise; what’s wrong with that word?

The Girls’ Day School Trust, which represents 23 private schools and two academies, updated its gender identity policy guidance document last month and shared it with its members. 

In a new section on admissions, the GDST said its schools do not accept applications from pupils  who are legally biologically male, even if they identify as women [girls].

They said that having a policy on ‘gender identity’ rather than the sex recorded on a pupil’s birth certificate would ‘jeopardise the status of GDST schools as single-sex schools’ under the 2010 Equality Act. 

However, a female pupil who begins to transition while already at one of the GDST’s schools should be supported to remain there for as long as they want to, the document adds.

Let’s have more of this.

Marjorie Taylor Greene joins Trump is being permanently booted off Twitter.

Twitter on Sunday permanently suspended the personal account of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican of Georgia, after the company said she had violated its Covid-19 misinformation policies.

Twitter suspended Ms. Greene’s account after she tweeted on Saturday, falsely, about “extremely high amounts of Covid vaccine deaths.” She included a misleading chart that pulled information from a government database of unverified raw data called the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, a decades-old system that relies on self-reported cases from patients and health care providers.

Twitter said that Ms. Greene had a fifth “strike,” which meant that her account will not be restored. The company had issued her a fourth strike in August after she falsely posted that the vaccines were “failing.” Ms. Greene was given a third strike less than a month before that when she had tweeted that Covid-19 was not dangerous for people unless they were obese or over age 65, and said vaccines should not be required.

It’s like telling people to drive drunk during a blizzard.

On the alternative social messaging platform Telegram, Ms. Greene said that Twitter “is an enemy to America and can’t handle the truth.”

Sonia Sodha says something you’d think would be too obvious to have to say:

The police need to be politically impartial – they must not police people differently because of their political opinions. Yet there are numerous examples of police forces actively taking political sides in the sex and gender debate. Paul Giannasi, the national policing adviser for hate crime, has praised Lancashire police for expressing disappointment at lawful expressions of gender critical belief, congratulating them for their “initiative and empathy” in doing so.

Empathy for whom? For men who say they are women. Definitely not for women.

The police officer who unlawfully warned off [Harry] Miller told him, Miller said, that a foetus could have a female brain but grow male body parts, later confirming he learned this unscientific belief on a training course. Greater Manchester police social media accounts have used and defended the derogatory and misogynistic term “terf”, associated with rape and death threats against women expressing gender-critical beliefs.

Somehow women have become the brutal heartless aristocratic men of the world, trampling lesser beings beneath their ruling class feet.

Just handing away our rights as if they were his to hand away.

Oh just stop right there. That’s cheating. It’s not “a question” whether housing trans women is more like housing lesbians or housing men, obviously, because trans women are men. Housing trans women is identical to housing men because both trans women and men are men. He doesn’t need evidence to prove that because it’s true by definition. Housing men is like housing men; housing men is not like housing lesbians.

He tries to pretend that’s not true by calling men “cis men” but that’s a cheat. “Cis” is a word that’s used to deflect perception of cheating of this kind.

As with sports, defenders of the dogma say oh but they’re on estrogen, they’re not the same as men, but that’s horseshit. 1. most are not on estrogen and 2. even with estrogen the advantages remain huge.

He just thinks women’s safety doesn’t matter. It’s maddening.

There is no such step. Trans women are men. You might as well say “you missed a step where you prove that trans women act the same as flibberty men.”

Yes it’s all just a big joke.

Andy Lewis aka Le canard noir is doing a letters-debate thing with Embrace the void aka Aaron Rabinowitz. The latter defines some terms at the outset:

The other important term here is moral panic, which I’ve discussed in a few places but just briefly refers to a substantial overreaction to a small or nonexistent problem.

Mm. It’s a small or nonexistent problem – the fact that we (women) are being told we have to redefine ourselves in a way that entails including men as women on demand. If a man tells us he’s a woman we have to agree, or at least comply; if we refuse, punishment is swift. To us that is not a small problem.

Often the problem is treated as an existential threat to some part of civilization, and often there’s a special emphasis on harms to women and children.

I find that extremely snide. He probably didn’t mean it that way, but then that’s the problem, isn’t it. He’s hinting that it’s a sentimental slushy ploy to emphasize the harms to women and children, which requires ignoring the fact that the harms to women and children are worse and that that’s because adult men have a lot of genuine advantages over women and children. Yes, we women are yipping about it a lot but that’s because it’s kneecapping our ongoing struggle to be treated as fully equal human beings along with men. Excuuuuuse us for objecting.

The other way it’s snide is that it implies there’s nothing real to object to, it’s just “oh won’t somebody please think of the [designated victims]??” Easy for him, but he’s not as easily beaten up as a woman is.

So, I’m not optimistic about this exchange.

Girls can’t “identify” their way out of having their genitals sliced off.

The death of a young woman in Sierra Leone, almost immediately after undergoing female genital mutilation, has sparked outrage and revived calls to end the practice.

The body of 21-year-old Maseray Sei was found on 20 December at Nyandeni village in Bonthe district, southern Sierra Leone, a day after the FGM took place. Sei’s family said that after the procedure the mother of two boys complained of a migraine and was in pain, with complications from FGM thought to be the cause, according to activists working on the case.

Maybe pointless mutilation of genitals isn’t such a good idea after all.

Sierra Leone has one of the highest rates of FGM in the world, with nine out of 10 women and girls aged between 15 and 49 affected, according to Unicef. …

Rugiatu Turay, an activist and former deputy minister for gender in Sierra Leone, said the case was another shocking example of the toll of FGM on women.

“It’s a tragic case and, in a way, shows how many more people like her have died or are suffering, because the majority of cases are unreported,” she said.

Turay chairs a coalition of 21 national groups fighting FGM which is now putting pressure on the authorities to carry out the postmortem.

Meanwhile, in the “developed” world, mutilation of genitals is all the rage.

Dress your people in lacquer and rubber:

The sexology department at a Norwegian university headed by a trans-identified male and his wife prompted backlash after requiring students to participate in a fetish club as part of their research.

Zoologists can do research on animals without dressing up as animals. I don’t see why sexologists can’t do the same.

Tonje Kristin Jensen, a student at the University of Agder, told the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation that she decided to forego a study trip in Oslo after receiving a letter providing a required dress code that included fetish gear on the theme of “lacquer and rubber.” The memo encouraged students to attend in erotic clothes, such as lace and thigh-high stockings.

Erotic for whom?

It wrote: “We have a dress code which relates to rubber, lacquer, leather, and the like. Or one can choose the erotic dress code, where lace, corsets and the like dominate. Girls can also not wear denim.”

What if girls want to wear a denim corset?

The university trip was planned for a fetish club called Cat People in Oslo. On its Facebook page, the club features several sexualized photos of women in bondage.

Not men in bondage though. I think we’re beginning to detect the vague outlines of the answer to “erotic for whom?”

In 2018, The World Health Organization (WHO) removed Fetishism, Transvestic Fetishism and Sadomasochism as psychiatric diagnoses in response to lobbying by Norwegian group FRI. The new ICD classification defines Fetishism, Fetishistic Transvestism and Sadomasochism as variants in sexual arousal, in direct contradiction with research that has consistently correlated sadism with violence, including homicide. Some research suggests that as much as 50% of sexual killers are sexually sadistic, and even higher rates have been found in serial sexual killers.

Nah it’s just a harmless kink. What’s with all the moral panic, laydeez? Come on, get your corset on and put your hands behind your back.

A letter to the Glinner update from Matt Osborne:

Mr. Linehan,

The following comment from an Alabama Democratic Party insider was just passed along to me:

“How are we going to talk to voters with a straight face after setting a quota for non-binary party officials?”

I have been sounding the alarm all this time, and now the pigeons are coming home to roost. This midterm election year is going to be awful for Democrats. I was just discussing the poor polling on all this gobbledygook with my local-political friends and said “every time another man cheats women out of their sports, Democrats lose ten House seats.” One of them responded by conveying that comment, which is less than a day old.

It’s a desperately sad joke, isn’t it. We have climate change and a pandemic and the usual life or death matters to deal with, including the continuation of democracy itself, and we could lose everything because of this stupid frivolous narcissistic belief system that lets grown men pretend to be women and push real women off the cliff in the process. It’s Swift’s boiled eggs all over again.

H/t Sackbut

That’s an amazing story.

Innocent on grounds of inability to sweat m’lud.

Lawyers for a US woman who has accused Prince Andrew of sexual assault are seeking proof of the British royal’s alleged inability to sweat.

Virginia Giuffre’s legal team made the request as part of a civil case against the prince in a New York court.

Ms Giuffre, 38, alleges that Prince Andrew sexually assaulted her when she was a teenager at the homes of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

Prince Andrew has consistently denied the allegations.

In a 2019 interview with BBC Newsnight, he said a “problem” with her account was that a medical condition at the time meant he could not have been sweating, as she claims he was.

So now they want him to produce evidence of that there medical condition.

This minor detail is funny in its way, but the story as a whole is utterly revolting – filthy rich adults sex trafficking teenage girls. Those girls couldn’t identify their way out of that prison.