Sarah Phillimore tells us of someone who wrote to ActionAidUK asking them to use the word “sex” rather than “gender” in their mailings because

These words are being conflated on a regular basis and it is causing issues. Women and girls are being discriminated against and abused on the basis of their sex. Words are important and it needs to be crystal clear who is being subject to the violence so we can help those most in need.

You can write their reply in your sleep.

We agree that words are important. As ActionAid UK is an organisation focused on supporting the most marginalised women and girls in the world, it is important to us that we are clear that when we are talking about women and girls, we are including transgender women and girls in our definition of women and girls.

In other words transgender “women and girls” are the most marginalized so yes we will continue to “center” them instead of actual women and girls.

ActionAid UK defines women and girls as anyone who self-identifies as a woman or a girl. Allowing self-determination of our bodies is a basic feminist principle.

Yes self-determination of our bodies. Ours. Women’s. That’s not to say that men shouldn’t have that self-determination too, just that it’s not and can’t be and shouldn’t be an issue for feminism because feminism is for and about women. Literal women, not pretend women, not identify-as women, not feelings in the head women.

ActionAid UK understands there is no such thing as a ‘biologically female/male body’

Does ActionAidUK understand that the UK is a half-eaten doughnut that Athena dropped while she was watching “The Real Housewives of Pittsburgh”?

Sarah Phillimore comments:

ActionAidUK declares itself to be a charity ‘that works with women and girls living in poverty’. It apparently recognises the harm done to women and girls by violence. Women and girls do not ‘choose’ to become victims of violence, rape, sex trafficking, FGM or abortion from their mother’s wombs. They haven’t ‘self identified’ into this condition. It is immediately obvious to those who hurt and kill them, who deny them an education, who force them into marriage aged 12, what sex they are. For about 99% of living humans, it is immediately obvious what sex they are.

But now we’ve forgotten all that.

My days now seem to consist of an endless cycle of remote court hearings, Zoom meetings, walking the dogs and sending emails to various organisations that can be distilled to a simple scream of WHY.

WHY does recognising the vulnerabilty of people who feel unhappiness with their ‘gender identity’ have to come at the expense of reality? Why does biology have to be denied to ensure that we treat everyone with compassion and humanity? WHY is it always women and girls who have to move over and abandon their rights to claim their actual, physical identities as members of the female sex?

WHY?

Many of us would like to know.

Trump and his hooligans just can’t get it together on what they’re supposed to be saying about Fauci. We hate him? We love him but he has to shut up about this whole pandemic thing? He doesn’t know what he’s talking about? He knows lots but he needs to be more tactful?

Yes, and more.

The White House on Wednesday disavowed an overt attack on the government’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, from one of President Trump’s senior advisers on trade and China, Peter Navarro.

Navarro wrote an op-ed for USA Today on Tuesday in which he argued that Fauci “has been wrong about everything I have interacted with him on” — another salvo in a series of pointed remarks against the immunologist.

And what has Navarro ever been right about?

Navarro, who has no medical training, ticked through a series of matters on which he disagreed with Fauci, including the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine to treat the coronavirus. The National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration have said the malaria drug is unlikely to be effective.

And Navarro knows better how exactly?

Two White House officials who declined to be named insisted Navarro “went rogue” and didn’t clear his editorial with the White House communications team

Sure sure sure, we definitely believe that.

So a bishop and a rabbi walk into a pub issue a joint statement:

It’s a funny kind of “statement” because I can’t find it in any form except that image, only excerpts in a few news items, mostly churchy ones. I just zipped through the bishop’s tweets for the past couple of weeks in case he’d tweeted a link but nope. He seems like a very decent man, full of concern for the downtrodden, but I still have to take issue with some of the claims in this statement.

We have noted with sadness the increasing use of the term ‘transgender’ ideology and other derogatory terms about trans people.

It’s not derogatory to say there is such a thing as trans ideology. What else can we call it? There are claims about what “trans” means and how we are to behave toward people who say they are it; what can we call those claims if not ideology?

I suppose the answer would be “facts” or “the truth.” I suppose the idea is that calling it ideology implies invention as opposed to discovery.

Ok, fair enough, but then this is the core issue, isn’t it. Much of the bullying by activists and allies is around this push to convince everyone that it’s simply true that some people are “in the wrong body.” Much of the resistance is to this push.

So, the rabbi and the bishop are apparently saying we shouldn’t resist this push to accept that a set of very shaky claims is simply true new discoveries about human…sex? Gender? Essence?

But what if the claims are in fact as wrong and confused and fantasy-based as they appear to us? What if children and teenagers really are being mutilated on the strength of this new truth-or-ideology? Don’t we need to know that? Wouldn’t it in fact be a good thing if we discovered that hopla! people don’t need to mutilate themselves after all, because the idea that we can be born in “the wrong body” turns out to be an invention and not a fact?

Then they proceed to the usual – and undisputed – announcement that trans people shouldn’t be persecuted.

As faith leaders, we believe that trans people, like every other person, have every right to be cherished, and protected by society and in the gender in which they choose to live.

Watch out! They sneaked a stinger into the tail. Every person has every right to be in the gender in which they choose to live. If it’s what they choose to live in then it’s not a fact that it’s what they are, is it. It can’t be both. It can’t be a fact about them and a choice.

Anyway what does choosing to live in a gender mean? Not a lot, as we’ve explored ad infinitum here.

They think it’s time to “soften” the rhetoric, “so that trans people may indeed be seen as people.” But trans people already are seen as people. No gender-unbelievers consider them not people. No gender-unbelievers call them not people. If we’re going to soften the rhetoric, how about not claiming or hinting that gender skeptics say trans people are not people? How about seeing us “as people” too?

The world is far richer for their contribution…

Is it? I’m not seeing the enrichment.

They end by saying let’s talk about this in a new way, “one that looks to build up rather than destroy, and to honour rather than denigrate.” Build up what, though? Build up the idea that a man who says he thinks of himself as a woman is every bit as much a woman as a woman is, and probably better than she is at being a feminist because he is both a woman and trans, which=feminist squared.

Not doing that, soz.

I thought it was a photoshop when I looked to see why “Ivanka” is trending – but no, she really did tweet it her own royal self.

Remember, kids, she’s an OFFICIAL in the WHITE HOUSE.

She’s also someone who’s never eaten canned beans in her life.

She’s also the loyal daughter and employee of the president who calls Mexicans rapists and bad hombres.

Eyebrows are elevated:

Ivanka Trump is facing backlash after tweeting a photo of herself holding up a can of Goya beans. The tweet from the president’s daughter includes Goya’s slogan, “If it’s Goya, it has to be good,” in both English and in Spanish. She also posted the image to her Facebook and Instagram pages.

As White House officials do oh wait no they don’t. Marketing canned beans isn’t part of their job, and is in conflict with their job.

Trump’s social media post comes days after Goya CEO Robert Unanue praised Mr. Trump during an event last week at the White House. “We’re all truly blessed at the same time to have a leader like President Trump, who is a builder,” Unanue said.

Well he’s a builder of ugly high rises, yes, but he’s also a let-dier, a killer, a destroyer, a bribe taker, a raper…and a few other things.

Oh no, the radical left New York Times. No wonder Bari Weiss quit.

But it’s ok, the White House issued a statement saying it’s all totally fine.

“Only the media and the cancel culture movement would criticize Ivanka for showing her personal support for a company that has been unfairly mocked, boycotted and ridiculed for supporting this administration — one that has consistently fought for and delivered for the Hispanic community,” White House communications aide Carolina Hurley said. “Ivanka is proud of this strong, Hispanic-owned business with deep roots in the U.S. and has every right to express her personal support.”

She’s not in a position to “show her personal support” for a commercial product, because of her job.

People who work for presidents get an ethics briefing before they start. The ethics briefing doesn’t carve out an exception for presidents’ daughters who want to show their “personal support” for a brand.

Updating to add:

Ross Douthat on cancel culture:

All cultures cancel; the question is for what, how widely and through what means.

There is no human society where you can say or do anything you like and expect to keep your reputation and your job. Reputational cancellation hung over the heads of Edith Wharton’s heroines; professional cancellation shadowed 20th-century figures like Lenny Bruce. Today, almost all critics of cancel culture have some line they draw, some figure — usually a racist or anti-Semite — that they would cancel, too. And social conservatives who criticize cancel culture, especially, have to acknowledge that we’re partly just disagreeing with today’s list of cancellation-worthy sins.

This is what I keep saying. (It surprises me to agree with Douthat, but there you go.) It’s not a matter of Absolute Freedom but of the particulars. I think Trump should be canceled, for a start. I don’t think Twitter should have banned Meghan Murphy.

Cancellation isn’t exactly about free speech, but a liberal society should theoretically cancel less frequently than its rivals.

The canceled individual hasn’t lost any First Amendment rights, because there is no constitutional right to a particular job or reputation. At the same time, under its own self-understanding, liberalism is supposed to clear a wider space for debate than other political systems and allow a wider range of personal expression. So you would expect a liberal society to be slower to cancel, more inclined to separate the personal and the professional (or the ideological and the artistic), and quicker to offer opportunities to regain one’s reputation and start one’s professional life anew.

Then of course we also think illiberal societies should become more liberal in that way. We don’t think China should be shutting down all criticism and rebellion in Hong Kong; we don’t think Putin should have his critics thrown out of windows; we don’t think Mohammed bin Salman should have had Jamal Khashoggi chopped into pieces.

Cancel culture is most effective against people who are still rising in their fields, and it influences many people who don’t actually get canceled.

The point of cancellation is ultimately to establish norms for the majority, not to bring the stars back down to earth. So a climate of cancellation can succeed in changing the way people talk and argue and behave even if it doesn’t succeed in destroying the careers of some of the famous people that it targets. You don’t need to cancel Rowling if you can cancel the lesser-known novelist who takes her side; you don’t have to take down the famous academics who signed last week’s Harper’s Magazine letter attacking cancel culture if you can discourage people half their age from saying what they think. The goal isn’t to punish everyone, or even very many someones; it’s to shame or scare just enough people to make the rest conform.

And it works. It works like a bastard. We know this from all the many many reports by the unsilenced TERFs of countless closet TERFs who thank the unsilenced and wish they could join them but can’t if they want to keep their jobs or chances of promotion or friends. That’s cancel culture working.

H/t Sackbut among others

To lose one centrist columnist, Mister Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose two looks like carelessness.

A pair of prominent writers announced they’re leaving their prominent publications Tuesday. The resignations appear to be related to recent debates within the wider media landscape about the alleged stifling of public discourse.

Bari Weiss, a former op-ed staff editor and writer for The New York Times, resigned from the newspaper today, while prominent New York writer Andrew Sullivan announced this would be his last week at the magazine.

So what’s the betting? Is a new and exciting Centrist Gazette about to burst onto the scene?

Not all that exciting…

There’s a reason they call it Penis News…

Trump is holding a kind of rally disguised as a press briefing at the moment. Apparently he’s sweating heavily and failing to charm his audience.

That really is all he says. It doesn’t answer her question, and it doesn’t connect to what she’s talking about, but it’s all he can think of to say. He really is that dense.

Actually, Mike, yeah, we do. That’s exactly what we want. They know more about it than we do. They sure as hell know more about it than you do.

The “press briefing” is actually a campaign speech attacking Biden.

Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on A firm grasp.

first-time writers, centrists, conservatives and others who would not naturally think of The Times as their home

David Brooks, Bill Kristol,Thomas Friedman, Ross Douthat – just off the top of my head.

To a large extent the New York Times’ editorial page has long been a who’s who of “very serious people”, AKA the same centrist “very serious people” whose propagandising helped land America in Iraq. To say that centrist writers wouldn’t see the New York Times as their home, would imply that they’d never heard of it.

But the big thing that struck me here was this:

This is a galaxy in which, to choose just a few recent examples, the Soviet space program is lauded for its “diversity”; the doxxing of teenagers in the name of justice is condoned; and the worst caste systems in human history includes the United States alongside Nazi Germany.

This is one of those things that pisses me off with centrist pundits. In one breath they will proclaim that we should be able to deal with nuance. Defending somebody’s right to say something, for example, is not defending what they’re saying.

A big part of this is what the whole “Intellectual dark web” schtick is trying to claim its about: The ability to have nuanced discussions which are supposedly verboten under “cancel culture” because the people having the discussion aren’t allowed to broach uncomfortable territory.

Apart from the awful name, I could get behind that if it wasn’t a lie.

So look at Weiss’ first example – the Soviet space program is lauded for its diversity. The Soviet space program achieved a lot of firsts in the space race, America was first to the moon in part because on just about every other milestone the Soviets got there first.

Now I don’t know how diverse the Soviet program really was, but her issue isn’t one of fact, it is one of praising the Soviets for something.

When did it become a bad thing to recognise that bad governments are in fact capable of doing some things right? Isn’t that part of the same nuance that the centrists claim to stand for?

You know what else the Soviets did? Opposed Apartheid. Are we supposed to pretend that’s a bad thing because the Soviets did it? Long before America did?

Isn’t this the precise sort of uncomfortable territory that Weiss’ “Intellectual dark web” is supposed to be able to explore? Isn’t this the exact sort of thing she’s made a brand out of championing? Or at least, wants us to think she’s made a brand out of championing?

And then you look at the rest of it, and I can’t help but think the first example demonstrates the problem that gives rise to the others. If you cannot acknowledge the Soviets getting something right, then can you see the humanity in a pack of teenagers wearing MAGA hats?

If you can’t see the nuance in communist history, are you going to be able to see the nuance in American history?

And much as I would disagree that America’s caste system is up there with Nazi Germany’s, how does what she’s saying gel with an opposition to “cancel culture” and “safe spaces”?

Maybe I’m looking at this weird, but I can’t help but think there is something very snaky going on with a centrism that finds race realism more acceptable than discussing the successes of the Soviet space program.

I hadn’t, but now that you point it out…

Another fresh exciting novel idea from Brendan O’Neill – masks! Masks are authoritarian! Fight the power!

Here come the sneerers. Their target this time? Anyone who expresses even a tiny amount of scepticism about mandatory mask-wearing in shops. Within hours, mask sceptics have become the new climate-change deniers. They’re granny-killers. They’re sociopaths. They’re the kind of people who care more for their right to breath all over the fruit and veg at Lidl than they do for the continued existence of people over the age of 75. The speed with which mask scepticism has been turned into a foul blasphemy that only thick people who probably voted for Brexit would ever engage in rather confirms that this latest manifestation of the culture wars has very little to do with masks. It’s all about people. Those people. It always is.

He says, having started his piece with “Here come the sneerers.”

It is remarkable that it is always the people who spent the past year or so telling us that Boris and his crew are fascists who have unquestioningly embraced every Covid-related diktat issued by Boris’s government.

What? On the one hand it’s not about the masks it’s about the people, on the other hand it’s always the people who hate Boris who do what Boris says? That doesn’t add up. That contradicts itself not once but twice. Tell us exactly where we hurt you, Brendan; you’re all over the place.

The snobs even have a study now to confirm their prejudices against mask sceptics. The Daily Mail reports that researchers in the US have found that ‘people who refuse to wear a mask or comply with social distancing have lower cognitive ability’. ‘Real covidiots!’, as the Mail sums them up. We’re squarely back in Brexit / blue passport territory, with the chattering classes once against looking down their long noses at what they presume to be the mentally deficient, ‘low-information’ little people.

So it’s about snobbery? Or is it about chattering? Wait is it long noses? No it’s blue passports? I can’t keep up. He has such a rich vocabulary of inverse snobbery I can’t parse it all.

We have to talk about this. We cannot let mask-wearing become the ‘new normal’. Masks are horrible. They’re stuffy and claustrophobic. They make it hard to read people’s faces. They alienate us from each other even more, hiding smiles and discouraging chit-chat.

He should try being on a ventilator. That really hides smiles and discourages chit-chat…and then you die.

And then there’s this shit.

Blackpool woman accessed child abuse images in hospital bed

This “woman”:

Julie Marshall used public wifi to look at some of her 80,000 images as she recovered from a heart attack in August 2017, Preston Crown Court heard.

…

The 54-year-old, who had no previous convictions, admitted downloading images from the internet between June 2004 and April 2018 in February.

They included 677 images of the most serious nature, known as category A images.

…

She was also given a 10-year notification order to sign the sex offenders register and a six-year sexual harm prevention order.

“She” is also not a woman.

Statistics? What are they?

Inclusive to all survivors…except women who want women-only spaces. Remove barriers to anyone who wants support…except women who want women-only spaces.

“We continue to provide women only space within our Centre to all who identify as women” – so a massive beardy bloke gets to be in the women only space at their Centre provided he says “I am a woman.” That’s fine then.

Bari Weiss has written a pompous self-admiring letter to the New York Times explaining why she is awesome and the Times is pathetic so she quits so there.

I joined the paper with gratitude and optimism three years ago. I was hired with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives and others who would not naturally think of The Times as their home.

Wait a second. Why would the Times want to bring in first-time writers? Why would it be a bad thing that first-time writers would not otherwise appear in the paper? Why isn’t it just obvious that first-time writers don’t just get to appear in the Times as a matter of right, or quotas, or filling a gap? The Times is top of the ladder, and beginners don’t usually get to the top of the ladder just by asking. You kind of have to climb it.

The reason for this effort was clear: The paper’s failure to anticipate the outcome of the 2016 election meant that it didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers.

Did it? Did it really mean that? Let’s not forget that Trump only just squeaked through, and that he lost the popular vote by 3 million, and that Comey had more to do with the squeaking through than anything about “the country” – i.e. the populist rage BW wants us to think of when she talks of “a firm grasp.”

The priority in Opinion was to help redress that critical shortcoming.

Listen, Thomas Friedman has been there for decades. What more do you want?

The paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people. This is a galaxy in which, to choose just a few recent examples, the Soviet space program is lauded for its “diversity”; the doxxing of teenagers in the name of justice is condoned; and the worst caste systems in human history includes the United States alongside Nazi Germany.

On that one I genuinely don’t understand her point. She appears to be saying the US has not ever had or been one of “the worst caste systems in human history”…but why? The caste system we had was appalling. It didn’t include Auschwitz, that’s certainly true, but on the other hand it lasted a lot longer than 12 years.

So anyway, she’s left the Times, and bets are being placed on what her new gig is.

A Vanity Fair piece from last month by trans woman Grace Robertson says how wrongy-wrong JK Rowling is and muses aloud about why.

Rowling, a British feminist, is soaking up these anti-trans views—she’s transphobic because everyone she reads and listens to is. Why? That’s the real mystery. Some pin the blame on many British journalists’ close ties to 2000s “skeptic” movement, largely built around dismissing pseudosciences such as homeopathy and “anti-science” views. My view is that it’s about just how white and privileged journalism is in the U.K.

Wait wait wait. Back up a step. Don’t be in such a hurry to step over that. What about this skeptic movement which is built around “dismissing” – or rather saying what is wrong with – pseudosciences such as homeopathy and anti-science [without scare-quotes] views? What does that tell you? If there’s a connection to skepticism about bullshit and hostility to science, what does that tell you?

It tells you that the fact-claims of trans ideology are pseudo-scientific bullshit, and that that matters. It tells you there’s little or no reason to think the claims are true. It tells you that if you accept them all uncritically you are being had.

Robertson also wishes UK feminists could get beaten up as much as US ones have.

My view is that it’s about just how white and privileged journalism is in the U.K. One study estimated that 94% of British journalists are white, with another finding that over half come from private schools (an eternal indicator of Britain’s class system). This is not a unique issue, but privilege has gone less challenged than in the U.S. “Middle- and upper-class white feminists have not received the pummeling from black and indigenous feminists that their American counterparts have,” wrote Sophie Lewis in the New York Times last year. 

I get the feeling Robertson would be happy to volunteer.

Paris Lees, trans columnist for British Vogue, wrote on Twitter that feminists who criticize her are also hostile to black women who “put forward an anti-racist agenda.”

No doubt he did, but it’s a lie.

A Russian historian says things they don’t want to hear.

He is accused of child pornography; the charges may be a way to shut him up.

While Dmitriev was held in pre-trial detention, a group of Kremlin-backed historians have worked to rewrite the history of one of the largest sites the historian uncovered, Sandarmokh, where 9,000 victims of Stalin’s Great Terror are buried. The new narrative casts the site as a World War II-era burial ground and dilutes Sandarmokh’s association with Stalin. “This is happening across the board,” Galkova said. “We see how convenient it is to switch over attention from the collective memory of the repressions to the Great Patriotic War [WWII].”

You too, huh? We’ve got that here. Shut up about slavery and treason, admire the nice statue of the man on a horse.

Head of a local branch of Memorial, an NGO focusing on political repressions, Dmitriev has uncovered and documented mass grave sites since the late 1980s, well ahead of other memorialization efforts. He is responsible for recording thousands of names of those killed during the Great Terror and his name appears in the pages of Anne Applebaum’s Pulitzer Prize winning history of the Gulag, in Masha Gessen and Misha Friedman’s 2018 book “Never Remember” and in scores of other books.

Applebaum, who met with Dmitriev while researching her book, called his arrest “appalling” and a “profound reversal” in attitudes towards Gulag history when I spoke with her earlier this year for Coda’s documentary series, Generation Gulag. “This is somebody who should be a local community hero,” she told me.

Ssshhhhh we don’t want to hear it.

Kids – don’t try this at home.

Originally a comment by Papito on The thought-terminating lie.

I think the problem is that people don’t know the difference between “existential” and “epistemological.” I don’t believe that people such as JK Rowling pose an existential threat to transpeople so much as an epistemological threat.

Maybe “existential” sounds more fancy to TRAs, or more dramatic. They want desperately to be validated, but just like stolen library books, they won’t cease to exist because they’re not validated. Nobody is denying trans people (or stolen library books) exist, they’re just denying that trans people know what they think they know. That’s an epistemological quarrel.

The trans religion goes like this: in addition to the physical sex of people, people also have a quality called “gender.” The “gender” is unrelated to the sex of a person, but it is inborn, ever-present, intangible, unmeasurable, and vitally important. The “gender” is more important than sex. Whether a person is sexually male or female is almost irrelevant in trans religion; the important thing is their “gender,” which they are assigned at birth by foolish doctors who get it wrong a lot, and can then later decide to change.

The knowledge of which sex a person is can be gained through objective, scientific measures, such as whether a person has male genitalia or female genitalia, and whether a person has XX chromosomes or XY chromosomes. However, sex is irrelevant if you’re a transgenderist, and the knowledge of which “gender” a person is can only be determined by that person’s feelings and beliefs, not by any external or objective measure. According to the trans religion, “gender” is what makes a person a man or a woman: only bigoted people pay attention to sex, and claiming that sex is what makes a person a man or a woman is transphobic.

The principal dogma of the trans religion is that any person who feels they are a woman – whose sense of “gender identity” is that of a woman – is a woman. Being born of the female sex makes a person a woman no more than realizing at forty, after having two kids as a man, that one is really a woman. That is because knowledge of “gender” can only come from inside. The outside of the body is just an illusion, perhaps a temporary condition.

When TRAs bellow “TWAW,” they are insisting that the cardinal belief of their religion – that it’s “gender” that makes you a woman – must be unassailable. The denial of this dogma would mean that transwomen are not really women, but men dressed up as women. They don’t know they’re women, they just think they’re women. Denial of the result or the process makes their religion untenable. They characterize this denial as a threat to their existence; it threatens their self-concept even more than it would if you were to tell a Catholic that Mary wasn’t a virgin, or that Jesus was just a man.

Transgenderism is a relatively new religion. If it persists, it’s likely to change, as Catholicism has. Anybody remember Limbo? It’s where virtuous pagans used to go, along with unbaptized babies. When I was a little boy in Catholic school, we were encouraged repeatedly to pray for the souls of the poor little babies in Limbo. Limbo was a matter of panic for parents who bore sickly infants. No more, because it wasn’t really central to the Catholic faith. Catholicism dropped Limbo in 1992.

The Gender Identity is not that sort of peripheral belief in the transgender religion; it’s a fundamental tenet of the faith, like the Eternal Soul in Catholicism. Without it, the rest of the structure falls apart. Transgenderism could get rid of all the silly pronouns, or most of the 33 or 58 or however many genders claimed to exist these days. That wouldn’t be important to the faith. What transgenderism can’t get rid of is the idea that gender can only be determined internally, by feelings. Any attempt to assert that external sexual characteristics are important in determining who is a woman and who is a man is an attack on the epistemology of gender identity. When we say “you’re not really a woman, you’re just a man who thinks he’s a woman,” it tears apart their entire religion. It also deflates, for some, their sexual (auto-gynephilic) fantasy.

The degree of the claimed harm in “misgendering” strikes us as absurd. The manager of the building next door referred to me as “Ms…” in an email the other day. Was I irate? Deflated? Did I tweet angry things at his employer, or sob into my couch? No. It’s utterly unimportant to me, far more of an embarrassment to him than to me. Does it anger people that much to have their race mistaken? Based on my multi-racial family, no. It’s annoying if persistent, but more a cause for humor than anything.

That’s because it’s not our religion. I seriously pissed off a devout Catholic once – an educated grown up! – by saying I would have respected the Pope more if he was a go-go dancer when he was young, instead of just staying in the church and doing all that praying and stuff. I like the new Pope better, BTW. I’m not likely to be mad if someone makes fun of Mohammed to me, or the Pope, or Martin Luther, or transsubstantiation, or Ganesha, or the hilarious Book of Mormon. No more than my race is or my sex is, none of these things are my religion. Transpeople are different.

The “let’s smear Fauci” plan doesn’t seem to be going all that well.

Business Insider notes that not listening to Fauci is one thing (Trump listens to no one and wouldn’t understand if he did) and smearing him is another.

Sidelining Fauci is one thing. Actively defaming him is much worse, though entirely expected from this White House.  Trump and his lackeys are smearing Fauci, probably the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, as wrong “about everything” and even circulating a list of Fauci’s alleged mistakes to reporters, as though it’s dirt on a political rival. 

President Trump tolerates only one kind of relationship with his employees, toadying. Everyone who won’t boot lick ends up fired, libeled, under investigation by Bill Barr, or all of the above. Since Fauci is a civil servant he can’t be fired, and he hasn’t yet been investigated by Barr — but don’t count that out! — so instead he’s just being defamed.

This White House has proved time and time and time again during the pandemic that it doesn’t want truth. It wants good news, even when it’s false. Trump prefers happy lies to grim truths, and thanks in part to his negligence, the pandemic is proving to be a long roster of grim truths — testing catastrophes, spiking caseloads, surging deaths, a failed lockdown.   

Because there are some situations that lying just can’t change. You can draw new hurricane paths on the map with a Sharpie all you like, but it won’t change what the hurricane actually does. You can say the virus is going away all you like, but the virus pays no attention.

But then Trump doesn’t want to change the path of the hurricane or the infection rate of the virus, all Trump wants to change is how people think of [the National Weather Service/Fauci/everyone] in relation to how they think of him. Trump’s lies are all in aid of convincing everyone that he is Immortal Perfection and all others are scum.