No really that’s ok we can do this ourselves, we don’t need help. Really. We’re doing it. Your help is not needed or requested. Dude, seriously, back off.
Every woman is a woman, yes, thank you for the tautology. That doesn’t mean that every (or any) man who calls himself a woman is a woman, and in fact, it’s not the case that every (or any) man who calls himself a woman is a woman. Every woman is a woman, and only women are women.
That’s about it really. It’s not complicated.
And Bozo is doing what they told him to do.
Trump just reiterated his lack of worry about the spread of the novel illness in the US. Perhaps problematic, though is that, to many, he’s coming across as casually dismissive and posturing, not measured, and reassuringly presidential.
“You have to be calm,” he said, at the White House this morning before departing to tour the tornado damage in Tennessee and just after signing an $8.3 billion emergency spending bill to deal with the virus.
And the best way to be calm is to have the government hide the truth from you. Better calm and dead than agitated and alive, right?
“It will go away,” he said. “We have very low numbers [of confirmed cases] compared to many countries throughout the world, our numbers are lower than almost anyone…deaths, is it 11?” It is.
It was. Now it’s 14. Also…we have low numbers now, because contagion doesn’t go from zero to a billion in one day. Other countries have more because that’s where it started, not because The God of Epidemics and Stock Markets made it so.
“This came unexpectedly, it came out of China, we closed it down, we stopped it, it was a very early shut down,” he added.
Sure, just wave your tiny hands and say we shut it down, that’s all it takes.
Ok they’re not looking out for our health and safety but at least they are doing everything they can to protect profits.
Another developing nightmare for the White House is growing fears that the travel industry — an important driver of the economy — could face a catastrophic blow as conferences are canceled and families mull whether to hold off on vacation plans.
After United Airlines announced cuts to capacity on domestic and international flights, the CEO of Southwest Airlines warned the domestic carrier may soon make the “gut punch” decision to cut flights owing to a falloff in bookings that started last week.
Trump met airline executives at the White House on Wednesday and they asked him not to publicly discourage Americans from taking planes since their business were at risk, a person familiar with the meeting told CNN’s Kevin Liptak.
Oh did they. Did they really. That’s fascinating because planes are known to be disease vectors like almost nothing else. The airlines don’t bring in new air during flights because it costs more, so they circulate the same stale re-breathed virus-laden air for the whole two or five or twelve hours of the flight. But hey, never mind that there’s a building epidemic, the important thing is the CEOs’ paychecks. These shitheads sat in Trump’s office and asked him not to issue appropriate health warnings but to shut up about it instead for the sake of their bank accounts.
Is that ruthless enough?
The Guardian’s David Smith also just asked Donald Trump at the White House what he thought of Elizabeth Warren dropping out of the race for the Democratic nomination yesterday, after a very disappointing performance in the Super Tuesday primaries across 14 states (she did not win any and came third in her home state of Massachusetts).
Boom! Like taking a doctor’s hammer on the knee, those misogynistic Trumpian reflexes shot up.
“I think lack of talent was her problem,” he said, of one of the most talented figures in the Democratic party and the US Senate.
While he is not one of the least talented figures in anything but THE least talented figure in anything.
“She was a tremendous debater, she destroyed Mike Bloomberg very quickly,” he said, of Bloomberg’s first debate with his Democratic rivals, earlier this year, when Warren skewered him on his track record of discrimination lawsuits from women employees and sexist jokes, leaving the former New York mayor and billionaire gasping.
But of course the irony is that there’s nothing Trump loathes more, is viscerally repelled by, than a strong debating female…..
He went on: “But people don’t like her. She is a mean person. They like a person like me that’s not mean.”
Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on Women deserve better:
The more I read this line, the more it bugs me.
Feminism is nothing without women of colour, migrant, disabled, queer, trans, Black and sex working women.
Feminism has included racists, xenophobes, eugenicists, homophobes etc… throughout its history.
And their bigotries did not render their calls for an end to gender inequality null, any more that MLK Jnr’s homophobia rendered his calls for racial equality null.
If you eliminated racism, xenophobia, homophobia etc… feminism would still have its place in fighting sexism.
To proclaim that feminism or any other social justice activism is “nothing without…” is an all or nothing fallacy that inherently demands a higher standard of behaviour from allies than you would demand from enemies.
You cannot solve every problem all at once, you can make progress by breaking problems up into manageable chunks. Pushing the feminist movement into being the everything movement inherently devalues feminism by removing its core idea from the discussion, and removing its focus.
And that is not to say that feminism is better without the listed groups, or that the various groups are wrong to organise or demand recognition from the feminist movement, but to point out that the core idea of gender equality is a thing in and of itself that can provide common ground to people of otherwise very different ideologies.
These people can work together within the context of feminism even if they don’t like each other very much outside of that context. This is how movements win, not by achieving a broad based intersectional agreement on all points, but agreement on a few points that allow majorities to develop behind them, allowing progress on those points.
By requiring agreement on all points, intersectionality minimises support for all points, thus slowing and even reversing progress on any given point.
Whoopsie! Big surprise for Mister Barr.
A federal judge Thursday criticized Attorney General William Barr for his handling of the Mueller report when it was released last spring, saying Barr’s early description of the report didn’t match the special counsel’s actual conclusions.
This is a Republican judge, appointed by Bush.
Judge Reggie Walton asked if Barr’s actions were a “calculated attempt” to help President Donald Trump and opined the attorney general had a “lack of candor” with the public and Congress.
“The Court cannot reconcile certain public representations made by Attorney General Barr with the findings in the Mueller Report,” Walton wrote on Thursday. Barr’s initial publicly announced interpretation of the findings from former special counsel Robert Mueller “cause the Court to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller Report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller Report to the contrary.”
…
Walton said he will review the full Mueller report himself to make sure the Justice Department didn’t over-redact it for public release.
What are the odds? You think he’ll find it just fine and dandy? I don’t.
Walton’s decision effectively puts the Mueller report — which has never been released to the public in its entirety — in the hands of the court under seal. Walton said he will review it confidentially. He could potentially then order the Justice Department to make more of the report available, under the Freedom of Information public records access law.
Let’s hope so.
Trump made some “remarks” yesterday at a coronavirus briefing with airline bosses, which the White House duly transcribed for us.
In a certain way, you could say that the borders are automatically shut down, without having to say “shut down.” I mean, they’re, to a certain extent, automatically shut down.
Impressive, isn’t it? We’re in good hands. But then he gets to the important part.
But it’s affecting the airline business, as it would. And a lot of people are staying in our country, and they’re shopping and using our hotels in this country. So, from that standpoint, I think, probably, there’s a positive impact. But there’s also an impact on overseas travel, which will be fairly substantial.
That’s the important thing – people are stuck in the US because of a disease outbreak, so they’re forced to spend more time in OUR HOTELS, thus causing more money to go into the pockets of people who OWN HOTELS, which is pretty much the most important consideration on the planet. Yay disease outbreak, more $$$$$$$$ for Donnie!
Then he hands it over to Pence, who mostly says how awesome Trump is and how everything good was his idea.
So, Mr. President, as you said, it is a whole-of-government approach, but in a very real sense, it’s a whole-of-America approach. And I’ve already expressed, and I know you feel a great deal of gratitude to our partners in industry and in the airline industry for acting on your priority to put the safety and health of the American people first.
THE PRESIDENT: Good, Mike. Thank you very much. I just want to add, if I might — and to go a little bit further — the Obama administration made a decision on testing that turned out to be very detrimental to what we’re doing. And we undid that decision a few days ago so that the testing can take place in a much more accurate and rapid fashion. That was a decision we disagreed with. I don’t think we would have made it, but for some reason it was made. But we’ve undone that decision.
The Times reported on that last “remark” and said it’s a crock.
It was not entirely clear what he was referring to. Health experts and veterans of the government during Mr. Obama’s presidency said they were unaware of any policy or rule changes during the last administration that would have affected the way the Food and Drug Administration approved tests during the current crisis. Moreover, if there were, Mr. Trump did not explain why his administration did not change the rules during its first three years in office.
In other words he told a big ol’ lie.
Mr. Trump appeared intent on focusing attention on the Obama administration at a time when his own handling of the outbreak has come under intense criticism. He made a point of using the former president’s name in comments to reporters during a White House meeting with airline executives, called to discuss the economic effect of the virus.
Among other things, critics have pointed to the dismantling of a White House effort set up by Mr. Obama to respond to global health emergencies. The officials involved have left and not been replaced over the past two years, a point made by Obama administration veterans in recent days.
So obviously the thing to do is say some vague handwavey shit about “a decision on testing” and then use the word “detrimental,” which will surprise everyone so much they’ll forget to notice the handwaving.
Michelle Forman, a spokeswoman for the Association of Public Health Laboratories, whose members had complained that the Food and Drug Administration took too long to approve their tests, said there were some discussions during the Obama administration about whether to tighten restrictions on laboratories that developed their own tests, but “nothing was ever put into place.”
She said the association, which represents state and local government labs, was not aware of any Obama-era rules that changed how the labs were regulated or how applications in a public health crisis were reviewed.
Yeah but Trump knows. He does. He has inside dope. He knows what NOBODY else knows, including anyone who was in the Obama administration.
Dr. Sharfstein said that the Trump administration hindered itself by giving first approval for a coronavirus test to the C.D.C., which meant that private labs could not conduct testing for clinical reasons without their own approval.
“They didn’t have to do it in the first place,” he said. “They’re reversing a decision that they themselves made.”
Oh so they’re correcting their own unnecessary rule about testing. And saying it was Obama’s. Well that’s fine, nothing wrong with that. Standard operating procedure.
This is horrifying. I mean really horrifying, as in you feel fear and horror.
Some replies:
What’s all the fuss about an occasional rib “popping out”? And not being able to breathe or run, and constant pain, yes yes, but why all the fuss?
Dan Orr’s manifesto or campaign pledge or promo or whatever it is:
Women deserve better from our university. Sexual violence and harassment remain prevalent, and women are too often held back by misogyny and its intersections. As co-chair of Oxford SU’s Women’s campaign I helped bring women together to discuss feminism, establish support networks and campaign for change. From working with Irish activists in demonstrating and fundraising for the Repeal the Eighth campaign to tackling sexual violence on campus I learnt that the strength of the feminist movement is in its diversity and in the solidarity we have for each other. I want to bring the women at this university together to enact real lasting change. As a trans woman I have been lucky to work with and be supported by some deeply compassionate women activists and I want to extend the same support to women who are often excluded from certain types of feminism. Feminism is nothing without women of colour, migrant, disabled, queer, trans, Black and sex working women. As women’s officer I intend to focus on ensuring harassment is dealt with appropriately, sex working students receive support, student parents have a place to study and that we remain a pro-choice SU. Vote Dan Orr for women’s officer.
Women are “held back by misogyny and its intersections” – what are the intersections of misogyny?
Why was a man co-chair of Oxford SU’s Women’s campaign?
Why was a man needed to help “bring women together to discuss feminism, establish support networks and campaign for change”?
He learned “that the strength of the feminist movement is in its diversity and in the solidarity we have for each other,” by which he must mean its eagerness to include men in its feminism.
He wants “to bring the women at this university together to enact real lasting change” – like a shepherd guarding sheep.
I guess it’s the head-tilt that makes him a woman.
A university students’ union is under fire for rebranding International Women’s Day to include trans women.
Leicester students’ renaming of the celebration as International Womxn’s Day follows their election of a trans woman to the post of women’s officer. Dan Orr will represent the views of women on campus, speaking out about sexism and misogyny.
Which he doesn’t understand from the inside, on account of how he’s a man.
A female student at Leicester University told The Times that she was “very upset” by the election but feared speaking out publicly in case she was disciplined by the university.
“I am sure Dan Orr will try her best, but she has not grown up with the same prejudices that face girls and women [and] the stereotypes they have had to deal with that are related to the female body. I know she will have had her own prejudices to deal with but they are not the same,” she said. The Leicester students’ union has an LGBT+ officer and a trans and non-binary officer.
So trans people get two officers and women get zero. Women are half the population but…
The university will call the day by its traditional name. However, in a newsletter to students, it said: “We use the term ‘womxn’ as a more inclusive spelling of ‘women’ that includes any person who identifies as a womxn.”
But that’s the wrong kind of inclusive. I don’t get to go to a refugee camp and “identify as” a refugee and take up some of the scant resources there. Nobody does. Include me out.
Kathleen Stock, a professor of philosophy at Sussex University, said: “Concepts aren’t ‘umbrellas’ or ‘shelters’ for whoever wants to come in — that’s not what concepts do. They’re cognitive tools,” adding that Ms Orr’s election was “a backwards step”.
Off a cliff of stupid.
Two of Scotland’s best known libraries are under attack for their conflicting stance on trans rights as the “culture wars” escalate in the country’s arts scene.
Feminists have railed against the Glasgow Women’s Library after a women’s campaign group opposed to gender self-declaration law changes were denied access.
Their fury was inflamed by news that trans rights activists had been permitted to hold a training day at the publicly funded venue, led by two men.
In a statement online, the Glasgow Women’s Library said: “We will only accept venue hire bookings from organisations that align with our values and we always do our best to make sure of this when bookings are made.”
So the values of a Women’s Library are that men training other men (presumably on how to pretend to be women) are welcome but women pointing out that men are not women are not welcome. At a Women’s Library. Women get out, men come right in. At a Women’s Library.
But answer came there none.
This one is in an area where I’ve actually been, so that’s new.
An Amazon employee in Seattle has tested positive for the coronavirus, according to an internal message sent on Tuesday afternoon.
…
All other employees who came in close contact with the individual have been notified, according to the message. The employee worked out of the Brazil building, which is located blocks away from the Amazon Spheres, the company’s giant greenhouse domes in downtown Seattle. The company said it defined close contact as “closer than 6ft/2 meters over a prolonged period of time”.
The Brazil building is in South Lake Union, which has a pleasant park along Lake Union so I go there sometimes. Not that I’m thinking “Ooh I probably have it,” it’s just…interesting.
It’s a bizarre neighborhood. Not long ago it was a drab uninteresting area of low-slung industrial buildings and now it’s jam-packed with glittering new glass towers.
This concludes today’s episode of me me me me.
A bitter conflict is escalating in the Scottish literary scene with the Scottish Poetry Library (SPL) standing accused of “institutional transphobia” after it said that it would not support “bullying and calls for no-platforming of writers”.
But first we need to know what “transphobia” is, because people and institutions “stand accused” of it all too often not because they have shouted their hatred of trans people but because they have, for instance, said that women should not be persecuted for not ticking every box on the trans list of boxes to tick.
The issue was raised in the Scottish parliament on Tuesday, where the SNP’s Joan McAlpine said it was “worrying that women such as feminist poets in Scotland, Jenny Lindsay and Magi Gibson, have been subject to online mobs trying to stop them getting work or blocking their performances”.
The library stressed that it had spoken out to encourage freedom of expression. “We are a values-led organisation that embraces inclusivity, collaboration and a respect for pluralism – of languages, cultures and faiths … this does not mean that we are taking sides in any particular debate but we will not be passive if we are made aware of behaviours within our community that do not align with our values.”
The vagueness is a problem though. Vagueness is part of this whole mess. What is “transphobia”? Why is disagreement over definitions called a “phobia”? What is “gender identity”? Why are we being ordered to subscribe to a vague and woolly yet binding set of magical claims?
But in response, a group of trans and non-binary authors released an open letter that said the SPL’s position “may reflect serious institutional transphobia”, and had caused “extensive distress”.
See? More vague and woolly demands accompanied by passive-aggressive threats.
Reactions to SPL’s statement and the ongoing fallout have been varied. Scottish PEN said on Tuesday that it was disappointed, writing: “Free expression is complex and any policy that ignores such complexity can stifle the free expression of a range of stakeholders, most notably members of marginalised communities.”
But which “marginalised communities”? In what way are they marginalised? What about women – do we count as a marginalised community?
On Wednesday, more than 200 writers including author Lionel Shriver and comedian Graham Linehan put their names to an open letter of support for the “unequivocal stance” of the SPL: “From universities to arts organisations, libraries and government departments, the no-platforming and bullying of anyone holding views not actively endorsing extreme gender ideology is destroying our cultural life,” says the letter, although the SPL had [not] mentioned
notgender. “Scotland has always been an example of progressiveness in arts, education and culture, and we are proud that the first stand against this aggressive chilling of intellectual debate and thought has been taken by Scotland’s national poetry library.”
I signed that letter too.
Warren is out, so we have to choose between Biden and Sanders to get the sack of shit out of office. I’m disgusted.
The sack of shit thinks his random thoughts are more authoritative than the informed thoughts of people with relevant education.
President Donald Trump on Wednesday night spun a web of theories minimizing the coronavirus’ threat to Americans, accusing the World Health Organization of dispensing inaccurate facts about the outbreak, and suggesting that those with the disease could be safe going to work.
During expansive remarks on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s program, the president continued to break with public health officials’ more dire messaging regarding the international crisis and forcefully contradicted the WHO, which earlier in the week pegged the global mortality rate for the coronavirus at 3.4 percent.
Donald Trump is not someone who should be “forcefully” correcting the WHO, because he can barely find his own ass in the dark.
“Well, I think the 3.4 percent is really a false number. Now, and this is just my hunch, and — but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this. Because a lot people will have this and it’s very mild. They’ll get better very rapidly. They don’t even see a doctor. They don’t even call a doctor,” Trump said.
Hunch shmunch. His hunches are not relevant to anything, and he should keep them to himself. He’s a pig-ignorant real estate huckster, and he has nothing to tell us about COVID19.
“You never hear about those people. So you can’t put them down in the category of the overall population in terms of this corona flu and — or virus. So you just can’t do that,” he continued. “So if, you know, we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better, just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work but they get better.”
Look at him. He thinks the people telling us about the estimates don’t know that.
Oh please.
Academics? Why academics? That makes it sound as if it’s a technical term, and a product of expertise and research. It’s not. It’s a political label, and a very silly one. It puts a modifier on sex to make pretend-sex seem more legitimate and science-based and…you know…real. It puts it there to make it seem as if “trans woman” and “cis woman” are just two kinds of woman, when in fact the “trans” in “trans woman” literally means “not.” You can’t use “not woman” and “woman” to mean two kinds of woman. Trans women are men who
women. There is no need for a pseudo-technical word to express not being that kind of woman but the other kind, the kind who just is a woman.
Furthermore, “cisgender” is of course not “used by academics worldwide to mean “not transgender” because most academics, like most people, don’t talk about the subject at all, and have no interest in it.
There is no need for a word to say “women who are not pretending to be women.” No need at all.
Vaishnavi Sundar finds out what it’s like to be canceled:
I am a filmmaker, writer and a women’s rights activist. I spend my time advocating for equal opportunities, contraceptive rights, education and the empowerment of women and girls. I centre women in all my work. When I started screening my film on workplace sexual harassment across India, I was hoping to raise public consciousness. But What Was She Wearing? was India’s first feature-length documentary on the subject.
However, I encountered strong resistance to the film from liberal feminist gatekeepers. Women who would send me private messages asking for professional favours and contacts, and congratulate me on the film, refused to acknowledge my presence on their public timelines or retweet anything about the film. At first, I thought this was my eternal bad luck or some flaw in my personality.
Then the rejections started, from lefty publications that had snapped up everything she sent in the past.
Last month, I discovered the reason I had become a social outcast in liberal-feminist bastions. I was in the US for an exchange programme, and I wanted to use the opportunity to screen my film at various places while I toured the country. One screening was scheduled in New York, organised by the Polis Project. The proverbial i’s were dotted, posters designed and I was even introduced to a female Indian moderator. But a week before the screening, the organiser (also a woman of Indian origin) sent me an email. She said the event would be cancelled because of my ‘transphobic’ views.
So feminist work on subjects like sexual harassment is worth nothing compared to the outrage of “transphobic” views. In other words the hell with what women are concerned about, are they being accommodating enough to men???? This from left-wing outlets.
Many moons ago I got into a Twitterspat about pre-op trans women in women’s shelters, prisons, bathrooms and women’s sports. And someone had brought the tweets in question to the organisers’ attention. As a result, the Polis Project thought it was only fair to shelve a screening of a film about a pressing topic that affects women across all social strata in society. All because the filmmaker believes biological sex is not a social construct, that women’s sex-based oppression is real, that housing people with male genitalia in spaces with victims of male sexual violence can be harrowing to women inmates, that mental illnesses like autogynephilia and other dysphorias can cause dangerous, irrevocable damage, and that gender theorists are erasing women, much like patriarchy does.
Feminism just doesn’t matter now because men who long to wear fuck-me shoes matter so much more.
I have since confronted the editors of the publications that blacklisted me. It appears that Indian trans-rights activists googled my name and wrote to every outlet I had ever been published in, telling them about my ‘TERFy’ tweets.
That’s the way to win hearts and minds.
How can so many liberal feminists call themselves ‘liberal’ and laud pornography, an industry in which women are brutalised (and often killed)? How can you encourage children to be ‘drag queens’ performing sexual acts for adults, in the name of gender ideology? I wish they wouldn’t call it a movement anymore. It is a cult that extols men, who are often not really ‘queer’ but who want to take advantage of ‘self-identifying’ as a woman in order to gain oppression points and external validation.
Feminism 2020: all about the men now.
Lisa Nandy did an interview with the Guardian the other day. She sounds quite good in many ways. But…
We are meeting a couple of days after Harvey Weinstein received his guilty verdict in a New York courtroom. Nandy says she is appalled that there are women in the Labour party whose sexual harassment cases have still not been resolved years after they made complaints. “We’ve failed a lot of women over recent years,” she says. “It’s very reminiscent of what happened with antisemitism where there are a number of cases which quite simply haven’t been dealt with. It gives the green light to people who harass women to believe they can find a home in the Labour party.” She says she would allow a committee of women to determine what harassment is, introduce an independent complaints process, and robust protections for whistleblowers. Aiming fire at Jeremy Corbyn she says: “There cannot be one rule for friends of the leader and another rule for others.”
Recently Nandy has landed herself in hot water with some feminists over her decision to sign, along with Long-Bailey, a pledge from the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights that calls for the expulsion of members who hold “bigoted, transphobic views”. It describes Women’s Place UK – which wants to protect single-sex spaces – as a “hate group”. Does she regret it? “No, I don’t. I care deeply about safe spaces for women. I know from personal experience there is a generation of women who fought very hard to create and protect safe spaces, that it matters. Where you have women who want to have a genuine debate about how better to protect them, it’s a very welcome debate. But that has to start with the recognition that trans men are men, trans women are women and that they exist.”
And if it doesn’t then that’s a “hate group.”
We have to start with “the recognition” of a lie, that men who think of themselves as women literally are women. We have to, and if we don’t, Lisa Nandy will call us a hate group.
Progressive movements of the past haven’t ordered people to “recognize” lies. They didn’t say workers were plutocrats, much less that plutocrats were workers. They didn’t order us to “recognize” that white people who want to be black actually are black. This is a new thing on earth, and it speaks of a truly deep contempt for women, so deep that women share it too.
Keir Starmer talks a lot of crap and makes a lot of false analogies, as Allison Bailey points out.
Cowley is an car-factory town just outside Oxford. The juxtaposition is rather like Columbia/Harlem or Yale/New Haven or Berkeley/Oakland.
There’s something missing in this story…I can’t quite put my finger on it…
A transgender man who has given birth to a child has begun an appeal to be legally registered as the “father” or “parent”, rather than the “mother”.
Freddy McConnell is fighting a decision made by a High Court judge last year that a person who carries and gives birth to a baby is legally a mother.
Mr McConnell, a single parent from Kent, lives as a man following surgery, having been assigned female at birth.
What is it, what is it…what is being left out…oh yes, I get it!
This shithead is suing to ensure that her child will have no mother.
Not “no mother” as in the mother died or left, but no mother as in there never was any mother.
Is shithead thinking at all about the child? At all about what the child might want as it grows up?
Notice also that the BBC used the fatuous “assigned at birth” for the reality of what sex McConell was born as and remains.
Mr McConnell has said the High Court’s decision breached his human right to respect for private and family life. If the appeal succeeds his son would become the first person born in England and Wales to not legally have a mother.
And is that a good thing? Is that a first that anyone aspires to for a child? Is McConnell really showing more respect for family life than the judge is?
Iain Macwhirter at The Herald Scotland:
WHEN I started writing about the trans self-identification issue nearly two years ago it was with the utmost trepidation. Questioning, or even discussing, the proposal that men should be able legally to become women merely by making a declaration of such, was regarded as transphobia, homophobia, bigotry.
…
Cultural and health bodies, and even the Scottish Government, were ceasing to use the very word “woman” in case it offended male-bodied transwomen. Bizarre substitutes like “womxn”, “menstruators” and “ciswomen” were being deployed in the cause of inclusivity.
Which – to belabor the obvious – is a very warped way to use the word “inclusivity.” The word should mean not excluding people from public events and institutions and the like for no good reason: a public quarantine during an epidemic is a good reason; misogyny and xenophobia and racism are bad reasons. The word should not mean including white people in the category “black people” or bosses in the category “workers” or gentiles in the category “Jews” or men in the category “women.”
Inclusivity used to mean including all women in the category women, and more specifically doing the work to include all women, by reaching out and recruiting and making room. It did not mean including men, and it didn’t give a rat’s ass how men “identified.” But that was then.
Nicola Sturgeon evidently regarded Self-ID as the new frontier of progressive legislation. With the minimum of public discussion, she committed the Scottish Government to abolishing the very definition of woman as “adult human female”. (That phrase is regarded as hate speech by some police forces).
Well, times change. This issue is now out in the open. More and more women are speaking out against the undermining of sex-based rights.
…
Influential figures in the SNP, like the former communications guru, Kevin Pringle, are now urging Nicola Sturgeon to follow the UK Government. But the Scottish Equalities Secretary, Shirley-Anne Somerville, apparently intends to press ahead with legislation to allow self-ID. Mr Pringle is speaking for many in the party who now realise that the growing backlash against Self-ID could threaten the SNP’s chances in next year’s Holyrood elections.
…
It has been left to genuinely courageous women like Joan McAlpine MSP and Joanna Cherry, MP, to fight for reason. For doing so they have been the target of astonishing abuse on social media, and from the trans activists embedded in the SNP.
…
But there is an equitable solution. Of course allow transwomen to identify as female without needless bureaucratic obstacles. But the Government should make clear in the legislation reforming the Gender Recognition Act that this does not mean abolishing the biological definition of sex or infringing women’s sex-based rights under the Equalities Act.
You’d think that a feminist like Nicola Sturgeon would regard that as self-evident. Perhaps she does. But if so she needs to say it loud and clear before half the voting population – women – turn against the SNP.
Here’s hoping.
