Also in today – Devon Rape Crisis and Sexual Abuse Services tweets:

Are you a self-identified woman? Are able to commit 3 evenings a month to volunteering? Are you passionate about gender equality & ending violence? If you’ve answered yes to all of the above we want to hear from you. Full details; http://devonrapecrisis.org.uk/support-us/get-involved

Which, as many women angrily responded, is just a terrible thing to do. Women who need rape or sexual abuse services don’t want them from men. They don’t want them from men even if those men “self-identify as” women. Rape and sexual abuse services should not be a place for men to exercise their fantasies. Rape and sexual abuse services should be … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey at the Miscellany Room.

Can you stomach another article on Epstein?

This one is a Mother Jones interview with Stuart Pivar, who described himself as a close friend of Epstein, until he realized what Epstein was up to. Though he still continued to engage in some fairly gross apologetics for him, so I take the claimed separation with a grain of salt. (Pharyngula readers may recall that Pivar once sued PZ Myers for calling him a “crackpot.”)

Some notable excerpts. Those dinners with scientific stars:

There were lavish dinner parties with the likes of Steven Pinker and Stephen Jay Gould during which Epstein would ask provocatively elementary questions like “What is gravity?”

The least useful message shirt ever:

Smirk smirk abortions not just for THE LADIES.

As if abortions were like earrings or Jimmy Choos or being on the cover of Vogue.… Read the rest

McKinnon is continuing to show what a reasonable, thoughtful, decent, other-regarding human he is.

Nathan Oseroff thought the issue was David Koch:

I saw one of those show up in my feed and I’m wondering if they really think David Koch was a young woman?

McKinnon had to explain he’d been talking the same shit about Magdalen:

Oh, I also said it in relation to a really truly horrible TERF who’s dying of brain cancer.

It’s the latter that they’re so uppity about.

Magdalen is not horrible. “TERF” is just trans-english for “cunt.” We’re “uppity” because gloating about her terminal brain cancer is disgusting.… Read the rest

Trump was too busy adding up how much money he was going to lose by making the G7 pay him for putting the next one in his hotel to make it to the climate session today. (It’s actually sort of relevant that the Doral is in Miami, because Miami is one of those scandalously reckless places that keep building giant hotels and condo towers on a sinking shore. Miami is committing suicide while the world watches, dumbfounded.)

Donald Trump did not attend Monday’s crucial discussion on climate and biodiversity at the G7 meeting of international leaders in Biarritz, missing talks on how to deal with the Amazon rainforest fires as well as new ways to cut carbon emissions.

Reporters

Trump says the best possible place to hold the next G7 is…you’ll never guess…one of his golf resorts. What a happy coincidence, because he’s in a position to get them a good deal.

Speaking as this year’s meeting of world leaders wrapped up, he told reporters that “my people” had toured venues across the US before concluding his Doral hotel would be ideal.

“It’s not about me, it’s about getting the right location,” he said at a news conference on Monday.

Of course. It’s never about him, it’s always about doing the right thing, and there is nowhere in the entire United States that would do as well for a meeting of world leaders than his personal golf resort in … Read the rest

There are bigger things to talk about in relation to the G7, but all the same…

Bolsonaro jeers at Macron because Bolsonaro’s wife is hot and Macron’s isn’t.

That’s how we’re doing the G7? Playing Whose Wife Is Most Fuckable? Really?

French President Emmanuel Macron has lashed out at Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro for endorsing “rude” remarks about his wife.

A supporter of the Brazilian president mocked Mr Macron’s wife, Brigitte, 66, in a Facebook post.

The post contained a photo contrasting the French first lady’s appearance with that of Mr Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle Bolsonaro, 37.

“Now you understand why Macron is persecuting Bolsonaro?” it reads.

In response to the comment, Mr Bolsonaro wrote (in Portuguese): “Do not humiliate (him)…

Karen L. Blair asks the age-old question, Who will date a trans person?

Who is Blair?

Karen Blair is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia; an Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia; and Chair of the Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity Issues (SOGII) Section of the Canadian Psychological Association.

So, not just a random activist on Twitter but an expert.

Regardless of your current relationship status, imagine for a moment that at some point in the future you were to find yourself single and looking. Under such hypothetical circumstances, which of the following people would you consider as a potential dating partner:

• a cisgender[1] woman
• a

The Guardian on Trump in Biarritz:

Senior aides in Donald Trump’s entourage have accused the G7 host and French president, Emmanuel Macron, of seeking to embarrass his US counterpart by making the summit focus on “niche issues” such as climate change, according to multiple US media reports.

Good scare quotes but there should be more of them, or else GIFs of scorn and derision.

Can we focus for just a second? CLIMATE CHANGE IS NOT A NICHE ISSUE.

Not in any sense. Climate change is making the planet less inhabitable for most mammals, fish, birds, insects, and plants right now and it’s getting worse all the time, at a much faster clip than was predicted even a few years … Read the rest

Trump at the G7 is whining because Macron is doing things his way instead of Trump’s way. Isn’t the entire world supposed to do things Trump’s way? If not, why not?

Macron had ripped up the script before anyone even landed in the seaside resort of Biarritz: picking a fight with Brazil over Amazon forest fires, surprising the Europeans with a threat to block a trade deal with Latin America, and keeping allies guessing about what trick he would pull next.

Did Macron “pick a fight” with Brazil over Amazon forest fires, or is Bolsonaro picking a fight with all of us by clear-cutting the Amazon? Who is really the baddy here?

With mounting threats to the global economy, divisions

Trans activism does wonders for your feminism, I must say. Stamps it right out.

Sally Hines, Professor of Sociology and Gender Identities:

Re GC feminist protest pranks @ManchesterPride, please, just…[GIF of woman making the “sit down and be quiet” gesture]

Thing is, most of them are (at least!) my age and they really have only *just* discovered protest! Such a yawn. I don’t want to people watch them. They have nothing to teach me. I say, with #pride, Please. Just. Go. Away. You are not fun. You are not pretty (though yep, vacant)

Old, boring, and ugly, the professor of gender identities calls feminist women.

We get more progressive every day!

(It’s a Sex Pistols joke, the people … Read the rest

And he wasn’t even elected.

Boris Johnson has asked the attorney general, Geoffrey Cox, whether parliament can be shut down for five weeks from 9 September in what appears to be a concerted plan to stop MPs forcing a further extension to Brexit, according to leaked government correspondence.

An email from senior government advisers to an adviser in No 10 – written within the last 10 days and seen by the Observer – makes clear that the prime minister has recently requested guidance on the legality of such a move, known as prorogation. The initial legal guidance given in the email is that shutting parliament may well be possible, unless action being taken in the courts to block such

Rebecca Kukla – Philosophy, Georgetown, and cop of all things trans – has a public Facebook post from last week about how her piece for the Institute of Art and Ideas was drastically cut without her knowledge and how the Institute of Art and Ideas didn’t tell her it was a multi-person piece and that she would be posting in the company of TERFs. She includes the uncut piece, and what she says in one of the cut parts is interesting.

There is no such thing as ‘the’ transgender experience and identity of course; the experiences of transgender folks are as varied as the experiences of anyone else, and transgender people also do not share a single identity. Some trans

Isaac Chotiner at the New Yorker introduces us to an academic who thinks white people are Superior:

Amy Wax, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, is the academic who perhaps best represents the ideology of the Trump Administration’s immigration restrictionists. Wax, who began her professional life as a neurologist, and who served in the Solicitor General’s office in the late eighties and early nineties, has become known in recent years for her belief in the superiority of “Anglo-Protestant culture.”…

Last month, in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference, in Washington, D.C., Wax promoted the idea of “cultural-distance nationalism,” or the belief that “we are better off if our country is dominated numerically, demographically, politically, at