I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or not, until I scrolled down and saw that she’s blocking anyone who asks, so that’s a no. She actually means this.

Today for #NationalGirlsAndWomenInSportsDay, I’m celebrating the incredible strength and bravery of trans women & girls who live and compete authentically & are forced to fight for their inclusion. Trans women are women & every woman deserves the opportunity to thrive in sports. pic.twitter.com/QsLaLRD6tu

— Emily Adams (@eaadams6) February 3, 2021

It’s national women and girls in sports day, so she’s celebrating the “bravery” of men who beat women in sports by claiming to be women. Also their “strength,” which is kind of the issue.

Laurel Hubbard (@laurelHubbard11)

This just in: women talk too much.

The president of the Tokyo Olympics has refused to resign after igniting a storm of criticism by saying that women do not belong on committees because they talk too much.

Yoshiro Mori, the 83-year-old former prime minister and president of the Tokyo 2020 organising committee, made the remarks at a meeting of the Japan Olympic Committee on Wednesday.

…

Speaking at an online JOC meeting about proposals to increase the number of female directors, Mr Mori said that in his experience at the Japan Rugby Football Union, women made meetings last too long.

“It takes twice as long. Women have a strong sense of rivalry. If one raises her hand to speak

Facebook targets pro-violence advertising to – naturally – the people most likely to use it.

As part of my research while working as a consulting producer on Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, I made many pro-Trump social media accounts. The accounts were a window into the Trump echo-chamber, where the unhinged threats and vitriol posted by radicalized users are chilling. Yet as shocking as the posts can be, they make perfect sense if you look at the ads that bombard those accounts.

Roughly four out of five ads shown to my pro-Trump profiles sell tactical gear clearly intended for combat. This is not a new thing – it has been going on since I started looking at these accounts in June 2019,

The ACLU is digging in.

FACT ONE: Trans girls are girls. pic.twitter.com/R5OWNl5ooI

— ACLU (@ACLU) February 3, 2021

But that’s not a “fact.” It’s an ideological construct, of a peculiarly fatuous kind, and it’s not true; it’s the opposite of a fact.

FACT THREE: Including trans athletes will benefit everyone. pic.twitter.com/H0Fpt8xb4X

— ACLU (@ACLU) February 3, 2021

Nonsense.

Say it with us: Trans people belong EVERYWHERE — including on sports teams. https://t.co/3e7Or90lZ5

— ACLU (@ACLU) February 3, 2021

Include trans people on sports teams by all means, just not male people on female teams, because it’s unfair.… Read the rest

USA Today reports:

A group of high-profile women athletes and women’s sports advocates is taking on the contentious issue of transgender girls and women in sports by proposing federal legislation to exempt girls’ and women’s competitive sports from President Joe Biden’s recent executive order that mandates blanket inclusion for all transgender female athletes.

In the Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation, signed on Inauguration Day, the Biden administration said that any school that receives federal funding must allow biological boys who self-identify as girls onto girls’ sports teams or face action from the federal government.

But the group of women’s sports leaders, including tennis legend Martina Navratilova, several Olympic

2/ The article still has two stealth edits that it shouldn't have: The editors never acknowledged a change to the very first sentence, which initially misrepresented the ruling badly, and more recently a deletion of a reference to PBs being 'reversible,' full-stop. But whatever.

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) February 2, 2021

4/ Too petty not to recirculate this once more. This was the reaction of a top-level editor at a top-tier publication to criticism of a piece that turned out, as his own publication would later acknowledge, to be correct.https://t.co/qVvSNUawbK

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) February 2, 2021

… Read the rest

Why was NPR talking about “multiracial whiteness”? Because of a Washington Post think piece by Cristina Beltrán, who is an associate professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU.

The Trump administration’s anti-immigration, anti-civil rights stance has made it easy to classify the president’s loyalists as a homogenous mob of white nationalists. But take a look at the FBI’s posters showing people wanted in the insurrectionist assault on the U.S. Capitol: Among the many White faces are a few that are clearly Latino or African American.

So! Rather than try to figure out how brown people manage to be fans of murderous bullies who despise brown people, we have to decide that that’s “whiteness.”

Yes, Trump’s voters — and

It’s not just Alison Phipps – it’s a whole new item. “Whiteness” now means…you know…everything. All the bad things.

Vast swaths of media are becoming completely unreadable/unlistenable — above all, stiflingly predictable — and it sucks because media is important https://t.co/bfWe0TNMCD

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) February 2, 2021

Oh yes, “multiracial whiteness.” That’s kind of like multisex karenness.

My friend argues that "white" means capitalist. And so "white privledge" is really more about rich people.

People want to piggyback on these ideas by redefining them. Like how "abolish the police" didn't really mean abolish.

It's pointless to talk about anything.

— Benjamin Danard (@BenjaminDanard) February 3, 2021

… Read the rest

A clean sweep at the Pentagon:

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has dismissed every member of the Pentagon’s advisory boards in a sweeping move fueled by concern that the Trump administration had rushed through a series of last-minute appointments, defense officials said Tuesday.

Along with a concern that those appointments were highly likely to be stooges for him as opposed to people who ought to be on a Pentagon advisory board.

The move affects several hundred members of about 40 advisory boards, including dozens of people who had been named to the posts in the closing days of former President Donald Trump’s tenure.

Among those who were dismissed are highly partisan figures such as Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s 2016 presidential

Very granola, very crunchy person turns trumpian insurrectionist:

Before the pandemic, Rachel Powell, a forty-year-old mother of eight from western Pennsylvania, sold cheese and yogurt at local farmers’ markets and used Facebook mostly to discuss yoga, organic food, and her children’s baseball games. But, last year, Powell began to post more frequently, embracing more extreme political views. Her interests grew to include conspiracy theories about covid-19 and the results of the Presidential election, filtered through such figures as Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and the Infowars founder Alex Jones.

Some more time passes and she turns up at the January 6 insurrection.

Videos show her, wearing a pink hat and sunglasses, using a battering

One more visit with Alison Phipps.

I have a new paper out in @EJCS_Journal and it's *fully open access* – it's called 'White tears, white rage: victimhood and (as) violence in mainstream feminism.'

Abstract below – read/download the full paper at: https://t.co/uaZUYTCwhE pic.twitter.com/FdQZaNsFHc

— Alison Phipps (@alisonphipps) January 19, 2021

“…the cultural power of white feminism partly derives from the cultural power of white tears.”

It’s so…hit them don’t hit me. So chickenshit. So malicious. She’s lily-white herself and she’s climbing the academic ladder by heaping shit on white women. She makes scholarship look like a con game.

Hur hur radical feminists, they’re exactly like Brexiters and men’s rights activists, hur hur hur.

We’re all doomed.… Read the rest

Alison Phipps says we’re “stalking” her “profile,” which apparently means seeing one of her tweets. How very dare we.

To the angry 'gender crits' now stalking my profile/wilfully misreading my work: here's the definition of political whiteness from my book. It's about frameworks of political action & relationships to white supremacy: you are the only ones essentialising it in bodies (as usual) pic.twitter.com/cyqRQT8kJA

— Alison Phipps (@alisonphipps) February 2, 2021

Reading the Definition of Political Whiteness from Her Book does not, oddly enough, convince me that her way of deploying it is clever and enlightened.

Nope. Not convincing. Why “whiteness”? Why that word instead of another? Why not maleness or richness or powerfulness?

I haven’t read her book so I … Read the rest

I thought Chase Strangio couldn’t get any worse. Silly me.

Cis folks, especially cis women, today would be a good day to affirm your support for full inclusion of trans people, your love for trans people, and the fact that the presence and existence of trans people does not hurt cis people.

— Chase Strangio (@chasestrangio) February 2, 2021

There’s a lot to fume at in that tweet, but I especially bristle at that “especially.” Why especially? Why women especially? WHY WOMEN ESPECIALLY?… Read the rest

Moira Donegan on AOC and what she told us:

On Monday night, after making several public allusions to the gravity of her experience, AOC used Instagram Live to describe her experience of the Capitol attack on 6 January. She spoke of hiding in her office as the mob breached the Capitol; she hid behind the door in a bathroom as she heard people ransacking the rooms outside. Someone came into the bathroom where she was hiding, their face on the other side of the door that she hid behind. At one point, a voice yelled, “Where is she? Where is she?” That turned out to be a Capitol police officer, but he did not identify himself; Ocasio-Cortez describes feeling

The question is answered: yes Trump’s new “legal team” is willing to repeat his lies.

Donald Trump’s legal team for his second impeachment trial has filed a 14-page brief defending his actions on January 6, when the then-president incited a violent insurrection at the US Capitol.

On January 6, Trump repeated his baseless claims that Joe Biden won the presidential election because of widespread fraud, and he encouraged his supporters to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol as Congress certified Biden’s victory.

He encouraged them to do more than march to the Capitol.

“Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness,” he said. “You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.”

The president’s legal

Putin is still Putin.

A Moscow court has sentenced Alexei Navalny to two years and eight months in a prison colony in a landmark decision for Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on the country’s leading opposition figure.

Calling it a “crackdown” makes it sound legitimate. The right word would be “suppression.”

Navalny, who has accused the Russian president and his allies of stealing billions, was jailed for violating parole from a 2014 sentence for embezzlement in a case he has said was politically motivated.

…

After a judge read the verdict, subtracting the 10 months he had spent under house arrest from his original three-and-a-half-year sentence, Navalny and his wife Yulia stared at each other across the court room. She took

Originally a comment by Vila Restal on The war on cis women.

As someone who works in the VAWG sector it’s interesting to note that the helpline number given at the end of the article is for Galop. Ostensibly for LBGT survivors, it’s focus is on male victims, and they’ve been given a lot of support and training by the women’s organisations.

You see women working in VAWG jobs do recognise that men can be victims – for example young gay men involved in the chemsex scene are vulnerable to abuse while under the influence of drugs and are reluctant to approach the police because of the illicit nature of the drugs involved. While male victims can’t be accommodated … Read the rest

Sarah Ditum on the “be kind” bullshit:

Setting yourself up as an opponent of kindness would be extravagantly poor taste, especially now the hashtag #bekind is irrevocably associated with suicide prevention. This is unfortunate for me, because I am not a kind person; or at least, I don’t think of kindness as the quality I would like to be defined by or measured against in public life. I’m a critic, which makes it my job to say critical things.

That’s a crucial distinction. I make some effort not to be actively unkind, which I haven’t always been brilliant at, but like Sarah I don’t want that to be the thing that jumps out at you. (Fortunately it never … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Still scrambling.

Trump knows that the Senate isn’t going to convict him no matter what defense he mounts. He can ignore the trial entirely, or hire competent counsel and heed their advice, or show up personally and moon Chuck Schumer and call the GOP Senators “my obedient little bitches, especially Ted Cruz who has an ugly wife,” and the outcome will be the same.

So Trump’s goal isn’t to mount a “good defense,” or even any defense at all, except in the sense of “the best defense is a good offense.” What he really wants to do is indulge his own emotional needs and put on a good show for his supporters. … Read the rest

Another scorching exposé of those selfish bitches who support women who have survived sexual violence when they should be supporting trans women instead:

It was at the tail end of 2017 when Cora*, a frontline worker for a south London organisation supporting women who have survived sexual violence, realised that undercurrents of transmisogyny had become a new precedent for her workplace. 

“I just remember there being far more comments like ‘Yeah we only support real women’,” Cora says. 

How dare they!!! How dare they support women who have survived sexual violence instead of men who have a fantasy that they are women? Have you ever heard of anything so selfish?

Both visibility and hostility were on the rise for trans