Another “oh both sides are just so extreme.”

The trans right vs. gender critical debate is so intensely toxic on both sides that expressing any view that is not extreme will instantly attract attacks. I cannot even touch it myself here on Twitter because personal friends & family have such ferocious opinions (on both sides)

— Iona Italia, PhD (@IonaItalia) April 13, 2021

So…it’s extreme to say that men can be women and it’s also extreme to say that men can’t be women? It’s all just a matter of sides and not in the least a matter of what’s true and what isn’t?

Is there any other issue that is quite this electric? It has reached the stage at

Typical Pink News way of framing “he said a thing we don’t like”:

Richard Dawkins drew criticism Saturday (10 April) for a provocative tweet that compared trans people to Rachel Dolezal.

No he didn’t draw criticism; people decided to criticise him.

On Saturday morning, an entire minute after tweeting about the late Prince Phillip’s top hat, the evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist abruptly gave his take on trans lives that absolutely nobody asked for.

Remind me – how does Twitter work, again? You’re supposed to wait for someone to ask you a question before you tweet? You mustn’t tweet about subject X unless someone asks you to? Have I got that right?

Dawkins compared trans folk to Rachel Dolezal, the

Christians and Proud Boys unite to fight the common enemy…

A data breach from Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo has revealed that millions of dollars have been raised on the site for far-right causes and groups, many of whom are banned from raising funds on other platforms.

…

Some of the biggest beneficiaries have been members of groups such as the Proud Boys, designated as a terrorist group in Canada, many of whose fundraising efforts were directly related to the 6 January attack on the United States Capitol.

Church militant.

Candyce Kelshall, the president of the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies-Vancouver, who at at Simon Fraser University researches violent transnational social movements, said that far-right crowdfunding on GiveSendGo was

What’s NARAL doing sharing this?

Of course women (and girls) are the only people who get abortions. What is a man going to do with an abortion? Men don’t get abortions, women do. The reasons are too obvious to spell out.

You can’t “remind” people of nonsense. “Reminder that owls aren’t the only rabbits who get shovels!” Can’t remind me of that because I never knew it because it’s a consignment of geriatric shoe manufacturers. … Read the rest

Meghan Murphy is underwhelmed by Andrew Sullivan’s urging us to “compromise.”

The problem begins with the premise: that the category of “trans” is either a definable or rational category, distinguishable from those who do not identify as “trans.” Often, explaining that there is no such thing as a “trans person” is (disingenuously, in my opinion) interpreted to mean I wish to “deny the existence” of people who identify as trans. I do not. I am well aware there are people in this world who identify as transgender or who have attempted to “transition” to the opposite sex or gender. It is the category itself that makes no sense. Anyone could be trans, should they choose to claim it. It means

Scientific American tries to tell us that “youth” who identify as trans need to take puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, yes need I tell you. It’s science.

This week Arkansas became the first state to ban physicians from giving hormones or puberty-delaying drugs to transgender people under age 18. Doctors who do so could be stripped of their licenses and sued. The law is called the Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act…

…

The state senate sponsor of the Arkansas bill, Alan Clark, has said that puberty blockers and hormone treatments are “at best experimental and at worst a serious threat to a child’s welfare.” But medical and scientific organizations say his claim is wrong.

We are given the … Read the rest

But hey at least it’s nothing to do with social contagion, so that’s good.

There is no such thing as rapid onset gender dysphoria. There is no social contagion.

— Chase Strangio (@chasestrangio) April 12, 2021

I guess Strangio has access to the minds of all people who identify as trans, and thus knows all their thoughts and where the thoughts came from. Must be a lot to keep track of.… Read the rest

Huh. I thought Dawkins wouldn’t backtrack, but…wrong again.

Funny. It was always easy for him to brush off feminist women who disagreed with him, but trans women? Not so much, I guess.

I do not intend to disparage trans people. I see that my academic “Discuss” question has been misconstrued as such and I deplore this. It was also not my intent to ally in any way with Republican bigots in US now exploiting this issue .

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) April 12, 2021

… Read the rest

So there can be such a thing as too much deference? Who knew?!

The BBC’s wall-to-wall coverage of Prince Philip’s death has become the most complained-about moment in British television history, as viewers expressed their annoyance that shows such as EastEnders and MasterChef were replaced with royal tributes.

At least 110,994 people have contacted the BBC to express their displeasure at the decision to turn most of the corporation’s TV channels and radio stations over to rolling tributes to the Queen’s husband.

BBC One and BBC Two dedicated Friday evening’s programming to Philip, and their ratings fell as viewers switched off altogether, turned to streaming services or watched shows such as Gogglebox on Channel 4.

But but but but … Read the rest

Republican slapstick:

In an email on Monday morning, the National Republican Senatorial Committee announced that its chairman, Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), presented Trump with its first-ever “Champion for Freedom Award.” The NRSC said that the award is given to conservative leaders who work “tirelessly” to “stop the Democrats’ socialist agenda.”

…

Trump was handed the award on the same weekend that he rambled on about his usual grievances at the RNC’s spring donor retreat while delivering remarks at his Mar-a-Lago resort. The former president, however, reportedly saved his most incendiary insults for McConnell, who he derided as a “dumb son of a bitch” for not opposing the November election results.

Well it doesn’t get much more freedom than that.… Read the rest

Well, no.

Where to begin. “Gender affirming care” isn’t a medical thing, it’s a political thing disguised as medical. There’s no such thing as “gender affirming care.” Saying he means it “in the most literal and serious sense” is ludicrous: not prescribing cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers can’t possibly be seen as literal (and serious) genocide. It’s not even literal withholding of life-saving medical care, which itself couldn’t be called genocide without a lot of other factors added. It’s not even that, and on the contrary, it’s intended to avoid risky interventions in natural puberty. There’s a heated debate about whether cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers are harmless or not, about whether they’re harmful or not, about whether they … Read the rest

Peter Tatchell orders women to let men into spaces reserved for us.

Excluding trans women from women’s spaces because of physical or sexual violence by a tiny unrepresentative minority is like banning all Muslims because of terrorist acts by a handful of extremists. SO WRONG!

So then not allowing men into women’s spaces because of violence by a minority is also like “banning all Muslims because of terrorist acts by a handful of extremists”? So then women don’t have a right to women-only spaces at all, ever, no matter what? Do women have to give birth in public then? Do we all have to do everything in public and leave all our doors and windows open?

In other words Peter … Read the rest

Be more inclusive by never mentioning mothers or fathers.

Schools and sporting groups in Victoria will be told to  avoid terms like “mum”, “dad”, “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” as part of a push to curb the dropout and suicide rates of LGBTQI+ young people.

Here’s a surprising fact: lesbians and gay men can have mothers and fathers. I don’t think lesbians and gay men object to the words “mother” and “father.” (I don’t know why schools are talking about “mum” and “dad” instead of “mother” and “father”; mum and dad are personal names, which schools shouldn’t be using for anyone, because it’s intrusive and weird. “Mum” and “dad” are not nouns, they’re family nicknames.)

The North Western Melbourne Primary Health

Genevive Gluck at Glinner’s site on the core reversal:

In 2018, Me Too campaigner Rose McGowan was at a Barnes and Noble bookshop in New York promoting her memoir Brave, which details the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. During a question and answer session, as Rose was discussing her grief and recovery, a trans-identified male heckled her from the crowd, saying, “We get raped more often. We go through domestic violence more often. Trans women are in men’s prisons, and what have you done for them?”

The viral video depicts a trans-identifying male with hair dyed pink, wearing a pale pink hoodie, standing among a crowd of seated patrons

The magic is gone.

Several Republican leaders on Sunday expressed concern at incendiary comments made by former President Donald Trump during a speech Saturday night at a Republican National Committee donor retreat.

Incendiary comments were fine as long as he was squatting in the White House, but now that he’s the official loser, they’re discovering an uncomfortable level of heat.

The former president went off-script in a roughly 50-minute keynote speech at his Mar-a-Lago resort in South Florida, ripping into Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, even calling him a “dumb son of a bitch.” Trump also took aim at former Vice President Mike Pence — saying he was “disappointed” in him for not fighting the certification of the

Ruth Smeeth, CEO of Index on Censorship, complains of polarization…a complaint I always find rather dull and beside the point. “X is for torture and Y is against it; oh no the polarization!” It seems especially beside the point for an organization whose title and purpose is to oppose censorship. It’s not literal censorship to say stop being so polar, but it is a form of pressure to say different things in a different way.

Of course, the reality is this has always been part of our political discourse. There is a healthy tradition of challenge in our public space. But…my concern is it is no longer on the fringes of our national conversations, it now dominates and the

Young Americans for Freedom made the mistake of sneering at the observation that racism is built into many US highways, thus giving a lot of people the opportunity to educate onlookers about the well-documented fact that racism is built into many US highways. Own goal.

This is not parody. pic.twitter.com/bzbplAnfqO

— YAF (@yaf) April 10, 2021

No, they’re right, it’s not parody, and it’s true.

Not just in NYC. In Denver, I-70 cut off a community called Swansea from the rest of the city

— Amy H (@TheRufusFiles) April 11, 2021

That thing about roads designed not to allow buses? That’s closely tied to voter suppression, too. The suppressionist bills that limit voting places are helped along by extra difficulty … Read the rest

He’s still alive, but it was a near thing.

A second lieutenant in the US army is suing two Virginia police officers over a traffic stop last December in which the officers drew their guns, pointed them at him and used a slang term to suggest he was facing execution before pepper-spraying him and knocking him to the ground.

Body camera footage shows Caron Nazario, who is Black and Latino, dressed in uniform and with his hands held in the air outside the driver’s window as he tells the armed officers he is “honestly afraid to get out” of his SUV.

But they must have had a good reason for the traffic stop, right?

No.

Daniel Crocker, a Windsor

At A Blog of One’s Own:

On 11 March, Legal Feminist (a collective of feminist lawyers, of which I am a member: tweeting from @legalfeminist and blogging at legalfeminst.org.uk) tweeted this:

Torrey Peters, who identifies as a woman, has been longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. Peters wrote this: pic.twitter.com/cguNCJX9a2

— Legal Feminist (@legalfeminist) March 11, 2021

That’s from a pre-prize novella Peters wrote called The Masker.

The Masker isn’t a one-off: there’s a genre. It’s called “sissy porn,” and “forced feminisation” is a popular trope among aficionados^[2]. It is a manifestation of a phenomenon known as autogynephilia: a tendency in some heterosexual males to be aroused by the thought or image of themselves as

They just will not report on this subject honestly.

A protest against trans health-care scheduled this weekend in downtown Vancouver has reignited a debate pitting the protection of vulnerable youth against the right to free speech.

It’s not a “protest against trans health-care.” Nobody is campaigning to prevent trans people from getting health care. The issue is not health care at all, it’s health-compromising body modifications to match the sex one is not. It’s also not a matter of trying to block the protection of vulnerable youth. Nobody is demanding the free speech right to keep vulnerable youth from being protected.

Vancouver social justice lawyer Adrienne Smith fears the April 10 event will include transphobic rhetoric that contributes