Andy Lewis on confusion between ontology and epistemology of sex

Much confusion appears to exist in popular discussion about the nature of sex. This has political importance at the moment, most visibly in recognition of people with trans identities in law and society. Confusions abound around conflations of the terms sex and gender, but, most fundamentally, about what a sex is, and what it means for an organism, animal or human, to have a sex. What is a sexed body? How can we tell what sex an organism is? Clear responses to these questions are so often lacking. And without that, policy, law and social arrangements are likely to be incoherent and unjust.

Much of that lack of clarity is … Read the rest

McKinnon did his CNN bit. He’s highly excited.

https://t.co/KahJgo6bpm

— Dr. Veronica Ivy (@SportIsARight) April 10, 2021

CNN calls him Associate Professor of Philosophy at College of Charleston, which is misleading since he’s “quit” [or been told to quit or be fired, or just plain been fired] and will be gone as of May 15 and has been on sabbatical and then medical leave all this year.

His fans are gloating at his…erm…whatever this is.

https://twitter.com/DaniD2021/status/1380897441025814534

Anyway. Point is, things have to be arranged to suit McKinnon. That’s all you need to understand about trans women in sport.

You realize I'd literally have no one to race against, then, right?

There are no trans women *in the world* at my

… Read the rest

Oh look, a provocation from Dawkins that doesn’t make me roll my eyes.

In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as.

Discuss.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) April 10, 2021

Been discussing for several years now. Progress slow.

https://twitter.com/hogotheforsaken/status/1380871629048274947 https://twitter.com/JudyWeb92176381/status/1380863145883930626

It’s outrageous that children are being taught that in school, by the people delegated to educate them. Talk about violating human rights.

Those 7.8 billion people came into existence precisely because there are two sexes.

— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) April 10, 2021

… Read the rest

Originally a comment by latsot on The most extreme elements.

A compromise is supposed to be a mutual acceptance of terms. A deal. It’s expected that each party give something up to achieve a result beneficial to everyone. The phrase a “compromise on the rights of women” implies that it’s only women – as usual – who are expected to give anything up and what they’re expected to give up is – as usual – their rights.

This is not a compromise as the word is generally understood. Sullivan uses it to make disagreement seem unreasonable and himself the sole arbiter of reason.

That much is obvious. What’s not, apparently, is that negotiation isn’t really about making compromises, it’s … Read the rest

This kind of crap.

i wish i lived in a world where i didn't have to have sensitive zoom meetings during my period because i'm crying at the drop of a hat *and* incredibly irritable.

— Magdalene Visaggio (@MagsVisaggs) April 8, 2021

the next time someone tells me trans women don't have periods im gonna dump a whole tub of period diarrhea on them.

— Magdalene Visaggio (@MagsVisaggs) April 8, 2021

No you’re not, because I for one did say it and you didn’t and you can’t, because you don’t know where I am and because it’s hardly worth it to travel from wherever you are and because there’s no such thing as “period diarrhea” and because if there were … Read the rest

It takes my breath away sometimes to see with what relaxed confidence some men will tell women to compromise on our rights. Andrew Sullivan is one such man.

If we were going to construct a test-case for how dysfunctional our politics have become, it would be hard to beat the transgender issue. It profoundly affects a relatively minuscule number of people in the grand scheme of things, and yet galvanizes countless more for culture war purposes. It has become a litmus test for social justice campaigners, who regard anyone proposing even the slightest qualifications on the question as indistinguishable from a Klan member. It has seized the attention of some of the most extreme elements among radical feminists, who

… Read the rest

This is very bad news: Amazon succeeded in blocking the union.

Workers at the Bessemer, Alabama warehouse voted 1,798 to 738 against the effort, labour officials said.

That represented a majority of votes cast in the contest, which was seen as a key test for Amazon after global criticism of its treatment of workers during the pandemic.

The union said it would challenge the results.

It accused Amazon of interfering with the right of employees to vote in a “free and fair election”, including by lying to staff about the implications of the vote in mandatory staff meetings and pushing the postal service to install a mailbox on company grounds in an effort to monitor the vote.

“Amazon has

… Read the rest

“Rachel” McKinnon aka Veronica Ivy is working his final weeks at the College of Charleston and still finding time to abuse a student on Twitter. It’s almost as if he’s just not a very nice man.

There ARE freshmen on the roster. She didn't make the cut.

So…is she going to sue her cis teammates who are faster than her?

Or will she maybe accept that she didn't even make the fucking roster.

HAHAHAHAHA. Just get better, girl. Stop blaming others for being slow.

— Dr. Veronica Ivy (@SportIsARight) April 9, 2021

I cannot WAIT to bring this up Saturday on CNN.

SHE DIDN'T EVEN MAKE THE ROSTER

There are no trans girls on the track team at CofC. So

… Read the rest

Mm. Progressive.

this is Jessica Marie Hann, one of the transwoman being transferred to a female institution under California's new laws.

Hann beat both of 'her' infants to death.

A female correctional officer will be required to preform a solo strip search of this person under this new law. pic.twitter.com/LQhpprmMWB

— Doom Pill Pagliacci (@Slatzism) April 8, 2021

More on “Jessica Marie” Hann from March 2019:

Desert Hot Springs, California. Jason Michael Hann was convicted of senselessly murdering his infant daughter and son, and abandoning their bodies in storage units. At the time of his arrest, he was found to be subjecting a third infant, his son, to life-threatening harm. Now on death row, the 45-year-old serial baby killer

… Read the rest

Man approves of man being nominated for women’s prize.

All I want to say is that Detransition, Baby is an incredible book & deserves all the prizes.

— Garth Greenwell (@GarthGreenwell) April 7, 2021

Easy for him. He’s a man, so he doesn’t get overlooked and forgotten and tucked away on the pink fluffy shelf the way women do.

There has been so much ugliness fluorescing on this site of late (there is always so much ugliness but it is especially visible on my TL this morning) & I am so sorry if it has been directed at you.

— Garth Greenwell (@GarthGreenwell) April 7, 2021

He’s apologizing to himself in case any of the ugliness on Twitter has been … Read the rest

Yeah, god damn it, open up the cruise industry again, because how could that possibly be at all risky in the midst of a pandemic?

The state of Florida is suing the Biden administration to reopen the cruise industry “immediately” and allow cruises to “resume safely,” Florida’s governor and attorney general announced Thursday.

“Safely” how? A cruise ship is a small place where thousands of people are packed together like tuna in a can.

“We don’t believe the federal government has the right to mothball a major industry for over a year based on very little evidence and very little data. And I think we have a good chance for success,” Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said during a news

… Read the rest

The Babylon Bee:

LITTLE ROCK, AR—In a huge blow to trans-species rights, Arkansas has passed a controversial law banning the dismemberment and surgical altering of children if they want to be a different creature. 

But trans mermaids are mermaids!

“I’ll never forget the day my daughter Belle was splashing in the tub and said, ‘Look at me, Mommy! I’m a mermaid!'” said local progressive mother and part-time librarian Zindy Derple. “I knew that day she was different. A mythical fish-creature trapped in a human girl’s body.”

Belle’s dismemberment surgery has now been canceled due to Arkansas’s new law. 

“Now, we can’t even get her the compassionate leg-removal medical care needed to turn her into her true mermaid self,” she

… Read the rest

Greg Sargent at the Post notes the determination of the Republicans to enforce evil on all of its foot soldiers via the example of Georgia governor Brian Kemp.

Kemp’s travails are detailed in a great new piece in the New York Times. It examines Kemp’s frantic efforts to atone for the heresy of refusing to help then-President Donald Trump overturn his Georgia loss, and then defending the loss as a legitimate outcome.

That is, the heresy of refusing to help Donald Trump break a bunch of laws in order to steal the election.

The central revelation is that Kemp sees his advocacy for Georgia’s new voting law as a way to win back GOP voters still fuming over his

… Read the rest

The Republican “we’re gonna TELL on you” ploy is getting more attention.

The National Republican Congressional Committee debuted a bright-yellow prechecked recurring-donation box on its donation page with a startling ultimatum.

The message from House Republicans’ campaign arm — which caught the eye of many reporters on Wednesday — told people that it needed to know it hadn’t “lost you to the Radical Left” and that if they opted out of making their donation a recurring one and “UNCHECK this box, we will have to tell Trump you’re a DEFECTOR & sided with the Dems.”

It’s interesting how stupid that message is, and how cheerful the Republicans who thought it up must be about telling their own people “We … Read the rest

The insult of nominating a man to win a women’s writing prize is compounded by the fact that the book is badly written as well as stomach-turningly sexist. (I haven’t read the whole book, but I have read snippets, and writing that bad is not confined to snippets. The snippets are as it were diagnostic. Someone who writes that badly writes that badly all the time.)

"Standing for decency." Lol. pic.twitter.com/kr606laHtY

— Internationally Powerful #SuperLesbian ⚢ (@theomegalesbian) April 8, 2021

It just couldn’t get much worse. It’s a prize for women so the people in charge nominate a man who calls himself a woman, for a book in which he writes that “feminization” is all about being the object of … Read the rest

Some people think much too well of themselves.

Former reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner is talking with political consultants as she actively explores a run for governor of California, three sources with direct knowledge of her deliberations tell Axios.

Based on what? Being a self-obsessed nitwit? What possible qualifications could that boring vain narcissistic twerp have for being governor of a state that’s larger than many countries? Not to mention the fact that he killed a woman by crashing into her car when she was stopped at a red light. Who would want a governor who killed someone by driving badly?… Read the rest

Sian Cain, scolder of women who don’t agree that men are women if they say they are, tweets.

Hey wonderful @secondshelfbks – how many copies of Detransition, Baby have you sold in the last 24 hours?

— Sian Cain (@siancain) April 7, 2021

She also retweets.

A statement about eligibility for the Women's Prize for Fiction.

Our full terms and conditions of entry can be viewed on our website: https://t.co/nAkInbbiUZ pic.twitter.com/gEsAEuszUF

— Women's Prize (@WomensPrize) April 7, 2021

I don’t know what to tell them. It’s nice that (according to them) the Women’s Prize has always aimed to honour, celebrate and champion women’s voices, but the reality remains that they’re not doing that by making men eligible for the prize. … Read the rest

Sian Cain at the Guardian writes:

The Women’s prize for fiction has issued a strongly worded statement saying that it “deplores any attempts to malign or bully” authors nominated for the prize, after trans novelist Torrey Peters was targeted in an open letter.

In other words the Women’s prize for fiction has issued a statement maligning and bullying women who say the Women’s prize for fiction should be for women as opposed to men who claim to be women. So I guess the Women’s prize for fiction isn’t for women any more.

The US writer, who is nominated for the £30,000 award for her debut novel Detransition, Baby, was the subject of a letter published online on Tuesday

… Read the rest

In Georgia news:

A district attorney in Atlanta said Wednesday that she will not pursue charges against a Georgia state lawmaker who was arrested during a protest of the state’s sweeping new election law.

Probably because she didn’t commit a crime.

“After reviewing all of the evidence, I have decided to close this matter,” Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said in an emailed statement. “It will not be presented to a grand jury for consideration of indictment, and it is now closed.”

Rep. Park Cannon, a Democrat from Atlanta, was arrested March 25 after she knocked on the door to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s office while he was on live television speaking about the voting bill he had

… Read the rest

Hey Siri,

Define grace.

pic.twitter.com/cTmuKD8AqQ

— Dr. Jonathan N. Stea (@jonathanstea) April 7, 2021

… Read the rest