I’ll open with a sincere apology to OB and anyone else who may have seen the porn I linked to in the previous miscellany room.
I honestly have no idea how it occurred, I do not have porn photos on my PC, but I failed to check the link before posting, so I accept I am to blame.
I no longer use the website that allowed me to create links to images and will post no further image links until I can find a better, more reliable site.
Kevin Drum talks about a NYT opinion column about wokeism and self-censorship on a college campus. Drum has been gradually coming to understand that this is a real and widespread problem, whether you call it “cancel culture” or something else, and he has some good things to say, noting that the reaction to the essay is essentially proof of the validity of the points made in the essay.
I think it’s a good piece, describing the same kinds of pressures people (especially women) face to keep their unorthodox opinions to themselves or risk censure, poor grades, or verbal attacks.
Definitely not a good sign. I don’t want to read too much into a single post on Facebook, but if this means that Greta has embraced sex denialism, it kind of undermines her own message about going not putting ideology above science. I guess it’s only wrong when the other side is doing it.
Prestigious Adelaide boys’ school Prince Alfred College will allow a student transitioning to a female to stay enrolled and complete their study for the first time.
Headmaster Bradley Fenner wrote to parents on Tuesday evening to share that the Year 12 student will remain at the college.
“This morning, a student who has been at Prince Alfred College since the Early Learning Centre has told her peers that she is transgender, identifies as a woman and henceforth will be known as Alice,” Mr Fenner said in the letter.
Well, of course he will remain at PAC; he is, after all, still just a boy. Not to forget the $28,200.00 in annual fees his parents are paying. I wonder where he pees, and which Rugby team he plays on?
“There is also the other question of it still being a non co-ed school which isn’t open to students who were actually born girls.”
So, it appears the school does know the difference between male and female and are quite happy “Alice” is male. At least until a girl identifying as a boy wishes to enroll… the school may suddenly decide it is no longer trans friendly at all.
re #’s 9-11 above, well it wouldn’t be a surprise if she did. I believe she has been diagnosed with Aspergers (an autism spectrum disorder). Aspergers and other ASD’s, along with depression, are over represented in transitioning. Especially so for young women. So she’s in the at risk category. There are medical professionals pointing out that most people diagnosed with ASD who present with body dysphoria are initially strongly obsessive about transitioning, but frequently repudiate this years later. The advice is to withhold any permanent or irreversible treatment until absolutely certain.
I mean, that’s why it’s sad for the world that she endorses transism. If she transes herself and makes herself a sterilized permanent medical patient, it will be sad for her, as well. :-( Poor kid.
Facebook is allowing people to call for the death of Russian invaders or of specific Russian leaders, with some caveats. Meanwhile, you can still get in trouble for stating biological facts.
Now this is fascinating. The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the body that knew of sexual assaults and helped hide the evidence, has a grand new logo for its “Women’s Network”
“A clinic which receives NHS funding has been promoting prostitution as a way for transgender people to pay for their transition treatment, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Being a sex worker ‘can be useful and sometimes empowering’, according to a guide produced by CliniQ, a sexual counselling service for transgender people at King’s College Hospital in London. It adds: ‘It can help us pay for parts of our transition.’
The booklet by CliniQ, which is part-funded by King’s College NHS Trust and three London local authorities, also suggests that transgender men – people born in female bodies but transitioning to male – can hide the fact that they are trans when visiting gay sex parties.
[…]
The pamphlet, which features crude sexual language including 22 uses of the words ‘f***’ and ‘f******’ in its 44 pages, focuses extensively on extreme sex acts, including sadomasochism and bondage.
‘Sex in public spaces is legal, so long as other members of the public cannot see you,’ it states. ‘Or so long as it is unlikely someone will come across you having sex. For example, having sex in a quiet woodland, away from the road or path, late at night.’”
I just saw a NYT headline “She Killed Two Women. At 83, She Is Charged With Dismembering a Third” (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/10/nyregion/harvey-marcelin-shopping-cart-body.html), and looked at the story out of perhaps morbid interest, but also because I was absolutely sure of a particular plot twist that was going to be there – and of course it was. But I was particularly struck by the weird phrasing of the headline – as if the most important thing was to emphasize (twice!) that male serial killer of girlfriends Harvey Marcelin must not be misgendered! TSKAW!
Weirdly, there are photos of the two authors of the piece – two very young women. Does the Times normally put little snaps of the reporter on its stories? Seems odd.
Emma Watson was a presenter at the recent BAFTA awards. She was introduced by Rebel Wilson, who said, “She calls herself a feminist, but we know she’s a witch.” Watson responded, “I’m here for ALL witches.” This is widely seen as a dig at JK Rowling. Watson is getting some praise and some criticism for her sentence. Some of the criticism I think is excessive, but that’s how things go.
None of the articles on the incident seem to have noticed that “witch” is usually a false accusation against a woman used to get her punished or killed. Rowling has herself used the term to describe her treatment by trans activists. If Watson is indeed “here for ALL witches”, it should include Rowling and other outspoken women who have spoken out against trans activism and in support of the rights of women. Probably not what Watson’s cryptic comment was intended to cover, though.
If you didn’t know lesbian bars were in trouble, prepare for some pretty bleak numbers: 30 years ago, there were approximately 200 lesbian bars in this country — all spaces where specifically lesbian-identifying people could commune together. Now there could be as few as 21.
Well then, here’s this interview with someone trying to “save” lesbian bars. Let’s see what she says.
[The Lesbian Bar Project] believe[s], and we’ve outlined this on our website, that lesbian bars are not just for lesbian-identified people. They’re for all marginalized genders within the LGBTQIA community, so that all queer women, regardless if they’re cis or trans, non-binary people and also trans men have a space. Lesbian bars have a divisive past — they have to reckon with the transphobic and racist policies that they maintained for a really long time, and some still do. None on our list, but I think gay bars in particular need to do better.
Ah. Got it. So you’re the reason that lesbian bars are disappearing.
[INTERVIEWER]: I think what especially stood out to me about the film is what you mentioned: not shying away from discussing the racist and transphobic past and history of lesbian bars. You make sure to talk about that, which I think will help to change the culture. I really appreciated that.
Yeah, that was big. We really weren’t sure if we were going to call it The Lesbian Bar Project. We debated that for a long time. But we felt that we should be more flexible with how we define what a lesbian or who a lesbian is. When Lisa Cannistraci of Henrietta Hudson changed her logo [replacing an image of a woman with a genderless symbol], she got a lot of shit for that, which sucks. But she had the best retort to it, because people were saying, like, oh, man, it’s no longer a lesbian space. Just like transphobic and terrible stuff. And she said, really beautifully, you thought 10-20 years ago you were in a lesbian, women only space. But you were wrong. There were men there. There were non-binary people there. They were trans women there, there were bisexual and pansexual people. There were so many different identifiers and community members there, and we just didn’t have the language for it yet. Or it wasn’t as socially acceptable yet.
I look at that, and I’m like, trans men, non-binary people, bisexual, pansexual, whatever — those people have always been part of the lesbian community. So it would be such a shame and a disservice if we only were exclusive to cis-lesbian identified people. That isn’t what our community’s about. And I think that the gay male community has often been exclusive, sexist and misogynistic to many different types of people within the queer umbrella. Queer women should do better. Hopefully they will catch up and they need to, but I think that we can really set a precedent.
Not that most of the commentariat is of the demographic that plays all that many FPS games, but the Ukrainian studio that created the STALKER series (loosely based on at least one novel and a short story “Roadside Picnic”) is probably not going to get to launch STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl (they stopped using the Russian spelling). This is probably the first time an international release of a computer game was cancelled by an actual war.
As an added cherry (probably) Russian trolls are review bombing the other games in the series and in response others are doing whatever the reverse of that is resulting in overall higher ratings than the games have seen in the past. They’re good games, but they’re also buggy and are much improved by modding.
I think the headline’s use of the term “bipartisan” is incorrect; this was to be a discussion on a topic of free speech, trying to show that people (a liberal atheist and a conservative Christian) who had strong disagreements on certain important topics, in particular so-called “LGBTQ rights”, could nonetheless find common ground on the topic of free speech. I think Federalist Society was trying to do something I respect, encourage discussion and debate rather than silencing. It is interesting to me that the Yale speech code encourages free speech and supports the right to protest, but specifically forbids any protest that “interferes with speakers’ ability to be heard and of community members to listen”. Good job, Yale.
Of course the protest of a free speech discussion proves the need for the discussion. Of course the primary issue the protesters were protesting had to do with “trans rights” or “trans kids”.
I’m surprised and pleased that Monica Miller from the American Humanist Association agreed to participate. I wonder if the organization is rethinking their incredibly boneheaded move of rescinding Dawkins’ Humanist of the Year award over simply raising issues and asking questions. It would have been good for the event to go forward; pity.
Cops were called (by somebody, unclear who). People were attacked. People were threatened. Letters afterward complaining about calling the cops on “peaceful student protesters”. I think I have a different understanding of the word “peaceful”.
There has been a lot of commentary lately about left-wing groups working with right-wing groups over certain issues for different reasons. I saw another article recently that stated that right-wing groups know trans issues are a wedge between left-wing factions, and the right-wing groups are using gender-critical feminists as “human shields”. (The article is not sympathetic, nor is it very good, but it has some good points.) It is a mine field.
Two weeks ago I read an excellent book, “Unbreakable” where Australian women shared their stories of pain, assault, rape. I had heard of almost all these women, but was unaware of their stories. Some made me sad, some made me angry, and some brought me to tears.
From the blurb
Every woman has a story of survival. In this revealingly honest collection, successful Australian women talk about the challenges they have overcome, from sexual assault and domestic violence to racism, miscarriage, and depression. While delving deep into these experiences and their personal cost, the contributors also demonstrate the strength and courage they had to move forward with their lives. In a time when bragging about sexual harassment doesn’t preclude being elected president of the United States, we must stand together and speak out against violence against women. Unbreakable shows that every woman, no matter her success, has a story, and that together we are stronger. In Jane Caro’s words: I want to pass on courage and hope to women who have also gone through such things by all of us speaking up about our own experiences. These things do not need to either define us or destroy us. We can find the strength to move forward, and this book shows how successful women have done just that. Contributors include Kathy Lette, Mariam Veiszadeh, Tracey Spicer, Lee-Ann Tjunypa Buckskin, Rebecca Lim, Van Badham, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Susan Wyndham, Andie Fox, Dee Madigan, Catherine Fox, Zora Simic, Nina Funnell, Sandra Levy, Polly Dunning and Jacinda Woodhead, with a foreword by Tanya Plibersek.
But today, I am angrier and am crying inside – Jane Caro, who edited the book, who wrote of her own experience of sexual assault, is a believer in TWAW, thinks William Thomas is a woman and that we should be paying for the medical transition of children.
Worth noting that the Reason Party, that Caro is standing for at next Federal election, was born out of the Sex Party, itself born out of a Sex Industry lobby group…
I’m pretty sure I saw a Caro tweet in support of someone cancelled for GC beliefs (in a “don’t agree, but defend your right” sort of way) and get such immediate grief from the usual suspects they deleted the tweet within a few hours.
@36 Thank you Sackbut! I wrote it in a frenzy of rage, without any editing and barely any revising. That’s the way to make a good piece that flows! Graham texted me and told me to to just stop everything and do it. Don’t overthink it, just feel the anger and put it out there. We can revise later if we need to. And he was right! Barely any revision was needed. I guess that’s the power of passion! (Anger is a kind of passion!)
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — A major Boise hospital went on lockdown for about an hour Tuesday after far-right activist Ammon Bundy urged supporters to go the facility in protest of a child protection case involving one of his family friends.
…
Earlier in the day, Bundy released a statement on YouTube warning that if an acquaintance’s young child was not returned to the family after a hearing Tuesday afternoon, that “patriot groups” would take action. Bundy later released another video telling people that child protection workers were poised to move the baby from the hospital to a foster home, and telling them to show up at the facility immediately.
One of the guests is Jack Turban. It is really disturbing to realise that pretty much any time I see the word ‘science’ online I’m going to encounter anything but.
I’ve spent the last few days reading Maya Forstater’s witness statement. It’s all fascinating and horrifying by turns. This paragraph alone sums up, for me, the ‘gender critical’ position, and that of most people who haven’t bought into the cult’s version of reality.
354. I strongly dispute the characterisation of my tweets and article as using “fear-mongering against a marginalized community”. As I tried to explain several times in emails to Luke, Mark, Amanda and Masood, if there is a word for female people then that word is by necessity exclusionary of male people and vice versa. And if it is legitimate to be able to have services, statistics, schools and sports for male people and female people separately, then it must be possible to use these words and concepts clearly. Saying that women and girls should be able to change, shower and sleep in rooms without male colleagues, classmates or strangers is not fearmongering, but is based on a rational assessment of the needs of women and risks posed to them if they are not able to have privacy and security. The needs of male people who identify as having a female gender identity (“transwomen”) should also be considered and accommodated in public life, but not by making a hostile environment for women. The way to achieve protection of everyone’s rights must involve talking about the conflicts and trade-offs of different policies.
nuffy does a lot of proper footwork in the streets of Edinburgh talking to people about feminist issues and especially (at the moment) trans issues. She’s fierce, funny and relentless, so if you’re looking for someone to follow on Twitter, you could do a lot worse.
The article has some problems. The discussion wasn’t about the First Amendment, but about free speech; it wasn’t “bipartisan” in the usual American sense of Democratic and Republican, but rather two people (representing ADF and AHA) who disagreed strongly on certain important issues (in particular, trans “rights” issues). But the gist of the story is that a federal judge, Laurence Silberman of the D.C. Circuit Court, suggested that students who protested against the discussion are demonstrating their disdain for the concept of free speech, and this disdain should count against them if they seek clerkships.
On the one hand, this sounds like the same kind threat issued against people who think wrongly on trans issues. On the other hand, though, these students have really disrupted a peaceful discussion, and they refuse to allow the opposition to express views or explain themselves. I think the Judge has a point that maybe this kind of protest (not protest in general, nor protest on this issue, but this manner of protest) is a negative factor for someone seeking certain kinds of legal positions.
There is evidence that the discussion went on without further incident after the protestors left. It would also not surprise me to learn that the ADF was the party that called the cops, perhaps to bolster their “victimhood” case. Nonetheless, the student trans activists seemed all too willing to deny anyone the right to speak, or to listen to someone else speak, on the topic of transgender ideology and its impact on women.
Right-wing organizations like ADF are aware that they can use this kind of issue as a wedge between leftists and the general public, and between left-ish factions.
Most behind a paywall, but the conclusion is that both positions probably arise within the same group of people from their consumption of disinformation and conspiracy theories.
I don’t look at Pharyngula any more but I keep wondering whether PZ has ever mentioned Lia Thomas. A quick search suggests not. While I was looking, I noticed that PZ had posted….. this…..
I think author Megan McArdle makes some good points. She acknowledges that people can’t change sex, she recognizes the unfairness of pitting men against women, and she expresses discomfort with the idea of basing competition classes on identity, and she recognizes that many of the arguments in favor of “inclusion” really aim toward an endpoint of one big open league. But she never gets around to answering the question in the headline: what is the purpose of women’s sports? It’s not to have a competition for weaker or smaller people, but to provide opportunities for women, opportunities they have been historically denied due to discrimination and sexism as well as unfairness.
Sackbut, for me the value of competitive sport is that it tests you in ways that can improve your life. I was an overweight 13 year old when I joined a competitive swimming league at the local YMCA and I found I liked pushing myself to swim further and faster. It gave me self-confidence as a teen and while I was never a great athlete I was able to at least compete and sometimes even win. I think women deserve the same opportunity to compete with each other and strive for physical excellence. It’s not really about glory so much as we all know that most of us will never be Olympic champs. Rather, it’s about reaching your personal best. I think even the few years I spent swimming up until I was 18 have had a life-long benefit for me. I know my younger sister who was also a swimmer and ran the mile in high school also has benefitted since herself.
I agree regarding the benefit of competitive sport, but that’s not quite the issue here. Small men, less-fit people, children, all deserve the benefits of sport, but that doesn’t mean that interscholastic or intercollegiate competition, or the various levels of sports championships, need to provide these benefits. There are other leagues, less formal competitions, lower levels. The question isn’t whether women should be provided opportunities to play sports at all, but whether they should have separate teams and leagues in which to compete with prestige and resources equivalent to those of the men’s teams. This is the question I thought the article I posted was going to address, and I think the author was genuinely unsure of an appropriate answer. Quoting:
Because taken to its logical conclusion, “biology is unfair, but that doesn’t give you the right to exclude better athletes from competition” isn’t a great argument for including Thomas in the women’s division. It sounds more like an argument for abolishing women’s sports in favor of one, open league.
Does that sound too reductive? Sure, we might argue, biology is one reason sports are separate, but winning isn’t the only purpose of sport; it also teaches teamwork, self-discipline and important social values such as inclusion. All of which is true, and yet … if women’s sports didn’t exist, would we now create them for the purpose of letting women experience the joys of all-female teams? Would we do it to allow trans athletes such as Thomas to compete as their authentic selves?
Highly unlikely. Whatever various social purposes women’s sports serve, their justification is biology
I disagree with the “authentic true selves” mumbo jumbo, but I do think she sees clearly the direction the arguments are going.
Her final two paragraphs I think are quite good, again with some disagreements:
Which is why Thomas’s participation feels unfair, even though she is following the rules: It seems to violate the primary purpose of the league. Her defenders have offered moving homilies to inclusion and warnings about the suffering of trans athletes who might be excluded. All are points worth considering. But they still haven’t explained why we would ever organize sports around internal identity rather than external biology.
I confess that that idea makes no sense to me, which is why, on balance, I think women’s sports should probably be reserved for cisgender women, or trans women who transitioned before puberty. I am still persuadable on this point; we are all learning as we go. But of one thing I am fairly certain: Unless and until someone answers this fundamental question, advocates of inclusion will never convince the public that pitting a trans athlete against a cisgender woman is anything like a fair fight.
The primary purpose of the league, that’s exactly the question. If there were no women’s leagues, if all leagues were open, there is no reason that makes any sense to create leagues according to identity. McArdle advocates sports reserved for women, although she doesn’t have a good handle on why, except that this is the way things are now and she would need more convincing to change it. I do think there are good reasons that can be articulated as to why separate women’s sports exist, and I agree with McArdle that the emphasis on fairness is missing an opportunity to talk about those reasons.
Just scheduled my second COVID booster at the local CVS. As part of the process, they asked for “sex assigned at birth”. So not only is gender assigned, but sex as well?
While the SC is busy gutting voting rights, the Biden administration is ready to gut Title IX:
The draft text of the regulation included this key sentence, according to the people familiar with it: “Discrimination on the basis of sex includes discrimination on the basis of sex stereotypes, sex-related characteristics (including intersex traits), pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity.”
The regulations would also rewrite, for the third time in three administrations, complex rules for universities and K-12 schools in adjudicating allegations of sexual harassment and assault. The Trump administration’s version included more due process rights for the accused, and the new version is expected to be friendlier to those leveling the accusations.
The TiM determination to be seen as women is like a strangely garbled and inverted version of the Groucho Marx line, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” Modifying the concept of “woman” in such a way that it would allow a man to be a “member of the club” immediately obliterates the club they so desperately want to join. This is the crux of Bjarte Foshaug’s definitional argument. Given the avoidance by “inclusive” organizations of use of the word “woman”, or to promulgate a vapourous definition of “woman” that sketches her with false reverence as a mysterious, amorphous froth of asperational potentialty, how can it be that TiMs know what a woman is, and know that indeed they are one? The trans inclusive flight of fancy has left them with no solid ground to land on. Perhaps that is the point: if the definition is so uncertain and maleable, then anyone can meet it. As we’ve learned, and have seen, the point of the propagandist’s muddying of the waters isn’t necessarily to accept their view as truth, but to spread doubt about what is true. He has won if we throw up our hands and decide that “truth” is unreachable, uncertain, or does not exist. Whenever I hear or read anyone talking about “all women” I immediately look for the asterixes, fine print, and rejections of “exclusion.” Not women then. Gotcha. “All shall have prizes.” Except women, whose prizes shall be taken away by, or given instead to, men. This is progress? In a pig’s eye.
And we’ll put aside the near-pathological hatred and scorn that many TiMs are so eager to pour on members of the sex they claim (or hope) to be, as well as the belief that some of them have that they’re better at “womaning” than any woman will ever be. Jealousy over never being able to become, no matter the effort, what women just are? The mere existence of women must be triggering for some of them; the accusations of trans “genocide” a frightening projection.
I came across this article. It’s a cogent and thorough discussion of the gender critical position from a legal standpoint. It’s a couple of years old, so I suspect it’s been discussed here before, and it doesn’t say anything I haven’t seen said here before, but still I think it’s worth bookmarking.
A meme. A conservative Republican woman who opposes men in women’s restrooms is going to have to “wrestle with her demons” when the man she encounters in the women’s restroom is also a conservative Republican. The specific people in this case are Laura Ingraham and Bruce “Caitllyn” Jenner, but it hardly matters, really. I guess the meme creator thinks it does matter; that somehow Ingraham would be inclined to consider a man to be a woman if the man in question largely shares her political views (and claims to be a woman). It seems the meme creator thought this was a “gotcha”, which I think indicates serious lack of understanding of the issue.
I’d have gone but this one was women only. nuffy says that the women prisoners heard the chanting and approved. They are locked up with at least one man.
I do read Pharyngula still, and no he hasn’t touched that live wire. I can only speculate, but I wonder if even he thinks that one is too strong an example of male performance for easy dismissal, even with his audience.
#69
I enjoyed the bit where he got the location of the humerus wrong.
This video is hilarious. (NB: the last several minutes are a paid promotion about a toothbrush, you can stop watching when it comes on.) JP Sears comedy.
Ben Miller today writes in response to Raquel Rosario Sanchez’s editorial “The Taliban knows exactly what a woman is” in The Telegraph:
”feminism is when you praise the Taliban”
Needless to say, Ben is getting roasted as a result, deservedly so. I did note this comment though from Katelyn Burns in the thread:
“The Taliban also knows the difference between trans women and cis men too, which is the inconvenient truth hidden behind this take. The Taliban don’t even bother oppressing trans women, they just murder us. Solidarity is the only way to defeat them.”
I see this as a kind of forced teaming on Burns’ part, as it implies that if we don’t agree that TWAW then we’re not in solidarity with opposing the Taliban. This is silly on the face of it, because you can oppose what the Taliban is doing whether you believe TWAW or not. Solidarity on one cause doesn’t mean that everyone has to march in total lock-step on every issue.
Ben Stephens in a response to Burns also notes the obvious:
I work for a global charity dedicated to the rights of women and girls, including the kinds of human rights abuses perpetuated by the Taliban.
It is also explicitly trans-inclusive. It is perfectly possible to do both.
which advises against using “trans” terminology at all.
Using phrases like “trans people” makes people think that we (feminists and gender critical men) think that “trans” is a coherent category, and it makes line-drawing impossible. If we are honest with ourselves, all of us know that none of us know who fits into the category of “trans people.” Is it people who sincerely think that they are the opposite sex? Is it people who claim to be the opposite sex because they are aroused by the idea of being the opposite sex? Mainstream society, including the media, consistently uses phrases like “trans people,” “trans athletes,” “trans students,” etc., as though those words have some meaning that everyone understands. But in reality, no one really knows.
Certainly using “trans wonen” gives too much away, which is why I know longer use the term, spaced, hyphenated or joined into one word, as it is here. I’m inclined to agree with this article that using “trans” as a modifier for whatever group or individual suggests there is more content and coherence to the “trans” concept than there actually is. The “trans umbrella” sure seems to be not much more than a whole lot of forced teaming. How much do young women caught up in ROGD share with AGP males, apart from the former being handy human shields and cannon fodder for the use of the latter?
I think he makes some cogent observations about the state of the war, especially in the area of gender identity ideology. At the end, he advises people who think the current trends are disturbing not to sit silently on the sidelines, lest they will regret doing so.
A U.S. national security adviser suggests that the Russians have thrown their naval personnel under the bus in the sinking of the Moskva:
The U.S. was not able to confirm Ukraine’s claims of striking the warship, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Thursday. Still, he called it “a big blow to Russia.”
“They’ve had to kind of choose between two stories: One story is that it was just incompetence, and the other was that they came under attack, and neither is a [particularly] good outcome for them,” Sullivan told the Economic Club of Washington.
An uncontrolled fire at sea that reaches your stored ammunition, a fire that is not caused by enemy fire, is one of the worst fuck-ups that can possibly happen on board a ship. That the Russians implicitly are opting for this story, over admitting being attacked by a weaker enemy, is telling. The actual sinking they’ve ascribed to a storm at sea while the stricken cruiser was under tow. A Ukrainian official wondered, if the Moskva was sunk by a storm, why was the rest of the Russian Black Sea Fleet being moved away from the Ukranian coast, coincidentally and conveniently, out of missile range?
How times have changed. And not. In 1981, the Soviet Union was quick to blame a Western attack for a plane crash that killed more than two dozen high ranking Soviet military personnel. The actual cause of the plane crash was too much cargo, improperly loaded, i.e., incompetence. Much of the cargo consisted of luxury goods that were unavailable in the Soviet Far East. The officers, in Leningrad for a military conference, were taking this normally unobtainable booty back with them to the back of beyond. They didn’t quite get there. The plane barely made it off the end of the runway before it pitched up, stalled, banked, and crashed, killing all on board.
So in one scenario we have the excuse of gross incomptence used to hide a military strike by an adversary, in the other, accusations of a military strike by an adversary to hide gross incompetence.
As Ukraine was the first to announce they had struck the Moskva with Neptun shore-to-ship missiles, I think that was what happened, as how would Ukraine otherwise have known about an accidental fire aboard that ship? I’m not surprised the Kremlin opted to not admit it, because it makes them look bad for underestimating Ukraine’s ability to strike the Russian Navy. Blaming it on an accidental fire shifts blame from the Kremlin and Putin to those poor schlubs in the Russian Navy. I imagine such beatings will continue until morale improves.
Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund has some members with connections to Deep Green Resistance, a radical feminist organization. The complaints against CELDF include failure to respect pronouns. Insert eye roll.
The article initially describes DGR as “a self-described “radical feminist” group, advocates for an end to industrial civilization — and opposes rights for transgender people”, which I think is inaccurate, but later contains this section:
Jensen and DGR identify as “radical feminist,” a worldview that believes in the abolition of gender as a social construct. This also means DGR essentially denies the existence of transgender people, referring on its website to transgender women as “people born male and socialized into masculinity.” Practically speaking, the group opposes letting transgender women have access to “women-only” spaces like bathrooms.
I’m imagining Trump’s Lia Thomas ramblings: “He’s a smart guy, really smart. She is literally beating those girls. We never would have thought… someone could be so smart. So beautiful, but the Left. The Left want to trans your kids. Turn them into, well. But Lia Thomas, wow. I like winners.”
Hundreds of sex offenders have managed to avoid criminal records by saying sorry for their depraved acts, it was revealed today.
Around 870 cases, which include five instances of child rape, have been dealt with via ‘community resolution’ across Britain in the previous two years.
Under the controversial measure, sex pests admit their guilt and apologise but are never given a permanent criminal record, reports the Mirror.
…
Normally reserved for the lowest level crimes such as shoplifting, community resolution orders allow criminals who show genuine remorse to escape the full force of the law.
No criminal record, no parole, no fine. Just run along and don’t do it again.
The victims of their wicked acts are asked for their opinion on the punishment, but official guidance warns their views will ‘not be definitive’.
I wonder how this element plays out in practice. “Ma’am, what manner of punishment do you think is reasonable for your rapist?”
“Jail, obviously. He raped me!”
“Wow, hysterical much? You seem too close to the events to offer fair and dispassionate feedback on the matter. So I’m going to let him go free.”
Since 2020, seven cases involving rape – five of which involved children, were resolved using a community resolution order, per Home Office data.
They make this point, which I think is a reasonable one, at least in part:
But conversion practices can be distinguished by the fact that those who carry them out see only one acceptable outcome. The British government’s consultation stressed that legislation would be symmetrical, covering therapies that aim to change a person “to or from being transgender”, and that the aim was to ensure that young people were “supported in exploring their identity without being encouraged towards one particular path”. Health, counselling and psychotherapy organisations including the British Medical Association, NHS England, Scotland and Wales, and the Royal College of General Practitioners have stated that a ban would not rule out appropriate clinical interventions for transgender people or those questioning their gender.
So, yes, therapy that aims to insist that transition is bad and You Will Not Do It Ever is going to run afoul of this approach. However, the “one acceptable outcome” idea definitely describes the “enthusiastic affirmation” approach. I wonder to what extent people outside of the GC crowd recognize this as “conversion therapy”.
I would be concerned, too, that simply providing facts and telling the truth about sex, puberty blockers, hormone treatments, surgery, effectiveness of treatments, and regret, would be construed as seeing “only one acceptable outcome”. Simply stating that you can’t change your sex, you can only make your body look somewhat more like the opposite sex, you can pretend to be the opposite sex but you won’t be, you can demand people treat you as the opposite sex but they are not obliged to do so, that is truthful but definitely discouraging one path. So I don’t agree with neutrality here.
I don’t think there’s any point in trying to legislate therapy around sex and gender. It’s far too subjective a thing to try and determine what’s bad and what’s good. The effect of the law getting involved at all is just to discourage therapists from going near the issue — if there’s a remote chance your distressed client could accuse you of criminal harm, the safe bet is to stay away entirely. And that will only make it harder for people experiencing confusion and distress about sex and gender.
That’s more or less been the problem with trans activists all along: they make it so risky to venture into the subject that everyone just keeps their head down and tries to avoid it altogether. And some of the people paying the price are the poor fools who get convinced they’re transgender themselves.
The activists’ hostility and intolerance isn’t helping “trans people”, it’s hurting them.
I agree with you, the law should stay out it. It would be much better for the medical and mental health professions to police their own practices and ethics.
We have here in Alabama one of those new laws criminalizing provision of puberty blockers and other “transition” treatments to young people. It is of course being decried as harmful to trans kids. I dislike it, not because I support the treatments, but because I don’t think the government needs to be involved in the issue.
That’s more or less been the problem with trans activists all along: they make it so risky to venture into the subject that everyone just keeps their head down and tries to avoid it altogether. And some of the people paying the price are the poor fools who get convinced they’re transgender themselves.
Well put. Enthusiastically support these ideas, or else we’ll have you fired or de-careered or no-platformed or jailed. It helps no one, especially the people they are claiming to help.
I’m very much for the law being involved when it comes to quack treatments that can cause lasting harm to people, especially children. Let a thousand lawsuits be brought forth by detransitioning people who are angry and have every right to be compensated for the damage done to them. Medical malpractice in the form of surgery, puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for the dubious reason of there being some kind of ineffable gender identity is going to have its day in court.
Well, I’m happy enough to see pushback where I can, but I can’t really support that complaint and the massive payout. The plaintiff was reprimanded for calling a trans-identified male student “sir”, and he sued his employer for violating his “religious freedom”. He also claimed “philosophical, scientific and biological reasons”. In other words, he’s a Christian asshole who abused his authority as a professor to humiliate a student. And he’s getting rich off of it. I see a slippery slope off in the distance.
[Would you believe my browser flags “sackbut” as a spelling error? It suggests “sackful”, etc. Let’s try some other estimable musical instruments: “crumhorn” = “corundum” (?), “lirone” = “online”, “theorbo” = “bother” (that one’s not far off the mark!)]
Mostly no disagreement here. It is distressing that in the US the pushback against gender identity ideology is most visibly coming from conservatives and based on religious freedom instead of things like, you know, facts, or the rights of women, or the safeguarding of children. But it is nonetheless pushback, and I’m glad to see resistance to the pronoun police, even if I disagree with the rationale given.
(I could have sworn I saw something from an honest-to-goodness feminist writer lamenting exactly this point of difference between the US and the UK in the last few days, but darned if I can find it; I don’t recall if there were further comments. Ah well.)
The reporter, Kathryn Mannie, begins with a brief description of the book:
The book is set in an apocalyptic scenario in which people with a sufficient amount of testosterone get turned into monstrous beasts. All that remains of humanity are cisgender women, non-binary people, transgender men and transgender women.
(I wonder if, in this future, fully intact “transgender women” also turn into beasts? Or do they all have testosterone dutifully reduced to the level that would allow them to join the Penn women’s swim team? And what about transmen? Is Chase strangio’s T level still low enough to prevent her from becoming a monstrous beast, moustache notwthstanding? Not that I’m intetested enough to read it and find out. I’d pay for a root canal before buying (or reading) Manhunt .)
Even with this bare bones outline, we’re in trouble already. The ideas of “cisgender women”, “non-binary people” and “transgender” men and women are plopped in without definition. We’re already supposed to know who and what these entities are. Anyone outside of the trans/GC Twitterverse would have little idea what the hell any of that really meant. Any one without the requisite familiarity with these terms of art will be counting on Mannie as their guide. That, it turns out, will be a mistake.
Then a bit of well poisoning:
In the book, the Rowling character travels with her TERF friends to a castle, where they all perish after it collapses in an inferno.
TERFs are feminists who exclude transgender women in their fight for women’s rights — Rowling is considered by some as a TERF due to transphobic tweets she has shared on social media.
The definition of TERF given here shows that the writer has taken a side, and hidden this fact from the view of most of her readers. The very definition she uses smears women and sneaks TiMs in as women in a few deceptively simple words. Anyone who didn’t know the meaning of TERF before has been given an inaccurate description cloaked in presumed journalistic “neutrality. “Pro-woman is painted as “anti-trans.” How much differently that would have come across if it were rewritten thus:
TERFs are feminists who exclude trans identified males from single-sex organizations, facilities, and institutions intended for women only.
The phrase “transphobic tweets” links to a story about the “backlash” against her “Wimpund” tweet, which is portrayed as a tone-deaf equation of “womanhood” with menstuation that “erases” trans men, as opposed to it being a satirical comment on the erasure of women in messaging intended to convey lifesaving medical information, in the interests of “inclusion”.
Here’s what I consider the least dishonest part:
Several news outlets have reported on a number of negative reviews the book has received on Amazon.
“I have no idea how this even got published. The existence of this book proves once again that misogyny is alright as long as you identify as a member of a certain group,” one reviewer complained. “If you want to read a messed-up individual’s unhinged violent sexual fantasies against women then this is the book for you!”
A handful of other reviews also deride the novel for being misogynistic and promoting violence against women. One reviewer wrote that the book “describes horrible violence towards an actual living person which could be interpret (sic) by extreme activists as an instruction manual.”
But it’s okay, all those bad reviews are by evilTERFs who have axes to grind:
In response to the online backlash, the author is claiming that supporters of Rowling are flooding the Amazon and Good Reads pages for her book with negative comments….Some reviews on Amazon are acknowledging the controversy the book has whipped up, with one person writing, “This book is being bombed with one star reviews because it’s written by a trans woman. The terms ‘misogyny’ and ‘women hating’ are being thrown around because cis women can (sic) handle the fact that a trans women (sic) has written one of the best dystopian books we’ve seen of the last century.”
It ends with quotes from the glowing NPR review, concluding the piece on an upbeat note for our Brave and Stunning trans author.
One of the problems I see with this story is that it focuses too much on the whole “Let’s kill off JKR” theme. Not that fantasizing the death of an actual living, breathing woman isn’t bad. It’s terrible, cruel, and uncalled for. The biggest problem for me is that it takes for granted that Rowling, as well as her supporters and followers actually want to murder trans people. It’s taken as read that this supposed desire is an accurate and truthful portrayal of what feminists believe, that this could be a possible future if they had their way. It’s another installment of the transperbolic lie that “THEY WANT US ALL DEAD!” The journalist’s definition of TERF reinforces the “anti-trans, not pro-woman” portrayal of feminists, making this dystopian exaggeration into a legitimate artistic act of pre-emptive “self-defence”, instead of a sick, misogynistic projection.
It’s curious that a movement that views “misgendering” and “deadnaming” as unspeakably violent, is so unabashedly and self-righteously violent in its own rhetoric on social media. And now, long form fiction. The writer of this Global piece would be hard pressed to find anything at all from the feminist side that comes any where close to the years of demonization, harassment, and threats that trans activists and their allies have heaped upon women who dare to say “no” to male entitlement dressed in a frock. This extreme asymmetry suggests that the question of exactly who, if given the opportunity, would be killing whom a somewhat different answer than Felker-Martin is positing in his screed. If feminists had been threatening rape and murder against TAs, it would have been front page news; the writer of this article would pointed it out. It would be being retweeted over and over. But rape and death threats to women? Same old same old. This book is just more of the same. It sounds like little more than a bog standard trans activist’s “Shut up, TERF; choke to death on my dick!” tweet, padded out to the length of a novel. Dead women can’t say “No.”
A man made bomb threats and suggested that people responsible for definitions he didn’t like should be shot. I note via the URL that the threats were deemed to target “LGBTQ”, which is incorrect, as best I can tell. This guy has made violent threats over the definitions of things like “male” and “female” and “gender identity”, which were too ‘woke’ for his liking. He appears to be a right-wing zealot, complaining about Marxists and others.
I hate thinking this way, but it’s inevitable: demands will come that radical feminists denounce these threats; any such denouncements will be deemed false and insufficient; the incident will be used as proof that radical feminists want to kill certain people.
It’s primary season again and I’m pleased to note that almost none of the Dems have gender/LGBTQ+ anything in their candidate blurbs. Haven’t looked at individual websites for any of them but I’d say that’s a good sign that serious people in the party have recognized what a hindrance that shit is.
Thinking of Democrats and gender, I wonder whether the Biden administration’s proposed changes to Title IX regs to include gender identity as a protected class is going to be announced this month, as has been expected. I wonder if some Democrats are worried that by doing so they’d be handing the Republican one big stick of an issue to beat them with in the midterms.
This is report from a religious organization (not Templeton) that has a vested interest in compatibility between science and religion. They claim “the angry hostility towards religion engineered by the New
Atheist movement is over”; I’m not convinced that the hostility existed in the general public, but perhaps it’s quieter. There are probably some interesting results in this study, but there are some glaring omissions. There are racial and ethnic differences in whether religion and science are compatible? OK, but are there racial and ethnic differences in being non-religious? Are religious or non-religious people more likely to claim incompatibility? The “combined data table” does not break out data by religion, so I can’t find this out, although the article indicates this information was collected.
It’s funny but I actually gained my angry hostility to religion from the Science of Discworld novels (which do feature Dawkins a bit, admittedly) and to a lesser degree the gender goblins. Haidt’s “Righteous Minds” only intensified it.
As the 50th anniversary of Title IX arrives in June, historians are reflecting on the legacy of women’s sports teams and whether it’s time to stop segregating some sports by sex.
The article claims that women’s sports teams were created as “a place for female athletes to flourish”. Rules for women were made different to protect their delicate reproductive organs. Women were protected from corrupting influences like gambling.
The claim is made by Sheree Bekker that women’s sports were created so that men would not face the indignity of being defeated by women. That claim is strongly rejected by Chris Beneke. I am no expert, but I don’t think this is two people shouting at each other, and I have seen much more against this claim than for it. Nonetheless, the bulk of the article seems to be aimed at gathering believable evidence for Bekker’s claim.
The article uses this claim to bolster the idea that maybe more sports should be mixed sex. Some of the points they introduce are quite odd. They quote a female rugby player who supports trans-identified males playing on women’s teams; she says she’s fine with playing on mixed-sex teams, and she’d be comfortable tackling a guy. (Note that rugby is one sport whose governing body has come down against trans-identified males playing on women’s teams due to safety and fairness.) She thinks this would rid the sport of intrusive “gender” inspections that have happened in the past. The article suggests that non-contact sports that emphasize skill over strength and speed, such as fencing or shooting, might be workable as mixed-sex sports.
Trans athletes are barely mentioned in the article, but I think they loom large in the background. Those who support the significant expansion of mixed-sex sports are not going to care if trans athletes participate. A number of people who advocate for trans “inclusion” do explicitly advocate mixed-sex sports. Cynical me thinks there will be comparatively few trans-identified males who choose to participate in mixed-sex sports, not in relation to those who seek to participate in women’s sports, and almost none will seek to participate in men’s sports. It’s all about validation.
Title IX, the article claims, prohibits sex-based discrimination in sports. We’ve discussed here the word “discrimination” and how it tends to have a negative connotation, “making an unjust or prejudicial distinction” rather than simply “making a distinction”, “discriminate against” rather than “discriminate between”. I think it’s appropriate to acknowledge the differences between men and women, and make accommodations and allowances as needed, rather than to pretend they are all the same; I think some of these sports mixing advocates are doing the latter, though.
Notice how inadequately the Times explains Lia Thomas there:
Professor Bekker wrote the thread after Lia Thomas won the 500-yard freestyle at the N.C.A.A. women’s swimming championship in March, becoming the first transgender woman to win the competition and intensifying the debate about the inclusion of trans women in female sports.
That’s it! Nothing about how huge he is or how he ruined it for his teammates.
Needless to say, the only thing GCs are complaining about is if they’re not on the list :)
I’m not, rather disappointingly. It’s rather embarrassing. Neither is Ophelia, we’re obviously not TERFing hard enough. There a few names on there I recognise, though.
The list breaks off at names/handles beginning with N though doesn’t it? That’s how it appeared to me yesterday, and I saw a couple of people say they didn’t know if they were on the list or not because it’s not complete. The woman who compiled it said the compiling done so far took her hours and hours. I’d be very indignant if I were left off it because it’s like a million people long so what am I, chopped liver?
Candace Owen tweeted, in response to some action by the Biden administration:
A literal, actual Ministry of Truth.
We are now deep in the throes of a Harry Potter novel.
thereby confusing Harry Potter and 1984.
I suspect that there are a number of Americans who, unfamiliar as they are with UK government, associate any “Ministry of X” titles with Harry Potter. But this is another level of confusion. She brought up Ministry of Truth, she wasn’t repeating it. Had she heard about Ministry of Truth and just assumed it was Harry Potter? Has she read 1984? Has she read Harry Potter, for that matter?
The team working on the James Webb telescope has finished final corrections of the mirror segments. All the instruments have also been turned on and are in the final process of commissioning, including the mid-infrared detector MIRI that had to be cooled down to 7° Kelvin (!). The first test images (of a small part of the Large Magellanic Cloud) from all the instruments are very impressive indeed. According to NASA:
The image quality delivered to all instruments is “diffraction-limited,” meaning that the fineness of detail that can be seen is as good as physically possible given the size of the telescope.
At 167 pages, it’s detailed and damning. It was not until after she launched her action that she discovered just how far her chambers had bought into trans ideology, moving from simple legal representation of trans clients, to proselytizing within chambers and lobbying outside for the primacy of gender and the “rights” conferred by self-ID, based on Stonewall’s stance on what they would like the law to be, rather than what existing law is. A pretty arrogant move on the part of people who are supposed to be familiar with and working within current legal reality. Instead, they are misrepresenting the law and helping organizations like Stonewall, to do an end-run around the legal protections and provisions for women’s single-sex spaces.
Just finished going through Allison Bailey’s Witness Statement, skimming some sections, reading others more thoroughly. My impression? Stonewall and Garden Court Chambers are going to be really sorry they messed with her. IAMNAL, but from where I’m sitting, they are so fucked…
Ms. Bailey, along with Maya Forestater are real heroes. They will have a lasting legacy on the lives of millions of women in the UK, and billions around the world. They might not be soldiers or fighter pilots, but they will have helped to fight for democracy, and will have saved countless lives from pain and degredation. It might not be a shooting war, but it is a fight, and there have been casualties. To borrow some Churchill, ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much been owed by so many to so few.’
When I first learned about the atrocity being committed in paediatric gender clinics, I imagined that when it finally came under scrutiny, the house of cards would collapse in an instant./1
But now having witnessed people ignore Sweden & Finland halting paediatric transition, not bat an eyelid at the damning findings of England’s Cass Review, and completely disregard the developments in certain US states, I realise people can ignore any truth no matter how obvious/2
The explanation for this is what psychologist Anthony Greenwald calls the totalitarian ego, which he says functions like a police state, suppressing incompatible evidence, no matter how strong and compelling, and locking away threatening ideas./3
The next chapter in Pissing Off the Wrong People. (Or, what happens when your virtue signal goes off prematurely and sets fire to the powder magazine.)
The venue rented by Dr. Jane Clare Jones for her book launch event has cancelled the booking.
I’ve just had the venue for my launch event cancel on the basis that they “are proud of our relationship with the trans community and feel it wouldn’t be appropriate.”
Such a terribly powerless minority who could in no way be implicated in coercion or suppression eh Stonewall?
I’m busy composing an enraged email thanking them for informing us that they intent to discriminate against us for legally protected beliefs, and for contributing to the accumulating evidence of women’s suppression under the auspices of the ideology of the trans rights movement.
She’s talking to lawyers.
‘Provision of goods and services’… Hmmmmmm….
It would be a shame if a bunch of GC discrimination lawyers had been invited to this party wouldn’t it…
Thanks everyone. I’m not going to name them or say anything more right now. Taking advice…
Anyone who knows the name of the venue can you not put it on here pls… need to talk to lawyers first. Thanks x
Hell, I wouldn’t want to be the recipient of her e-mail, let alone having her come at me with a lawyer for pulling this sort of shit.
This past February, Lunz Trujillo published work that shows this kind of anti-science attitude is associated with having a rural identity. And this identity is held not only by people who live in rural areas, but also by people who strongly identify as rural, regardless of where they currently live.
Shocked! People express nonsensical views because of self image! And their self image doesn’t make those views true!
It’s all so obvious when the identity in question isn’t gender identity, or to a lesser extent, racial identity.
Random gripe: my favourite procrastination pastime, crossword puzzles, is being absolutely ruined by gender ideology. Everyone’s trying to make their crosswords edgy by inserting trans words. Today it was “University of Pennsylvania Swimmer Thomas” (LIA). Every other day it’s something like “brief unsexual orientation” (ACE) or “xe or zqizzph, for example” (NEOPRONOUN), and on and on. There’s at least one trans reference in every. single. puzzle. Everywhere. NYT. LAT. New Yorker. Atlantic. NY Mag… they’re all crazy for gender gobbledygook. It’s so annoying.
This article in the Washington Post about the TSA not allowing a woman to take her breast milk through security is maddening for several reasons, including this:
Hundreds of responses showed she wasn’t alone in her struggle as a nursing parent navigating confusing, and sometimes inconsistent, security rules. Calandrelli said it was validating to know she wasn’t alone.
It continues with several references to “lactating parents”. I’ve fathered two children, and never once did I lactate. But my wife did both times.
I did not listen to the interview, I just read the article. It talks about a women’s prison and people held there for “gender nonconforming” behavior. “Tens of thousands of women and transmasculine people”.
It seems to me these are all women, and they were targeted because they didn’t conform to societal expectations of women. “Transmasculine people”, who are they? Women who dress and present as men (but are nonetheless women, and so included in the term “women”)? Women who claim to be men, and who dress and present as men? But their self-declared gender is “men”, and they conform to that gender. Actual men who are somehow “transmasculine”? It seems obvious that this was indeed a women’s prison, that all the people incarcerated in it were women. This segmenting into “women and transmasculine people” is spurious as well as misleading.
Well, at least today was a day during which she didn’t write an essay accusing me of being a child molester, so I guess she’s having one of her good days. ;-)
She sure did. but so did a lot of people. They got swept up in a moment. One night I got into a pissy argument about gender-critical radfems on twitter being unneccessarily cruel to reasonable and open-minded trans people who are trying to be our allies, and people took revenge by scouring my profile for evidence that I must be some kind of evil outsider impostor. They dug up that I had mentioned once my interest in the history of the Roman emperor Hadrian and his young partner Antinous: they are the most significant out gay men in all of human civilization. The former was one of the most formidable Roman emperors; the latter was deified and as a god he was quite literally more popular than Jesus in Europe until the 5th Century. Extremely fascinating stuff! But this interest of mine in gay male figures in history was distorted into evidence that I’m a dangerous menace trying to promote pedophilia. (The young Antinous was 16 or 17 when he first got involved with Emperor Hadrian. Which is not cool, but any thinking person knows this was typical two thousand years ago. Hell, it was typical two hundred years ago! That’s history for you.) Lorelei/Hatpin-woman got particularly and shamefully caught up in it and went so far as to write an appallingly homophobic essay warning people that I’m secretly an untrustworthy pervert who’s dangerous and must be kept away from children, and that I’m basically unhuman and unfit for employment. A change.org petition went around to have me removed from the charity I founded. (Change.org pretty much right away saw that it was insane, libelous, and homophobic, and they took it down.) But not before far too many Twitter radfems signed it.
The whole episode was truly awful and it revealed how terribly easy it is for social media (and Twitter especially) to make people tribal and hostile to each other. It doesn’t humanize or unite people; it divides them and turns them against each other. I had socialized privately with Hatpinwoman a lot up until then, and even considered her a friend. I had socialized privately with many of the women who turned on me. Which made the betrayal all the worse.
But I learned a big lesson: when there’s a big online “battle” between “sides” neither side will tolerate you if you espouse nuance and take a middle-ground position. Twitter rewires our brains to attack nuance or compassion for the “other” side.
To this day I hold firmly and unashamedly that men who have gender dysphoria aren’t all terrible misogynists by default — even the ones who identify as transwomen. I personally believe such men who recognize that they’re men, that women’s boundaries matter, and that children should not be transed, are crucial allies. I also get that a lot of women aren’t interested in pursuing that angle, because they’re busy defending their own boundaries and rights. And that’s quite alright; I certainly won’t proselytize to them about my views. But all too often they come after me for not being in line with their views. It’s quite exhausting.
My first assumption was that the vandal was a man. I think that men commit vandalism more than women (though I’m not sure of that). It makes sense that it would be easier for them to get away with it.
The name “Ibi-Pippi Orup Hedegaard” sounded pseudonymous and not typical of either sex (though I’m not sure).
Then I saw: “The perpetrator, the Danish artist Ibi-Pippi Orup Hedegaard, pasted a photo of herself on the painting and signed her name in black permanent marker.”
And I thought: I bet this is probably still a man, who wants people to call him “her”.
And indeed, far further down in the article, it said: “Ibi-Pippi, who has been using her first name and feminine pronouns since declaring that she identifies as “a lesbian woman trapped in a man’s body”, explained her rationale to TV 2 East Jutland, saying the act was intended to start a conversation about property.”
And there was a picture of a very obvious man with stubble, not even trying to look female or feminine.
Incidentally, this other article about the story calls him “him”:
I just stumbled across a twitter link to this recent debate between Julie Bindel and Elizabeth Nolan Brown about legalising prostitution. I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet. Some of you have likely already seen it.
My alma mater (Western University, London Ontario, Canada) felt the need to do a bit of social media clean-up as a result of complaints recieved over a poster that, among other images, included one of two women in hijab about to kiss.
Western University posted the image on its Instagram account Tuesday to mark the international day against homophobia, transphobia, and biphobia. The poster was removed Wednesday after numerous complaints and a petition signed by more than 32,000 people requested the social media post to be removed.
(The International Day is officially a commemoration of the 1990 decision by WHO to declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder. The original decision was about homosexuals, and while bisexulaity does involve homosexual activity at least some of the time, the “Day” (instituted in 2004 as something specifically about homosexuality) now includes forced teaming, with “transphobia” having been tacked onto the commemoration since 2009. [As if there aren’t a million other days, weeks and months of the year for the “T”. Could we please have an hour or two where we are allowed to forget them?])
The result? Two “communities” in conflict.
The firestorm surrounding a Western University social media post that included two Muslim women wearing the hijab about to kiss presents an opportunity to start a dialogue around the “sensitive matter,” says a local leader with Pride London.“This is a great starting point of a conversation,” said Stephen D’Amelio, vice-president of Pride London, an organization that represents the city’s LGBTQ2-plus community. “I think this is important to embrace and educate and to learn alongside others.”
Perhaps a more polite form of “Educate yourself”?
“It should be made clear that this is not an attack on the LGBT-plus community, and the existence of queer Muslims is acknowledged,” the petition says. “This does not mean that the Muslim community should allow any or all elements of its religion to be used to propagate any notion one deems worthy.”
On Thursday, local Muslim leaders issued a statement that said their goal is “understanding and harmony.”
“We want to do our part to promote understanding and harmony among the diverse people who live on these lands and who share many common goals and values, even as we differ on many issues,” the statement said. “We unequivocally reject any hateful statement made toward any individual or group based on their religion, culture, ethnicity and/or sexual orientation.”
“I think we live in a world that is very reactionary and we are all expected to make sure we do the best we can at all times,” he said. “It’s a sensitive matter. We understand that it’s not a quick, easy answer.
“I think that is what Western and it’s faculty and students are trying to achieve.”
(I wouldn’t necessarily trust what they’re “trying to achieve” though, as this is the same Western University which, several years ago posted signs on campus bathrooms which said “Western respects everyone’s right to choose a washroom apprpriate for them. (and my favourite part) Trust the person using this space belongs here.”
Part of the University’s decision to pull the image in the face of criticism could be because we are approaching the first anniversary of the terrorist killing of four members of a London Muslim family. There’s always going to be opposition, offence and pushback against this sort of imagery from some Muslims; you can’t please everyone. The University might have decided that retaining the image would be a bad look.
Mind you…I wave at dogs sometimes. Not often, but if, for instance, they’re looking at me from a distance too great to hear a “hello” I might waggle my fingers at them. Did it just a day or two ago. Dog wagged tail. They’re very human-focused, poor dears. Bred to be.
Does that mean people with penises – of whom there are so many in that image – are girls? No, it does not.
Really surprised they didn’t just identify as men during working hours…
In Afghanistan, female announcers began to cover their faces at the behest of the Taliban. pic.twitter.com/RonVWqKdtQ— Anatolia Intel (@AnatoliaIntel) May 22, 2022
@149, thanks for that link. She’s a good laugh. Not sure her grasp of law was the strongest, but it was certainly sufficiently strong. I’m appalled NZ Police have started this shit of harassing feminists for expressing GC views, while still happily allowing the usual misogynistic and racist bullshit to continue. I suspect mumbly Joe was mumbling because he knew he was basically bullying without any chance of ever getting a successful prosecution.
Bill Maher recently began his show with a monologue about the rapid increase of transing and queering amongst the youth, and also pointed out the sudden decline in mentions of women/woman/girl in the materials of e.g. the ACLU. I only know this because PZ wrote about it, and linked to it. Some of his rebuttals however were… underwhelming.
Maher refers to a tweet by the ACLU listing the groups harmed by the looming loss of abortion access in USA, pointing out that it makes no mention of the one group central to the issue: women. PZ is on the case.
His next ‘joke’: the ACLU said that abortion bans disproportionately harm certain people. He then borrows the outrage of Fox News and Helen Lewis by claiming that the list left off women. It didn’t. Here’s the tweet:
Abortion bans disproportionately harm:
▪️ Black, Indigenous & other people of color
▪️ the LGBTQ community
▪️ immigrants
▪️ young people
▪️ those working to make ends meet
▪️ people with disabilities
Protecting abortion access is an urgent matter of racial and economic justice.
— ACLU (@ACLU) May 11, 2022
Uh, Bill: every single one of those bullet points is about the effect on people. Women are people. So are trans men. The list is about groups of people who are most affected by the bans, and the point is that wealthy Republican white women aren’t going to feel the pain, but all these groups that are already marginalized by society will.
Apparently women are not a group that is marginalised by society!
Maher then makes a point about Finland and Sweden blocking the use of puberty blockers, as there may be many unknown long-term effects, making them a form of experimentation on kids. PZ’s response to this:
Can he get even more TERFy? Of course he can. “The children!” he cries. They’re experimenting on children! His source: Abigail Shrier, in Irreversible Damage. We all knew he was a quack from his bizarre opinions about vaccines, but I guess he’s even more deeply into quackery now.
A problem with that rebuttal: the sources Maher presented for those news items were media outlets unrelated to Abigail Shrier. For the medical side-effects, he cites The Times, the Endocrine Society (via Washington Post), and a doctor Marci Bowers. For Finland and Sweden’s change of policy, he cites National Review and a non-profit called One Of Us.
Abigail Shrier’s book was only brought up incidentally to this. It was referred to as “a book questioning the sudden up-tick of trans children”, and was only mentioned as a segue into the ACLU’s sudden abandonment of free speech under Chase Strangio’s influence. Yet even if she was the source of both of fact claims, so what? Corroboration can be found elsewhere.
No part of PZ’s post is particularly good, but those were the two that fairly leapt off the page at me. The only agreement I have with him is that Maher is not particularly funny or charismatic. Such a shame that the left has largely abandoned this area of commentary, leaving it to such bores as Maher.
The National Center for Health Statistics has reported (PDF) that the birth rate in the US has increased slightly in 2021, the first increase in seven years, but is still far below the 2.1 replacement¹ rate (births per woman²).
I found this report via an article from Focus On The Family (yeah, I know), which is very concerned about the replacement rate, and which makes the superficially plausible statement that religious people have more children than atheists and agnostics, therefore their proportion will increase. They assume that people will continue in the religious tradition (or lack thereof) of their birth family. This assumption has generally been true but is by no means guaranteed, as the numbers of people exiting Christianity or specific Christian sects attest. FOTF asserts that religion is the key to keeping the population at a constant or growing level; maybe they are correct. Some of us think the “population bust” indicated in the NCHS report would not be a bad thing.
¹ Different understanding of “replacement theory” here.
² Neither the NCHS nor FOTF shies away from using the word “woman”.
When I sat down to write this, I knew that I would be angry and distressed. In her evidence under oath, McGahey analogised three situations, repeatedly and in detail: women attempting to rise in their careers against male opposition; black South Africans fighting for full civil rights; and men who think of themselves as women trying to get lesbians to accept them as sexual partners. The glass ceiling; apartheid; the cotton ceiling—three barriers she framed as similar, with oppressed people on one side and oppressors on the other. This puts Bailey—a black lesbian and survivor of sexual assault who rose from humble origins to high in a respected profession—on the same side as men who think women aren’t up to senior jobs, and white supremacists. It puts men who “strategize” ways to get into lesbians’ knickers on the same side as women passed over for promotion and—I can’t believe I’m typing this—black South Africans fighting to end apartheid. Lesbians who say that they sleep with no men, not even those who identify as women, are bigots; men who refuse to accept women’s sexual boundaries are civil-rights heroes. Bailey is Eugène Terre’Blanche, the white-supremacist Afrikaaner who led the backlash after the end of apartheid; Morgan Page is—somehow—Nelson Mandela.
Fair Play For Women submitted ten complaints to IPSO between July 2019 and December 2021. In each complaint, the word “woman” or “female” had been used to describe an individual whose sex is male but now self-identifies as a transgender woman. In most cases, “woman” appeared in the headline without any clarification in the body of the story that the individual was transgender and not a natal female. Most stories related to sexual or violent offending; some accused and some convicted. In most cases we escalated the complaint all the way to the IPSO Complaints Committee for final review.
We said that use of the word “woman” in the headline was a breach of Clause 1(i) of the Editors Code “The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information or images, including headlines not supported by the text.”
We argued that when a newspaper covers a story about crime an individual’s sex becomes relevant to the public’s proper understanding of that story. This is because the propensity to commit crime is well known to be highly sex-dependent (most violent and sexual crime is committed by males not females). Most readers will understand the word ‘woman’ in a headline to mean a person whose sex is female not male. As such, the inaccurate and misleading use of the word “woman” in a story about crime distorts public understanding and awareness of male patterns of criminality. It is therefore in the public interest for IPSO to uphold the accurate reporting of sex in these cases.
Nevertheless, IPSO rejected all of our complaints for at least one of two reasons.
Reason 1: It’s not inaccurate if a newspaper is accurately reporting what is said.
Lots of inaccurate things are said court. IPSO’s position appears to be that these inaccuracies can be repeated in the press as long its clearly presented as someone’s subjective view rather than as an objective fact.
…
Reason 2: We can’t decide what’s accurate without the consent of the individual involved.
IPSO often rejected our complaints on the grounds that it was a complaint from a third party, rather than a complaint from the individual who is subject to the alleged inaccuracy. IPSO is allowed to consider complaints from third parties, but in doing so it must consider and prioritise the impact on the first party.
…
By not even accepting our complaints, IPSO has avoided having to consider where the fair balance lies. What matters more? The privacy of a sex offender to hide his sex or the well being of the victim to read her truth? Should the privacy of an individual always trump the public interest not to be misled? Or are there occasions when sex matters and readers must not be misled?
Getting this balance right matters. Public support for female-only spaces depends on the public’s understanding of which sex commits most sexual and violent crimes. Misleading articles about “female” sex offenders distorts public perception, and along with it societal debate and public policy making.
IPSO has a responsibility to help the press get this right.
The broadcaster received a complaint about an episode of Front Row on BBC Radio 4 which was aired on March 24.
The listener said the way the programme described the author’s views was “misleading”, adding that it was “offensive and harmful to discuss JK Rowling in the same context as Eric Gill, Adolf Hitler and R Kelly”.
The Executive Complains Unit (ECU) at the BBC dismissed the latter part but admitted the statement by Tom Sutcliffe was “potentially misleading”.
The claim is that a company bailed on an LGBTQ book program due to conservative backlash. Read a little further, and you find that the book program is from “The GenderCool Project”, which “aims to have conversations with children about being Trans and Non-Binary”. That is not an LGBTQ book program, that’s a T book program. First they force the T into the alphabet soup, then they only report on the T issues. I see no particular reasons kids need to have conversations about “being” trans or non-binary. Perhaps conversations about how some people claim to be trans or non-binary, and other people think those claims are without merit, might be appropriate, but that’s not at all what an organization named “GenderCool” would want.
First they force the T into the alphabet soup, then they only report on the T issues.
It’s worse than that, since the T agenda is not just different from, but actively hostile* to the LGB one. It’s as if sparrows, thrushes, and finches got organized (with considerable success!) to protect themselves from their predators, and hawks (who eat sparrows and thrushes and finches) somehow managed to get the “H” added to the “STF” (Sparrow, Thrush, Finch) alphabet soup by emphasizing certain superficial similarities (“We all have beaks and feathers, lay eggs etc.”). We can imagine the hawks saying something like “The STF parts of the community have come a long way towards reaching their goals, which is great, but the H part has been almost entirely neglected all this time. To make up make up for this sin of omission it’s only fair that the battle for Hawk rights be given top priority”, and we can imagine lots of heads nodding in agreement and thinking (without thinking too carefully) “sounds reasonable”. And before you know it, Hawks have managed to claim a total monopoly on speaking for sparrows, thrushes, and finches whether the latter agree with them or not, and frame any criticism of Hawk ideology (including the part about eating sparrows, thrushes, and finches) as an attack on the “STFH community”. As far as I’m concerned, this is the situation we’re in.
Robyn Blumner of CFI I think makes many good points in her editorial, Identitarianism is incompatible with Humanism. She is especially vocal here in opposing cancel culture, and criticizes the American Humanist Society for rescinding Dawkins’ Humanist of the Year award over his questioning of trans ideology:
Apparently decades of past good works are erased by 280 characters. Just poof. No wonder a New York Times poll1 recently found that 84 percent of adults say it is a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” problem that some Americans do not speak freely because of fear of retaliation or harsh criticism.
This is what identitarians have wrought. Rather than lifting up individuals and imbuing them with autonomy and all the extraordinary uniqueness that flows from it, identitarians would divide us all into racial, ethnic, and gender-based groups and make that group affiliation our defining characteristic. This has the distorting effect of obliterating personal agency, rewarding group victimhood, and incentivizing competition to be seen as the most oppressed.
Hemant Mehta, unsurprisingly, misses the point when he accuses Blumner of missing the point.
I see conservative Matt Walsh of the conservative Daily Wire has a documentary coming out about What Is A Woman. It includes a shielded interview with one of wilLIAm Thomas’ teammates. The trailer looks very good (in a “damning” sort of way). The documentary is only available at the moment to Daily Wire subscribers, a line I won’t cross, but maybe it will be more widely available soon.
Following on from this mornings language discussion (that), and because I don’t know of another such concentration of language obsessives, I have a question for you all.
In professional (engineering/science/quasi legal) writing, would you routinely use contractions (we’re, haven’t, hasn’t, aren’t, let’s, etc)?
Our company is pushing to modernise and simplify the way we write. We want it to be direct, less passive than currently, and accessible. We also need it to be professional, credible, and precise.
While our output might be addressed to clients from a wide range of backgrounds, in practice our work is handed on to lawyers, planners, engineers, other technical specialists, and ultimately judges when agreement cannot be reached. So, while clients have to understand what we say, when things have turned ‘real’ as the youth say, it’s a different audience that matters.
It’s tricky, because contractions can feel informal and thus potentially sloppy/inappropriate, but on the other hand saying things like “Do not” or “You should not” can sound angry and/or bossy and/or peremptory, not to mention excessively formal.
I guess if I had to decide I would suggest split the difference – it’s ok to use contractions but don’t overdo it – and DON’T contract “have” – no “should’ve” and the like. Yuck.
Stephanie Davies-Arai of Transgender Trend is getting an OBE or an MBE or some kind of British medal. (It doesn’t appear to have been specified which yet.)
I couldn’t be happier for her. She’s worked tirelessly for years and the resources she’s amassed are an invaluable resource.
I don’t like overly stuffy language because sometimes it seems unnecessarily robotic and it can be alienating. I guess if more formal language actually adds specificity or clarity to a sentence, I’m for it. But sometimes it just doesn’t do anything but make the person saying/writing it feel professional. Like when cops have to address the press and they use such uptight words like “persons” instead of people. Just say people, people! Are they doing this for legal and professional clarity, or are they just doing it because they want to sound like they are?
(Speaking of “persons” v. “people”: I think I saw some poor petrified cop with a mic in her face refer to “personages” one time. That’s not even the right word! You’re just adding syllables because you think more syllables is more formal! Don’t do that, persons!)
It can be a tricky balancing act. I would never want to have to write in a wholly formal, impersonal, characterless style…but there are degrees of relaxation. I can get away with a lot in blog posts, but I ditch some of the slang and in-jokes when writing the Free Inquiry column – but only some of it. There’s always some muted joking.
When Jeremy and I co-wrote Why Truth Matters he suggested I write a few hundred words so we could see how to mesh our writing styles. I wrote something full of flippancies and he responded with “Um er we need to be a little more formal than that” so I formaled it up and he was all “Thank fuck, I was terrified you had no clue how to do it.” Quite funny.
Thanks Ophelia and Artmorty for the responses. If anyone else wants to chime in feel free. I’m interested in responses.
I’m one of the drivers of trying to improve the company writing style, which has been passive, turgid and repetitious. Clients especially have struggled with it and as younger staff have come through it is so far divorced from any writing (or reading) they have ever had to do, they’ve really struggled with it. I think it’s possible to write in a simple and direct manner, while still being accurate* and professional. Part of me struggles with contractions in the professional context. Especially when used liberally and needlessly. We have a few younger converts who want to go fully ‘natural speech’, which to me is just too much wearing your baseball cap backwards while dragging a skateboard into a meeting. People might understand you, but they’re not necessarily going to take you seriously and they sure as hell will wonder why they’re paying you hundreds of dollars an hour.
All that said, I mourn the loss of richness and subtlety when using simple and direct business language. English has some fantastic words, which are very rarely dusted off these days.
* We’re in a highly technical field, so some jargon simply has to be used because it has specific meanings that can’t usefully be phrased a different way. A bit like the ‘female’ argument really. We provide a glossary for those.
Who’s the audience for your publications? And how would they react? It partly depends on how you want to present yourself. Speaking very coarsely, more contractions mean a more chatty style, which depending on the audience might come across as more friendly, or false.
For the most part I agree with Ophelia about contracting “have”, but if you’re going for a social media register you must use “should of”.
And regardless of what direction you go with contractions, try not to utilize “utilize”.
What a Maroon, the audience is best described in the bit buried back up thread…
While our output might be addressed to clients from a wide range of backgrounds, in practice our work is handed on to lawyers, planners, engineers, other technical specialists, and ultimately judges when agreement cannot be reached. So, while clients have to understand what we say, when things have turned ‘real’ as the youth say, it’s a different audience that matters.
The article speaking approvingly of the mission of this Baptist church to go and “share the gospel” with the “unchurched”. They track the “conversions” and sharing events for individual members of the church, including children. An eight-year-old girl is their champion evangelist, sharing the gospel, on average, 7-8 times a day, seven days a week. They expect and encourage children to do this work. I know it happens, I’ve read The Good News Club, but it shocks me nonetheless.
Owen Jones, has decided that words have a meaning after all. Apparently he suggested that trans activists shouldn’t use “genocide” quite so freely. Now he’s being piled on for tone policing trans people and “placating” genocidal TERFs.
An interesting thread that highlights another area where a little clarity shows the inherent incoherence and contradictions in trans activist demands: the provision (and funding) of medical services.
Trans activists are going to have to make their minds up. Is it
A) a variant of normal that doesn’t need any medical intervention (although adults are at liberty to pursue elective cosmetic surgeries privately like anybody else) or
Phobia indoctrination instills irrational fears in members of a high-control group and uses those fears to manipulate members so they won’t question the group’s beliefs or try to leave.
Here’s what phobia indoctrination looks like in the trans community:
– Telling community members that anyone who questions gender identity or transition (even if from a place of genuine care and concern) hates them, ‘denies their existence,’ or even wants them dead.
This pushes community members, especially naive children/young people, to cut themselves off from friends & loved ones who may question or contradict the trans community, or may simply fail to follow elaborate and bizarre protocols trans communities lead young members to expect.
Trans activists have long smeared gender-critical women as ‘Nazis’—which has proved a convenient shorthand for “I’m not talking to you and nobody else should listen to a word you say, and—if someone punched your lights out—that would be a win for humanity.” But Corinna Cohn’s right to point out that there’s been an alarming escalation in trans activist rhetoric about Nazism, eugenics, euthanasia, and genocide over the last few months, spiking over the weekend with a wildly dishonest attack on two prominent gender-critical women.
Sure, maybe it’s just Godwin’s law in action: baseless Nazi analogies are hard to resist, particularly when you’re a trans activist desperate to return to the days of no debate. But, having spent my teenage years reading everything I could find in an attempt to make sense of 20th-century totalitarianism, I think that what really happened—and how it happened—matters. Trans activists want to talk about Aktion T4, so let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about how ordinary doctors went down the dark road to medical experimentation, sterilization, euthanasia, and genocide.
You can see where this is going…
… doctors—in thrall to a deadly ideology—lost sight of what they were doing. They became wrapped up in medical fantasies and so committed atrocities. And at every step, when it might have been possible to raise questions or veer away from “medicalized killing,” the medical profession doubled down. Turning back risked a reckoning: If euthanizing this set of patients is wrong, maybe it was wrong when doctors killed those other patients, too. By continuing down the road to genocide, the medical profession justified to itself the acts that members had already committed in the name of medicine.
Of course the article speaks as if “transgender young people” were what’s happening, rather than “young people claiming to be transgender”. Of course it takes the view that people now have the language and support and resources to “discover” they are transgender, rather than “convinced”. The article notes that young adults make up a disproportionately large segment of “LGBTQ” people in the US, and that the internet is a major factor, but says nothing whatso-fucking-ever about the idea that maybe these young people are wrong, maybe this whole gender nonsense is wrong.
Just think of alllllllllll those transgender people in the past who simply had to put up with being trapped in The Wrong Gender. Light a candle for them.
That gender identity is being included with sexual orientation under this ban all but makes affirmation of gender the only option, which means a kid who is homosexual will instead be medically treated in an effort to try and make them the opposite sex. Also, this ban will likely have the perverse effect of leading parents of gender-questioning kids to get therapy from non-professionals, as the professionals in town now can’t legally see them.
But the city’s ordinance is explicit in saying it is only banning efforts to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.
The city specifically defines conversion therapy as any practices or treatments that seek to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, including psychological counseling. It also includes efforts to change a person’s behavior or gender expression, or reduce attraction or feelings towards someone of the same sex.
Experts said that young people increasingly have the language and social acceptance to explore their gender identities
This drives me crazy. What kind of “experts?” The journalistic principle at play should be to weigh the testimony of “experts” against the possibility of influence by a religious belief system that’s applying pressure on the debate.
If you’re talking about any other religious belief — say, Scientology — it becomes very clear that there’s two kinds of “experts” about it: believers themselves, and those who look at the belief system from the outside. Everyone on the inside will of course have nothing but good things to say about it because they have to. It’s people on the outside, who at least ostensibly have more freedom to look at it critically, who journalists should seek out for comment.
Of course with trans ideology you could still be under pressure to keep quiet and/or play along with their beliefs even if you don’t personally identify as one — far more so than with Scientologists. Obviously you won’t get an objective take on Scientology from Tom Cruise or Elisabeth Moss, but nor will you from anyone whose line of work could one day put them on the set of The Handmaid’s Tale or a Mission: Impossible movie. For the rest of us trapped in Gender La La Land, disagreeing with trans ideology is the same, and possibly worse: we could even find ourselves in trouble with the law.
So the press really has to take the social pressure aspect into account any time they cite “experts.”
But journalists don’t see it that way because journalists (a) don’t recognize that trans ideology is a quasi-religious belief system, based on ideas that are not backed by science, rooted in feelings that can’t be quantified scientifically; and (b) journalists don’t recognize the extent of the pressure people are under to affirm these religious beliefs. They conflate nonbelief in gender ideology with fringe characters who lack expertise in gender “science” and are motivated by an ideological hostility to progress.
Of course they got this idea in the first place by treating gender ideology believers as “experts” at the outset, and from the very moment journalists took the gender gurus at their word that they knew what they were talking about and that anyone looking in from the outside who disagreed was not to be trusted, this bias just became self-reinforcing.
So we really need to push hard on the fact that gender ideology is a new religion rather than a new science, and one that’s using manipulative tricks to push its agenda. It should be so obvious that this is true! But —by Xenu — look how well their strategy is working: half the atheist movement has fallen for it.
L. Ron Hubbard, crazy as he was, had shrewd insights into how to spread his cult, one of them being to glom his beliefs onto the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, because that’s what had the most appeal to Americans at the time. It wasn’t just a new science, it was a new science that made you glamourous and successful! In just the same way, the pseudoscience of trans ideology has been yoked to the virtues of progressive politics: gay and lesbian rights; identity politics; the civil rights movement. In a way that’s even more fiendishly clever, because its appeal is deeper than aspirations to fame and fortune: it’s morally righteous. Righteousness is stubborn as an ox, and prone to blindness. Blind righteousness is dangerous.
Our “Pro-life” Supreme Court wants to kill a man who is innocent, because a new trial would mean admitting that court procedure wasn’t properly followed:
In case there is a firewall, here is a portion of the story:
There has been a lot of attention paid, rightly, to the leaked opinion showing that the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. But another opinion, both cruel and absurd, issued by the Republican supermajority deserves attention, as well.
That is a decision released last month, Shinn v. Martinez Ramirez, which is likely to result in the execution of an innocent man. For the wrongfully convicted, it sets a precedent that shatters the hope that they can get new evidence of innocence examined by a federal court.
And not because the court has weighed the evidence for and against guilt and come to the conclusion that the man is guilty. (The latest court to review the evidence in the case concluded he probably couldn’t be found guilty of anything.)
The court is pushing to execute him because it says the evidence showing he is innocent should not be considered at all.
The ruling is especially significant for Idaho because it reversed a ruling of the federal Ninth Circuit, the final stop for an Idaho appellant before the U.S. Supreme Court. As Kevin Fixler reported, there’s likely one Idaho case already affected by the ruling.
The Ninth Circuit, guided by prior Supreme Court precedents, stood ready to hold evidentiary hearings in cases where convicts facing the death penalty would be able to introduce evidence that they had been wrongfully convicted because their lawyers failed to investigate the facts of the case or to present important evidence they were innocent during their state appeals.
The Supreme Court is run by ideologues, not jurists. And Thomas is quoted, so I am not sure if he actually wrote this opinion or not.
I found the link to Lilianna Segura’s article in the Intercept here:
Kevin Drum comments on an article by Ryan Grim at the Intercept. (Drum’s blog post is free; Grim’s article is behind a paywall after you’ve exhausted your free articles.)
The gist of the article is how progressive groups are mired in inner turmoil and purity spirals, and how so many progressive groups are all following the same trajectory. Quoting from Grim:
Inner turmoil can often begin, the managers said, with performance-based disputes that spiral into moral questions. “I also see a pattern of … people who are not competent in their orgs getting ahead of the game by declaring that others have engaged in some kind of -ism, thereby triggering a process that protects them in that job while there’s an investigation or turmoil over it,” the foundation official added. Such disputes then trigger broader cultural conversations, with battle lines being drawn on each side.
Drum notes:
The only surprising thing about Grim’s account is that it took so long for someone on the left to write it. The widespread revolt of young staffers, especially in the nonprofit space, is the subject of endless talk within the progressive movement, but you’d never know it on the outside because it’s been written about only in bits and pieces that never quite add up to a full story. Grim is the first to put the whole thing together without (very much) defensiveness or punch pulling.
Not new information, but a good unapologetic discussion of problems many of us have seen.
The Washington Post published the results of a poll showing that almost 60% of the respondents oppose allowing trans-identified men to participate in women’s sports, while less than 30% support it (with about 15% expressing no opinion). That despite the leading language used in the poll question:
Thinking about transgender women and girls – people whose sex was classified as male at birth but who currently identify as female – do you think transgender women and girls should or should not be allowed to compete in sports with other women and girls at each of the following levels?
(My bolding.) Talk about begging the question–they are of course not competing with other women and girls, because they are not women and girls. Poll questions are supposed to be as neutral as possible; something like: “Do you think that trans-women and girls–people who were born male but currently identify as women*–should be allowed to compete in women’s sports?”
They also found that “social acceptance of transgender people is good rather than bad for society,” whatever that means.
Yep. Any other issue and they would’ve found more neutral wording, but they’re mostly in thrall to the trans lobby.
I won’t give up on the Post–I’m addicted to newspapers, and the Post is my local paper, and still perhaps the best in the US. But it has its blind spots.
I saw this article about US Secretary of State Antony Blinken talking to Saudi Arabia in advance of President Biden’s visit there. The article is focused on “LGBTQI rights”, which probably accounts for the preponderance of comments about that topic, including the note that Blinken says he brings up “LGBTI rights” with the Saudis every conversation. But Saudi Arabia is a terrible place for women, and a terrible place for ex-Muslims, and a terrible place for anyone who wishes to criticize their government or Islam or religion. I don’t think I’ve seen any similar hints from the US government that they are concerned about draconian laws and practices regarding women or apostates. I don’t wish to have an “oppression Olympics”, as it’s sometimes called, but some serious acknowledgment of the problem would be good.
The article talks about teachers who were fired or, in some cases, bullied out of their jobs because they expressed unacceptable views, either on the job or on their own time. Gender ideology is among the contentious issues mentioned. These incidents create an atmosphere of fear, where teachers are afraid even to mention touchy topics, afraid of repercussions.
We know of this situation, certainly, but it is good to see mainstream news outlets talking about it.
There are a number of problems that I see in the article. Among them is the equivalence made of all of these various contentious statements. Perhaps more egregious, though, is the assumption, notably as seen in the graph in the article, to assume that all people who get in trouble do so for “adhering to their conservative values” or “adhering to their liberal values”, as if all conflicts are basically “Republican Party” versus “Democratic Party”. Perhaps they made an excessively simplifying assumption, but perhaps they genuinely think that’s how the conflicts play out.
It looks like the Audubon Society, in preparation to partner with a drag queen for Pride Month events, is pre-emptively blocking people on Twitter who might criricize this move.
I’m guessing they’re using some kind of list to do this. I’m not on Twitter myself, but I’ll bet that some at least some of the -Twitter-active readers/commenters here (along with our host) are already pre-blocked.
So this is the state of MAGA rhetoric these days. Twitter isn’t blocking it because it’s “in the public’s interest for the tweet to remain accessible,” but it can’t be shared.
And if you don’t know or remember who Eric Greitens is, he’s the former governor of Missouri who did this:
[O]n February 22, he was indicted on a felony charge of invasion of privacy and led away by the St. Louis Sheriff’s office. The indictment, which could result in up to seven years of prison time, comes barely a month after the local CBS affiliate KMOV reported that he cheated on his wife, secretly took photos of the woman he cheated with, and attempted to blackmail the woman into silence by threatening to release the photos.
This is an… interesting? piece from NY Mag by a nonbinary writer musing about pronoun issues.
I’m not sure how to feel about it. On the one hand, it shows some reflection and self-awareness in questioning whether the “my pronouns are … what are yours?” routine that has become obligatory in some circles is really helpful or just a tedious performance. On the other hand, it still feels a little precious, and another example of how this game is rigged against us boring binary cis people — first we were told we should be asking about pronouns, now we’re told that it’s bad because it treats someone’s gender as the most important thing about them.
This bit from the concluding paragraph kind of illustrates both aspects:
These days, it feels as if an identity that, not long ago, felt unique to me in most rooms I entered has gone mass. Yes, part of what I’m personally upset about is the fact that this thing I loved isn’t so alt anymore. But more than that, it feels as if pronoun culture has contributed to nonbinary becoming just the third gender after male and female, more static and concrete than its original fluid intentions.
I mean, good for the author for being willing to admit that a lot of the appeal of nonbinary status to them was being different and cool, but to then complain in the very next sentence that now nonbinary is just a third box instead of the indicator of super special snowflake individuality that the author wishes it to be seems like missing your own point.
These days, it feels as if an identity that, not long ago, felt unique to me in most rooms I entered has gone mass. Yes, part of what I’m personally upset about is the fact that this thing I loved isn’t so alt anymore. But more than that, it feels as if pronoun culture has contributed to nonbinary becoming just the third gender after male and female, more static and concrete than its original fluid intentions.
Let’s hope “transness” also goes the way of all fads.
So he makes it sound like his oh-so-unique identity was more like a shirt or dress that became a lot less interesting to him once he saw others wearing it. What happened to the deeply felt essence this was supposed to be based on? Somehow if others have deeply felt essences (who knew!), that makes yours boring. IT’S NOT FAIR! I’M THE ONLY ONE WHO HAS FEELINGS!! I’M THE ONLY ONE ALLOWED TO HAVE DEEEPLY FELT FEELINGS!!!
And as for the “fluid intentions” of enbeeness, that was only for those not doomed to be binary. The fluidity was only ever to be for the chosen few, who could only rise above everyone else if they we shackled to the floor. But isn’t exclusion supposed to be “bad?” Or does it all depend on who’s doing the excluding?
And once again, notice the implicit claims about what’s going on inside other people’s heads. It’s never simply about the right of trans people to define “who they are”. Hardly any of the claims People of Gender make about themselves make sense without a lot of implicit (and very insulting) assumptions about who other people are as well:
• “Women are whatever they have to be to make me one of them (and they don’t get a say in the matter!).”
• “Other people are whatever they have to be (‘cis’, ‘binary’, ‘gender conforming’) to make me different, special, an exception (‘trans’, ‘non-binary’, ‘gender-nonconforming’)”
• “Everyone else has to fit inside ‘static and concrete’ boxes so that my box can be more ‘fluid’ by comparison.”
I know it’s a terrible day today for levity, but this from Publisher’s Weekly actually isn’t a parody:
Science fiction author Charlie Jane Anders (Victories Greater Than Death) brought abundant charisma to the stage for her Ci10 [Children’s Institute 10 conference] keynote. Her hot-pink bob, matching Doc Martens, and neon-confetti-dotted black dress reinforced her energy. She delivered her talk, “Magical Portals Are Real, and I Can Prove It!,” in a conversational and confiding tone, to booksellers who know and recommend her LGBTQ+ fiction.
There was another shooting incident in Oslo last night. 2 people are confirmed dead and another 21 are injured, 10 of them in a critical condition. A man has been arrested for the crime. The suspect is a 42 year old Norwegian citizen of Iranian origin with several prior convictions. The shooting took place outside a pub that was a known meeting place for gays, and the police investigate the incident as a possible terrorist attack against the Pride movement. Of course the worst thing about such an abominable act of violence is that it happened at all, regardless of motive. Still, we all know how this will be spun, don’t we…
The Court’s on a roll of Evil. It also slashed at the Separation of Church & State recently by permitting religious schools to take taxpayer-funded vouchers. Our money now helps kids learn about Jesus.
According to The NY Times, however, the Supreme Court can be “outmaneuvered.” Maine came up with a neat trick:
Anticipating this week’s decision, Maine lawmakers enacted a crucial amendment to the state’s anti-discrimination law last year in order to counteract the expected ruling. The revised law forbids discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation, and it applies to every private school that chooses to accept public funds, without regard to religious affiliation.
So that’s the choice. Either
1) Accept the violation of ChurchState
or
2.) Make “gender identity” officially acknowledged in all schools, thus violating Women’s Rights.
Interesting review of Katie Tur’s new memoir, in which she discusses how growing up with an abusive and violent father prepared her for covering the Trump campaign. The twist is that her father has since declared himself trans, and blames his violence on repressing that side of himself. They have not reconciled; he claims it’s because she won’t accept his transness, but she says it’s because he’s never discussed and taken responsibility for his violence.
She uses feminine pronouns for him, but still refers to him as her father.
I attended a Rally for Reproductive Rights near the Alabama state capitol today. I missed the first part, but caught most of it. It was well attended; I’m no good at estimating crowds, but I think there were 300-400 people there.
There were lots of signs, at least 50, some of them rather clever. Lots of gender neutral language. I noticed 3-4 signs that mentioned “women”; one mentioned “female” in contrast to “men”. Maybe 3-4 signs were explicitly about trans people, including “abortion is not just a cis issue”.
There were members of a local abortion clinic escort group providing informal security. I know a number of these people, and I think quite highly of them, but I do note that the organization that provides the escorts has greatly expanded its focus to include “LGBTQ+” issues (the escort vests have rainbow designs, for instance), and they are fully onboard with gender ideology. Several of the escorts were waving enormous Pride flags. Flags related to women were non-existent.
I was enormously pleased to see my district’s Democratic nominee for Congress speak at the rally. She spoke well; she spoke forcefully; she spoke of women.
Rally participants marched from the main rally point to the capitol building, urged on by a chant leader. The chants en route said we were gathered for “reproductive rights”, “transgender rights”, “disability rights”, and “black lives matter”. No mention of women, and a 3::1 scope creep. At the capitol, the chant leader spoke of the governor’s terrible comments about the fall of Roe, and mixed in the state’s recent “anti trans” bills. I can party see that some people consider all these actions by Republican lawmakers part of the same thing, but they really aren’t, whether or not we agree they are all bad. The same lawmakers have failed to expand Medicaid, but that didn’t come up at the rally for some reason; ditto raising the minimum wage and a host of other perennial issues.
So, overall, I was pleased with the response, and displeased at the scope creep. At least people with “women” signs didn’t seem to get any grief from other attendees.
An all-woman production of 1776 sounds like a great idea. The original production only had a couple of roles for women (albeit with some great scenes for Abigail Adams).
This is not such a production. Instead, it’s 1776 with a cast that is “all women, nonbinary or trans.” In other words, a cast of women and men (playing women playing men, unless the trans actors are cast as Abigail Adams and Martha Jefferson). Still some non-traditional casting, but not nearly as interesting.
It’s a decent column that makes a fair amount of use of “women” (or “girls”). There is one reference to “person who is pregnant” and one to “people seeking abortion services”, but there is no mention of “trans” or “non-binary”, so little or no pandering to the genderists.
I saw also that there has been a net flow of people from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, with little hard data but some evidence that the complaints are over forced vaccines and overly heavy pushing of racial issues. I would not be surprised to learn that gender identity issues were part of the impetus.
These together make me think that maybe Elizabeth Warren would be the best standard bearer for the Democratic Party, and perhaps the best choice for presidential candidate in two years.
Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch insisted that coach Joseph Kennedy lost his job after offering “a quiet personal prayer” after football games. Gorsuch, whose rhetoric about church-state separation has echoed televangelists’ phrasing, added that the football coach simply wanted to participate in “a short, private, personal prayer.”
But there was no such “quiet personal prayer,” and Sotomayor called him on it in her dissent.
To the degree the Court portrays petitioner Joseph Kennedy’s prayers as private and quiet, it misconstrues the facts. The record reveals that Kennedy had a longstanding practice of conducting demonstrative prayers on the 50- yard line of the football field. Kennedy consistently invited others to join his prayers and for years led student athletes in prayer at the same time and location. The Court ignores this history. The Court also ignores the severe disruption to school events caused by Kennedy’s conduct.
She’s even got pictures to prove it (starting on p. 45 here).
Of course there’s no easy remedy when a majority of the SC signs on to a lie, beyond a constitutional amendment and/or impeachment. But surely this is another strong argument for expanding the court.
@228, yes that’s what I was getting at the other day in the OP. Popehat (Think) has since made the point that the only good thing about this is that if anyone else does exactly what that coach did, as opposed to what the opinion claims happened, it will be ‘easy’ to apply the establishment clause. At this point though, I have little faith that the conservative majority will do anything except lie, pretend, and generally make shit up as they go along. Having an unbeatable majority and a pending complicit GOP administration has utterly gone to their heads.
I seem to recall at least one example of a slave escaping to a “free state” via the postal service (because it’s illegal for state officials to tamper with federal mail or something like that). Is that something that would still be true?
“Halifax has reportedly lost in excess of £450,000 in investment accounts and savings today after customers closed their accounts following a row over pro-nouns on name badges.
“Customers are said to be closing their accounts today the bank’s social media team told them to leave if they ‘don’t like their new pronoun badges for branch staff ‘. The move has been branded one of the worst PR disasters in British business history.”
The only surprising thing about Grim’s account is that it took so long for someone on the left to write it. The widespread revolt of young staffers, especially in the nonprofit space, is the subject of endless talk within the progressive movement, but you’d never know it on the outside because it’s been written about only in bits and pieces that never quite add up to a full story. Grim is the first to put the whole thing together without (very much) defensiveness or punch pulling.
No, Grim is not the first person on the left to write about the phenomenon. Others have done so for years now. The difference is that those others were summarily excommunicated from the left on charges of heresy. Thus they were no longer recognized as being on the left, and thus their observations could be dismissed as right-wing fear-mongering.
In other news, a detransitioner by the Twitter handle of @ShifterofShapes did an interview with Blaire White. Only listen if you want your heart to break when he says he wishes someone had cared enough to just hug him and tell him the truth.
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich has spent months groundlessly telling Republicans that they can be on “Trump’s Team” or “Endorse Trump for President in 2024” by giving to his U.S. Senate campaign.
“Are you turning your back on Pres. Trump?” one Brnovich fundraising ad asked last year. “Renew your 2022 membership before it is too late.”
Such appeals pushed the actual team of advisers around Trump to a breaking point in June, after Trump endorsed Brnovich’s rival, Blake Masters, for the Senate seat in Arizona. In a cease-and-desist letter obtained by The Washington Post, an attorney for Save America, Trump’s political action committee, threatened legal action if Brnovich did not stop using Trump’s image and name in misleading ways.
Not sure where else to put this, which is I guess the point of miscellany. The local paper has an opinion piece on Cancel Culture, and how people are sick sick sick of it! But the example that the writer uses is about abortion protests (which may or may not be of the type that cross acceptable boundaries such as hounding Supremes at restaurants, vandalizing pro-life liars clinics, or what have you.)
I don’t know if you have to subscribe to read it, but here is a relevant passage:
More recently, pro-abortion advocates threatened any Supreme Court justice who wouldn’t accomplish their will. Even before the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, there was an assassination attempt, the targeting of children and vandalism. Abortion protesters have broken windows at crisis pregnancy centers and even set fire to churches. Leading pro-abortion organizations and many Democratic politicians have failed to condemn both the threats and the actions.
Polling shows that a large majority of Americans believe that free speech is endangered by “cancel culture.” Even The New York Times reports that 84% percent of Americans either think we have a “somewhat serious” or “very serious” problem telling others the truth about what we believe. Despite the danger that cancel culture poses to our political discourse and the functioning of society, few in power are doing anything to stop it.
I’m going out on a limb, here, but it is my firm opinion that women’s health care is not an example of “wokeness gone mad.” Going back to the eighties and the nineties, the phrase “politically correct” was used in the same way. While there are glaring examples of speech policing from the left-ish folx, not every left-ish position is mere wokeness.
The right have managed to convince the public that the left is only about controlling thought and speech (and I hesitate to use “left-right” as descriptors because I don’t really think that politics are reducible to a single scalar from left to right, but it’s close enough for government work and for this comment.)
They have succesfully hidden the fact that they are quite happy with authoritarian control of our lives, and we’ve gone along with it. In normal political discourse, a party that lies about elections, restricts voting access, redistricts a state like Wisconsin so that they maintain a permanent majority even though they are the plural minority, tramples on women’s rights to healthcare access, supports a power-mad lying former president who thinks that the KKK may have a point, want to prevent teaching about the controversial aspects of US History, hates the government but tell us we need to comply no matter what to whatever its enforcement arm (the Boys in Blue) tell us to do, and thinks that Christianity should lead the government, that party would be considered a weak outlier. But now even though they tried to join in a coup and don’t even want it investigated, that party is poised to take the Congress in the next election, because they have convinced us that everything the Democrats stand for is looney leftism.
“Be careful,” the banker with the pile of cookies said, “the guy on your left wants to take your cookie.”
I’m just saying that sometimes we are happy to help build our own gallows.
The couple’s lawsuit claims that the fertility clinic “negligently, recklessly, and/or intentionally transferred a female embryo to the Sanigers’ gestational carrier”.
Have a thought for the little girl growing up in that family.
Good points. There are so many things that get garbled in the urge to put everything into “left vs right” boxes.
they have convinced us that everything the Democrats stand for is looney leftism.
And those on the left have convinced many that standing against gender ideology is far right conservatism.
I saw a post from a left-ish friend who was applauding the hounding of Brett Kavanaugh. People were saying they hoped he never had a peaceful meal in the rest of his life. I don’t know what I think; maybe I think he deserves this kind of treatment because he did actually participate in causing great harm. But this seems like mob justice, it seems like excusing harassment and abuse and intimidation only because of our feelings toward the target. Certainly we talk here about people being hounded by purportedly “woke” protesters because of questioning or challenging gender ideology. Some of those action are swept up by right-wing pundits in their list of “wokeness gone mad”, but that doesn’t make the protests “left” vs “right”, despite possible agreement by “left” protesters and “right” pundits on that point.
I wish people could report on these kinds of harassment campaigns with at least a little bit of misgivings. Maybe I’m a bit glad that a misogynist liar who hurt people with his rulings got to see how angry people are, but maybe I’m not happy that people acted the way they did, just as I’d not be happy if the protesters and the target of their ire were on the sides opposite their actual ones.
There was an episode of, I think, ER, where a hotshot young doctor witnessed a horrible car accident in which a man’s leg was trapped inside the wreck. The doctor took a chainsaw from a nearby work site and sawed off the man’s leg so he could be extracted from the wreck and taken to treatment. Among the issues discussed during the episode was not so much whether the doctor was justified in sawing off the man’s leg, but rather that the doctor had done so with much bravado and glee. I think of that episode occasionally, when people are doing questionable things in the service of good; it does make it worse, in my eyes, if they are happy about it.
After reading the above as well as some other sections pertaining to gender identity, I have some initial thoughts…
To try and sum up, the justification for making gender identity something that is covered under sex-based discrimination is an interpretation of the Supreme Court’s Bostock decision (2020) where it’s claimed that the term “sex” did not need to be defined in order to protect the Title VII employment rights of gay and transgender persons. The problem with this is that there’s a difference between what Title VII with respect to Bostock protects, namely the right to not suffer discrimination with regard to employment based on sexual or gender preference, and what Title IX protects, namely the rights of women as a sex class to not suffer discrimination in favor of men in educational programs supported by the federal government. I think the proposed changes are using an apples-to-oranges comparison here that misses the main point – that discrimination on the basis of sex is not the same thing as discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender preference. In other words, this is misguided reasoning that puts sex in the head, rather than the body, and that the body does matter.
So the proposed changes are intended to prevent harm to transgender individuals who wish to be treated on the basis of their claimed gender identity, even if their physical characteristics do not match said identity. Sex is therefore subsumed to gender identity, and even though the proposed changes here do not currently apply to athletics, it’s difficult to believe they won’t if these proposed changes are put into effect. That the impact of these proposed changes is far greater on women than men as a sex class is something that is being ignored, and that is contrary to the purpose of Title IX.
“People” all over the article, in reference to menstruation. One mention of “men”, in the context of saying that menstruation gets ignored in studies because the scientists are nearly all white men. But if men can menstruate, why should that be relevant? And why is white relevant? Are they implying that black men menstruate?
We as a species are now taking part in a real life version of a particularly fiendish iteration of the “trolley problem,” in which we are pondering whether or not to throw the switch, riding in the trolley, and tied to the tracks all at the same time. We are the dinosaurs and the asteroid. Our current situation is an unprecedented superposition of disasters and catastrophes reinforcing each other and reverberating around the globe. The greatest threat to our way of life comes from our way of life. Climate, biodiversity, water, food, resources, war. The people who are in the position to control the situation (to the dwindling degree that such control remains at all possible or effective) are ultimately going to be subject to many of the same dire consequences as those riding the trolley or caught in its path. The timing might vary depending on locale and wealth, but like some nightmare moebius strip, but we are all on the trolley, and we are all on the tracks. As the seconds tick, the power of the switch to do anything at all ebbs away.
This has been your daily reminder that we are all so very, very fucked.
The groups cited financial obstacles imposed by Warner Bros., the producer of the movie series, holding the trademark to Quidditch, as well as a wish to “distance themselves” from J.K. Rowling, the author of the books, and what they called her “anti-trans positions,” referring to her contentious statements on gender identity made in recent years.
Turns out the complaints about JKR were an add-on:
He added, however, that Warner Bros. had prohibited the sale of merchandise that used the word “Quidditch” and that the sport had been forced to sacrifice major business opportunities. Mr. Benepe argued at the time — before the latest political controversy with Ms. Rowling — for a name change.
So it’s nonsense that the organization was mad at JKR over her views and consequently sought a name change. It’s entirely about trademarks, entirely about merchandising, entirely about control. The complaints about JKR are a smokescreen to gain points with a certain demographic.
Yes, but that’s the thing. NYT, WaPo, Guardian, every single one of them, all have teaser headlines stating that this move was about JKR’s “controversial” views, when it’s clear, especially when looking at the timeline, that this is all about revenue and merchandising and control, most of which is a conflict with Warner Brothers rather than JKR, and none of which has anything to do with “controversial” views.
If the new media wanted to stoke outrage (which is, after all, the most reliable way to sell paper), they could have made the story about the miserly, meanie-pie trademark owners. After all, Warner Brothers isn’t going to sell any fewer DVDs no matter how many people play a game called Quidditch.
I’m not on Twitter myself, but there are a few accounts I check up on. Not too long ago, one of those accounts, lascapigliata8, was hidden by Twitter trans-activist techs. It is now behind a warning that says:
Caution: This profile may include potentially sensitive content
You’re seeing this warning because they Tweet potentially sensitive images or language. Do you still want to view it?
La scapigliata is not posting porn, but defence of women’s rights, issues around child safeguarding, and robust criticism of TRA bullshit. I guess Twitter-Stasi doesn’t like her; she’s on somebody’s shit list for wrongspeak. The Twitter trans activists have now escalated their interference. Now, once you’ve clicked through to view her profile, every single post has been replaced with:
Age-restricted adult content. This content might not be appropriate for people under 18 years old. To view this media, you’ll need to log in to Twitter. Learn more
“I guess she touched a nerve.”
I’m not going join Twitter at this point, but it’s still infuriating to see vindictive little blue-haired trans techie-tyrants powertripping against women they disagree with, but allowing death threats and bullying of those very same women because they had it coming.
The US Food and Drug Administration, which is run by Rachel Levine’s Department of Health and Human Services, revealed on July 1 that it had identified that pubery blockers carry a risk of brain damage to children. Levine, a few days later, called for more children to take them https://t.co/OuZCpdcUhI
No new entries yesterday. I’m sure it can’t be the first time in all those years, but I can’t remember any other examples. Hope you’re ok, Ophelia. I’m afraid your consistent posting schedule has spoiled some of us to the point where we start to worry if a day goes by without the daily dose of sanity from B&W.
Bjarte, I vaguely remember one other time, though I’m not online every day. I hope she’s fine too, but I’m optimistic. I wonder how many of us check in here every day, I know I do unless I’m incommunicado. I occasionally have entire days when I don’t interact with a single soul, no texts, phone, interwebs, not even a wave from a neighbor — I question the weirdness of that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
twiliter, same here. As I once commented during the lockdown, you know you don’t have a life when the pandemic pretty much only requires you to go on living the way you were already doing anyway…
Really good article from Gender Clinic News about the Tavistock closure, relating it to other actions around the world and giving a summary of the history.
While we wait, hungrily, for more B&W intellectual nourishment, we can sample Substacts goodies from Dennis Kavanaugh, Kathleen Stock, Julie Bindel, Suzanne Moore, and any more that people can suggest below.
Bjarte, I prefer to think she’s sipping piña coladas on a beach somewhere, and enjoying a sunset with some fabulously interesting person who knows what a treasure she is. :) I am hopelessly optimistic though, bordering on pollyannaish. ;)
This piece that came out in 2015 was recommended to me and it’s worth reading still despite it being seven years out of date now. There’s also a genuine peak trans moment to be had from a certain cartoonist that, to put it bluntly, is creepy as fuck. I don’t believe in trigger warnings but I will say that much. Here it is:
I read it at the time, along with everything else I could find by Rebecca. She’s a giant in the field. And I remember that revolting cartoon – but I hadn’t realized it was early “Sophie LaBelle”! Early, bad, clumsy Wisey the Pretty.
Among the comic strips I follow is Heart of the City, a charming strip about a young girl named Heart, her friends, and their lives in Philadelphia. It was created by Mark Tatulli, and he wrote the strip for many years. A few years ago he passed the strip along to Christina “Steenz” Stewart. She is Black, and she made significant changes to the strip over the few years, in addition to having a drastically different art style. Many characters were added, several faded away, the cast became much more racially diverse, and there was a bit more focus on the differences between the life experiences of girls and boys. I was wary at first, change is hard, but I’ve really come to like where Steenz is taking the strip.
Recent outrage over the use of the phrase “people who bleed” reminded me that a current plot line is Heart starting her period. This is the first standard newspaper strip I can recall that has ever touched on that topic. It’s being handled really well.
I looked up information about the strip and about Steenz. She was inspired by seeing an African-American woman cartoonist, which helped her realize she could do this, too.
But she identifies as non-binary and prefers “they”.
So this woman, who writes so well about the experience of being a girl, and who was inspired by another Black woman, has decided she’s not a woman. This makes me sad. She gets a “first” added to her bio, but it’s unfortunate to see her reject such an important aspect of her life and what (not who) she is.
The only source I could find for the second story is about 30 minutes into this episode of the BBC Newshour. A woman in Saudi Arabia has been sentenced to 34 years for tweeting calls for reform in the kingdom. Apparently in SA that’s a form of terrorism.
The Saudi Arabia thing is a bit complicated… from what I’ve heard all the hypocrisy on reform in SA is because the Prince will not accept any reform not coming from him personally. L’etat est moi and all that… Which isn’t to say religious shit isn’t going on, but that monarchical bastard is power tripping hard.
A comment. Yes, this is from a right-wingish news source and it shows. I checked the other local paper (The Leader) and tried to find any report about Jaman and the YMCA in it and only came up with her being quoted in a story about cutting down some poplar trees in town. IMO, for them to not cover this tells me they’re deliberately not wanting to report the story. Why might that be? That’s a damned good question.
There seems to be a few versions of what happened that the report mentions, which isn’t surprising. The police chief dismissed the incident as not being a criminal matter, which is true enough as under Washington State law now a man who identifies as trans is not going to be charged if they walk into a women’s locker room, and if a woman complains about it they’re told to find another facility. If there isn’t one though, well, too bad I guess.
The freedom to speak out — to challenge and even to offend — is the driver of every form of progress. The advance of science, the emancipation of women, revolutions that have taken down monarchies and corrupt regimes — these achievements, at their core, were driven by free expression.
Soon after the 9/11 attacks, Rushdie wrote: “The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women’s rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex.”
Speaking as a former teenage believer, I concur: Islamic fundamentalism is a wholesale assault on the foundational principles of the West. We must not only protect but also stand alongside those whose lives are threatened by theocracy merely for what they say or write.
When someone attempts to take Rushdie’s life, what’s at stake is not just the inventive language and far-sighted vision of one person. Also at stake is our freedom to share ideas: the lifeblood of Western civilization.
But in place of the courageous confrontation and unified defense that such an assault demands, I see around me today far too much shuffling of feet and mumbling. What ought to have prompted simply a resounding defense of free speech has stirred, from some on the left, criticism of the act itself, but hollowed out by caveats: I believe in free speech … but not if this or that minority is offended.
The secular cult of wokeism uses diversity, equity and inclusion — words that should be pillars of progress — to impose a fearful conformity that is fundamentally inimical to free speech. Indeed, the wokeists and the Islamists have this in common: Both use the language of offense and hurt feelings to shut down ideas. “Hate speech” can be just a secular version of “blasphemy.”
She’s getting some blowback in the comments for not mentioning Christian nationalism in the US (fair point), but I think JK Rowling could attest to the parallels among the three groups.
Marjorie Taylor Greene took time away from calling for Merrick Garland to be impeached to tell a few talk shows she is going to introduce a bill to ban “Affirmation Only therapy for trans kids.”
Which is good, right? And Tucker Carlson told her he’s going to tell everybody in the Republican Party to support it.
I’m going to be a Danny Downer here, and say that this going to set back the drive to ban the practice because of who are promoting it, and will only confirm for those who accuse the gender critical of being tools of the RW Christian Nationalism. I may be wrong, and maybe it’s good that SOMEOne is doing it, but it’s a shame that it’s her. Why couldn’t a trusted Member of Congress take it up? Someone who isn’t seen as a, well, as MTG.
The same reason a lot of non-straight and/or non-men do, because it’s bullshit, you say? Oh, no, you ignorant fool. You’re thinking of that crude form of astrology that, you know, 90% of its adherents spout. If only you knew about Sophisticated Astrology, you’d feel differently!
More frustratingly, there’s a huge misconception around what astrology actually is. When Jack from Hinge or Joe on Tinder thinks about astrology, his mind is likely to jump to newspaper horoscopes and memes — and that’s part of the problem.
Both of these are forms of star-sign astrology, which ignores the existence of the birth chart. There is no way that all Virgos will come into money this week or that every single Taurus is a materialistic foodie who loves a lie-in. Star signs are just a form of entertainment, not the pinnacle of astrology.
It’s the birth chart, a map of the sky at the time you were born, that reveals the good stuff. It details exactly where each planet was at this magical moment in time. Every planet has its own unique energy, and their placements reveal a little nugget of information about each person, from their sexual kinks and likely career path to their attachment style and romantic tendencies. (Star signs, on the other hand, are dictated exclusively by the sun.) I, for example, am a unique combination of Aquarius with an Aries Moon, Libra Ascendant, Capricorn Venus, and Pisces Mars. Admittedly, I probably wouldn’t believe in astrology if I didn’t know this and thought that astrology meant that every Aquarius has the same traits.
You see? The true astrology makes the author a special, special snowflake. And while we can all laugh at the notion that the position of the Sun at the moment of your birth determines your fate, surely you wouldn’t dismiss as stupid and unscientific the obvious fact that the positions of the planets at the moment of your birth determines what your sexual kinks, career path, etc. will be for the rest of your life, would you?
Oh, you would?
Huh. You must be infected by toxic masculinity.
Men who dismiss astrology always whip out the same argument: there is no scientific evidence to support astrology. I hate to break it to you, but astrology and astronomy were actually studied together as a science until the 1700s.
Kings and queens hired trusted astrologers to help them make political and military decisions, and medieval physicians looked to birth charts to diagnose patients. Astrology didn’t fall out of favour until the Enlightenment period, when the Church and scholars decided that astrology wasn’t worth studying anymore, and we just . . . listened.
Well, that’s me told then.
Yessir, everybody in the 1700s knew that astrology was for real and then the Church talked them all out of it. Yep. That totally checks out.
There are than a few assumptions about men and astrology in that article, primary among them is the idea that anyone is ‘afraid’ of astrology. I think that of all the absurd statements in that piece, the cake is taken by ‘Men are victims, too.’ Most skeptics gave up on astrology because of the lack of demonstrable cause and effect. One of the linked pieces in the article is an explanation of the Mercury Retrograde shadow fog and an explanation of how to deal with. Meanwhile, Mercury is just continuing it’s merry way through it’s orbit, not aware that’s actually retrograde and causing havoc on Earth so far away in space. https://www.popsugar.co.uk/smart-living/mercury-retrograde-shadow-period-48845618
She also claims that since “cis” men are ruled by Leo, and the sun is masculine energy and since the sun sits in a fixed position and is immovable thus men are immovable. She may need a few more lessons in astronomy.
When the IAU reclassified Pluto as a Dwarf Planet, astrologers complained that they weren’t consulted on an issue that would so badly throw their charts out of wack. I just kind of wondered why they hadn’t detected the importance of the other dwarf planets on my charts before then. Oops. But, appaprently the astrologers decided that they would not participate in the demotion of Pluto and treat it as a planet. Saves time on rewriting all their charts that they had to furiously re-write after Pluto was discovered by that meddler, Mr. Tombaugh.
No, I’m not afraid of astrology, and I even find it interesting. I like the art of astrology, the art of tarot cards, and I’ve even gotten my cards read on occasion. It’s not because I believe that they have predictive value, but because I think the lore behind it is fun to learn and the interpretation of the readers can be springboards for discussion. There’s no fear at all.
But, I do think that it can cause harm when they promise what they can’t deliver and give false hope to the familiies of missing people. When I was a blogger, I wrote a post on this and used as an example the story of an astrologer who was contacting the family of a missing woman in the Seattle area and writing in her own blog about it. I applied some skepticism and explained what I found lacking in her methodology, and that the missing woman’s body had been found in an entirely different part of the PNW than she had predicted. She replied, all hurt that I had been skeptical and wrote “I was only trying to help.” Same here, Ms. Astrologer. Same here.
Would I date someone who follows astrology? Yes, I would, People have weird quirks and weird beliefs, but that doesn’t mean that they are necessarily incompatible. The only women I wouldn’t date are those who have pronouns, call themselves queer, or have an irrational hatred of Monsanto. That’s not because I love Monsanto, I just think that the hatred is irrational. (Aside: I was at a party a few years back and having what I thought was a pleasant conversation based on mutual attraction when all of a sudden the conversation turned to GMO’s and I asked her to explain to me what was wrong with them. She avoided me the rest of the evening and gave me dirty “you corporatist” sideeye glances occasionally.)
It’s all about the trans, never mind those birthing people. If I was anti-abortion Republican though I’d be delighted to see my enemies making themselves ridiculous.
A Chinese man froze some of his sperm, then underwent medical and legal transition as required by Chinese law to be considered a woman. His wife later gave birth to a child via the frozen sperm. Because the child was born, even conceived, after his transition, courts ruled they he has no parental rights in regard to the child. He retains such rights in regard to an older child born before the transition.
Tube on strike, I dawdled to Paddington on Friday. Passing the old wrought iron sign for Pizza Express, I was reminded of an event 30+ years ago, when I got caught up in a drama that resulted in a divorce, two marriages and many changed lives. It began with a heart attack — Electra Rhodes (@electra_rhodes) August 21, 2022
Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the news that gender euphoria is indeed a thing.
“There are cisgender women who are more masculine. There are women without uteruses or breasts. There are cis-men with low testosterone. Intersex people are as common as people with red hair. The idea of gender-affirming care is dropping assumptions about people, accepting those who deviate from the norms,” they say,
Not only does Jess believe that gender affirming care should be accessible to every patient, but they point out how the health-care system currently pathologizes transness, and how that is harmful. Most jurisdictions require a diagnosis of gender dysphoria (meaning distress due to one’s biological sex not aligning with their gender identity) in order for people to medically and surgically transition, and in some instances, to change their sex designation on their ID
“When we categorize gender dysphoria as a disorder in the diagnostic and statistical manual (DSM) and require a diagnosis of gender dysphoria to get access to services, we are saying that there has to be something wrong about somebody’s body to access gender-affirming care. Not all trans people experience dysphoria. Some people might feel okay in their body as it is, but they might know that they will feel more themselves if they had access to this care,” they say. “I’d like to see the discussion shift towards gender euphoria instead.”
More at the link. You might want to put a pillow on your desktop before reading it though.
PZ has been charting the sizes of the spiders he is breeding in his lab, and today pointed to a new innovation in his chart – the data points are now colour coded to indicate the sex of each spider. Given how incredibly blurry sex is in humans, it must be exponentially more difficult to identify in animals whose sex characteristics are often smaller than a millimetre. Truly an amazing feat.
And then he refers to some of them as ‘girls’… but isn’t that a gender word? One wonders how they communicated that to him.
You likely have seen that the Brooklyn Public Library has made it possible for teenagers all over the US to obtain library cards, which can then be used to borrow electronic books and audiobooks at no charge. This is to facilitate getting around book bans or removals. The books the library is advertising in this program are the usual set challenged by conservative Christians. I was pleased, however, to find that the library has electronic copies of “Irreversible Damage” and “Trans”. It would be a shame if the library omitted such material while decrying censorship.
Hemant makes this a story about faith-based sexism. Perhaps that’s correct. The quotes from the Christian school coach are about “respect” and “no physical contact between boys and girls”, although it is indeed noted that football is a dangerous sport.
Girls playing on boys’ teams is one thing; the risks to the girls are perhaps understood and accepted, and the girls don’t pose an additional risk to other players. The girls aren’t claiming to be boys, there isn’t this additional nonsense of discrimination against “some boys”.
I assume the Christian school would also forfeit, say, a girls’ field hockey game with boys on the roster of the opposing team. That happens in field hockey, overwhelmingly a female sport in the US, where some jurisdictions allow boys to play on the girls’ team if there is no boys’ team. This again is not a situation where the boys are claiming to be girls. In this case, there would be reason to be concerned for the welfare of the girls on the Christian school team.
A couple of tweets that made me laugh. I have no problem with getting older and appreciating that young women are lovely. But getting older and exclusively dating women barely out of school is another matter. He deserves this mocking.
white smoke has emerged from the chimney atop north hollywood high school, signaling that leonardo dicaprio has chosen a new girlfriend— Bob Vulfov (@bobvulfov) August 30, 2022
titanic turns 25 this year at which point i assume leonardo dicaprio will no longer want to be in it— Tom Neenan (@TNeenan) August 31, 2022
“You will see that the happiest girl in the world is playing a nice game of football with her team,” said Marjolein.
Aside from the moral and sexual problems with a 31-year-old biological male using the same changing room as a bunch of teenage girls, Schepers clearly enjoys a physical advantage over the other players he will come up against.
As we previously highlighted, after a biological male in his 30’s who identifies as a transgender woman was allowed to compete in a Gaelic soccer final against 16-year-old girls, women who complained about it had their accounts banned by Twitter.
I’ll bet he’s happy. He gets to practice his ephebophilia in the open, and there’s nothing the girls can do about it.
tl;dr Some angry men attacked a lesbian couple, and a TIF heroically stood up to defend them, and was violently murdered by the men. TRAs online say that TERFs are responsible for the TIF’s death, and babble about “stochastic terrorism”.
Online anonymous platforms such as forums enable freedom of speech, but also facilitate misogyny, extremism, and political polarisation. We have collected tens of millions of postings to such forums and created a new tool for social scientists to study how these phenomena are linked.
I suspect the data in the database only confirms what we already suspect or even know, but it can’t hurt that people are taking a good hard look.
My home province of Ontario is setting the stage for a COVID disaster.
Members of Ontario’s outgoing science table say they would have advised against the province’s decision to scrap COVID-19 isolation requirements if they were consulted on the move.
Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Kieran Moore said Wednesday that those who test positive for COVID-19 no longer need to isolate for five days, an approach he referred to as “practical and pragmatic.”
Under new guidelines, people should stay home until their fever clears and their symptoms have improved for at least 24 hours but they should wear a mask “in any setting” for 10 full days and refrain from going into high-risk settings such as long-term care homes during that time.
Incredulous reporters asked Moore questions he didn’t answer. If he had any integrity, he should have refused to make this announcement and resigned. More people will die.
In announcing the end of mandatory isolation, Moore said better ventilation and environmental cleaning in schools, combined with the level of immunization across Ontario, mean “we now can have a more permissive approach to return.”
Dr. Gerald Evans, a science table member who also teaches at Queen’s University, said it’s far too early to lift the isolation rule.
“This is not a way to handle the pandemic at this point,” Evans said. “I think it’s being led by some very, very simplistic thinking.”
Maybe Doug Ford thinks he can succeed where Donald Trump failed in bluffing his way through the pandemic. He still hasn’t learned that the virus doesn’t give a shit about our politics and economics. Ford’s performance earlier in the pandemic wasn’t too bad, but now he seems to have reverted to the more usual Conservative fucking moron mode. Once things go to hell, there will be so many able to say “We told you so!” They’re telling us now.
Why are you so confident that things will go to hell in Canada when this doesn’t seem to have played out in the rest of the world where restrictions have largely been lifted for some time? Differing thresholds for “hell”?
Why are you so confident that things will go to hell in Canada when this doesn’t seem to have played out in the rest of the world where restrictions have largely been lifted for some time?
Let me count the ways…
(First, let me note that the following concerns the province of Ontario, not the whole country. However much, or often the former might think it’s the latter, I’m only concerned with the actions of the Ford government.)
-A new school years is starting. The boosted immunization rate of children is alarmingly low, approximately 20% for 12-17. Close to zero for very young children. Masks are no longer required in schools. You do the math.
-Colder weather is approaching, so people will be spending more time indoors in close proximity to others. Apparently figures for Southern Hemisphere winter COVID cases went up. No reason the same won’t happen in Ontario once it gets colder.
-Workers infected with the virus will be allowed to go back one day after their symptoms abate. While they are still infectious. Without extra sick days, workers will be pressured by employers to do exactly that, even if they would prefer not to. Sucj returnees are supposed to remain masked for ten days, but that is no substitute for staying the hell at home.
-Mix the premature re-integration of infectious people into the general public, stir vigorously with relatively unprotected kids, pour into confined winter spaces and bake. The result is not going to be pleasant.
The bit where the woman has to choose between ‘admitting’ she’s an addict (she’s nothing of the sort) or stay in jail because she doesn’t qualify for the state-run rehab options that were a requirement for her release from jail (on a ‘fetal endangerment’ charge) was a nice callback to Salem, I thought.
The chaplain, inspired by a question from a student asking whether they have to “accept all this LGBT stuff”, wrote a sermon in which he said no, they don’t. He said “The school has no place telling pupils they have to accept an ideology – I would say that even applies to Christianity”. He is, as one might expect, in trouble for this sermon.
Note this description of the reaction to a “diversity wall” that prompted the question:
He said: “Some objected on religious grounds, others found the aggressively political approach concerning, feeling beliefs were being forced upon them.
“Others were simply confused about what they could or could not believe”.
It’s not really possible to dictate what people should believe, only what they should profess to believe.
Based on the brief article, I think the chaplain is in the right; the school has no business insisting that students “accept all this LGBT stuff”, nor even Christianity. How students treat other people is the issue, not students’ opinions.
Good article. There is some good discussion of sex versus gender in the article. I am pleased to see this kind of material from MIT. I have a digital subscription, but I didn’t notice this special “The Gender Issue”; I’ll have to go back and see if there are other articles of interest.
The Trump White House, and William Barr pressured the US Attorney in the Southern District of New York to prosecute John Kerry for negotiating the Iran Nuclear Weapons deal:
In another incident, Berman tells of the DOJ’s pressure to indict former secretary of state John Kerry for violating the Logan Act, a law that prohibits private citizens from negotiating with foreign governments. A call from the DOJ came after a Trump tweet blasting Kerry, who had negotiated the Iran nuclear deal, which Trump later scrapped. The Southern District of New York found no viable legal theory for charges. Several months later, a morning tweet by Trump on the topic was promptly followed by an afternoon call from the DOJ, complaining about delay in charging. When the Southern District of New York told the DOJ it was declining to prosecute, the department sent the case to the District of Maryland, which would later come to the same conclusion.
WaPo opinion piece by Jennifer Finney Boylan (normally writing for NYT, I think) on transgender status as a medical condition, provided for your teeth-gnashing pleasure. Boylan engages with topics like this a (very) little bit better than many others, without only resorting to slogans and misrepresentation, but “gender-affirming care” once again rears its head without Boylan spelling out the details. Being trans is just about “being free” and that’s why “conservatives like DeSantis” (it’s always only conservatives) are against them.
She appeals directly to DeSantis with “Is there room in your heart to accept the possibility that I know my own soul, and what is necessary for me to live with grace?” DeSantis has no redeeming characteristics that I can discern, but this is a completely ridiculous standard for setting public policy, as well as being nausea-inducing. Why can I not get government funding to provide my necessary crystals, Reiki, and third-eye ophthalmology? My chakras and soul are imperiled without them (and also why do you want me to kill myself)! Of course, xtian groups get uncritical and unwarranted governmental support all the time, so maybe that’s the model they are trying to imitate.
Is there any writer (not branded a TERF) who engages with this subject without euphemism, grandiosity and obfuscation? I think I answered my own question with the parenthetical. Also, I propose that Boylan live with Grace (Lavery) and see how that works out.
“If I were president, they wouldn’t have sat me back there.” Trump wrote. “In Real Estate, like Politics and in Life, LOCATION IS EVERYTHING!!!”
Well, maybe not.
A seating chart published by The Times of London shows those seated apparently arranged in the following order: the queen’s family, monarchs, leaders of the Commonwealth, and other world leaders.
The Telegraph reported that leaders of Commonwealth countries were put in front of other leaders “due to protocol.”
Biden is not related to the queen, a monarch or a Commonwealth member.
Neither is Trump, therefore his placement would likely have been no different.
He’s the king of NY real estate, right? That’s royalty!
Maybe they would’ve done us all a favor and put him in the casket.
Why don’t they goes after sneaky hobbitses?? Thieves who WRIGGLED Lections, who steals the PRECIOUS???!! Yes why not THEMS? They only seeks those who trieds OUR TROOTHS- that the Precious was OUR OWN! But is it the Bigly Lies precious? NO! FALSE! It’s a lies that it’s a lieses!!— Gollum J. Trump (@realGollumTrump) September 20, 2022
I don’t really follow US news very closely, so I didn’t know about the bomb threats against the Boston Children’s Hospital. But clearly, the presence of hateful rhetoric from the extreme right, followed by violect action, makes it very difficult to have a nuanced discussion about trans issues. It’s just too easy to get lumped in with actual, real life fascists.
Hey, remember how the special master ordered Trump to submit an affidavit by tomorrow stating whether he disputed the accuracy of the government’s inventory from the Mar-a-Lago search? Which would force Trump to put up or shut up on the “FBI planted evidence” innuendo?
Yeah, that’s not happening any more. Judge Cannon to the rescue!
Below is a powerful poem by Dennis Saddleman, read by him as part of the official observance of the day in Ottawa. It’s a harrowing reminder that History is not confined to the past. Its echoes yet ring clearly. Do we hear them? Will we listen?
Labour prides itself on being the party of equality. Yet at the party’s annual conference in Liverpool last week, a group of Labour women found themselves denied an exhibition stall. And to ensure that women could attend their fringe event safely, they kept its location secret until just before it started, worked with the police and hired security.
They are Labour Women’s Declaration, a gender-critical group of women who believe that biological sex cannot be replaced with self-declared gender identity, and that women have the right to access single-sex sports, spaces and services such as prisons and domestic abuse refuges.
Good on the Guardian for running that piece. I wish some newspapers here (I’m looking at you, Washington Post) would represent that side of the argument, rather than just the current narrative about “transphobia”. (As an aside, my spellcheck doesn’t recognize that word, and suggests I replace it with “transpiration”. Sometimes I love spellcheck.)
The article he’s referring to is on Vice, and features a big picture of JK Rowling. The headline mentions Rowling and an arrest. However, the person arrested in Carolyn Farrow, who allegedly doxxed a trans activist (Stephanie Hayden). Farrow is described as an “ally”, whatever that means in this case, of Rowling. There appears to be no connection in the article between Farrow and Rowling, except that the article looks like the usual crap hit job on feminists, whining about “misgendering” and “right-wing”. Maybe some of it is accurate, maybe some of the entities involved can be described as right-wing, maybe Farrow did engage in harassment and doxxing, Maybe Farrow indicated, like many of us, that she stands with JKR. But Rowling had nothing to do with this case, and to reference her in the headline is crappy journalism at best.
I saw Farrow’s account of the arrest a day or two ago – it sounds as grotesque as the first one. Litigious pest “Stephanie” Hayden disliked a tweet and sicced the police on her, and the police carried on as if she’d killed several people while robbing a bank.
Speaking of dumb attacks on Rowling, I was listening to a podcast yesterday (it’s about a tv show, nothing trans-related), and heard the following exchange:
Podcast Host 1: “sort of like in the Fantastic Beasts books, written by She Who Must Not Be Named.”
Podcast Host 2: (giggles) “OMG, can you believe she just handed us that?”
Me: Uh, yeah, can’t believe that JK Rowling, when writing Harry Potter in the 1990s, failed to foresee that three decades later, two people who were possibly not even born yet would turn her phrase “He Who Must Not Be Named” into a devastating putdown of her, out of anger at her views on transgender issues. What an utter lack of foresight. I bet she would have changed the way she wrote those massively successful books just to avoid the shame of an obscure podcast making such a clever and cutting remark. Such a blunder!
(Ok, actually, I’ve heard the “She Who Must Not Be Named” formulation elsewhere, too — these two didn’t invent it — but the point remains.)
It’s behind a paywall, so here’s the first few paragraphs:
It can be hard not to notice that a suspiciously large number of children, of seemingly normal human linguistic capacity, are officially designated as language impaired. In 2019, two researchers set out to determine just how common this phenomenon is. Examining nationwide data, they found that each year, 14 percent of states overrepresent the number of Black children with speech and language impairments.
Just what does “language impaired” mean, though? Much of the reason this diagnosis is so disproportionate among this group and has been for decades is that too many people who are supposedly trained in assessing children’s language skills aren’t actually taught much about how human language works. And it affects the lives of Black kids dramatically.
The reason for that overrepresentation is that most Black children grow up code switching between Black English and standard English. There is nothing exotic about this; legions of people worldwide live between two dialects of a language, one casual and one formal, and barely think about it. Many Germans, Italians, Chinese people, South Asians and Southeast Asians and most Arabs are accustomed to speaking different varieties of language according to different forms of social interaction. So, too, are Black Americans. Black children, along the typical lines of bidialectal contexts like these, are much more comfortable with the casual variety of Black speech, only faintly aware that in formal settings there is a standard way of speaking that is considered more appropriate. Black English grammar is often assumed to be slang and mistakes. But it’s actually just an alternate, rather than degraded, form of English compared to the standard variety.
He might have added that we don’t stigmatize children whose first language isn’t English by labeling them “language impaired”. Non-standard varieties of a language aren’t objectively worse than standard varieties, although for better or worse being proficient in the standard variety is often necessary for accessing education and decent jobs, as McWhorter recognizes.
Yes, all kids need to learn standard English in order to be able to access mainstream sources of achievement, not to mention to be taken seriously in specific contexts. This may not be fair. But the idea of standard English as a menacing, racist “gatekeeper” (which I have covered here) makes for good rhetoric yet will help no one in the real world. Certain dialects will be treated as standard as inevitably as certain kinds of clothing are considered more fashionable than others.
But for kids to be designated as linguistically deficient right out of the gate, based on notions such as that if they don’t always use the verb “to be” they don’t understand how things are related, makes no sense. It constitutes a dismissal of eager and innocent articulateness. And as such, it is an errant and thoughtless injustice that must be stopped.
Linguists (and others) have been saying this for a long time: kids can and should be taught standard American English without stigmatizing the non-standard varieties they might speak.
On a slight tangent – I once overheard an amusingly dramatic example of code switching: I was on a bus, sitting behind a Black man who embarked on a phone conversation in very street code, with lots of repeated “how ya doin”s and the like, that went on for a couple of minutes, and then all of a sudden he was talking polysyllabic sociological lefty academese about hegemony and whatnot.
I’ll open with a sincere apology to OB and anyone else who may have seen the porn I linked to in the previous miscellany room.
I honestly have no idea how it occurred, I do not have porn photos on my PC, but I failed to check the link before posting, so I accept I am to blame.
I no longer use the website that allowed me to create links to images and will post no further image links until I can find a better, more reliable site.
It’s ok. There wasn’t anything much on it, but there were links labeled porn, so I just dispatched it. No worries.
I’m obviously doing something wrong, nothing here seems to be linking to the new Miscellany Room. Is there a password? How do I get there?
You’re here? This is it? Isn’t it?
Oh — so it is and so I am!
My apologies. I bookmark them from here; I thought I bookmarked a link to their repository.
It’s been awhile, and I grow old …
Heh. Just don’t wear your trousers rolled.
Kevin Drum talks about a NYT opinion column about wokeism and self-censorship on a college campus. Drum has been gradually coming to understand that this is a real and widespread problem, whether you call it “cancel culture” or something else, and he has some good things to say, noting that the reaction to the essay is essentially proof of the validity of the points made in the essay.
Today brings yet another masterly discussion about wokeism on campus
The opinion piece, by Emma Camp at the University of Virginia, is linked in Drum’s post, but I’ll post it here, too:
I Came to College Eager to Debate. I Found Self-Censorship Instead.
I think it’s a good piece, describing the same kinds of pressures people (especially women) face to keep their unorthodox opinions to themselves or risk censure, poor grades, or verbal attacks.
Disappointing, but not surprising:
https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/67133/greta-thunberg-tweets-about-people-who-are-oppressed-because-of-their-gender-on
Greta Thunberg tweets about “people who are oppressed because of their gender” on International Women’s Day wearing a hat with the trans symbol.
Because IWD can’t be about women, apparently.
She’s probably twenty minutes from deciding she’s a “they”…
Definitely not a good sign. I don’t want to read too much into a single post on Facebook, but if this means that Greta has embraced sex denialism, it kind of undermines her own message about going not putting ideology above science. I guess it’s only wrong when the other side is doing it.
I hope she doesn’t trans herself.
Well, of course he will remain at PAC; he is, after all, still just a boy. Not to forget the $28,200.00 in annual fees his parents are paying. I wonder where he pees, and which Rugby team he plays on?
So, it appears the school does know the difference between male and female and are quite happy “Alice” is male. At least until a girl identifying as a boy wishes to enroll… the school may suddenly decide it is no longer trans friendly at all.
https://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/prince-alfred-college-will-allow-a-student-identifying-as-female-to-remain-at-the-boysonly-school/news-story/9ccc46967d3c2a357b0d9ff822a5bad1
re #’s 9-11 above, well it wouldn’t be a surprise if she did. I believe she has been diagnosed with Aspergers (an autism spectrum disorder). Aspergers and other ASD’s, along with depression, are over represented in transitioning. Especially so for young women. So she’s in the at risk category. There are medical professionals pointing out that most people diagnosed with ASD who present with body dysphoria are initially strongly obsessive about transitioning, but frequently repudiate this years later. The advice is to withhold any permanent or irreversible treatment until absolutely certain.
It’s so sad, because she represents the face of pro-science in that generation.
I mean, that’s why it’s sad for the world that she endorses transism. If she transes herself and makes herself a sterilized permanent medical patient, it will be sad for her, as well. :-( Poor kid.
I heard about this yesterday.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/mar/11/facebook-and-instagram-let-users-call-for-death-to-russian-soldiers-over-ukraine
Facebook is allowing people to call for the death of Russian invaders or of specific Russian leaders, with some caveats. Meanwhile, you can still get in trouble for stating biological facts.
Now this is fascinating. The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the body that knew of sexual assaults and helped hide the evidence, has a grand new logo for its “Women’s Network”
https://imgbox.com/Q7iyqRr7
Not sure. Are they tone deaf, or just trolling women? Again.
https://www.pmc.gov.au/pmc/careers/graduate-careers/about
It’s right there, at the bottom of this page.
Yikes!!!! WTF!
https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/67597/nhs-funded-clinic-is-promoting-prostitution-as-a-way-for-trans-people-to-pay-for
“A clinic which receives NHS funding has been promoting prostitution as a way for transgender people to pay for their transition treatment, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Being a sex worker ‘can be useful and sometimes empowering’, according to a guide produced by CliniQ, a sexual counselling service for transgender people at King’s College Hospital in London. It adds: ‘It can help us pay for parts of our transition.’
The booklet by CliniQ, which is part-funded by King’s College NHS Trust and three London local authorities, also suggests that transgender men – people born in female bodies but transitioning to male – can hide the fact that they are trans when visiting gay sex parties.
[…]
The pamphlet, which features crude sexual language including 22 uses of the words ‘f***’ and ‘f******’ in its 44 pages, focuses extensively on extreme sex acts, including sadomasochism and bondage.
‘Sex in public spaces is legal, so long as other members of the public cannot see you,’ it states. ‘Or so long as it is unlikely someone will come across you having sex. For example, having sex in a quiet woodland, away from the road or path, late at night.’”
I just saw a NYT headline “She Killed Two Women. At 83, She Is Charged With Dismembering a Third” (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/10/nyregion/harvey-marcelin-shopping-cart-body.html), and looked at the story out of perhaps morbid interest, but also because I was absolutely sure of a particular plot twist that was going to be there – and of course it was. But I was particularly struck by the weird phrasing of the headline – as if the most important thing was to emphasize (twice!) that male serial killer of girlfriends Harvey Marcelin must not be misgendered! TSKAW!
Jeezus.
Weirdly, there are photos of the two authors of the piece – two very young women. Does the Times normally put little snaps of the reporter on its stories? Seems odd.
Meaningless dustup, but I have comments.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10610553/Woke-brat-Emma-Watson-blasted-witches-BAFTAs-barb-JK-Rowling.html
Emma Watson was a presenter at the recent BAFTA awards. She was introduced by Rebel Wilson, who said, “She calls herself a feminist, but we know she’s a witch.” Watson responded, “I’m here for ALL witches.” This is widely seen as a dig at JK Rowling. Watson is getting some praise and some criticism for her sentence. Some of the criticism I think is excessive, but that’s how things go.
None of the articles on the incident seem to have noticed that “witch” is usually a false accusation against a woman used to get her punished or killed. Rowling has herself used the term to describe her treatment by trans activists. If Watson is indeed “here for ALL witches”, it should include Rowling and other outspoken women who have spoken out against trans activism and in support of the rights of women. Probably not what Watson’s cryptic comment was intended to cover, though.
Yes I saw that, and felt very unclear on what it was supposed to mean. Possibly nothing much.
https://www.heyalma.com/meet-the-queer-jewish-filmmaker-whos-saving-lesbian-bars
Well then, here’s this interview with someone trying to “save” lesbian bars. Let’s see what she says.
Ah. Got it. So you’re the reason that lesbian bars are disappearing.
She continues:
Not that most of the commentariat is of the demographic that plays all that many FPS games, but the Ukrainian studio that created the STALKER series (loosely based on at least one novel and a short story “Roadside Picnic”) is probably not going to get to launch STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl (they stopped using the Russian spelling). This is probably the first time an international release of a computer game was cancelled by an actual war.
As an added cherry (probably) Russian trolls are review bombing the other games in the series and in response others are doing whatever the reverse of that is resulting in overall higher ratings than the games have seen in the past. They’re good games, but they’re also buggy and are much improved by modding.
The #DetransAwarenessDay webinar I mentioned the other day can now be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnvZvqwIR7o
Yale law students disrupt bipartisan free speech panel, trigger police escort
I think the headline’s use of the term “bipartisan” is incorrect; this was to be a discussion on a topic of free speech, trying to show that people (a liberal atheist and a conservative Christian) who had strong disagreements on certain important topics, in particular so-called “LGBTQ rights”, could nonetheless find common ground on the topic of free speech. I think Federalist Society was trying to do something I respect, encourage discussion and debate rather than silencing. It is interesting to me that the Yale speech code encourages free speech and supports the right to protest, but specifically forbids any protest that “interferes with speakers’ ability to be heard and of community members to listen”. Good job, Yale.
Of course the protest of a free speech discussion proves the need for the discussion. Of course the primary issue the protesters were protesting had to do with “trans rights” or “trans kids”.
I’m surprised and pleased that Monica Miller from the American Humanist Association agreed to participate. I wonder if the organization is rethinking their incredibly boneheaded move of rescinding Dawkins’ Humanist of the Year award over simply raising issues and asking questions. It would have been good for the event to go forward; pity.
Cops were called (by somebody, unclear who). People were attacked. People were threatened. Letters afterward complaining about calling the cops on “peaceful student protesters”. I think I have a different understanding of the word “peaceful”.
There has been a lot of commentary lately about left-wing groups working with right-wing groups over certain issues for different reasons. I saw another article recently that stated that right-wing groups know trans issues are a wedge between left-wing factions, and the right-wing groups are using gender-critical feminists as “human shields”. (The article is not sympathetic, nor is it very good, but it has some good points.) It is a mine field.
There was a protest today at the NCAA Women’s Swimming Championships.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2744082449071029&id=1244024505747506
Oh lawd, here comes the New Yorker to chime in on Lia Thomas…
https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/how-one-swimmer-became-the-focus-of-a-debate-about-trans-athletes
Second paragraph and I’m literally shaking with rage.
It’s gonna to be real tough getting through this one. Pray for me.
Aw DIDDUMS.
(Lia Thomas, not you.)
Hahaha, I just did a thorough fisking of the whole piece, which will go up at Glinner’s substack in the morning. It’s got me so full of rage!!
Excellent! I just did a non-thorough whine at the first third or so of the piece and left it at that because it’s SO irritating.
Two weeks ago I read an excellent book, “Unbreakable” where Australian women shared their stories of pain, assault, rape. I had heard of almost all these women, but was unaware of their stories. Some made me sad, some made me angry, and some brought me to tears.
From the blurb
But today, I am angrier and am crying inside – Jane Caro, who edited the book, who wrote of her own experience of sexual assault, is a believer in TWAW, thinks William Thomas is a woman and that we should be paying for the medical transition of children.
https://twitter.com/JaneCaro4Reason/status/1504339090631798785?s=20&t=YKxzY2b7m0TAZtlJ4q8bhg
#34
Worth noting that the Reason Party, that Caro is standing for at next Federal election, was born out of the Sex Party, itself born out of a Sex Industry lobby group…
I’m pretty sure I saw a Caro tweet in support of someone cancelled for GC beliefs (in a “don’t agree, but defend your right” sort of way) and get such immediate grief from the usual suspects they deleted the tweet within a few hours.
Arty @ 32
I just read your fisking on Glinner’s substack, and it is masterful, chef’s kiss.
@36 Thank you Sackbut! I wrote it in a frenzy of rage, without any editing and barely any revising. That’s the way to make a good piece that flows! Graham texted me and told me to to just stop everything and do it. Don’t overthink it, just feel the anger and put it out there. We can revise later if we need to. And he was right! Barely any revision was needed. I guess that’s the power of passion! (Anger is a kind of passion!)
Wait, you mean there’s some other way to write?
Hey, is anyone wondering what Ammon Bundy has been up to lately?
Idaho hospital locks down amid far-right call for protest
Being a fuckhead, that’s what.
Jeezus.
Artymorty channeling The Clash. (“Let fury have the hour/Anger can be power/Do you know that you can use it?”)
I’ve loved the Ace Attorney games for years, so this delighted me:
The employment tribunal, Ace Attorney style:
https://twitter.com/pitopishi/status/1504999134067326987
(Someone NEEDS to make the whole thing! I’d buy it!)
Happened to spot this while looking for something else (the Reply All ‘demon picture’, if anyone else follows them):
https://gimletmedia.com/shows/science-vs/2ohxk2a/trans-kids-the-misinformation-battle
One of the guests is Jack Turban. It is really disturbing to realise that pretty much any time I see the word ‘science’ online I’m going to encounter anything but.
I’ve spent the last few days reading Maya Forstater’s witness statement. It’s all fascinating and horrifying by turns. This paragraph alone sums up, for me, the ‘gender critical’ position, and that of most people who haven’t bought into the cult’s version of reality.
Sorry, I should have provided a link:
https://mforstater.medium.com/illustrated-witness-statement-by-maya-forstater-3181bb41258f
Arty@37:
It was good, I do like a point-by-point rebuttal. We don’t see enough of those, these days.
In other news, my friend nuffy (and others) left a birthday present for Joanna Cherry on Friday:
https://twitter.com/nuffyknuckles/status/1504610691335999497
nuffy does a lot of proper footwork in the streets of Edinburgh talking to people about feminist issues and especially (at the moment) trans issues. She’s fierce, funny and relentless, so if you’re looking for someone to follow on Twitter, you could do a lot worse.
That’s beautiful, latsot! I hope she loves it.
She did!
https://twitter.com/joannaccherry/status/1504726122075938817
Sarah Ditum notes someone’s rather stunning lack of reflection on their cancellation. BUT IM NOT A TERF IM NOT IM NOT
https://twitter.com/sarahditum/status/1505803669584990215
Listening to the Ketanji Brown Jackson hearings. Someone needs to tell Chuck Grassley that Obama isn’t president anymore.
Republicans complaining about “dark money”. Gah.
Thank you for doing this for the rest of us.
Not going to last long.
I’m grateful that I’ll never be nominated for a SC seat.
Democrats were soooooo unfair to Kavanaugh (and Barrett).
Mike Lee: the Founders were “raised up by God” to their task, and created “the greatest civilization ever!” (USA is the GOAT!).
Also channeling Steely Dan re Odysseus tying himself to the mast (in-joke with my son).
So far all the pontificators are white; all but one male. Mostly mansplaining the Constitution.
Klobuchar is probably the best public speaker of them all.
I’m out.
Massachusetts AG Maura Healy commented that girls who have a problem sharing restrooms with
Transgender girlsneed to hold it.So, the choice is, be a team player or get kidney infections.
https://www.bostonherald.com/2016/04/28/healeys-hold-it-has-critics-hopping-mad/
I missed that this is from 2016.
I don’t remember seeing anything about it before, in my defense.
A bit of follow-up to my comment at #28:
Federal judge urges colleagues reconsider hiring practices after Yale free speech event
The article has some problems. The discussion wasn’t about the First Amendment, but about free speech; it wasn’t “bipartisan” in the usual American sense of Democratic and Republican, but rather two people (representing ADF and AHA) who disagreed strongly on certain important issues (in particular, trans “rights” issues). But the gist of the story is that a federal judge, Laurence Silberman of the D.C. Circuit Court, suggested that students who protested against the discussion are demonstrating their disdain for the concept of free speech, and this disdain should count against them if they seek clerkships.
On the one hand, this sounds like the same kind threat issued against people who think wrongly on trans issues. On the other hand, though, these students have really disrupted a peaceful discussion, and they refuse to allow the opposition to express views or explain themselves. I think the Judge has a point that maybe this kind of protest (not protest in general, nor protest on this issue, but this manner of protest) is a negative factor for someone seeking certain kinds of legal positions.
There is evidence that the discussion went on without further incident after the protestors left. It would also not surprise me to learn that the ADF was the party that called the cops, perhaps to bolster their “victimhood” case. Nonetheless, the student trans activists seemed all too willing to deny anyone the right to speak, or to listen to someone else speak, on the topic of transgender ideology and its impact on women.
Right-wing organizations like ADF are aware that they can use this kind of issue as a wedge between leftists and the general public, and between left-ish factions.
Saturday’s Toronto Star reported on a poll that showed a strong correlation between anti-vax beliefs and support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine: https://www.thestar.com/news/investigations/2022/03/19/how-vaccination-status-might-predict-views-on-the-russian-invasion-of-ukraine.html
Most behind a paywall, but the conclusion is that both positions probably arise within the same group of people from their consumption of disinformation and conspiracy theories.
Did anyone else see this?
I think JKR is still on a roll.
I don’t look at Pharyngula any more but I keep wondering whether PZ has ever mentioned Lia Thomas. A quick search suggests not. While I was looking, I noticed that PZ had posted….. this…..
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/files/2022/03/TheCisAgenda.png
… without irony, as far as I can tell.
WaPo opinion piece: The key question raised by Lia Thomas’s swimming success: What is the purpose of women’s sports?
I think author Megan McArdle makes some good points. She acknowledges that people can’t change sex, she recognizes the unfairness of pitting men against women, and she expresses discomfort with the idea of basing competition classes on identity, and she recognizes that many of the arguments in favor of “inclusion” really aim toward an endpoint of one big open league. But she never gets around to answering the question in the headline: what is the purpose of women’s sports? It’s not to have a competition for weaker or smaller people, but to provide opportunities for women, opportunities they have been historically denied due to discrimination and sexism as well as unfairness.
Sackbut, for me the value of competitive sport is that it tests you in ways that can improve your life. I was an overweight 13 year old when I joined a competitive swimming league at the local YMCA and I found I liked pushing myself to swim further and faster. It gave me self-confidence as a teen and while I was never a great athlete I was able to at least compete and sometimes even win. I think women deserve the same opportunity to compete with each other and strive for physical excellence. It’s not really about glory so much as we all know that most of us will never be Olympic champs. Rather, it’s about reaching your personal best. I think even the few years I spent swimming up until I was 18 have had a life-long benefit for me. I know my younger sister who was also a swimmer and ran the mile in high school also has benefitted since herself.
All-TIM soccer team to play against a women’s team:
https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/70151/all-tim-soccer-team-to-play-all-woman-team-london
JA @ 67
I agree regarding the benefit of competitive sport, but that’s not quite the issue here. Small men, less-fit people, children, all deserve the benefits of sport, but that doesn’t mean that interscholastic or intercollegiate competition, or the various levels of sports championships, need to provide these benefits. There are other leagues, less formal competitions, lower levels. The question isn’t whether women should be provided opportunities to play sports at all, but whether they should have separate teams and leagues in which to compete with prestige and resources equivalent to those of the men’s teams. This is the question I thought the article I posted was going to address, and I think the author was genuinely unsure of an appropriate answer. Quoting:
I disagree with the “authentic true selves” mumbo jumbo, but I do think she sees clearly the direction the arguments are going.
Her final two paragraphs I think are quite good, again with some disagreements:
The primary purpose of the league, that’s exactly the question. If there were no women’s leagues, if all leagues were open, there is no reason that makes any sense to create leagues according to identity. McArdle advocates sports reserved for women, although she doesn’t have a good handle on why, except that this is the way things are now and she would need more convincing to change it. I do think there are good reasons that can be articulated as to why separate women’s sports exist, and I agree with McArdle that the emphasis on fairness is missing an opportunity to talk about those reasons.
Elaine is brilliant.
https://youtu.be/J9ZNINhdhN0
Irony?
Who knows?
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2022/03/29/terfs-are-experts-in-anatomy/
Just scheduled my second COVID booster at the local CVS. As part of the process, they asked for “sex assigned at birth”. So not only is gender assigned, but sex as well?
Argh!
While the SC is busy gutting voting rights, the Biden administration is ready to gut Title IX:
So brave, I mean the sheer courage of these people. :P
https://mobile.twitter.com/POTUS/status/1509532210495254528
The TiM determination to be seen as women is like a strangely garbled and inverted version of the Groucho Marx line, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” Modifying the concept of “woman” in such a way that it would allow a man to be a “member of the club” immediately obliterates the club they so desperately want to join. This is the crux of Bjarte Foshaug’s definitional argument. Given the avoidance by “inclusive” organizations of use of the word “woman”, or to promulgate a vapourous definition of “woman” that sketches her with false reverence as a mysterious, amorphous froth of asperational potentialty, how can it be that TiMs know what a woman is, and know that indeed they are one? The trans inclusive flight of fancy has left them with no solid ground to land on. Perhaps that is the point: if the definition is so uncertain and maleable, then anyone can meet it. As we’ve learned, and have seen, the point of the propagandist’s muddying of the waters isn’t necessarily to accept their view as truth, but to spread doubt about what is true. He has won if we throw up our hands and decide that “truth” is unreachable, uncertain, or does not exist. Whenever I hear or read anyone talking about “all women” I immediately look for the asterixes, fine print, and rejections of “exclusion.” Not women then. Gotcha. “All shall have prizes.” Except women, whose prizes shall be taken away by, or given instead to, men. This is progress? In a pig’s eye.
And we’ll put aside the near-pathological hatred and scorn that many TiMs are so eager to pour on members of the sex they claim (or hope) to be, as well as the belief that some of them have that they’re better at “womaning” than any woman will ever be. Jealousy over never being able to become, no matter the effort, what women just are? The mere existence of women must be triggering for some of them; the accusations of trans “genocide” a frightening projection.
I came across this article. It’s a cogent and thorough discussion of the gender critical position from a legal standpoint. It’s a couple of years old, so I suspect it’s been discussed here before, and it doesn’t say anything I haven’t seen said here before, but still I think it’s worth bookmarking.
A meme. A conservative Republican woman who opposes men in women’s restrooms is going to have to “wrestle with her demons” when the man she encounters in the women’s restroom is also a conservative Republican. The specific people in this case are Laura Ingraham and Bruce “Caitllyn” Jenner, but it hardly matters, really. I guess the meme creator thinks it does matter; that somehow Ingraham would be inclined to consider a man to be a woman if the man in question largely shares her political views (and claims to be a woman). It seems the meme creator thought this was a “gotcha”, which I think indicates serious lack of understanding of the issue.
nuffy done a thing:
https://www.alamy.com/news/newsresults.aspx#BHM=foo%3Dbar%26qt%3D%26pn%3D1%26ps%3D120%26aoa%3D1%26news%3D%26sports%3D%26entmt%3D%26Videos%3D%26bb%3D1%26md%3DOL14079326%26dt%3D%26gid%3D%7BCCDBB3AC-4926-412F-ADF4-90666AD489D1%7D%26destxml%3D%26imglst%3D%26orderby%3DDT%26newsseq%3D%26userid%3D%7B00627446-D6D5-4AFF-A7D7-F59CB5764DE1%7D%26rand%3D1648913738130
I’d have gone but this one was women only. nuffy says that the women prisoners heard the chanting and approved. They are locked up with at least one man.
#63 latsot
I do read Pharyngula still, and no he hasn’t touched that live wire. I can only speculate, but I wonder if even he thinks that one is too strong an example of male performance for easy dismissal, even with his audience.
#69
I enjoyed the bit where he got the location of the humerus wrong.
Et tu, Princess?
This video is hilarious. (NB: the last several minutes are a paid promotion about a toothbrush, you can stop watching when it comes on.) JP Sears comedy.
The Best Female Swimmer In The World
Ben Miller today writes in response to Raquel Rosario Sanchez’s editorial “The Taliban knows exactly what a woman is” in The Telegraph:
”feminism is when you praise the Taliban”
Needless to say, Ben is getting roasted as a result, deservedly so. I did note this comment though from Katelyn Burns in the thread:
“The Taliban also knows the difference between trans women and cis men too, which is the inconvenient truth hidden behind this take. The Taliban don’t even bother oppressing trans women, they just murder us. Solidarity is the only way to defeat them.”
I see this as a kind of forced teaming on Burns’ part, as it implies that if we don’t agree that TWAW then we’re not in solidarity with opposing the Taliban. This is silly on the face of it, because you can oppose what the Taliban is doing whether you believe TWAW or not. Solidarity on one cause doesn’t mean that everyone has to march in total lock-step on every issue.
Ben Stephens in a response to Burns also notes the obvious:
I work for a global charity dedicated to the rights of women and girls, including the kinds of human rights abuses perpetuated by the Taliban.
It is also explicitly trans-inclusive. It is perfectly possible to do both.
Hear, hear.
I came across this article (it’s from 2021, but saw a link to it yesterday)
https://www.karadansky.com/read/acknowledging-trans-as-a-coherent-concept-is-a-fatal-own-goal-for-feminists
which advises against using “trans” terminology at all.
Certainly using “trans wonen” gives too much away, which is why I know longer use the term, spaced, hyphenated or joined into one word, as it is here. I’m inclined to agree with this article that using “trans” as a modifier for whatever group or individual suggests there is more content and coherence to the “trans” concept than there actually is. The “trans umbrella” sure seems to be not much more than a whole lot of forced teaming. How much do young women caught up in ROGD share with AGP males, apart from the former being handy human shields and cannon fodder for the use of the latter?
Wheeeee…
Also wheeee…
What could be expected from enabling and encouraging delusion, though?
A piece by Jean Hatchet on trans activists body shaming JKR because of the hate lunch.
https://thecritic.co.uk/why-are-tras-body-shaming-j-k-rowling/
Ross Douthat in the New York Times: How to Make Sense of the New L.G.B.T.Q. Culture War
I think he makes some cogent observations about the state of the war, especially in the area of gender identity ideology. At the end, he advises people who think the current trends are disturbing not to sit silently on the sidelines, lest they will regret doing so.
A U.S. national security adviser suggests that the Russians have thrown their naval personnel under the bus in the sinking of the Moskva:
An uncontrolled fire at sea that reaches your stored ammunition, a fire that is not caused by enemy fire, is one of the worst fuck-ups that can possibly happen on board a ship. That the Russians implicitly are opting for this story, over admitting being attacked by a weaker enemy, is telling. The actual sinking they’ve ascribed to a storm at sea while the stricken cruiser was under tow. A Ukrainian official wondered, if the Moskva was sunk by a storm, why was the rest of the Russian Black Sea Fleet being moved away from the Ukranian coast, coincidentally and conveniently, out of missile range?
How times have changed. And not. In 1981, the Soviet Union was quick to blame a Western attack for a plane crash that killed more than two dozen high ranking Soviet military personnel. The actual cause of the plane crash was too much cargo, improperly loaded, i.e., incompetence. Much of the cargo consisted of luxury goods that were unavailable in the Soviet Far East. The officers, in Leningrad for a military conference, were taking this normally unobtainable booty back with them to the back of beyond. They didn’t quite get there. The plane barely made it off the end of the runway before it pitched up, stalled, banked, and crashed, killing all on board.
So in one scenario we have the excuse of gross incomptence used to hide a military strike by an adversary, in the other, accusations of a military strike by an adversary to hide gross incompetence.
As Ukraine was the first to announce they had struck the Moskva with Neptun shore-to-ship missiles, I think that was what happened, as how would Ukraine otherwise have known about an accidental fire aboard that ship? I’m not surprised the Kremlin opted to not admit it, because it makes them look bad for underestimating Ukraine’s ability to strike the Russian Navy. Blaming it on an accidental fire shifts blame from the Kremlin and Putin to those poor schlubs in the Russian Navy. I imagine such beatings will continue until morale improves.
‘Rights of nature’ law clinic faces transphobia allegations
Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund has some members with connections to Deep Green Resistance, a radical feminist organization. The complaints against CELDF include failure to respect pronouns. Insert eye roll.
The article initially describes DGR as “a self-described “radical feminist” group, advocates for an end to industrial civilization — and opposes rights for transgender people”, which I think is inaccurate, but later contains this section:
This description I think is closer to the mark.
Credit to Salacious 99 on Reddit:
I’m imagining Trump’s Lia Thomas ramblings: “He’s a smart guy, really smart. She is literally beating those girls. We never would have thought… someone could be so smart. So beautiful, but the Left. The Left want to trans your kids. Turn them into, well. But Lia Thomas, wow. I like winners.”
Found on DailyMail but corroborated elsewhere:
Police let off 870 sex offenders including five child rapists without punishment or a criminal record ‘because they said sorry’
No criminal record, no parole, no fine. Just run along and don’t do it again.
I wonder how this element plays out in practice. “Ma’am, what manner of punishment do you think is reasonable for your rapist?”
“Jail, obviously. He raped me!”
“Wow, hysterical much? You seem too close to the events to offer fair and dispassionate feedback on the matter. So I’m going to let him go free.”
Jesus goddamn christ, actual rapists let free.
The Guardian view on banning ‘conversion therapy’: protect everyone
They make this point, which I think is a reasonable one, at least in part:
So, yes, therapy that aims to insist that transition is bad and You Will Not Do It Ever is going to run afoul of this approach. However, the “one acceptable outcome” idea definitely describes the “enthusiastic affirmation” approach. I wonder to what extent people outside of the GC crowd recognize this as “conversion therapy”.
I would be concerned, too, that simply providing facts and telling the truth about sex, puberty blockers, hormone treatments, surgery, effectiveness of treatments, and regret, would be construed as seeing “only one acceptable outcome”. Simply stating that you can’t change your sex, you can only make your body look somewhat more like the opposite sex, you can pretend to be the opposite sex but you won’t be, you can demand people treat you as the opposite sex but they are not obliged to do so, that is truthful but definitely discouraging one path. So I don’t agree with neutrality here.
@sackbut
I don’t think there’s any point in trying to legislate therapy around sex and gender. It’s far too subjective a thing to try and determine what’s bad and what’s good. The effect of the law getting involved at all is just to discourage therapists from going near the issue — if there’s a remote chance your distressed client could accuse you of criminal harm, the safe bet is to stay away entirely. And that will only make it harder for people experiencing confusion and distress about sex and gender.
That’s more or less been the problem with trans activists all along: they make it so risky to venture into the subject that everyone just keeps their head down and tries to avoid it altogether. And some of the people paying the price are the poor fools who get convinced they’re transgender themselves.
The activists’ hostility and intolerance isn’t helping “trans people”, it’s hurting them.
Artymorty @ 92
I agree with you, the law should stay out it. It would be much better for the medical and mental health professions to police their own practices and ethics.
We have here in Alabama one of those new laws criminalizing provision of puberty blockers and other “transition” treatments to young people. It is of course being decried as harmful to trans kids. I dislike it, not because I support the treatments, but because I don’t think the government needs to be involved in the issue.
Well put. Enthusiastically support these ideas, or else we’ll have you fired or de-careered or no-platformed or jailed. It helps no one, especially the people they are claiming to help.
Sorry if I’m late to the party, but have just discovered this resource.
https://www.womenarehuman.com/
I’m very much for the law being involved when it comes to quack treatments that can cause lasting harm to people, especially children. Let a thousand lawsuits be brought forth by detransitioning people who are angry and have every right to be compensated for the damage done to them. Medical malpractice in the form of surgery, puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for the dubious reason of there being some kind of ineffable gender identity is going to have its day in court.
University to pay professor $400,000 after reprimanding him for refusing to use student’s pronouns
I’m surprised at the size of the settlement, but I’m glad there was pushback against the gender nonsense.
Lauren Black, writing well about dysphoria:
https://ceriblack.substack.com/p/leap-of-faith
Sackbut @ #96…
Well, I’m happy enough to see pushback where I can, but I can’t really support that complaint and the massive payout. The plaintiff was reprimanded for calling a trans-identified male student “sir”, and he sued his employer for violating his “religious freedom”. He also claimed “philosophical, scientific and biological reasons”. In other words, he’s a Christian asshole who abused his authority as a professor to humiliate a student. And he’s getting rich off of it. I see a slippery slope off in the distance.
[Would you believe my browser flags “sackbut” as a spelling error? It suggests “sackful”, etc. Let’s try some other estimable musical instruments: “crumhorn” = “corundum” (?), “lirone” = “online”, “theorbo” = “bother” (that one’s not far off the mark!)]
Peter @ 98
Mostly no disagreement here. It is distressing that in the US the pushback against gender identity ideology is most visibly coming from conservatives and based on religious freedom instead of things like, you know, facts, or the rights of women, or the safeguarding of children. But it is nonetheless pushback, and I’m glad to see resistance to the pronoun police, even if I disagree with the rationale given.
(I could have sworn I saw something from an honest-to-goodness feminist writer lamenting exactly this point of difference between the US and the UK in the last few days, but darned if I can find it; I don’t recall if there were further comments. Ah well.)
If it’s any comfort, I see that kind of lament often. It’s something we honest-to-goodness feminist writers grumble about many times a day.
Canada’s Global News reports on Manhunt author’s fantasized depiction of Rowling’s death in novel:
https://globalnews.ca/news/8775229/j-k-rowling-killed-off-book-trans-author/
The reporter, Kathryn Mannie, begins with a brief description of the book:
(I wonder if, in this future, fully intact “transgender women” also turn into beasts? Or do they all have testosterone dutifully reduced to the level that would allow them to join the Penn women’s swim team? And what about transmen? Is Chase strangio’s T level still low enough to prevent her from becoming a monstrous beast, moustache notwthstanding? Not that I’m intetested enough to read it and find out. I’d pay for a root canal before buying (or reading) Manhunt .)
Even with this bare bones outline, we’re in trouble already. The ideas of “cisgender women”, “non-binary people” and “transgender” men and women are plopped in without definition. We’re already supposed to know who and what these entities are. Anyone outside of the trans/GC Twitterverse would have little idea what the hell any of that really meant. Any one without the requisite familiarity with these terms of art will be counting on Mannie as their guide. That, it turns out, will be a mistake.
Then a bit of well poisoning:
The definition of TERF given here shows that the writer has taken a side, and hidden this fact from the view of most of her readers. The very definition she uses smears women and sneaks TiMs in as women in a few deceptively simple words. Anyone who didn’t know the meaning of TERF before has been given an inaccurate description cloaked in presumed journalistic “neutrality. “Pro-woman is painted as “anti-trans.” How much differently that would have come across if it were rewritten thus:
TERFs are feminists who exclude trans identified males from single-sex organizations, facilities, and institutions intended for women only.
The phrase “transphobic tweets” links to a story about the “backlash” against her “Wimpund” tweet, which is portrayed as a tone-deaf equation of “womanhood” with menstuation that “erases” trans men, as opposed to it being a satirical comment on the erasure of women in messaging intended to convey lifesaving medical information, in the interests of “inclusion”.
Here’s what I consider the least dishonest part:
But it’s okay, all those bad reviews are by evilTERFs who have axes to grind:
It ends with quotes from the glowing NPR review, concluding the piece on an upbeat note for our Brave and Stunning trans author.
One of the problems I see with this story is that it focuses too much on the whole “Let’s kill off JKR” theme. Not that fantasizing the death of an actual living, breathing woman isn’t bad. It’s terrible, cruel, and uncalled for. The biggest problem for me is that it takes for granted that Rowling, as well as her supporters and followers actually want to murder trans people. It’s taken as read that this supposed desire is an accurate and truthful portrayal of what feminists believe, that this could be a possible future if they had their way. It’s another installment of the transperbolic lie that “THEY WANT US ALL DEAD!” The journalist’s definition of TERF reinforces the “anti-trans, not pro-woman” portrayal of feminists, making this dystopian exaggeration into a legitimate artistic act of pre-emptive “self-defence”, instead of a sick, misogynistic projection.
It’s curious that a movement that views “misgendering” and “deadnaming” as unspeakably violent, is so unabashedly and self-righteously violent in its own rhetoric on social media. And now, long form fiction. The writer of this Global piece would be hard pressed to find anything at all from the feminist side that comes any where close to the years of demonization, harassment, and threats that trans activists and their allies have heaped upon women who dare to say “no” to male entitlement dressed in a frock. This extreme asymmetry suggests that the question of exactly who, if given the opportunity, would be killing whom a somewhat different answer than Felker-Martin is positing in his screed. If feminists had been threatening rape and murder against TAs, it would have been front page news; the writer of this article would pointed it out. It would be being retweeted over and over. But rape and death threats to women? Same old same old. This book is just more of the same. It sounds like little more than a bog standard trans activist’s “Shut up, TERF; choke to death on my dick!” tweet, padded out to the length of a novel. Dead women can’t say “No.”
[…] a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? in Miscellany Room […]
Man Charged With Threatening Merriam-Webster Over Gender Definitions
A man made bomb threats and suggested that people responsible for definitions he didn’t like should be shot. I note via the URL that the threats were deemed to target “LGBTQ”, which is incorrect, as best I can tell. This guy has made violent threats over the definitions of things like “male” and “female” and “gender identity”, which were too ‘woke’ for his liking. He appears to be a right-wing zealot, complaining about Marxists and others.
I hate thinking this way, but it’s inevitable: demands will come that radical feminists denounce these threats; any such denouncements will be deemed false and insufficient; the incident will be used as proof that radical feminists want to kill certain people.
It’s primary season again and I’m pleased to note that almost none of the Dems have gender/LGBTQ+ anything in their candidate blurbs. Haven’t looked at individual websites for any of them but I’d say that’s a good sign that serious people in the party have recognized what a hindrance that shit is.
Thinking of Democrats and gender, I wonder whether the Biden administration’s proposed changes to Title IX regs to include gender identity as a protected class is going to be announced this month, as has been expected. I wonder if some Democrats are worried that by doing so they’d be handing the Republican one big stick of an issue to beat them with in the midterms.
Some background here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/03/30/transgender-discrimination-title-ix-rule-students/
Newsweek: White Men Less Likely to Accept Link Between Science and Religion: Report
This is report from a religious organization (not Templeton) that has a vested interest in compatibility between science and religion. They claim “the angry hostility towards religion engineered by the New
Atheist movement is over”; I’m not convinced that the hostility existed in the general public, but perhaps it’s quieter. There are probably some interesting results in this study, but there are some glaring omissions. There are racial and ethnic differences in whether religion and science are compatible? OK, but are there racial and ethnic differences in being non-religious? Are religious or non-religious people more likely to claim incompatibility? The “combined data table” does not break out data by religion, so I can’t find this out, although the article indicates this information was collected.
It’s funny but I actually gained my angry hostility to religion from the Science of Discworld novels (which do feature Dawkins a bit, admittedly) and to a lesser degree the gender goblins. Haidt’s “Righteous Minds” only intensified it.
NYT: How Women’s Sports Teams Got Their Start
The article claims that women’s sports teams were created as “a place for female athletes to flourish”. Rules for women were made different to protect their delicate reproductive organs. Women were protected from corrupting influences like gambling.
The claim is made by Sheree Bekker that women’s sports were created so that men would not face the indignity of being defeated by women. That claim is strongly rejected by Chris Beneke. I am no expert, but I don’t think this is two people shouting at each other, and I have seen much more against this claim than for it. Nonetheless, the bulk of the article seems to be aimed at gathering believable evidence for Bekker’s claim.
The article uses this claim to bolster the idea that maybe more sports should be mixed sex. Some of the points they introduce are quite odd. They quote a female rugby player who supports trans-identified males playing on women’s teams; she says she’s fine with playing on mixed-sex teams, and she’d be comfortable tackling a guy. (Note that rugby is one sport whose governing body has come down against trans-identified males playing on women’s teams due to safety and fairness.) She thinks this would rid the sport of intrusive “gender” inspections that have happened in the past. The article suggests that non-contact sports that emphasize skill over strength and speed, such as fencing or shooting, might be workable as mixed-sex sports.
Trans athletes are barely mentioned in the article, but I think they loom large in the background. Those who support the significant expansion of mixed-sex sports are not going to care if trans athletes participate. A number of people who advocate for trans “inclusion” do explicitly advocate mixed-sex sports. Cynical me thinks there will be comparatively few trans-identified males who choose to participate in mixed-sex sports, not in relation to those who seek to participate in women’s sports, and almost none will seek to participate in men’s sports. It’s all about validation.
Title IX, the article claims, prohibits sex-based discrimination in sports. We’ve discussed here the word “discrimination” and how it tends to have a negative connotation, “making an unjust or prejudicial distinction” rather than simply “making a distinction”, “discriminate against” rather than “discriminate between”. I think it’s appropriate to acknowledge the differences between men and women, and make accommodations and allowances as needed, rather than to pretend they are all the same; I think some of these sports mixing advocates are doing the latter, though.
This Jungian Life has a detransition episode this week:
Shadowland: Detransition – The Story of Beth
I’d say it’s a bit brave of them but it’s not like Lisa Marchiano’s not already known for talking about ROGD…
Notice how inadequately the Times explains Lia Thomas there:
That’s it! Nothing about how huge he is or how he ruined it for his teammates.
Trans activists have compiled a TERF list (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1v-4Rk-ynHC0MrG5FyuDZsYp743w0WFiO6caY80Yg4Y8/edit#gid=1489030622) suggesting targets for people to report and get banned from Twitter.
Needless to say, the only thing GCs are complaining about is if they’re not on the list :)
I’m not, rather disappointingly. It’s rather embarrassing. Neither is Ophelia, we’re obviously not TERFing hard enough. There a few names on there I recognise, though.
The list breaks off at names/handles beginning with N though doesn’t it? That’s how it appeared to me yesterday, and I saw a couple of people say they didn’t know if they were on the list or not because it’s not complete. The woman who compiled it said the compiling done so far took her hours and hours. I’d be very indignant if I were left off it because it’s like a million people long so what am I, chopped liver?
No…
The last one on the list is zzzmisanthrope.
I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re too important to be on the list.
Who wants to be on a stupid list, anyway?
Also, I’m starting my own list.
I must have seen an interim list yesterday then.
I think I’ll decide to be a listophobe now.
The screenshots shared on Twitter were not the whole list, just a few pages. The Google Docs list is searchable.
Does anyone have an update on Allison Bailey’s hospitalization?
Not a today update, but the news the next day was she was out of hospital and at home.
So this hits home. They’re claiming Bugs Bunny as one of their own. Somehow I doubt that Chuck Jones (or any of the other WB directors) thought of Bugs as trans, let alone “non-binary”.
Was Mel Blanc trans? I think NOT.
What’s next, the Pythons?
This is just funny.
Candace Owen tweeted, in response to some action by the Biden administration:
thereby confusing Harry Potter and 1984.
I suspect that there are a number of Americans who, unfamiliar as they are with UK government, associate any “Ministry of X” titles with Harry Potter. But this is another level of confusion. She brought up Ministry of Truth, she wasn’t repeating it. Had she heard about Ministry of Truth and just assumed it was Harry Potter? Has she read 1984? Has she read Harry Potter, for that matter?
Clearly Mel Blanc suffered from multiple personality disorder.
Bugs was certainly an opportunistic cross dresser if it got him close to his mark.
The team working on the James Webb telescope has finished final corrections of the mirror segments. All the instruments have also been turned on and are in the final process of commissioning, including the mid-infrared detector MIRI that had to be cooled down to 7° Kelvin (!). The first test images (of a small part of the Large Magellanic Cloud) from all the instruments are very impressive indeed. According to NASA:
https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/04/28/nasas-webb-in-full-focus-ready-for-instrument-commissioning/
@YNnB,
Of course he did it to escape people* who were literally trying to kill him.
*Along with the occasional Martian.
Forgive me if this has already posted here in the Room, or elsewhere on the blog, but here’s link to Allison Bailey’s Witness Statement: https://allisonbailey.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Witness-Statement-of-Allison-Bailey.pdf
At 167 pages, it’s detailed and damning. It was not until after she launched her action that she discovered just how far her chambers had bought into trans ideology, moving from simple legal representation of trans clients, to proselytizing within chambers and lobbying outside for the primacy of gender and the “rights” conferred by self-ID, based on Stonewall’s stance on what they would like the law to be, rather than what existing law is. A pretty arrogant move on the part of people who are supposed to be familiar with and working within current legal reality. Instead, they are misrepresenting the law and helping organizations like Stonewall, to do an end-run around the legal protections and provisions for women’s single-sex spaces.
Thank you, good to have.
Just finished going through Allison Bailey’s Witness Statement, skimming some sections, reading others more thoroughly. My impression? Stonewall and Garden Court Chambers are going to be really sorry they messed with her. IAMNAL, but from where I’m sitting, they are so fucked…
Ms. Bailey, along with Maya Forestater are real heroes. They will have a lasting legacy on the lives of millions of women in the UK, and billions around the world. They might not be soldiers or fighter pilots, but they will have helped to fight for democracy, and will have saved countless lives from pain and degredation. It might not be a shooting war, but it is a fight, and there have been casualties. To borrow some Churchill, ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much been owed by so many to so few.’
Well said.
Thank you!
Retweeted by Dr. Jane Clare Jones:
Mia
@_CryMiaRiver
The Totalitarian Ego
https://mobile.twitter.com/_CryMiaRiver/status/1523755726598184962
The next chapter in Pissing Off the Wrong People. (Or, what happens when your virtue signal goes off prematurely and sets fire to the powder magazine.)
The venue rented by Dr. Jane Clare Jones for her book launch event has cancelled the booking.
https://twitter.com/janeclarejones/status/1524064101760217089
She’s talking to lawyers.
Hell, I wouldn’t want to be the recipient of her e-mail, let alone having her come at me with a lawyer for pulling this sort of shit.
Oh good. I saw her tweet about the cancellation but not these later developments. Hope she (figuratively) nails them to the wall.
From Five Thirty Eight: Why Being Anti-Science Is Now Part Of Many Rural Americans’ Identity
Shocked! People express nonsensical views because of self image! And their self image doesn’t make those views true!
It’s all so obvious when the identity in question isn’t gender identity, or to a lesser extent, racial identity.
Random gripe: my favourite procrastination pastime, crossword puzzles, is being absolutely ruined by gender ideology. Everyone’s trying to make their crosswords edgy by inserting trans words. Today it was “University of Pennsylvania Swimmer Thomas” (LIA). Every other day it’s something like “brief unsexual orientation” (ACE) or “xe or zqizzph, for example” (NEOPRONOUN), and on and on. There’s at least one trans reference in every. single. puzzle. Everywhere. NYT. LAT. New Yorker. Atlantic. NY Mag… they’re all crazy for gender gobbledygook. It’s so annoying.
That is all.
THAT IS MASSIVELY ANNOYING.
This article in the Washington Post about the TSA not allowing a woman to take her breast milk through security is maddening for several reasons, including this:
It continues with several references to “lactating parents”. I’ve fathered two children, and never once did I lactate. But my wife did both times.
Another Terry Gross interview on NPR: This forgotten women’s prison helped cement Greenwich Village’s queer identity.
I did not listen to the interview, I just read the article. It talks about a women’s prison and people held there for “gender nonconforming” behavior. “Tens of thousands of women and transmasculine people”.
It seems to me these are all women, and they were targeted because they didn’t conform to societal expectations of women. “Transmasculine people”, who are they? Women who dress and present as men (but are nonetheless women, and so included in the term “women”)? Women who claim to be men, and who dress and present as men? But their self-declared gender is “men”, and they conform to that gender. Actual men who are somehow “transmasculine”? It seems obvious that this was indeed a women’s prison, that all the people incarcerated in it were women. This segmenting into “women and transmasculine people” is spurious as well as misleading.
I saw the blurb for that and could not bring myself to listen to or read it.
@hatpinwoman on Twitter has a thread about a study by King’s College, London, about the possibility of removing the concept of “sex” from law altogether: https://twitter.com/hatpinwoman/status/1526888927952519170
It’s called Abolishing legal sex status:The challenge and consequences of gender-related law reform
It’s been written by some entity called Future of Legal Gender Project. It’s their Final Report.
We can hope…
Report here: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/law/research/future-of-legal-gender-abolishing-legal-sex-status-full-report.pdf
Spooky: I was reading that as you were posting. Reading and retweeting and quoting a couple of Hatpinwoman’s best jokes. She’s on fire today.
Well, at least today was a day during which she didn’t write an essay accusing me of being a child molester, so I guess she’s having one of her good days. ;-)
She did that?
She sure did. but so did a lot of people. They got swept up in a moment. One night I got into a pissy argument about gender-critical radfems on twitter being unneccessarily cruel to reasonable and open-minded trans people who are trying to be our allies, and people took revenge by scouring my profile for evidence that I must be some kind of evil outsider impostor. They dug up that I had mentioned once my interest in the history of the Roman emperor Hadrian and his young partner Antinous: they are the most significant out gay men in all of human civilization. The former was one of the most formidable Roman emperors; the latter was deified and as a god he was quite literally more popular than Jesus in Europe until the 5th Century. Extremely fascinating stuff! But this interest of mine in gay male figures in history was distorted into evidence that I’m a dangerous menace trying to promote pedophilia. (The young Antinous was 16 or 17 when he first got involved with Emperor Hadrian. Which is not cool, but any thinking person knows this was typical two thousand years ago. Hell, it was typical two hundred years ago! That’s history for you.) Lorelei/Hatpin-woman got particularly and shamefully caught up in it and went so far as to write an appallingly homophobic essay warning people that I’m secretly an untrustworthy pervert who’s dangerous and must be kept away from children, and that I’m basically unhuman and unfit for employment. A change.org petition went around to have me removed from the charity I founded. (Change.org pretty much right away saw that it was insane, libelous, and homophobic, and they took it down.) But not before far too many Twitter radfems signed it.
The whole episode was truly awful and it revealed how terribly easy it is for social media (and Twitter especially) to make people tribal and hostile to each other. It doesn’t humanize or unite people; it divides them and turns them against each other. I had socialized privately with Hatpinwoman a lot up until then, and even considered her a friend. I had socialized privately with many of the women who turned on me. Which made the betrayal all the worse.
But I learned a big lesson: when there’s a big online “battle” between “sides” neither side will tolerate you if you espouse nuance and take a middle-ground position. Twitter rewires our brains to attack nuance or compassion for the “other” side.
To this day I hold firmly and unashamedly that men who have gender dysphoria aren’t all terrible misogynists by default — even the ones who identify as transwomen. I personally believe such men who recognize that they’re men, that women’s boundaries matter, and that children should not be transed, are crucial allies. I also get that a lot of women aren’t interested in pursuing that angle, because they’re busy defending their own boundaries and rights. And that’s quite alright; I certainly won’t proselytize to them about my views. But all too often they come after me for not being in line with their views. It’s quite exhausting.
Ugh, I’m sorry. I was aware of some of that, the bare outlines, but didn’t follow it up.
I just saw this article:
https://woodzog.com/an-artist-who-attacked-a-painting-by-asger-jorn-in-a-museum-in-denmark-apologizes-for-accidentally-using-such-a-strong-glue/
My first assumption was that the vandal was a man. I think that men commit vandalism more than women (though I’m not sure of that). It makes sense that it would be easier for them to get away with it.
The name “Ibi-Pippi Orup Hedegaard” sounded pseudonymous and not typical of either sex (though I’m not sure).
Then I saw: “The perpetrator, the Danish artist Ibi-Pippi Orup Hedegaard, pasted a photo of herself on the painting and signed her name in black permanent marker.”
And I thought: I bet this is probably still a man, who wants people to call him “her”.
And indeed, far further down in the article, it said: “Ibi-Pippi, who has been using her first name and feminine pronouns since declaring that she identifies as “a lesbian woman trapped in a man’s body”, explained her rationale to TV 2 East Jutland, saying the act was intended to start a conversation about property.”
And there was a picture of a very obvious man with stubble, not even trying to look female or feminine.
Incidentally, this other article about the story calls him “him”:
https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/asger-jorn-painting-vandalized-denmark-1234627162/
I just stumbled across a twitter link to this recent debate between Julie Bindel and Elizabeth Nolan Brown about legalising prostitution. I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet. Some of you have likely already seen it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsqkeXSbb2Q
Here is something to brighten up your day …
https://twitter.com/MKorero/status/1527681820040785920?s=20&t=6275d52k09Q7nKuHbkQ71A
YWNBAW
My alma mater (Western University, London Ontario, Canada) felt the need to do a bit of social media clean-up as a result of complaints recieved over a poster that, among other images, included one of two women in hijab about to kiss.
https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/western-university-lgbtq-poster-sparks-muslim-community-backlash
https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/western-social-media-maelstrom-starting-point-of-a-conversation-pride-london
(The International Day is officially a commemoration of the 1990 decision by WHO to declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder. The original decision was about homosexuals, and while bisexulaity does involve homosexual activity at least some of the time, the “Day” (instituted in 2004 as something specifically about homosexuality) now includes forced teaming, with “transphobia” having been tacked onto the commemoration since 2009. [As if there aren’t a million other days, weeks and months of the year for the “T”. Could we please have an hour or two where we are allowed to forget them?])
The result? Two “communities” in conflict.
Perhaps a more polite form of “Educate yourself”?
(I wouldn’t necessarily trust what they’re “trying to achieve” though, as this is the same Western University which, several years ago posted signs on campus bathrooms which said “Western respects everyone’s right to choose a washroom apprpriate for them. (and my favourite part) Trust the person using this space belongs here.”
https://www.uwo.ca/hro/doc/inclusive_washrooms.pdf )
Part of the University’s decision to pull the image in the face of criticism could be because we are approaching the first anniversary of the terrorist killing of four members of a London Muslim family. There’s always going to be opposition, offence and pushback against this sort of imagery from some Muslims; you can’t please everyone. The University might have decided that retaining the image would be a bad look.
[…] a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? at […]
From the book Girl Sex 101, a book about lesbians.
This is what lesbians look like, apparently: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FTSNkHXXEAAXyJK?format=jpg&name=medium
I have questions.
1. Why is there a dog there?
2. Am I the only one who can see it?
3. I mean, it doesn’t look like a guide dog, right, It doesn’t have a harness on it or anything?
4. Is that man (sorry lesbian) in the middle waving at the dog?
And yet this is still the least confusing thing about all this.
Mind you…I wave at dogs sometimes. Not often, but if, for instance, they’re looking at me from a distance too great to hear a “hello” I might waggle my fingers at them. Did it just a day or two ago. Dog wagged tail. They’re very human-focused, poor dears. Bred to be.
Does that mean people with penises – of whom there are so many in that image – are girls? No, it does not.
Really surprised they didn’t just identify as men during working hours…
@149, thanks for that link. She’s a good laugh. Not sure her grasp of law was the strongest, but it was certainly sufficiently strong. I’m appalled NZ Police have started this shit of harassing feminists for expressing GC views, while still happily allowing the usual misogynistic and racist bullshit to continue. I suspect mumbly Joe was mumbling because he knew he was basically bullying without any chance of ever getting a successful prosecution.
Got a fundraising e-mail from Ron Wyden on the issue of abortion:
One use of “people”
Two uses of “Americans” (once in the context of right to privacy)
*FOUR* uses of “woman/women”
Maybe they can get away with using the proper words if they’re fundraising in private?
Bill Maher recently began his show with a monologue about the rapid increase of transing and queering amongst the youth, and also pointed out the sudden decline in mentions of women/woman/girl in the materials of e.g. the ACLU. I only know this because PZ wrote about it, and linked to it. Some of his rebuttals however were… underwhelming.
Maher refers to a tweet by the ACLU listing the groups harmed by the looming loss of abortion access in USA, pointing out that it makes no mention of the one group central to the issue: women. PZ is on the case.
Apparently women are not a group that is marginalised by society!
Maher then makes a point about Finland and Sweden blocking the use of puberty blockers, as there may be many unknown long-term effects, making them a form of experimentation on kids. PZ’s response to this:
A problem with that rebuttal: the sources Maher presented for those news items were media outlets unrelated to Abigail Shrier. For the medical side-effects, he cites The Times, the Endocrine Society (via Washington Post), and a doctor Marci Bowers. For Finland and Sweden’s change of policy, he cites National Review and a non-profit called One Of Us.
Abigail Shrier’s book was only brought up incidentally to this. It was referred to as “a book questioning the sudden up-tick of trans children”, and was only mentioned as a segue into the ACLU’s sudden abandonment of free speech under Chase Strangio’s influence. Yet even if she was the source of both of fact claims, so what? Corroboration can be found elsewhere.
No part of PZ’s post is particularly good, but those were the two that fairly leapt off the page at me. The only agreement I have with him is that Maher is not particularly funny or charismatic. Such a shame that the left has largely abandoned this area of commentary, leaving it to such bores as Maher.
So PZ has gone all “All Lives Matter” when the lives in question are women’s lives. How impressive.
The National Center for Health Statistics has reported (PDF) that the birth rate in the US has increased slightly in 2021, the first increase in seven years, but is still far below the 2.1 replacement¹ rate (births per woman²).
I found this report via an article from Focus On The Family (yeah, I know), which is very concerned about the replacement rate, and which makes the superficially plausible statement that religious people have more children than atheists and agnostics, therefore their proportion will increase. They assume that people will continue in the religious tradition (or lack thereof) of their birth family. This assumption has generally been true but is by no means guaranteed, as the numbers of people exiting Christianity or specific Christian sects attest. FOTF asserts that religion is the key to keeping the population at a constant or growing level; maybe they are correct. Some of us think the “population bust” indicated in the NCHS report would not be a bad thing.
¹ Different understanding of “replacement theory” here.
² Neither the NCHS nor FOTF shies away from using the word “woman”.
It’s not exactly untrue but how well has it really worked out for Quiverfulls?
Here’s Helen Joyce’s take on Cathryn McGahey QC’s testimony (lesbian boundaries are just like apartheid) at hearing in Allison Bailey’s suit:
https://www.thehelenjoyce.com/joyce-activated-issue-7/
Fair Play for Women’s appeals to the British Independent Press Standards Organisation, IPSO, rejected:
https://fairplayforwomen.com/ipso-failing-women-with-transgender-rules/
Sorry to be bombing the miscellany room so much today, but I’ve found so many interesting things online today.
You lose some, you win some.
JK Rowling: BBC Radio 4 admits to ‘misleading’ statement on author’s gender views
https://www.thenational.scot/news/20170629.jk-rowling-bbc-radio-4-admits-misleading-statement-authors-gender-views/
I don’t know why I bother looking at these, sometimes, but: More lies from Marissa Higgins at Daily Kos.
The claim is that a company bailed on an LGBTQ book program due to conservative backlash. Read a little further, and you find that the book program is from “The GenderCool Project”, which “aims to have conversations with children about being Trans and Non-Binary”. That is not an LGBTQ book program, that’s a T book program. First they force the T into the alphabet soup, then they only report on the T issues. I see no particular reasons kids need to have conversations about “being” trans or non-binary. Perhaps conversations about how some people claim to be trans or non-binary, and other people think those claims are without merit, might be appropriate, but that’s not at all what an organization named “GenderCool” would want.
It’s worse than that, since the T agenda is not just different from, but actively hostile* to the LGB one. It’s as if sparrows, thrushes, and finches got organized (with considerable success!) to protect themselves from their predators, and hawks (who eat sparrows and thrushes and finches) somehow managed to get the “H” added to the “STF” (Sparrow, Thrush, Finch) alphabet soup by emphasizing certain superficial similarities (“We all have beaks and feathers, lay eggs etc.”). We can imagine the hawks saying something like “The STF parts of the community have come a long way towards reaching their goals, which is great, but the H part has been almost entirely neglected all this time. To make up make up for this sin of omission it’s only fair that the battle for Hawk rights be given top priority”, and we can imagine lots of heads nodding in agreement and thinking (without thinking too carefully) “sounds reasonable”. And before you know it, Hawks have managed to claim a total monopoly on speaking for sparrows, thrushes, and finches whether the latter agree with them or not, and frame any criticism of Hawk ideology (including the part about eating sparrows, thrushes, and finches) as an attack on the “STFH community”. As far as I’m concerned, this is the situation we’re in.
* The “Cotton Ceiling”, “Trans Away the Gay” etc.
So what you’re saying, Bjarte, is you’re a HERB.
Robyn Blumner of CFI I think makes many good points in her editorial, Identitarianism is incompatible with Humanism. She is especially vocal here in opposing cancel culture, and criticizes the American Humanist Society for rescinding Dawkins’ Humanist of the Year award over his questioning of trans ideology:
Hemant Mehta, unsurprisingly, misses the point when he accuses Blumner of missing the point.
I see conservative Matt Walsh of the conservative Daily Wire has a documentary coming out about What Is A Woman. It includes a shielded interview with one of wilLIAm Thomas’ teammates. The trailer looks very good (in a “damning” sort of way). The documentary is only available at the moment to Daily Wire subscribers, a line I won’t cross, but maybe it will be more widely available soon.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/upenn-swimmer-details-truth-surrounding-lia-thomas-in-new-matt-walsh-doc-what-is-a-woman
Following on from this mornings language discussion (that), and because I don’t know of another such concentration of language obsessives, I have a question for you all.
In professional (engineering/science/quasi legal) writing, would you routinely use contractions (we’re, haven’t, hasn’t, aren’t, let’s, etc)?
Our company is pushing to modernise and simplify the way we write. We want it to be direct, less passive than currently, and accessible. We also need it to be professional, credible, and precise.
While our output might be addressed to clients from a wide range of backgrounds, in practice our work is handed on to lawyers, planners, engineers, other technical specialists, and ultimately judges when agreement cannot be reached. So, while clients have to understand what we say, when things have turned ‘real’ as the youth say, it’s a different audience that matters.
Thought’s?
Innnnteresting question.
It’s tricky, because contractions can feel informal and thus potentially sloppy/inappropriate, but on the other hand saying things like “Do not” or “You should not” can sound angry and/or bossy and/or peremptory, not to mention excessively formal.
I guess if I had to decide I would suggest split the difference – it’s ok to use contractions but don’t overdo it – and DON’T contract “have” – no “should’ve” and the like. Yuck.
Stephanie Davies-Arai of Transgender Trend is getting an OBE or an MBE or some kind of British medal. (It doesn’t appear to have been specified which yet.)
I couldn’t be happier for her. She’s worked tirelessly for years and the resources she’s amassed are an invaluable resource.
(ugh torygraph link, sorry)
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/royal-family/2022/06/01/vindication-transphobic-gender-critical-campaigner-named-queens/
That IS interesting about contractions.
I don’t like overly stuffy language because sometimes it seems unnecessarily robotic and it can be alienating. I guess if more formal language actually adds specificity or clarity to a sentence, I’m for it. But sometimes it just doesn’t do anything but make the person saying/writing it feel professional. Like when cops have to address the press and they use such uptight words like “persons” instead of people. Just say people, people! Are they doing this for legal and professional clarity, or are they just doing it because they want to sound like they are?
(Speaking of “persons” v. “people”: I think I saw some poor petrified cop with a mic in her face refer to “personages” one time. That’s not even the right word! You’re just adding syllables because you think more syllables is more formal! Don’t do that, persons!)
It can be a tricky balancing act. I would never want to have to write in a wholly formal, impersonal, characterless style…but there are degrees of relaxation. I can get away with a lot in blog posts, but I ditch some of the slang and in-jokes when writing the Free Inquiry column – but only some of it. There’s always some muted joking.
When Jeremy and I co-wrote Why Truth Matters he suggested I write a few hundred words so we could see how to mesh our writing styles. I wrote something full of flippancies and he responded with “Um er we need to be a little more formal than that” so I formaled it up and he was all “Thank fuck, I was terrified you had no clue how to do it.” Quite funny.
Thanks Ophelia and Artmorty for the responses. If anyone else wants to chime in feel free. I’m interested in responses.
I’m one of the drivers of trying to improve the company writing style, which has been passive, turgid and repetitious. Clients especially have struggled with it and as younger staff have come through it is so far divorced from any writing (or reading) they have ever had to do, they’ve really struggled with it. I think it’s possible to write in a simple and direct manner, while still being accurate* and professional. Part of me struggles with contractions in the professional context. Especially when used liberally and needlessly. We have a few younger converts who want to go fully ‘natural speech’, which to me is just too much wearing your baseball cap backwards while dragging a skateboard into a meeting. People might understand you, but they’re not necessarily going to take you seriously and they sure as hell will wonder why they’re paying you hundreds of dollars an hour.
All that said, I mourn the loss of richness and subtlety when using simple and direct business language. English has some fantastic words, which are very rarely dusted off these days.
* We’re in a highly technical field, so some jargon simply has to be used because it has specific meanings that can’t usefully be phrased a different way. A bit like the ‘female’ argument really. We provide a glossary for those.
And O, that Stangroom story is funny.
Rob,
Who’s the audience for your publications? And how would they react? It partly depends on how you want to present yourself. Speaking very coarsely, more contractions mean a more chatty style, which depending on the audience might come across as more friendly, or false.
For the most part I agree with Ophelia about contracting “have”, but if you’re going for a social media register you must use “should of”.
And regardless of what direction you go with contractions, try not to utilize “utilize”.
How about shoulda? Is it ok to substitute shoulda for should of?
Only if you’re a young Marlon Brando.
What a Maroon, the audience is best described in the bit buried back up thread…
This story I find rather disturbing, although sadly not surprising.
Evangelistic culture sweeping small community
The article speaking approvingly of the mission of this Baptist church to go and “share the gospel” with the “unchurched”. They track the “conversions” and sharing events for individual members of the church, including children. An eight-year-old girl is their champion evangelist, sharing the gospel, on average, 7-8 times a day, seven days a week. They expect and encourage children to do this work. I know it happens, I’ve read The Good News Club, but it shocks me nonetheless.
Owen Jones, has decided that words have a meaning after all. Apparently he suggested that trans activists shouldn’t use “genocide” quite so freely. Now he’s being piled on for tone policing trans people and “placating” genocidal TERFs.
https://twitter.com/helenstaniland/status/1534121232353972231?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
Too late, he discovers the price of allyship with the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.
An interesting thread that highlights another area where a little clarity shows the inherent incoherence and contradictions in trans activist demands: the provision (and funding) of medical services.
https://twitter.com/tryingattimes/status/1533800504534368256
Facebook peeps–if anyone is interested in responding to trans glurge on the Scottish Atheist page, this post is public:
https://www.facebook.com/100045043056549/posts/pfbid029iPAVn82S2suGktRtwXPz7C9HePhicQfmAkruxjL8bespqgpvcmvgvxw6YYtsU6xl/
A thread that explains a lot in a small place:
https://mobile.twitter.com/elizamondegreen/status/1534586565326143488
It’s worth the read.
This is very good too:
https://elizamondegreen.substack.com/p/ok-lets-actually-talk-about-nazi?s=r
You can see where this is going…
Re #185
It is indeed an excellent thread. For those who prefer not to deal direct with Twitter, here is an unrolled version:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1534586565326143488.html
When is a Bumblebee a Fish?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-is-a-bumblebee-a-fish-when-a-california-court-says-so-11654611927?st=umo4uckleempt0e&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Google doesn’t mind making money while misleading those seeking abortions: Google misdirects one in 10 searches for abortion to ‘pregnancy crisis centers’
I’m sure there will be lots of commentary about this article soon, but:
NYT: Report Reveals Sharp Rise in Transgender Young People in the U.S.
Of course the article speaks as if “transgender young people” were what’s happening, rather than “young people claiming to be transgender”. Of course it takes the view that people now have the language and support and resources to “discover” they are transgender, rather than “convinced”. The article notes that young adults make up a disproportionately large segment of “LGBTQ” people in the US, and that the internet is a major factor, but says nothing whatso-fucking-ever about the idea that maybe these young people are wrong, maybe this whole gender nonsense is wrong.
Just think of alllllllllll those transgender people in the past who simply had to put up with being trapped in The Wrong Gender. Light a candle for them.
That gender identity is being included with sexual orientation under this ban all but makes affirmation of gender the only option, which means a kid who is homosexual will instead be medically treated in an effort to try and make them the opposite sex. Also, this ban will likely have the perverse effect of leading parents of gender-questioning kids to get therapy from non-professionals, as the professionals in town now can’t legally see them.
City council bans conversion therapy for minors in La Crosse – (La Crosse Tribune)
Sackbut @ 190:
Per the New York Times:
This drives me crazy. What kind of “experts?” The journalistic principle at play should be to weigh the testimony of “experts” against the possibility of influence by a religious belief system that’s applying pressure on the debate.
If you’re talking about any other religious belief — say, Scientology — it becomes very clear that there’s two kinds of “experts” about it: believers themselves, and those who look at the belief system from the outside. Everyone on the inside will of course have nothing but good things to say about it because they have to. It’s people on the outside, who at least ostensibly have more freedom to look at it critically, who journalists should seek out for comment.
Of course with trans ideology you could still be under pressure to keep quiet and/or play along with their beliefs even if you don’t personally identify as one — far more so than with Scientologists. Obviously you won’t get an objective take on Scientology from Tom Cruise or Elisabeth Moss, but nor will you from anyone whose line of work could one day put them on the set of The Handmaid’s Tale or a Mission: Impossible movie. For the rest of us trapped in Gender La La Land, disagreeing with trans ideology is the same, and possibly worse: we could even find ourselves in trouble with the law.
So the press really has to take the social pressure aspect into account any time they cite “experts.”
But journalists don’t see it that way because journalists (a) don’t recognize that trans ideology is a quasi-religious belief system, based on ideas that are not backed by science, rooted in feelings that can’t be quantified scientifically; and (b) journalists don’t recognize the extent of the pressure people are under to affirm these religious beliefs. They conflate nonbelief in gender ideology with fringe characters who lack expertise in gender “science” and are motivated by an ideological hostility to progress.
Of course they got this idea in the first place by treating gender ideology believers as “experts” at the outset, and from the very moment journalists took the gender gurus at their word that they knew what they were talking about and that anyone looking in from the outside who disagreed was not to be trusted, this bias just became self-reinforcing.
So we really need to push hard on the fact that gender ideology is a new religion rather than a new science, and one that’s using manipulative tricks to push its agenda. It should be so obvious that this is true! But —by Xenu — look how well their strategy is working: half the atheist movement has fallen for it.
L. Ron Hubbard, crazy as he was, had shrewd insights into how to spread his cult, one of them being to glom his beliefs onto the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, because that’s what had the most appeal to Americans at the time. It wasn’t just a new science, it was a new science that made you glamourous and successful! In just the same way, the pseudoscience of trans ideology has been yoked to the virtues of progressive politics: gay and lesbian rights; identity politics; the civil rights movement. In a way that’s even more fiendishly clever, because its appeal is deeper than aspirations to fame and fortune: it’s morally righteous. Righteousness is stubborn as an ox, and prone to blindness. Blind righteousness is dangerous.
[…] a comment by Artymorty at Miscellany Room […]
Our “Pro-life” Supreme Court wants to kill a man who is innocent, because a new trial would mean admitting that court procedure wasn’t properly followed:
https://www.twincities.com/2022/06/12/barry-jones-bryan-clark-arizona-death-sentence-supreme-court/
In case there is a firewall, here is a portion of the story:
The Supreme Court is run by ideologues, not jurists. And Thomas is quoted, so I am not sure if he actually wrote this opinion or not.
I found the link to Lilianna Segura’s article in the Intercept here:
https://theintercept.com/2022/05/28/barry-jones-supreme-court-arizona-shinn-martinez/
Jeeeeezus.
Stephan Patsis pokes fun at microagressions in his “Pearls Before Swine” comic strip. Poking fun at the woke could be a dangerous thing though…
https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2022/06/12
Regarding microaggressions, one of my favorite Jesus and Mo cartoons…
Kevin Drum comments on an article by Ryan Grim at the Intercept. (Drum’s blog post is free; Grim’s article is behind a paywall after you’ve exhausted your free articles.)
What’s wrong with progressive organizations? Just about everything.
The gist of the article is how progressive groups are mired in inner turmoil and purity spirals, and how so many progressive groups are all following the same trajectory. Quoting from Grim:
Drum notes:
Not new information, but a good unapologetic discussion of problems many of us have seen.
The Washington Post published the results of a poll showing that almost 60% of the respondents oppose allowing trans-identified men to participate in women’s sports, while less than 30% support it (with about 15% expressing no opinion). That despite the leading language used in the poll question:
(My bolding.) Talk about begging the question–they are of course not competing with other women and girls, because they are not women and girls. Poll questions are supposed to be as neutral as possible; something like: “Do you think that trans-women and girls–people who were born male but currently identify as women*–should be allowed to compete in women’s sports?”
They also found that “social acceptance of transgender people is good rather than bad for society,” whatever that means.
*Not females, dammit!
WaM@200–wow, that is terrible methodology. I stopped reading the NYT because they were publishing crap like that; this is a blow against WaPo now.
JG,
Yep. Any other issue and they would’ve found more neutral wording, but they’re mostly in thrall to the trans lobby.
I won’t give up on the Post–I’m addicted to newspapers, and the Post is my local paper, and still perhaps the best in the US. But it has its blind spots.
I saw this article about US Secretary of State Antony Blinken talking to Saudi Arabia in advance of President Biden’s visit there. The article is focused on “LGBTQI rights”, which probably accounts for the preponderance of comments about that topic, including the note that Blinken says he brings up “LGBTI rights” with the Saudis every conversation. But Saudi Arabia is a terrible place for women, and a terrible place for ex-Muslims, and a terrible place for anyone who wishes to criticize their government or Islam or religion. I don’t think I’ve seen any similar hints from the US government that they are concerned about draconian laws and practices regarding women or apostates. I don’t wish to have an “oppression Olympics”, as it’s sometimes called, but some serious acknowledgment of the problem would be good.
I guess everybody is bored with women.
WaPo: Caught in the culture wars, teachers are being forced from their jobs
The article talks about teachers who were fired or, in some cases, bullied out of their jobs because they expressed unacceptable views, either on the job or on their own time. Gender ideology is among the contentious issues mentioned. These incidents create an atmosphere of fear, where teachers are afraid even to mention touchy topics, afraid of repercussions.
We know of this situation, certainly, but it is good to see mainstream news outlets talking about it.
There are a number of problems that I see in the article. Among them is the equivalence made of all of these various contentious statements. Perhaps more egregious, though, is the assumption, notably as seen in the graph in the article, to assume that all people who get in trouble do so for “adhering to their conservative values” or “adhering to their liberal values”, as if all conflicts are basically “Republican Party” versus “Democratic Party”. Perhaps they made an excessively simplifying assumption, but perhaps they genuinely think that’s how the conflicts play out.
It looks like the Audubon Society, in preparation to partner with a drag queen for Pride Month events, is pre-emptively blocking people on Twitter who might criricize this move.
https://mobile.twitter.com/NoBettyInHere/status/1537605509670309889?cxt=HHwWgsCoiZCE1tYqAAAA
I’m guessing they’re using some kind of list to do this. I’m not on Twitter myself, but I’ll bet that some at least some of the -Twitter-active readers/commenters here (along with our host) are already pre-blocked.
I’m not, surprisingly, so they must not be using Billingham’s block list.
So this is the state of MAGA rhetoric these days. Twitter isn’t blocking it because it’s “in the public’s interest for the tweet to remain accessible,” but it can’t be shared.
And if you don’t know or remember who Eric Greitens is, he’s the former governor of Missouri who did this:
And I see you beat me to it. (Reminder to self: scroll down next time.)
Closing submission in Allison Bailey’s suit against Garden Court Chambers and Stonewall
https://allisonbailey.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/CLOSING-SUBMISSIONS-FINAL.pdf
This is an… interesting? piece from NY Mag by a nonbinary writer musing about pronoun issues.
I’m not sure how to feel about it. On the one hand, it shows some reflection and self-awareness in questioning whether the “my pronouns are … what are yours?” routine that has become obligatory in some circles is really helpful or just a tedious performance. On the other hand, it still feels a little precious, and another example of how this game is rigged against us boring binary cis people — first we were told we should be asking about pronouns, now we’re told that it’s bad because it treats someone’s gender as the most important thing about them.
This bit from the concluding paragraph kind of illustrates both aspects:
I mean, good for the author for being willing to admit that a lot of the appeal of nonbinary status to them was being different and cool, but to then complain in the very next sentence that now nonbinary is just a third box instead of the indicator of super special snowflake individuality that the author wishes it to be seems like missing your own point.
Re #211, good points. I can easily imagine at least two effects of this mainstreaming of nonbinary:
1. “I’m not nonbinary, I refuse to put myself into a single box like that.”
2. The emergence of “non-ternary” gender identity.
Let’s hope “transness” also goes the way of all fads.
So he makes it sound like his oh-so-unique identity was more like a shirt or dress that became a lot less interesting to him once he saw others wearing it. What happened to the deeply felt essence this was supposed to be based on? Somehow if others have deeply felt essences (who knew!), that makes yours boring. IT’S NOT FAIR! I’M THE ONLY ONE WHO HAS FEELINGS!! I’M THE ONLY ONE ALLOWED TO HAVE DEEEPLY FELT FEELINGS!!!
And as for the “fluid intentions” of enbeeness, that was only for those not doomed to be binary. The fluidity was only ever to be for the chosen few, who could only rise above everyone else if they we shackled to the floor. But isn’t exclusion supposed to be “bad?” Or does it all depend on who’s doing the excluding?
And once again, notice the implicit claims about what’s going on inside other people’s heads. It’s never simply about the right of trans people to define “who they are”. Hardly any of the claims People of Gender make about themselves make sense without a lot of implicit (and very insulting) assumptions about who other people are as well:
• “Women are whatever they have to be to make me one of them (and they don’t get a say in the matter!).”
• “Other people are whatever they have to be (‘cis’, ‘binary’, ‘gender conforming’) to make me different, special, an exception (‘trans’, ‘non-binary’, ‘gender-nonconforming’)”
• “Everyone else has to fit inside ‘static and concrete’ boxes so that my box can be more ‘fluid’ by comparison.”
Good news, everybody! Internet pseudonymity is hip again!
It stopped being hip? I’ve been nym’d my entire adult life (though those identities have been pretty stable as unique monikers)
Well, today is a bad day to be a wo… uh, a womb-haver.
I know it’s a terrible day today for levity, but this from Publisher’s Weekly actually isn’t a parody:
The head-tilt is, of course, a given.
Well, ain’t that just what we needed right now…
There was another shooting incident in Oslo last night. 2 people are confirmed dead and another 21 are injured, 10 of them in a critical condition. A man has been arrested for the crime. The suspect is a 42 year old Norwegian citizen of Iranian origin with several prior convictions. The shooting took place outside a pub that was a known meeting place for gays, and the police investigate the incident as a possible terrorist attack against the Pride movement. Of course the worst thing about such an abominable act of violence is that it happened at all, regardless of motive. Still, we all know how this will be spun, don’t we…
The Court’s on a roll of Evil. It also slashed at the Separation of Church & State recently by permitting religious schools to take taxpayer-funded vouchers. Our money now helps kids learn about Jesus.
According to The NY Times, however, the Supreme Court can be “outmaneuvered.” Maine came up with a neat trick:
So that’s the choice. Either
1) Accept the violation of ChurchState
or
2.) Make “gender identity” officially acknowledged in all schools, thus violating Women’s Rights.
Rock and a hard place.
Interesting review of Katie Tur’s new memoir, in which she discusses how growing up with an abusive and violent father prepared her for covering the Trump campaign. The twist is that her father has since declared himself trans, and blames his violence on repressing that side of himself. They have not reconciled; he claims it’s because she won’t accept his transness, but she says it’s because he’s never discussed and taken responsibility for his violence.
She uses feminine pronouns for him, but still refers to him as her father.
I attended a Rally for Reproductive Rights near the Alabama state capitol today. I missed the first part, but caught most of it. It was well attended; I’m no good at estimating crowds, but I think there were 300-400 people there.
There were lots of signs, at least 50, some of them rather clever. Lots of gender neutral language. I noticed 3-4 signs that mentioned “women”; one mentioned “female” in contrast to “men”. Maybe 3-4 signs were explicitly about trans people, including “abortion is not just a cis issue”.
There were members of a local abortion clinic escort group providing informal security. I know a number of these people, and I think quite highly of them, but I do note that the organization that provides the escorts has greatly expanded its focus to include “LGBTQ+” issues (the escort vests have rainbow designs, for instance), and they are fully onboard with gender ideology. Several of the escorts were waving enormous Pride flags. Flags related to women were non-existent.
I was enormously pleased to see my district’s Democratic nominee for Congress speak at the rally. She spoke well; she spoke forcefully; she spoke of women.
Rally participants marched from the main rally point to the capitol building, urged on by a chant leader. The chants en route said we were gathered for “reproductive rights”, “transgender rights”, “disability rights”, and “black lives matter”. No mention of women, and a 3::1 scope creep. At the capitol, the chant leader spoke of the governor’s terrible comments about the fall of Roe, and mixed in the state’s recent “anti trans” bills. I can party see that some people consider all these actions by Republican lawmakers part of the same thing, but they really aren’t, whether or not we agree they are all bad. The same lawmakers have failed to expand Medicaid, but that didn’t come up at the rally for some reason; ditto raising the minimum wage and a host of other perennial issues.
So, overall, I was pleased with the response, and displeased at the scope creep. At least people with “women” signs didn’t seem to get any grief from other attendees.
[…] a comment by Sackbut at Miscellany […]
An all-woman production of 1776 sounds like a great idea. The original production only had a couple of roles for women (albeit with some great scenes for Abigail Adams).
This is not such a production. Instead, it’s 1776 with a cast that is “all women, nonbinary or trans.” In other words, a cast of women and men (playing women playing men, unless the trans actors are cast as Abigail Adams and Martha Jefferson). Still some non-traditional casting, but not nearly as interesting.
On the lighter side of the news, Rudy Giuliani was “assaulted” today.
Elizabeth Warren and Tina Smith wrote a joint opinion column in the New York Times:
We’ve Seen What Will Happen Next to America’s Women
It’s a decent column that makes a fair amount of use of “women” (or “girls”). There is one reference to “person who is pregnant” and one to “people seeking abortion services”, but there is no mention of “trans” or “non-binary”, so little or no pandering to the genderists.
I saw also that there has been a net flow of people from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, with little hard data but some evidence that the complaints are over forced vaccines and overly heavy pushing of racial issues. I would not be surprised to learn that gender identity issues were part of the impetus.
These together make me think that maybe Elizabeth Warren would be the best standard bearer for the Democratic Party, and perhaps the best choice for presidential candidate in two years.
Warren was going to have a “trans” 9 year old pick her Secretary (of Education?)… I think that’s disqualifying.
That said, who have the Dems got? Where’s DeSantis or Abbot?
Gorsuch lied.
But there was no such “quiet personal prayer,” and Sotomayor called him on it in her dissent.
She’s even got pictures to prove it (starting on p. 45 here).
Of course there’s no easy remedy when a majority of the SC signs on to a lie, beyond a constitutional amendment and/or impeachment. But surely this is another strong argument for expanding the court.
Gah!
@228, yes that’s what I was getting at the other day in the OP. Popehat (Think) has since made the point that the only good thing about this is that if anyone else does exactly what that coach did, as opposed to what the opinion claims happened, it will be ‘easy’ to apply the establishment clause. At this point though, I have little faith that the conservative majority will do anything except lie, pretend, and generally make shit up as they go along. Having an unbeatable majority and a pending complicit GOP administration has utterly gone to their heads.
I saw this, which just made me hate Facebook/Meta even more.
Re #231, I saw an NPR piece about it: Instagram and Facebook begin removing posts offering abortion pills.
I seem to recall at least one example of a slave escaping to a “free state” via the postal service (because it’s illegal for state officials to tamper with federal mail or something like that). Is that something that would still be true?
Have some good news:
“Halifax has reportedly lost in excess of £450,000 in investment accounts and savings today after customers closed their accounts following a row over pro-nouns on name badges.
“Customers are said to be closing their accounts today the bank’s social media team told them to leave if they ‘don’t like their new pronoun badges for branch staff ‘. The move has been branded one of the worst PR disasters in British business history.”
https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/halifax-pro-noun-name-badge-24374038
Hahahahahahahahahahaha
Bit late to the party on this one, but …
No, Grim is not the first person on the left to write about the phenomenon. Others have done so for years now. The difference is that those others were summarily excommunicated from the left on charges of heresy. Thus they were no longer recognized as being on the left, and thus their observations could be dismissed as right-wing fear-mongering.
In other news, a detransitioner by the Twitter handle of @ShifterofShapes did an interview with Blaire White. Only listen if you want your heart to break when he says he wishes someone had cared enough to just hug him and tell him the truth.
Before you send your money to the grifter, make sure it’s the genuine grifter.
Gay couple order accessory; product does not match specifications.
Oh, and look at Pink News being TRANSPHOBIC! How do they know the baby is a “daughter”?
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2022/07/07/gay-couple-sue-ivf-clinic-sex/
Not sure where else to put this, which is I guess the point of miscellany. The local paper has an opinion piece on Cancel Culture, and how people are sick sick sick of it! But the example that the writer uses is about abortion protests (which may or may not be of the type that cross acceptable boundaries such as hounding Supremes at restaurants, vandalizing pro-life liars clinics, or what have you.)
https://enewspaper.twincities.com?selDate=20220709&goTo=A09&artid=1
I don’t know if you have to subscribe to read it, but here is a relevant passage:
I’m going out on a limb, here, but it is my firm opinion that women’s health care is not an example of “wokeness gone mad.” Going back to the eighties and the nineties, the phrase “politically correct” was used in the same way. While there are glaring examples of speech policing from the left-ish folx, not every left-ish position is mere wokeness.
The right have managed to convince the public that the left is only about controlling thought and speech (and I hesitate to use “left-right” as descriptors because I don’t really think that politics are reducible to a single scalar from left to right, but it’s close enough for government work and for this comment.)
They have succesfully hidden the fact that they are quite happy with authoritarian control of our lives, and we’ve gone along with it. In normal political discourse, a party that lies about elections, restricts voting access, redistricts a state like Wisconsin so that they maintain a permanent majority even though they are the plural minority, tramples on women’s rights to healthcare access, supports a power-mad lying former president who thinks that the KKK may have a point, want to prevent teaching about the controversial aspects of US History, hates the government but tell us we need to comply no matter what to whatever its enforcement arm (the Boys in Blue) tell us to do, and thinks that Christianity should lead the government, that party would be considered a weak outlier. But now even though they tried to join in a coup and don’t even want it investigated, that party is poised to take the Congress in the next election, because they have convinced us that everything the Democrats stand for is looney leftism.
“Be careful,” the banker with the pile of cookies said, “the guy on your left wants to take your cookie.”
I’m just saying that sometimes we are happy to help build our own gallows.
Lady M @ #238…
This paragraph jumped out at me:
Have a thought for the little girl growing up in that family.
Mike @ 239
Good points. There are so many things that get garbled in the urge to put everything into “left vs right” boxes.
And those on the left have convinced many that standing against gender ideology is far right conservatism.
I saw a post from a left-ish friend who was applauding the hounding of Brett Kavanaugh. People were saying they hoped he never had a peaceful meal in the rest of his life. I don’t know what I think; maybe I think he deserves this kind of treatment because he did actually participate in causing great harm. But this seems like mob justice, it seems like excusing harassment and abuse and intimidation only because of our feelings toward the target. Certainly we talk here about people being hounded by purportedly “woke” protesters because of questioning or challenging gender ideology. Some of those action are swept up by right-wing pundits in their list of “wokeness gone mad”, but that doesn’t make the protests “left” vs “right”, despite possible agreement by “left” protesters and “right” pundits on that point.
I wish people could report on these kinds of harassment campaigns with at least a little bit of misgivings. Maybe I’m a bit glad that a misogynist liar who hurt people with his rulings got to see how angry people are, but maybe I’m not happy that people acted the way they did, just as I’d not be happy if the protesters and the target of their ire were on the sides opposite their actual ones.
There was an episode of, I think, ER, where a hotshot young doctor witnessed a horrible car accident in which a man’s leg was trapped inside the wreck. The doctor took a chainsaw from a nearby work site and sawed off the man’s leg so he could be extracted from the wreck and taken to treatment. Among the issues discussed during the episode was not so much whether the doctor was justified in sawing off the man’s leg, but rather that the doctor had done so with much bravado and glee. I think of that episode occasionally, when people are doing questionable things in the service of good; it does make it worse, in my eyes, if they are happy about it.
The paragraph cited below from the proposed changes to Title IX concerns how “sex” is defined:
https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2022-13734/p-1218
After reading the above as well as some other sections pertaining to gender identity, I have some initial thoughts…
To try and sum up, the justification for making gender identity something that is covered under sex-based discrimination is an interpretation of the Supreme Court’s Bostock decision (2020) where it’s claimed that the term “sex” did not need to be defined in order to protect the Title VII employment rights of gay and transgender persons. The problem with this is that there’s a difference between what Title VII with respect to Bostock protects, namely the right to not suffer discrimination with regard to employment based on sexual or gender preference, and what Title IX protects, namely the rights of women as a sex class to not suffer discrimination in favor of men in educational programs supported by the federal government. I think the proposed changes are using an apples-to-oranges comparison here that misses the main point – that discrimination on the basis of sex is not the same thing as discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender preference. In other words, this is misguided reasoning that puts sex in the head, rather than the body, and that the body does matter.
So the proposed changes are intended to prevent harm to transgender individuals who wish to be treated on the basis of their claimed gender identity, even if their physical characteristics do not match said identity. Sex is therefore subsumed to gender identity, and even though the proposed changes here do not currently apply to athletics, it’s difficult to believe they won’t if these proposed changes are put into effect. That the impact of these proposed changes is far greater on women than men as a sex class is something that is being ignored, and that is contrary to the purpose of Title IX.
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/menstruation-changes-covid-vaccines-rcna38348
“People” all over the article, in reference to menstruation. One mention of “men”, in the context of saying that menstruation gets ignored in studies because the scientists are nearly all white men. But if men can menstruate, why should that be relevant? And why is white relevant? Are they implying that black men menstruate?
We as a species are now taking part in a real life version of a particularly fiendish iteration of the “trolley problem,” in which we are pondering whether or not to throw the switch, riding in the trolley, and tied to the tracks all at the same time. We are the dinosaurs and the asteroid. Our current situation is an unprecedented superposition of disasters and catastrophes reinforcing each other and reverberating around the globe. The greatest threat to our way of life comes from our way of life. Climate, biodiversity, water, food, resources, war. The people who are in the position to control the situation (to the dwindling degree that such control remains at all possible or effective) are ultimately going to be subject to many of the same dire consequences as those riding the trolley or caught in its path. The timing might vary depending on locale and wealth, but like some nightmare moebius strip, but we are all on the trolley, and we are all on the tracks. As the seconds tick, the power of the switch to do anything at all ebbs away.
This has been your daily reminder that we are all so very, very fucked.
[…] a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? at Miscellany Room […]
NYT: Broomsticks Stay, but Not the Name: Quidditch Becomes ‘Quadball’
Turns out the complaints about JKR were an add-on:
So it’s nonsense that the organization was mad at JKR over her views and consequently sought a name change. It’s entirely about trademarks, entirely about merchandising, entirely about control. The complaints about JKR are a smokescreen to gain points with a certain demographic.
Or even just another opportunity to get in some kicking.
Yes, but that’s the thing. NYT, WaPo, Guardian, every single one of them, all have teaser headlines stating that this move was about JKR’s “controversial” views, when it’s clear, especially when looking at the timeline, that this is all about revenue and merchandising and control, most of which is a conflict with Warner Brothers rather than JKR, and none of which has anything to do with “controversial” views.
If the new media wanted to stoke outrage (which is, after all, the most reliable way to sell paper), they could have made the story about the miserly, meanie-pie trademark owners. After all, Warner Brothers isn’t going to sell any fewer DVDs no matter how many people play a game called Quidditch.
So, this is depressing, even if the Guardian was forced to use the words “women” and “girls” repeatedly:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/jul/22/european-countries-pressurise-uk-over-removal-of-abortion-commitments-liz-truss
It’s enraging.
Extremely depressing. I did a post on it a couple of days ago – it was Andrew Copson at UK Humanists who blew the whistle.
I’m not on Twitter myself, but there are a few accounts I check up on. Not too long ago, one of those accounts, lascapigliata8, was hidden by Twitter trans-activist techs. It is now behind a warning that says:
La scapigliata is not posting porn, but defence of women’s rights, issues around child safeguarding, and robust criticism of TRA bullshit. I guess Twitter-Stasi doesn’t like her; she’s on somebody’s shit list for wrongspeak. The Twitter trans activists have now escalated their interference. Now, once you’ve clicked through to view her profile, every single post has been replaced with:
“I guess she touched a nerve.”
I’m not going join Twitter at this point, but it’s still infuriating to see vindictive little blue-haired trans techie-tyrants powertripping against women they disagree with, but allowing death threats and bullying of those very same women because they had it coming.
So can we just evacuate the women and girls from Texas and then just wall the state off, already?
https://abc13.com/amp/alvin-high-school-special-needs-sexual-assault-student-with-attacked-isd/12054478/
Freemage, that link didn’t work, but this should. Ghastly story.
YNnB, there is an alternative to Twitter for reading all the tweets from lightly censored accounts like la scapigliata8 called Nitter. Here’s a link:
https://nitter.net/lascapigliata8
It’s instructive to note what Twitter deems to be “age restricted” content which, surprise, is simply content that’s not favorable to trans activism.
The FDA is issuing a warning about puberty blockers.
FDA warns puberty blocker may cause brain swelling, vision loss in children
I see ripx4nutmeg has tweeted about this.
No new entries yesterday. I’m sure it can’t be the first time in all those years, but I can’t remember any other examples. Hope you’re ok, Ophelia. I’m afraid your consistent posting schedule has spoiled some of us to the point where we start to worry if a day goes by without the daily dose of sanity from B&W.
Bjarte, I vaguely remember one other time, though I’m not online every day. I hope she’s fine too, but I’m optimistic. I wonder how many of us check in here every day, I know I do unless I’m incommunicado. I occasionally have entire days when I don’t interact with a single soul, no texts, phone, interwebs, not even a wave from a neighbor — I question the weirdness of that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m sure Ophelia knows we miss her. :)
twiliter, same here. As I once commented during the lockdown, you know you don’t have a life when the pandemic pretty much only requires you to go on living the way you were already doing anyway…
Right, I remember the buzz about social distancing and thought, damn, I knew I should have patented that. Pretty sure I invented the thing. :D
Really good article from Gender Clinic News about the Tavistock closure, relating it to other actions around the world and giving a summary of the history.
Fall of the Tavistock
While we wait, hungrily, for more B&W intellectual nourishment, we can sample Substacts goodies from Dennis Kavanaugh, Kathleen Stock, Julie Bindel, Suzanne Moore, and any more that people can suggest below.
https://dennisnoelkavanagh.substack.com/
https://substack.com/profile/91305008-julie-bindel
https://suzannemoore.substack.com/
https://kathleenstock.substack.com/
Feel free!
I really don’t like this… :(
Bjarte, I prefer to think she’s sipping piña coladas on a beach somewhere, and enjoying a sunset with some fabulously interesting person who knows what a treasure she is. :) I am hopelessly optimistic though, bordering on pollyannaish. ;)
Update from Ophelia’s Facebook. A friend has checked in on her, and she’s fine. It’s just her internet connection. *sigh of relief*
twiliter, my avatar is Marvin the Paranoid Android for a reason ;)
Haha, well I hope she knows she is loved in the meanwhile. :)
SORRY!! Internet failure!!! I knew you might worry. Post to follow.
This piece that came out in 2015 was recommended to me and it’s worth reading still despite it being seven years out of date now. There’s also a genuine peak trans moment to be had from a certain cartoonist that, to put it bluntly, is creepy as fuck. I don’t believe in trigger warnings but I will say that much. Here it is:
https://sexandgenderintro.com
I read it at the time, along with everything else I could find by Rebecca. She’s a giant in the field. And I remember that revolting cartoon – but I hadn’t realized it was early “Sophie LaBelle”! Early, bad, clumsy Wisey the Pretty.
Among the comic strips I follow is Heart of the City, a charming strip about a young girl named Heart, her friends, and their lives in Philadelphia. It was created by Mark Tatulli, and he wrote the strip for many years. A few years ago he passed the strip along to Christina “Steenz” Stewart. She is Black, and she made significant changes to the strip over the few years, in addition to having a drastically different art style. Many characters were added, several faded away, the cast became much more racially diverse, and there was a bit more focus on the differences between the life experiences of girls and boys. I was wary at first, change is hard, but I’ve really come to like where Steenz is taking the strip.
Recent outrage over the use of the phrase “people who bleed” reminded me that a current plot line is Heart starting her period. This is the first standard newspaper strip I can recall that has ever touched on that topic. It’s being handled really well.
I looked up information about the strip and about Steenz. She was inspired by seeing an African-American woman cartoonist, which helped her realize she could do this, too.
But she identifies as non-binary and prefers “they”.
So this woman, who writes so well about the experience of being a girl, and who was inspired by another Black woman, has decided she’s not a woman. This makes me sad. She gets a “first” added to her bio, but it’s unfortunate to see her reject such an important aspect of her life and what (not who) she is.
[…] a comment by Sackbut at Miscellany […]
A couple of news items I heard on the radio today, as the Islamist war on women continues:
First, in Afghanistan, the Taliban fired shots over the heads of, and then beat, women who were protesting the regime. Their crime, aside from being women and in public, was chanting “bread, work and freedom”. Clearly we can’t have that.
The only source I could find for the second story is about 30 minutes into this episode of the BBC Newshour. A woman in Saudi Arabia has been sentenced to 34 years for tweeting calls for reform in the kingdom. Apparently in SA that’s a form of terrorism.
Such a peaceful religion.
The Saudi Arabia thing is a bit complicated… from what I’ve heard all the hypocrisy on reform in SA is because the Prince will not accept any reform not coming from him personally. L’etat est moi and all that… Which isn’t to say religious shit isn’t going on, but that monarchical bastard is power tripping hard.
Good news, out of Scotland, no less. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-62534817
Men shouting down an old woman in Port Townsend, WA the other day. I don’t think she’s going to shut up though.
https://twitter.com/ReduxxMag/status/1559393658964697088
Here’s another account about the Port Townsend protest from a local newspaper:
https://www.porttownsendfreepress.com/2022/08/16/women-seeking-civil-rights-stand-up-to-mob-hatred-and-intimidation-in-port-townsend/
A comment. Yes, this is from a right-wingish news source and it shows. I checked the other local paper (The Leader) and tried to find any report about Jaman and the YMCA in it and only came up with her being quoted in a story about cutting down some poplar trees in town. IMO, for them to not cover this tells me they’re deliberately not wanting to report the story. Why might that be? That’s a damned good question.
I’ve managed to find a news report from a professional source from August 9th about the Port Townsend YMCA story that has been archived here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220812153253/https://www.peninsuladailynews.com/news/ban-from-port-townsend-pool-sparks-debate/
There seems to be a few versions of what happened that the report mentions, which isn’t surprising. The police chief dismissed the incident as not being a criminal matter, which is true enough as under Washington State law now a man who identifies as trans is not going to be charged if they walk into a women’s locker room, and if a woman complains about it they’re told to find another facility. If there isn’t one though, well, too bad I guess.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Rushdie.
Key point:
She’s getting some blowback in the comments for not mentioning Christian nationalism in the US (fair point), but I think JK Rowling could attest to the parallels among the three groups.
Marjorie Taylor Greene took time away from calling for Merrick Garland to be impeached to tell a few talk shows she is going to introduce a bill to ban “Affirmation Only therapy for trans kids.”
https://www.newsweek.com/marjorie-taylor-greene-seeks-criminalize-gender-affirming-care-kids-1735044
Which is good, right? And Tucker Carlson told her he’s going to tell everybody in the Republican Party to support it.
I’m going to be a Danny Downer here, and say that this going to set back the drive to ban the practice because of who are promoting it, and will only confirm for those who accuse the gender critical of being tools of the RW Christian Nationalism. I may be wrong, and maybe it’s good that SOMEOne is doing it, but it’s a shame that it’s her. Why couldn’t a trusted Member of Congress take it up? Someone who isn’t seen as a, well, as MTG.
It’s Friday. How about some light mockery of woo (with some silly gender angles thrown in) to ease into the weekend?
I present to you Why Do Straight Men Hate Astrology?
The same reason a lot of non-straight and/or non-men do, because it’s bullshit, you say? Oh, no, you ignorant fool. You’re thinking of that crude form of astrology that, you know, 90% of its adherents spout. If only you knew about Sophisticated Astrology, you’d feel differently!
You see? The true astrology makes the author a special, special snowflake. And while we can all laugh at the notion that the position of the Sun at the moment of your birth determines your fate, surely you wouldn’t dismiss as stupid and unscientific the obvious fact that the positions of the planets at the moment of your birth determines what your sexual kinks, career path, etc. will be for the rest of your life, would you?
Oh, you would?
Huh. You must be infected by toxic masculinity.
Well, that’s me told then.
Yessir, everybody in the 1700s knew that astrology was for real and then the Church talked them all out of it. Yep. That totally checks out.
@screechy monkey
There are than a few assumptions about men and astrology in that article, primary among them is the idea that anyone is ‘afraid’ of astrology. I think that of all the absurd statements in that piece, the cake is taken by ‘Men are victims, too.’ Most skeptics gave up on astrology because of the lack of demonstrable cause and effect. One of the linked pieces in the article is an explanation of the Mercury Retrograde shadow fog and an explanation of how to deal with. Meanwhile, Mercury is just continuing it’s merry way through it’s orbit, not aware that’s actually retrograde and causing havoc on Earth so far away in space. https://www.popsugar.co.uk/smart-living/mercury-retrograde-shadow-period-48845618
She also claims that since “cis” men are ruled by Leo, and the sun is masculine energy and since the sun sits in a fixed position and is immovable thus men are immovable. She may need a few more lessons in astronomy.
When the IAU reclassified Pluto as a Dwarf Planet, astrologers complained that they weren’t consulted on an issue that would so badly throw their charts out of wack. I just kind of wondered why they hadn’t detected the importance of the other dwarf planets on my charts before then. Oops. But, appaprently the astrologers decided that they would not participate in the demotion of Pluto and treat it as a planet. Saves time on rewriting all their charts that they had to furiously re-write after Pluto was discovered by that meddler, Mr. Tombaugh.
https://nypost.com/article/what-is-pluto-return-astrology/
No, I’m not afraid of astrology, and I even find it interesting. I like the art of astrology, the art of tarot cards, and I’ve even gotten my cards read on occasion. It’s not because I believe that they have predictive value, but because I think the lore behind it is fun to learn and the interpretation of the readers can be springboards for discussion. There’s no fear at all.
But, I do think that it can cause harm when they promise what they can’t deliver and give false hope to the familiies of missing people. When I was a blogger, I wrote a post on this and used as an example the story of an astrologer who was contacting the family of a missing woman in the Seattle area and writing in her own blog about it. I applied some skepticism and explained what I found lacking in her methodology, and that the missing woman’s body had been found in an entirely different part of the PNW than she had predicted. She replied, all hurt that I had been skeptical and wrote “I was only trying to help.” Same here, Ms. Astrologer. Same here.
Would I date someone who follows astrology? Yes, I would, People have weird quirks and weird beliefs, but that doesn’t mean that they are necessarily incompatible. The only women I wouldn’t date are those who have pronouns, call themselves queer, or have an irrational hatred of Monsanto. That’s not because I love Monsanto, I just think that the hatred is irrational. (Aside: I was at a party a few years back and having what I thought was a pleasant conversation based on mutual attraction when all of a sudden the conversation turned to GMO’s and I asked her to explain to me what was wrong with them. She avoided me the rest of the evening and gave me dirty “you corporatist” sideeye glances occasionally.)
It’s all about the trans, never mind those birthing people. If I was anti-abortion Republican though I’d be delighted to see my enemies making themselves ridiculous.
https://www.wpr.org/how-gender-affirming-care-may-be-impacted-when-clinics-offer-abortions-close
A Chinese man froze some of his sperm, then underwent medical and legal transition as required by Chinese law to be considered a woman. His wife later gave birth to a child via the frozen sperm. Because the child was born, even conceived, after his transition, courts ruled they he has no parental rights in regard to the child. He retains such rights in regard to an older child born before the transition.
https://news.yahoo.com/trans-woman-japan-denied-status-222833005.html
Minor quibble… Japanese, not Chinese.
Because sometimes it’s good to hear a nice story…
Re 287, oops, I don’t know why I got it confused in my mind. Thanks.
Is it bad that everytime I see a writer in on a gaming site using “she* pronouns I assume they’re a man?
Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the news that gender euphoria is indeed a thing.
More at the link. You might want to put a pillow on your desktop before reading it though.
https://news.umanitoba.ca/mn-student-researches-trans-health-education-teaching-gender-affirming-care-is-beneficial-for-everyone/
PZ has been charting the sizes of the spiders he is breeding in his lab, and today pointed to a new innovation in his chart – the data points are now colour coded to indicate the sex of each spider. Given how incredibly blurry sex is in humans, it must be exponentially more difficult to identify in animals whose sex characteristics are often smaller than a millimetre. Truly an amazing feat.
And then he refers to some of them as ‘girls’… but isn’t that a gender word? One wonders how they communicated that to him.
How does he know which spiders are cis and which are trans?
Trans female spiders are female spiders, full stop. And the way to tell the difference is: if it eats its mate, it’s female.
You likely have seen that the Brooklyn Public Library has made it possible for teenagers all over the US to obtain library cards, which can then be used to borrow electronic books and audiobooks at no charge. This is to facilitate getting around book bans or removals. The books the library is advertising in this program are the usual set challenged by conservative Christians. I was pleased, however, to find that the library has electronic copies of “Irreversible Damage” and “Trans”. It would be a shame if the library omitted such material while decrying censorship.
Friendly Atheist article: Christian school forfeits football game against team with two girls on roster
Hemant makes this a story about faith-based sexism. Perhaps that’s correct. The quotes from the Christian school coach are about “respect” and “no physical contact between boys and girls”, although it is indeed noted that football is a dangerous sport.
Girls playing on boys’ teams is one thing; the risks to the girls are perhaps understood and accepted, and the girls don’t pose an additional risk to other players. The girls aren’t claiming to be boys, there isn’t this additional nonsense of discrimination against “some boys”.
I assume the Christian school would also forfeit, say, a girls’ field hockey game with boys on the roster of the opposing team. That happens in field hockey, overwhelmingly a female sport in the US, where some jurisdictions allow boys to play on the girls’ team if there is no boys’ team. This again is not a situation where the boys are claiming to be girls. In this case, there would be reason to be concerned for the welfare of the girls on the Christian school team.
Just started on the new Strike novel… Seems like Rowling has fandoms turning on creators on her mind.
A couple of tweets that made me laugh. I have no problem with getting older and appreciating that young women are lovely. But getting older and exclusively dating women barely out of school is another matter. He deserves this mocking.
A 31 year old man has won access to the locker room of the teenage girls soccer team he has been allowed to join. He is the happiest girl in Benelux:
https://summit.news/2022/08/31/31-year-old-transgender-footballer-celebrates-being-able-to-use-same-changing-room-as-team-of-teenage-girls/
I’ll bet he’s happy. He gets to practice his ephebophilia in the open, and there’s nothing the girls can do about it.
https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/150019/a-trans-identifying-woman-was-killed-in-germany-when-she-tried-to-protect-a-lesb
tl;dr Some angry men attacked a lesbian couple, and a TIF heroically stood up to defend them, and was violently murdered by the men. TRAs online say that TERFs are responsible for the TIF’s death, and babble about “stochastic terrorism”.
This looks like a useful resource, albeit with some access restrictions:
ExtremeBB: Supporting Large-Scale Research into Misogyny and Online Extremism.
I suspect the data in the database only confirms what we already suspect or even know, but it can’t hurt that people are taking a good hard look.
A twit linked in that post:
Have you seen a worse writer? Reminds me of Albi, the racist dragon.
A gender-queer memoir in which we learn about autophallophilia. Also, it’s done in a cute comic strip style for kids.
My home province of Ontario is setting the stage for a COVID disaster.
Incredulous reporters asked Moore questions he didn’t answer. If he had any integrity, he should have refused to make this announcement and resigned. More people will die.
Maybe Doug Ford thinks he can succeed where Donald Trump failed in bluffing his way through the pandemic. He still hasn’t learned that the virus doesn’t give a shit about our politics and economics. Ford’s performance earlier in the pandemic wasn’t too bad, but now he seems to have reverted to the more usual Conservative fucking moron mode. Once things go to hell, there will be so many able to say “We told you so!” They’re telling us now.
Wish us luck.
Why are you so confident that things will go to hell in Canada when this doesn’t seem to have played out in the rest of the world where restrictions have largely been lifted for some time? Differing thresholds for “hell”?
Let me count the ways…
(First, let me note that the following concerns the province of Ontario, not the whole country. However much, or often the former might think it’s the latter, I’m only concerned with the actions of the Ford government.)
-A new school years is starting. The boosted immunization rate of children is alarmingly low, approximately 20% for 12-17. Close to zero for very young children. Masks are no longer required in schools. You do the math.
-Colder weather is approaching, so people will be spending more time indoors in close proximity to others. Apparently figures for Southern Hemisphere winter COVID cases went up. No reason the same won’t happen in Ontario once it gets colder.
-Workers infected with the virus will be allowed to go back one day after their symptoms abate. While they are still infectious. Without extra sick days, workers will be pressured by employers to do exactly that, even if they would prefer not to. Sucj returnees are supposed to remain masked for ten days, but that is no substitute for staying the hell at home.
-Mix the premature re-integration of infectious people into the general public, stir vigorously with relatively unprotected kids, pour into confined winter spaces and bake. The result is not going to be pleasant.
File this under jokes I probably shouldn’t make on Facebook: Seventy-three-year-old man finally gets first job.
With the Help and Support of The Woman He Loves. [Duke of Windsor joke.]
The old queen is dead, God smite the king!
Nae king, nae queen, nae lord… We will na be fooled again!
:
Keep your blood-pressure meds handy for this one, folks.
The bit where the woman has to choose between ‘admitting’ she’s an addict (she’s nothing of the sort) or stay in jail because she doesn’t qualify for the state-run rehab options that were a requirement for her release from jail (on a ‘fetal endangerment’ charge) was a nice callback to Salem, I thought.
BBC: School chaplain told pupils ‘you don’t have to accept LGBT stuff’
The chaplain, inspired by a question from a student asking whether they have to “accept all this LGBT stuff”, wrote a sermon in which he said no, they don’t. He said “The school has no place telling pupils they have to accept an ideology – I would say that even applies to Christianity”. He is, as one might expect, in trouble for this sermon.
Note this description of the reaction to a “diversity wall” that prompted the question:
It’s not really possible to dictate what people should believe, only what they should profess to believe.
Based on the brief article, I think the chaplain is in the right; the school has no business insisting that students “accept all this LGBT stuff”, nor even Christianity. How students treat other people is the issue, not students’ opinions.
From MIT Technology Review: The quest to show that biological sex matters in the immune system
Good article. There is some good discussion of sex versus gender in the article. I am pleased to see this kind of material from MIT. I have a digital subscription, but I didn’t notice this special “The Gender Issue”; I’ll have to go back and see if there are other articles of interest.
The Trump White House, and William Barr pressured the US Attorney in the Southern District of New York to prosecute John Kerry for negotiating the Iran Nuclear Weapons deal:
https://wapo.st/3BBMvj1
Oyyyyyyyyyyy
WaPo opinion piece by Jennifer Finney Boylan (normally writing for NYT, I think) on transgender status as a medical condition, provided for your teeth-gnashing pleasure. Boylan engages with topics like this a (very) little bit better than many others, without only resorting to slogans and misrepresentation, but “gender-affirming care” once again rears its head without Boylan spelling out the details. Being trans is just about “being free” and that’s why “conservatives like DeSantis” (it’s always only conservatives) are against them.
She appeals directly to DeSantis with “Is there room in your heart to accept the possibility that I know my own soul, and what is necessary for me to live with grace?” DeSantis has no redeeming characteristics that I can discern, but this is a completely ridiculous standard for setting public policy, as well as being nausea-inducing. Why can I not get government funding to provide my necessary crystals, Reiki, and third-eye ophthalmology? My chakras and soul are imperiled without them (and also why do you want me to kill myself)! Of course, xtian groups get uncritical and unwarranted governmental support all the time, so maybe that’s the model they are trying to imitate.
Is there any writer (not branded a TERF) who engages with this subject without euphemism, grandiosity and obfuscation? I think I answered my own question with the parenthetical. Also, I propose that Boylan live with Grace (Lavery) and see how that works out.
Boylan gives the game away with that “I know my own soul.” It’s a religion disguised as the latest liberation/human rights movement.
Quelle surprise! Trump being petty.
Well, maybe not.
He’s the king of NY real estate, right? That’s royalty!
Maybe they would’ve done us all a favor and put him in the casket.
If he’d been president they would have seated him at Cockfosters tube station.
OK, this did make me laugh.
I just came across this article on Religion Dispatches: INSPIRED BY THE ANTI-ABORTION MOVEMENT AND QANON, ANTI-TRANS RHETORIC IS A BLATANT CALL FOR VIOLENCE (sorry about the ALL CAPS, but that’s what I got when I cut and pasted the title).
I don’t really follow US news very closely, so I didn’t know about the bomb threats against the Boston Children’s Hospital. But clearly, the presence of hateful rhetoric from the extreme right, followed by violect action, makes it very difficult to have a nuanced discussion about trans issues. It’s just too easy to get lumped in with actual, real life fascists.
True. On the other hand that article is very badly written and reasoned.
Hey, remember how the special master ordered Trump to submit an affidavit by tomorrow stating whether he disputed the accuracy of the government’s inventory from the Mar-a-Lago search? Which would force Trump to put up or shut up on the “FBI planted evidence” innuendo?
Yeah, that’s not happening any more. Judge Cannon to the rescue!
WHAT????????
Today, September 30, was Canada’s second National Day for Truth and Reconcilliation, also called Orange Shirt Day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Shirt_Day
Below is a powerful poem by Dennis Saddleman, read by him as part of the official observance of the day in Ottawa. It’s a harrowing reminder that History is not confined to the past. Its echoes yet ring clearly. Do we hear them? Will we listen?
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2079043651723/
Here’s an opinion piece in the Guardian, worth looking at:
If Labour is truly the party of equality, it wouldn’t shut down the trans debate
Opening paragraphs …
Good on the Guardian for running that piece. I wish some newspapers here (I’m looking at you, Washington Post) would represent that side of the argument, rather than just the current narrative about “transphobia”. (As an aside, my spellcheck doesn’t recognize that word, and suggests I replace it with “transpiration”. Sometimes I love spellcheck.)
This is truly horrific, what the Russians are doing to Ukrainians in occupied areas:
Russian Torture of Ukrainians
(I hope I did that link correctly, if not https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/10/05/ukraine-uncovers-box-gold-teeth-pulled-torture-victims/?ac=culture_personalised&WT.mc_id=e_DM43863&WT.tsrc=email&etype=Edi_Nhl_New_B&utmsource=email&utm_medium=Edi_Nhl_New_B20221005&utm_campaign=DM43863)
Russia’s defenders will have much to answer for.
Via Glinner. Planned Parenthood has YouTube ads pushing hormones and puberty blockers to minors.
https://twitter.com/IRefuseToSwerve/status/1577688674984235010
I had to share this, it’s hilarious.
Kevin Drum: JK Rowling not arrested by Surrey police
The article he’s referring to is on Vice, and features a big picture of JK Rowling. The headline mentions Rowling and an arrest. However, the person arrested in Carolyn Farrow, who allegedly doxxed a trans activist (Stephanie Hayden). Farrow is described as an “ally”, whatever that means in this case, of Rowling. There appears to be no connection in the article between Farrow and Rowling, except that the article looks like the usual crap hit job on feminists, whining about “misgendering” and “right-wing”. Maybe some of it is accurate, maybe some of the entities involved can be described as right-wing, maybe Farrow did engage in harassment and doxxing, Maybe Farrow indicated, like many of us, that she stands with JKR. But Rowling had nothing to do with this case, and to reference her in the headline is crappy journalism at best.
I saw Farrow’s account of the arrest a day or two ago – it sounds as grotesque as the first one. Litigious pest “Stephanie” Hayden disliked a tweet and sicced the police on her, and the police carried on as if she’d killed several people while robbing a bank.
Speaking of dumb attacks on Rowling, I was listening to a podcast yesterday (it’s about a tv show, nothing trans-related), and heard the following exchange:
Podcast Host 1: “sort of like in the Fantastic Beasts books, written by She Who Must Not Be Named.”
Podcast Host 2: (giggles) “OMG, can you believe she just handed us that?”
Me: Uh, yeah, can’t believe that JK Rowling, when writing Harry Potter in the 1990s, failed to foresee that three decades later, two people who were possibly not even born yet would turn her phrase “He Who Must Not Be Named” into a devastating putdown of her, out of anger at her views on transgender issues. What an utter lack of foresight. I bet she would have changed the way she wrote those massively successful books just to avoid the shame of an obscure podcast making such a clever and cutting remark. Such a blunder!
(Ok, actually, I’ve heard the “She Who Must Not Be Named” formulation elsewhere, too — these two didn’t invent it — but the point remains.)
Hurrrrrrrrrrr hurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Excellent article by John McWhorter on Black English (aka African American Vernacular English).
It’s behind a paywall, so here’s the first few paragraphs:
He might have added that we don’t stigmatize children whose first language isn’t English by labeling them “language impaired”. Non-standard varieties of a language aren’t objectively worse than standard varieties, although for better or worse being proficient in the standard variety is often necessary for accessing education and decent jobs, as McWhorter recognizes.
Linguists (and others) have been saying this for a long time: kids can and should be taught standard American English without stigmatizing the non-standard varieties they might speak.
On a slight tangent – I once overheard an amusingly dramatic example of code switching: I was on a bus, sitting behind a Black man who embarked on a phone conversation in very street code, with lots of repeated “how ya doin”s and the like, that went on for a couple of minutes, and then all of a sudden he was talking polysyllabic sociological lefty academese about hegemony and whatnot.